guajalote
1yr ago
Trump engenders hatred and revulsion unmatched by anyone in my lifetime, the source of that hatred is his 2016 election win, and that people like Bragg can't help themselves but act on it.
What's missing from your argument is an explanation of why Trump engenders unprecedented "hatred and revulsion." The explanation cannot be merely that he won the 2016 election, since many of the other people you mention (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden) also won presidential elections.
The standard pro-Trump explanation for why he's hated is something like "he's the only one who isn't corrupt and won't do what the deep state wants." The standard anti-Trump explanation is something like "Trump has shown a unique willingness to violate democratic norms, such as by calling on Russia to release hacked emails or stating that both the 2016 and 2020 election results were rigged."
It seems like the whole argument pivots around this "why is he hated" question. If Trump is in fact uniquely willing to violate democratic norms, it seems reasonable for his opponents to take issue with that and to argue he has forfeited the right to avail himself of those norms for protection. You and VDH raise good arguments for why the norm of "don't prosecute former presidents" exists, but many similar arguments could be made for why the norm of "presidents gracefully concede elections and don't challenge the results" exists. In game theory terms, if Trump consistently choses the "defect" option, it may be the optimal strategic choice for his opponents to do the same.
guajalote
9d ago
Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs.
This statement is often not true. Lawsuits are often a more efficient and transparent way of allocating costs.
Let's say society is worried about accidents caused by self-driving cars and wants to allocate some amount of resources to fixing the problem. There are two straightforward ways to structure the resource allocation:
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Pass a law specifying that victims of accidents caused by self-driving cars can sue the manufacturer for damages, or;
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Pass a set of safety regulations that self driving car companies have to comply with, and if a compliant self-driving car nevertheless causes an accident, the government compensates the victim.
In scenario 1 we are causing the cost of accidents to be carried by the car company, who is in the best position to figure out how to prevent accidents. So we have given them a monetary incentive to devote a rational amount of resources to fixing or improving the problem. This is the opposite of a reverse lottery because the car company is in the best position out of anyone to try to predict and prevent accidents.
Scenario 2 creates a situation where car companies are only encouraged to comply with regulations, rather than try to figure out the best way to prevent accidents. The regulator is in a much worse position to know what regulations will actually be effective at preventing accidents, and the regulator has no direct monetary incentive to care about preventing accidents. Simultaneously, they also have no monetary incentive to care about over-preventing accidents either. So we will almost necessarily get an inefficient set of regulations that devote an incorrect amount of resources to the problem.
Liability also doesn't come into play until the suit is underway. It's trivially true that anyone can file suit for anything, but the plaintiff isn't going to recover any money unless they have evidence of causation and damages.
Also, my thought experiment notwithstanding, it's already totally possible to sue self-driving car manufacturers for causing accidents, yet these companies are not only in business but doing better than ever.
guajalote
8mo ago
It seems like one of those situations where people go through a superficially logical chain of thought but commit a bunch of fallacies along the way without noticing.
- For a woman to be attracted to a man he must be a good person.
- Women are not attracted to incels.
- Therefore if a man is an incel he must be a bad person (fallacy of denying the antecedent).
- Therefore if a man is a bad person he must be an incel (fallacy of affirming the consequent)
guajalote
11mo ago
That may be true, but I'm not trying to argue the object level point. I'm just saying that there exist definitions "trans" that wouldn't run afoul of ymeskhout's objections.
guajalote
1yr ago
So would you be opposed to "cancelling" Hitler if it was guaranteed to prevent his rise to power? Or what if it provided a 50% chance of preventing his rise?
It depends on what you mean by cancelling, but if you mean violating his right to speak freely, then yes I would be opposed. The whole point of rights is that everyone has them, including bad people. The whole point of free speech is that it protects the right to say vile and reprehensible things.
guajalote
2mo ago
Why do you care if Bob screws up? Obviously Charlie doesn't care, at least not enough to do anything. Just let Bob screw up. If it's clear that Bob "owns" a different set of responsibilities than you do, his screw ups should only reflect badly on him and might even make you look good by comparison. Either Charlie will wise up and do something about it or he won't. Either way not your problem.
Also I would consider looking for a new place to work, since poorly managed businesses usually don't do well in the long run.
guajalote
5mo ago
Identical twins (genetic clones) are perfectly capable of disagreeing or even hating or killing one another.
guajalote
5mo ago
And yet Freud and Marx are far less influential than they were 100 years ago. Even people who purport to be Freudians or Marxists today will readily admit these people got things wrong, because the countervailing evidence is so overwhelming.
"Free Speech" is not a stable ideal, and whenever implemented it rapidly decays into "Free Speech so long as most people are okay with what you say", at best.
No system of organizing society is stable. The tree of liberty needs to be refreshed from time to time.
It's not clear to me why you think any of those beliefs would be useful. It is almost never the case that an empirically untrue belief (e.g. sun won't rise without human sacrifice) is useful, particularly in an open society where untrue beliefs can be challenged and proven wrong. The only context where a belief like that would be useful would be a closed culture where competing values are not allowed to challenge dogma and orthodoxy. Cultural mixing in a free society brings about the destruction of such beliefs.
guajalote
8mo ago
But even this "unjust" world is ultimately just in their belief system. Otherwise the concept of being "on the right side of history" would be incoherent. The good guys are destined to prevail in their eschatology.
guajalote
11mo ago
Have you played any of the early access for BG3? I have been holding off but a couple of my friends have told me they're unimpressed with it. I'm trying to reserve judgment.
I have. It's an extremely limited amount of content so it's hard to judge; I assume it's around 5% of what the final game will be. It reminds me of Divinity visually and in terms of gameplay. I really enjoy the DnD 5e rules system so I like that aspect of it as well.
guajalote
1yr ago
Right, but the only reason the athlete is a "brand risk" to begin with is because people care about what they do off the field. I recognize that people do care about this, but my argument is that people shouldn't care about this. Nobody cares about or wants to know about their plumber's politics because it's irrelevant; they should take the same approach with athletes.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think it's very unlikely that individual rocks are conscious, just as I think it's very unlikely that individual neurons are conscious, but a collection of neurons, rocks, or transistors arranged in a particular way and executing a particular algorithm may well be conscious.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think this may be true if we start out with all children learning via Method A, then switch to all children learning via Method B. But due to sorting effects, in the real world the kids near the top are already learning via Method B and the kids near the bottom are learning via Method A. So if we switch everyone to Method B the gap may well close to some degree.
I would also argue that switching to better methods that make learning easier may tend to close gaps simply because smart kids are more able to learn via any method, whereas less intelligent kids will struggle more with suboptimal methods. If you take a cohort of kids with different intrinsic skiing abilities and have them start on a black diamond (difficult slope) then you will see a big delta in performance between kids. The weakest skiers will fail and give up quickly, the strongest skiers will figure it out and get better. If you start them all on the bunny slope, you'll see less of a delta between the best and worst skiers since the worst skiers are at least able to make progress.
guajalote
1yr ago
Can you be more specific about the type of test you're talking about? I initially envisioned a g-loaded multiple-choice test like the SAT, but what you're describing sounds more like a long-form written answer test based on subject matter knowledge. As another commenter pointed out, maybe you're just a fast writer/typist?
As someone who has always been an extremely fast test taker (and a consistently high-scoring test taker), I still struggle to think of situations where more time would not be beneficial for me. Unless the test is pure regurgitation of memorized lists, or unless the test is so easy that you're scoring close to 100% on the initial pass, having more time to review and refine your answers should tend to result in a higher score.
guajalote
1yr ago
I agree this is a problem, but it's a different one than the OP pointed out. People should be free to speak as they wish.
guajalote
1yr ago
90% of confidence plus or minus blah blah blah
Unless you are using some transparent methodology to calculate the confidence interval, this is even worse than just saying 90% because you are now claiming to know both your priors and the uncertainty of your priors with high levels of precision.
guajalote
1yr ago
"50 Stalins" is sometimes used in discussion of free speech but it's applicable in other contexts as well. For example "John pretends to be an opponent of effective altruism, but all his arguments are just 50 Stalins critiques. He actually seems to agree with effective altruism, he just doesn't think they go far enough."
guajalote
1yr ago
The definition of Quokka should probably note that "Quokka is often used to refer to people who naively believe all disagreements are attributable to mistake theory" or something along those lines.
guajalote
1yr ago
I suspect this is not the same thing I'm describing. For me, this is not something that happens during meditation, it's something I can cause at will with no difficulty by consciously "letting go" of control of my muscles. I've been able to do this as long as I can remember. It's not a particularly pleasant feeling, a little like being electrocuted, and I can't maintain it for more than a few seconds without feeling like my muscles are going to involuntarily spasm.
guajalote
11mo ago
I had the extremely good luck of being born as a middle-class American and therefore enjoy a level of privilege that most people at most places and times could only dream of. I grew up with all my necessities taken care of, I got a higher education and postgraduate degree, I had access to all the fruits of modern technology - antibiotics, air conditioning, the internet. I have daily use of things that many kings of old would have traded half their kingdoms for. That I would have all the privileges I enjoy is exceedingly unlikely, I am among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged human beings who have ever lived on earth.
Not only that, but most members of this very forum are similarly privileged. The majority of users here are middle class or higher, educated, and live in conditions that most human beings could have never even dreamed of. What are the odds that hundreds of people, all from among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged humans in history, would all find themselves here at some random obscure internet forum? We are talking about a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, repeated hundreds of times. We're talking about odds of some miniscule fraction like 0.0000....0001%.
Therefore, I submit that The Motte was created by Jesus Christ himself. The odds that a place like this could arise by the chance congregating of individuals is so astronomically unlikely that we can dismiss such a hypothesis as ludicrous. Only the guiding hand of our Lord and Savior could have created such a rare and perfectly fine-tuned set of conditions.
guajalote
1yr ago
If you hold that consensual transactions are generally good, whereas non-consensual taking is generally bad, then there needn't be any tension between opposing colonialism and supporting open borders.
As you note, colonialism violates people's individual rights by one group subjugating another against their will, expropriating their rightful property and reducing or eliminating their rights.
An immigrant entering a country need not do any of these things. He can enter into entirely voluntary transactions to obtain housing, employment, etc. These are transactions where everyone involved is happy to participate and ends up better off; no one's rights are violated.
It is also conceivable that a group of immigrants could band together into a political bloc and use their collective political powers to "colonize" the native population and take away their rights. But there is no particular reason why such an outcome is inevitable or likely. Moreover, such an outcome can occur without any immigration, such as if a country's native protestant population banded together to oppress its native Catholic population. The free movement of people across borders does not require the formation of group identities nor does it require any group to oppress any other group.
No, it shouldn't change your priors, irrespective of whether there's a one-shot or multi-shot universe.
Given that you are a rational being, the odds that you will observe a universe where a rational being came into existence are exactly 100%. This is true regardless of whether hypothesis 1 or hypothesis 2 is true, and therefore it tells you no additional information about which hypothesis is correct.
That's true, because this situation is materially different from the one we are talking about above. Here, we know two sets of probabilities ex ante (both of which can occur), and are now trying to decide, ex post, which is more likely to have occurred. Given two different possibilites, the one with the higher probability is, by definition, the one that was more likely to occur (this is true whether the surgery is one-shot or many-shot, by the way).
In the situation we are discussing, we don't know anything about the probabilities ex ante, and we are trying to derive those probabilities based on our ex post observations.
A better analogy would be: you go into a surgery and nobody knows your odds of survival. You wake up after the surgery. What, if anything, does this tell you about your ex ante odds of surviving the surgery? The answer is, it tells you nothing about those odds. It just tells you that you survived. Your odds of survival could have been 0.001% or 99.9%, but since you can only observe outcomes in which you survive, that fact that you observe your own survival gives you no additional information about the ex ante likelihood of that outcome.
Another example to illustrate the point. Suppose an alien hands you a black box with a screen and a button on it. You push the button, and the number "21" appears on the screen. Pushing the button again does nothing and you cannot disassemble the box to learn how it works. What are the odds that the box was going to display the number "21" when you pushed the button? The answer is, you have no idea (except you know the odds are not 0%). It might have been a 100% chance, it might have been a 0.000000001% chance. You have no way of knowing based on your single ex ante observation.
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