guajalote
9mo ago
Write more, edit yourself more, and find someone who is a strong writer to help you edit your writing. Be merciless and aggressive with the editing. "Kill your babies." Also, read the works of people who are strong writers in the style you want to achieve and emulate them.
guajalote
9mo ago
The smart attack is to outflank him from the populist side by out-promising him in a vague way. Whatever Trump says he'll do (on the economy, immigration, whatever) she'll do even more and better. "I'll do even more and give you more free stuff."
This approach doesn't appeal to me personally at all, and probably doesn't appeal to the type of person who is coaching Kamala for the debate, but it appeals to the average voter and Trump would have a hard time rebutting it.
guajalote
10mo ago
Isn't this a fully general argument that applies to everything? "People are too stupid to make good decisions, so the government should make those decisions for them!" And yet despite the fact that many people are very stupid, the government almost always seems to do a worse job at making decisions than those "stupid" people did. It's the same intuition that leads people to think communism is a great and flawless idea that "just hasn't been implemented properly." It's important to judge policies by how well they work, not how good they sound.
guajalote
10mo ago
The incentive will arrive as soon as people start saying "I'll believe it when I see the negatives."
guajalote
10mo ago
The Jesus and Mohammed pics look like posters for a Marvel movie, like a live action version of South Park's "Super Best Friends." I wish Hollywood had the balls to make something like that.
guajalote
10mo ago
Humans don't behave what way? They don't make false statements and/or invalid arguments in support of positions they sincerely hold?
guajalote
10mo ago
this is only true if the argument includes no personal observations or other claims that might be false.
A person arguing for a claim they genuinely believe in is at least equally capable of (if not more capable of) making up false anecdotes, or exaggerating true ones. In general, personal anecdotes should get very little weight as evidence of anything.
If you're an actual human, you don't want to bother with someone who's likely to make a lot of invalid arguments
A person arguing for a position they truly believe is at least equally (if not more) likely to make invalid arguments, due to blind spots or confirmation bias or a simple desire to win the argument.
guajalote
10mo ago
What difference does it make? We should be evaluating the argument, not the person making it. The sincerity of the person making the argument doesn't change the validity of the argument.
guajalote
10mo ago
I don't think it is, nor should be, against the rules to merely argue in favor of an opinion one does not sincerely hold. If the poster breaks the rules in other ways, that's a different story, but I think it's fine and even valuable for people to be allowed to play devil's advocate.
guajalote
10mo ago
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Say what you said about how you've been quickly promoted within your first couple of years out of college.
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Explain what you accomplished without revealing how you did it; "I came up with a new testing process that reduced our testing costs by 5%" or whatever.
guajalote
10mo ago
Personally I think fresh, high-quality raw fish always tastes better (and has better texture) than cooked fish. Why, in your opinion, would it have been better cooked?
guajalote
11mo ago
The sketch was in reference to Bush, and what made the joke funny was the fact that everyone could tell Moore was not actually joking.
guajalote
11mo ago
It's free speech even if he's not joking. The whole point of free speech is to protect reprehensible speech. Inoffensive speech needs no protections.
guajalote
11mo ago
I would pick Fooled By Randomness over the Black Swan, but either way Taleb deserves a spot for sure.
guajalote
11mo ago
We already have a system where people pay money to receive housing, it's called the housing market. The market will provide plenty of housing if it's simply allowed to do so. We need to get the bureaucratic middlemen out of the way, not incentivize them to get even more involved.
guajalote
11mo ago
Imagine we have as a defendant a man named Charles. He is charged with intentionally killing his wife. The prosecution offers expert witness testimony to the effect of "When men named Charles kill their spouse it tends to be intentionally, rather than accidentally or negligently." That testimony would be fine under this rule, right? The testimony isn't about this Charles who is accused of killing his wife, it's about the abstract category of men named Charles who kill their spouse! Totally different!
It would be fine under the rule, but not fine under Daubert more generally because nobody is a qualified expert in "what people named Charles are thinking." The expert's opinion still has to be backed up by experience, facts, or data and you can move to strike it if it's not.
guajalote
11mo ago
I'm not a criminal lawyer, but I suspect they had to put on the expert because they bore the burden of proof on intent. If they didn't present any evidence of intent, they would presumably lose the criminal equivalent of a post-trial JMOL motion based on lack of evidence.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that alcohol prohibition reliably reduces the murder rate in the long run. This is worth taking into account, but it's hardly conclusive of whether we should have alcohol prohibition. Reducing the speed limit on all roads to 25mph will reliably reduce traffic deaths; outlawing TVs and bookshelves over a certain size will reliably save the lives of several hundred young children each year who are killed when furniture falls on them; not to mention all the lives that would be saved by banning candles and fireplaces; etc. Personal liberty has a great deal of value and I think we should be skeptical of prohibitions even if the data suggests they are "good" for people.
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