muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
No bio...
User ID: 1018
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Because no matter how much I argue that assuming the worst of others needs proof, there are always 10 more comments I saw but didn't have the time to respond to.
This is the key. Political diversity of opinion and quality of opinion are orthogonal to each other. A discussion place can be a place for learning and intellectual growth without contributors uniformly across the political spectrum to maintain an ideal measure of political diversity. It can't survive a flood of commenters who won't check each other's sources. The moment when there are nobody left but people who congratulate each other for correctness of their opinions is when a forum has become distinctly uninteresting.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Outside France, I think most of the "apocalyptic" views were more about her being pro-Putin and anti-EU. The immigration is only salient to both extreme pro-immigration and anti-immigration crowd, who make it a central thing about their platform / identity.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Very true. Another data point: Very few people today know or care about the hot 1896 political question of bimetallism, which gave occasion to "the greatest political speeches in American history" that enraptured the DNC.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
By the way, just to nitpick: the Ogaden War took place 1977-78. Was it ever extensively covered in Western media? I'd be surprised somewhat.
I suggest Biafran war as a better example. Possibly millions died in famine; there was a dramatic airlift; the Médecins Sans Frontières was established as a direct response. Today? Some people have heard about MSF/Doctors Without Borders, probably nobody about Biafra.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
So I think explicit political beliefs can actually falsely make it seem like two people are so different, but if they broadly actually do and want similar things in life (eg value college education, see similar things as desirable for the future like where and how to live), then it can work. In such cases the politics is just a thin aesthetic preference.
My wife has substantially different political opinions and I wouldn't call it thin aesthetics, but otherwise I agree. Majority of our political differences simply never come up too often. Those differences that come up, we made explicit compromises about early on, and soon those compromises became the normal. I think we both today equally like both of us have one place where we both have learned to actively ignore the rage-inducing news cycle, that is, our home.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
The link you posted is a short post, mostly speculation by a NR political correspondent, who appears to be mostly a regular journo. His analysis substantially equal to what we have here on the Motte already (it would serve the US interests to blow it up); he doesn't cite any named or anonymous insiders. Did you intend to post something else? Sikorski you refer to, in turn appears to be ex-Finance minister of Poland, which again doesn't sound like a credible insider. (IIRC there is an Israeli ex- minister of defense who proclaims aliens are visiting Earth on regular basis: showcases the quality of ex-ministers.)
making it impossible
Do we have any estimates how much time and money it would take to repair the damaged portion to the pipeline? Only thing I have seen is an estimate that will take up to couple of weeks before the area is safe and clear for investigation. It certainly does not appear impossible, by googling I can find companies that advertise case studies of providing gas pipeline repairs at depths of several thousands ft, though usually it is smaller scale leaks in production.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
That would be evidence that humans achieve something by torture. However, that something is not necessarily the exact information that is needed.
In pre-industrial Western countries, use of torture was often doctrinal to obtain not information, but confessions of heresy for the sake of the soul of the guilty. It was quite popular and quite widely applied! Then many death penalties also involved torture, because, uh, reasons? Whatever the reason was, it wasn't just 18th century French, the Romans also had reasons for torturous punishments (ditto for Hammurabi).
I wouldn't simply shrug off the possibility that yes, humans quite like torturing and killing other humans for "fun", and rationalize it. It likely has some reason, maybe something to do with warfare and establishing a domination hierarchy (but which is not necessarily the same reason humans say to themselves).
Speaking of military intelligence, I thought the oldest and most reliable way (even today) to obtain enemy's secrets is to pay agents with money and luxuries. Or that is what Sun Tzu suggests.
The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out,760 tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed.761 Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.
It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.762
It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.763
Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.764
The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy;765 and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy.766 Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.
It isn't exactly my position, but closest to it out of three you outline. Basically, it builds on observation that sometimes one genuinely must choose between some evil or another, and the government action to ban another doesn't necessarily help. Abortions are bad, so people cry that the state must do something; banning abortions is something, but what are its consequences?
On the topic of "domestic violence defense": I would say that most of time in Western history, a government action against domestic violence could have been detrimental for the core purpose of family (material conditions of upbringing or children; managing the household; transmission of property to the next generation), because legal proceedings would have removed an important adult from the family. Only with a bunch of other modern solutions to social fabric, the government action and prosecution of domestic violence makes sense. Incidentally it makes families less important and fundamental. (And frankly, sometimes the modern system can be abused by one party by casting as abuse or violence many things that are not.)
Abortion once came up in presence of my grandmother when she still was lucid. I had previously never discussed anything sexuality-related topics with her because of sort of decorum and religious upbringing. I was gobsmacked when she very matter-of-factually started recalling ages-old gossip about a neighbor who died from home attempted abortion related to infidelity case during the aftermath of WW2.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Putin has been president since 2000. Two decades should be enough to build an organization -- from doctrine to senior appointed personnel -- that gives if not accurate, then directionally truthful reports. Ukraine built a fighting army in 8 years. In the meantime, Russia has had an epidemic of people falling out of window.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Have you tried to reproduce a copyrighted photo using only the latent representations stored in your biological network?
While biological networks and computer models have some similarities in abstract, in practice there are crucial differences.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
she cannot manipulate objects
Situations like this are the main issue which makes this a difficult question (for me). In general, I am against euthanasia / assisted suicide (in particular proposals where the medical / healthcare system is to provide it) but supportive for legal suicide. Near all euthanasia proposals tend to include or slip into including people who have full mobility and no physical limitations to taking their own life. It is not really a suicide if it is not you but someone else pulling the trigger.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
So I gather your professor has not ever fallen in romantic love? Or ever experienced philia, love of friendship? In my experience, starting it is not exactly amenable to conscious control or choice. The best one can do is to choose people one hangs out with (as it is difficult to love someone who you have never heard about but only in very abstract sense of "love").
Secondly, the "proof" proves too much. There are other immutable traits for respective hypothetical partners, such as relative age difference, or permanent mental handicaps.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Don't take the attitude of scepticism ... into a maths class
I recommend the opposite if it is math math. All the skepticism, yes! After a while, it is a useful exercise to read a little bit about non-standard analysis, and then if you feel courageous, venture into essays by Zeilberger and other ultrafinitists, if for nothing else but to get an idea that a difference in opinion in math is possible.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
P.S. Furthermore, many traits are effectively immutable during time periods relevant for the purposes of dating or friendship formation. For example, one can not presume that a member of a cultural group will change their thoughts and cultural expression during the time period a decision is made (and one could make an argument that such intention that they should change is colonialist anyhow).
One particular example is music taste, which is mostly set by adulthood.
Thus, if one accepts the prof's insane troll logic, the obligation should extend to dating people who love country music.
Another angle to explore: "Bisexual" is a simply a word for certain behaviors and activities and immutable preferences for them. Thus, the argument for an obligation to be bisexual can be generalized to an obligation to disregard ones own preferences in order to reciprocate to some other person's immutable sexual preferences. But here we are in a conundrum: why some preferences are immutable that are considered to result in obligation to reciprocate, but some others are not (but are required to be disregarded)?
Can one have meaningful ability to consent in presence of such obligation to consent, anyway?
I am intentionally disregarding the "reasonable burdensomeness" criterion, as it is an obviously silly and unprincipled excuse that unravels to whole argument. Why would boredom with nonverbals be a reasonably big burden, but sex with men would not? And if distaste for sex with men is a reasonable burden, every heterosexual men with such distaste is not obliged to be bisexual, and the "obligation" is not a general obligation.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
The Illiad (or so I am told) starts with an argument about status symbol sex slaves, but contemporaries didn't consider sex slaves "grimdark", they considered it normal part of life and reality of warfare; the narrative is much more interested in how angry Achilles is when Agamemnon takes his sex slave. Achilles, his anger and everything else that unfolds are the exceptional thing worth telling a story about. "Grimdark" parts are environmental background noise to the signal.
So back to modern storytelling. Are the "grimdark" themes of gross violence or sex or both something we consider normal in our the society? Not really, I hope. And the uninspiring "adult" stories do not insert it as a background noise, but it is often supposed to be the centerpiece of drama.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Have you ever met a < 100 - 1sd IQ person trying to bamboozle you? They are not very good at it.
I am quite sure SBF must be > 100 on the basis that he managed to run FTX and related organizations for several years. Maybe he scores better on verbal than math, but I think there are all indications he is above average, because your average manager and quant certainly are. Difficult to say if it was "boiling hot", but where did that claim from anyway? You don't need boiling hot for score > 105 or even >115, and I'd guess >50% chances he is above that cutoff.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
On part of the promise surely works: You can still run your own instance and federate with those instances that want federate with you and build your own social net. However, social networks with free-for-all blocking are often very brutal brutal.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious that decentralization is not sufficient for freedom. Imagine a school cafeteria where you have freedom of association -- but the ruling clique can also say that loser nerds are not welcome to sit in their table.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
I'm assuming the newspaper isn't a well-regarded one or a very professional one.
Undersells it a bit. It appears Nya Dag is not "not well regarded" in the sense NYPost is but maybe more in the sense of Alex Jones.
Now that doesn't need to be an instant "boo", but one should consider that even with reputable newspapers, just that it made it to a newspaper doesn't make thing necessarily a credible nor true. The journalist should be expected to show that they did the legwork to prove the veracity of the leaked documents. The newspaper does not claim to have done anything besides receiving images of report that has "RAND" written on title page.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
I thought it was just Breq not caring about learning other pronouns or gender concepts than Radch female pronouns. Which was character building: Breq is fully-immersed chauvinist partisan for Radch totalitarianism.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
The irony is that both hardcore SJ crowd and anti-SJs miss any such implications.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Weird, what I heard was that The Dawn of Everything sometimes makes huge speculative leaps that are not supported by the literature purportedly cited. There was some discussion about it when it was reviewed in ACX YBR, links to some comment chains:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything/comment/7059788
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-dawn-of-everything/comment/7062066
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
I do not have PhD nor any degree whatsoever in immunology. But what about this: I think none of allergens (say, hay pollen) multiply in the host organism nor cause any other problems than the immunological overreaction. Infectious agents (viruses, bacteria, and other) do generally grow and multiply and eventually will cause problems to the host if the immune system stands still twiddling their thumbs. (And then you have toxins, which are not biological replicators, but disrupt biological function of the host.)
If you introduce allergens to host body in very small quantities, the immune system may do nothing, and then adapt to the "observation" that left alone, those allergens do nothing and ultimately disappear. Whereas a pathogen, unless dealt with, will keep multiplying and causing increasing amounts of problems to the host organism's main functions. If you introduce a very small dose of pathogen to the host organism, so small that the immune system (again) may do nothing, you will have more of the pathogen (a larger "attack surface" for the immune system).
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
The current blog still has some good comments. I think a couple of Scott's "Highlights From the Comments ..." collection posts have recently highlighted higher quality than the latest AAQC threads on the Motte. As an additional plus, the range of topics covered is more versatile than the Motte, which is mostly just CW politics.
However, there are more low-effort posters that makes signal-to-noise ratio worse, especially in Open Threads, and Substack comment UI is actively hostile.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1yr ago
Where are they?
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Obscure internet forums / platforms are by definition obscure. To hear about them here, one needs to be lucky: (1) someone who knows about such a place comes here and (2) wants to share a link here. Rationalist sphere was quite special in their mission to evangelize rationalism and reach out on the internet; not every discussion group has such objective. (I'd imagine such groups should be careful where they recruit.)
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Agreed with this and this: the elites have offline and not-public platforms.
Then how your comment is relevant, because the statistics shown in the figure counts investigators (who are sworn officers, not civilians?)
Sanity check from a different source:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/table-74> 686,665 full time officers in 2018 -> 210 per 100,000, almost exactly the same number as in the linked paper graphs. Even if one included civilians, the US would be massive outlier, and according to data description, one ought not to, because:
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