nand
1yr ago
It's not altruism if I'm getting something in return (or have already gotten something in return and am therefore indebted).
nand
1yr ago
It's not clear for example how to distinguish real, fundamental correlations from mere happenstance.
You mean, how to distinguish correlation from causation? Isn't this exactly the domain of the scientific/empirical method, and its associated toolbag of trickery?
nand
3mo ago
Just to clarify, your primary concern is the belief that an excess population of lonely and/or frustrated men will lead to a massive, horrific war? I'm trying to figure out if you consider the fact of men having to (increasingly?) compete for women's attention to be an inherent problem or whether or not you are only worried inasmuch as it will lead to a larger calamity.
nand
9mo ago
Can you elaborate on this point? What is the key difference in their immigration policy and why does it work so well?
nand
10mo ago
There are orders of orders of magnitude difference in probability between a 10-ton fighter jet arising from pure chance, and a microscopic DNA (or RNA-based) protocell with a few dozen to a few hundred nucleotide bonds.
If the latter took all of the universe to create, the former would be outrageously impossible.
nand
1yr ago
I disagree with your assessment of the situation because to me there is a significant distinction between "weak, injured or malformed" and "psychopathic, murderous, criminal". In a crude analogy with another important system of life, the immune system, the former represent damaged cells that need to be repaired, and the latter represents cancerous cells that need to be excised.
Side note, I don't think dwarf fortress is a representative simulation of the social dynamics at play, because it doesn't model what it's like to have, say, an asshole boss whose coworkers actively suffer because of his ongoing existence.
nand
1yr ago
Where can you find these people, you ask. Try looking at the way people talk. How many real words are they using? Are we sure the human species is not effectively bimodal at the age of 40?
Can you please clarify what you meant by this? What is a 'real word' in this line of thought?
nand
1yr ago
Shower thought: I live in an area that has 100% green electric power generation. If I use more power than necessary, does this increase or decrease my net carbon footprint? Say I pay out of my pocket to run 1 MJ of green power through a resistor. What effect does this have on my carbon footprint, as defined by the difference in overall emissions compared to the counterfactual world in which I didn't do this?
I have conflicting thoughts:
-
Power is power. If I didn't use that power, it could have been used instead of coal-derived power by somebody else. And obviously, most people would prefer to use greener power rather than less green power, if given a choice - and this argument holds all the way down the chain to the person using the least green power available. So the net addition to my carbon footprint when wasting 1 MJ of energy is determined by whatever it takes to produce 1 MJ of power at the tail end (i.e. coal). Or a slightly refined version: By supply and demand, increasing demand on green power just drives up the price of green power, causing more people to use non-green power because of the price differential, thus leading to the same 1 MJ to be burned in coal plants to cover the waste.
-
As a consumer of green power, I am essentially paying for the construction of green power plants. So all I'm doing is subsidizing the production of more green power, so my net carbon footprint is the sum of what it takes to build that infrastructure, minus whatever benefit will be derived from it after I'm done using it - so probably effectively neutral (or slightly negative).
I want to call this a "reference class fallacy". Any logical conclusion derived from treating something concrete as a typical member of a larger reference class.
To analyze it from another angle: the narrower the reference class you're arguing based on, the more statistical power your argument has. If I can prove something about everybody named /u/georgioz, I have proved quite a lot about you as an individual. But if I'm proving something that only holds in a statistical aggregate of all humans, I have gained almost no knowledge about you specifically. All I have gained is a tiny probability.
A reference class fallacy is when you pick an absurdly big reference class (e.g. all individuals) and then use reasoning based on the big reference class to infer knowledge about a potentially very small, distinguished subset (e.g. yourself, or even just humanity) of that reference class.
Since the reference class of individuals in the grabby aliens argument is potentially massive, the uncertainty of whether statistical statements over the entirety of that reference class applying to us specifically becomes quasi-infinitely high, thus making the argument vanishingly unlikely to be valid.
nand
1yr ago
I have a slightly related tangent story from my days at a psychological clinic. To cut a long story short, one patient was convinced she was being gang stalked by her family (and associates). Whether or not she was actually being gang stalked or not, I don't know. The evidence I saw is consistent with both confabulation and reality.
In any case, this (17-year old girl) patient was terrified to go to school. So she arranged an escort to accompany her there and back. Cue me and another (female) friend of hers, a highly schizotypal, spiritual person who believes in quantum healing and homeopathy, and so on. On our way to pick her up from school, we noticed a man standing outside and smoking (in the no-smoking area). He could have been watching us, or he could have been not. (Having gone to the same school, it was certainly not unusual for older middle-aged teachers to be chain smoking during the breaks.) Our reports to the clinic staff?
"She was being stalked by a man who gave off a menacingly evil aura! He did not fit the setting at all, I'm sure he was up to no good"
vs
"Uh, what I saw was a man standing next to a door. He didn't do anything of note, and I'm not sure if he even looked in our direction. The end."
tl;dr, different people can interpret radically different things into the same observations. Women are generally leaning towards the schizophrenic, neurotic end of the spectrum, and also generally more receptive to propaganda. So it does not surprise me one bit that a world filled with feminist "women are victims!" messaging has women end up hallucinating terrifying delusions of persecution into completely benign events.
nand
1yr ago
When people talk about big tech failing my first thoughts are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Apple. Not exactly companies designing industrial manufacturing / CAD software.
nand
1yr ago
I am curious, in such arguments, whether you refer to Gf or Gc as the relevant factor in determining whether somebody ought to run the country?
nand
1yr ago
And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.
But the majority of the people killed by the virus were negative GDP, so the first-order effect of the virus should have been to improve the economy.
nand
1yr ago
Those four examples have something in common which is completely unlike the defense missile example, though. A defense missile is a defense mechanism.
You are using four examples of retaliatory attacks, not defensive maneuvers. I think that is a very crucial difference. Compare the analogy to manslaughter in self defense vs murder. Nearly every nation agrees that it's legal to use lethal force to defend your life, but not to seek out your attacker and kill them in retribution.
if he lied, or even was misinformed, Ukrainian credibility will take a hit.
The one thing I have found consistently weird about the entire Western perception of this conflict is the universal mass-amnesia of the fact that Ukranian and Russian are birds of a feather. I personally tune out everything that comes from the mouth of a slavic leader as an obvious fabrication, and wait for the independent corroboration of events.
To be clear, I'm specifically addressing the claim that women are somehow naturally more interested in "immigration, equality or similar topics", but also the concept of cancel culture, witch hunting and woke ideology surrounding it. (i.e. the idea that dissidents must be quickly rooted out and chewed to shreds)
nand
1yr ago
Even "softcore" urination is banned there, for example. Also public nudity is a very gray area and, from my understanding, de-facto prohibited.
nand
1yr ago
The libertarians and fiscal hawks were saying we only had 30 years in the 90s, 20 years in the 2000s, 10 years in the 2010s... and now its next year or the year after.
Do you have a citation on this? (Especially the implied consensus)
nand
1yr ago
This post seems confused by its own argument. You setup an equivalence between a negative externality of X and a positive externality of not-X, which is logically sound. You then ask why we're treating X as a negative externality instead of treating not-X as negative externality. This does not follow from your reasoning.
Indeed, the logical equivalence of "X is a negative externality with respect to not-X baseline" and "not-X is a positive externality with respect to the X baseline", means that which framing you choose to do the calculation in, cannot possibly alter the result. Minimizing f(x) and maximizing -f(x) gives you the same value of x.
nand
1yr ago
Imagine if a democrat arrested 20 republicans for possessing an illegal firearm because they misunderstood an ATF statute and the ATF webpage said that particular modification / accessory was legal. And when Rs got mad about it, a democrat said "think on the meta level - from a pure signaling standpoint - if we want to prevent people from knowingly committing gun crimes, we have to arrest people who commit gun crimes, even if they possess a defense.".
This argument makes complete sense to me. Otherwise, you get exactly the implication that people will start intentionally violating gun laws because they know that "I thought it was allowed" is a valid legal defense.
nand
10mo ago
Personally, as an Apple user, I always felt that Apple is better at designing hardware than software. Designing software is more of a necessary factor in being able to design the hardware with the freedom they want. (Bespoke chips everywhere, complete control over the entire trust chain, etc.)
iOS is pretty much a pile of trash and the major downside to being able to use an Apple device.
nand
11mo ago
For small countries which do well, this leads to a different sort of jadedness where the national broadcaster is trying to ensure that their country loses deliberately for financial reasons (but is generally not able to say this to its viewers, who like winning). Ireland is the most famous example where eventually the cynicism got through to the viewers.
Can you elaborate on this point?
Or environmental factors (e.g. prevalent nutritional deficiencies)?
Incidentally, how do heritability estimates discriminate between genes that "causally" influence height (e.g. a gene that, when expressed, somehow biostructurally increases bone growth), and genes that dictate "unrelated" behavioral patterns which, in turn, affect the desired trait (e.g. craving/distaste for junk food)? Am I right in thinking that this is another major weakness of GWAS - even if you identify candidate genes, those genes might completely fail to transfer to, say, another population in which junk food doesn't exist?
So if you run a GWAS identifying N promising genes for affecting height on US citizens, you couldn't use that to reliably increase the height of European babies?
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