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nopie


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 16 07:44:09 UTC
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User ID: 1228

nopie


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 16 07:44:09 UTC

					

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User ID: 1228

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The rule that you are not allowed to occupy other countries without a good reason.

The rule is enforced by most powerful countries on this planet, namely, NATO countries who supply Ukraine sufficient weapons so that they can fight against Russian occupying forces.

Ukraine is different. It is a European country that is being fast-tracked into the EU. Those who try to attack my friends, will get harshly punished.

The rules are clear. Just because someone somewhere broke them and didn't get punished is not an excuse.

Yes, Putin is a liar, an imperialist and a murdering conqueror. People have characterized him fairly.

Putin is a war criminal.

It might be. Tucker Carlson is not very reliable though.

What is absurd in the statement that Ukraine successfully pushed away Russian attack to most of their country?

As I said Ukraine might or might not recover Donbas and/or the Crimea but they successfully defended their capital from falling into Russia's hands. Now with the western help their army has only gotten stronger and I expect that they will liberate at least some of the territories currently occupied by Russians.

  1. What does it mean “the Big Guy”?

  2. The data is already quite strong about this. It has already been a warning in vaccine information for more than a year. What we don't know, how much of a risk it is. Probably not that great in absolute numbers. However, the benefit from vaccine in young people is also not that great. We don't know if the benefits overweigh the risks.

  3. Very likely indeed.

  4. Who is Ray Epps?

  5. I don't think that China lying about covid matters. Nothing about covid really matters anymore. Most stats are only meant to scare people without true understanding how risks are/were age stratified. It took 3 years for European Medicines agency to finally say that covid risk increases exponentially by age even though we learned it within the first 2 weeks of pandemic.

Why do you care about those people on internet?

Any reasonable person understands that it is morally wrong for one country to attack another that has never threatened you.

Then one can say – forget about morals, the power decides the outcome. Turns out Russia is not as powerful as we thought and they got stuck in Ukraine and are losing positions every day, thanks for western support.

A lot of people just suffer from denialism. The fog of war doesn't allow us to see clearly what is going on in every detail but in a nutshell the reality is clear. Russians might or might not manage to keep Donbas and/or the Crimea but the rest of Ukraine has remained an independent country and that is not going to change.

People in the western countries have free access to all the information and most of us see it clearly.

For a lot of Russians it is harder to see in this way because they suffer from collective delusions that Ukraine is a bad country (nazis or not) that does not deserve to remain independent and Russia is going to take over Ukraine and make it a glorious part of Russia.

Dictators always follow the same pattern – start with breaking the two-term rule and then break the country.

The wall street does not rule the world or countries. They certainly do lobbying but it is not a dictatorship and many smart people constantly suggest ways how to improve the global financial system.

Noah Smith have made very good comparisons about the economy of the post-soviet countries – the countries which have joined the EU have developed faster than those which didn't. If you look from the point of view of freedoms, you will see the same results.

Ukraine has lost a lot of potential by failing to join the EU sooner. Better late than never.

I would say that about 30-35 million people that can be added to the global community that is engaged in improving human society is a big deal. It is not only about advancement of technologies because this can be done also in dictatorships like China but about the fabric of the society that is beneficial for all of us. The society is constantly facing different problems (social networks, lockdowns, lack of democracy etc.) that we need more people to deal with these problems in a positively progressive way instead of heavy-handed manner.

The biggest problem with dictatorship is that it is less effective. Putin started a senseless war that hurt Russia a lot. In Western democracies people can also make wrong choices but it is self correcting and it is better in long term development.

Exactly this. Don't even try to think seriously about articles that claim that masks work despite evidence that says they don't. It is a big fail for rationalists to even think in this way.

  1. Russia is bad for attacking Ukraine unprovoked.

  2. Even the war criminal Prigozhin who recently gained a lot of popularity in Russia said that it was a lie. Ukrainians were fighting clandestine Russian forces in Donbas.

  3. Threatening “Russia's interests” or threatening Russia? Very different things.

  4. Russian attack on Ukraine was a mistake even from the point of view of Russian supremacy because it was destined to fail. It has weakened Russia considerably and they are only themselves to blame for it. Now the question is why so many seemingly smart people don't see this? Even the baddies like Prigozhin have realized this. I can kind of understand why so many people in Russia have this delusion. The human nature of conformity forces them to adapt to follow even misguided leaders. But why many people in the west believe this nonsense that somehow Russia is going to win in Ukraine?

The chances of Germany attacking the USSR prior to 1941 was very high. The evidence was that Germans thought of themselves as higher race and it was only a question of time when they would attack all other countries, including the USSR.

The strength of the evidence can vary – from very weak to very strong. I wouldn't be able to predict anything without strong evidence. You try to confuse absence of evidence with evidence of absence.

My Bayesian sense says that you are a Russian troll.

The following evidence is present:

  1. new account, not much engagement

  2. you write very confusing things, do not stay on topic and then demand (yes, you demand) – “please explain this or that”.

  3. you support extreme point of view

  4. your answers are being regularly downvoted

Any evidence against?

The article itself (with which you still have yet to engage) provides plenty of context on this, e.g. re: "negotiations as 20" vs. "negotiations as 19+1." Russia even wanted to join NATO at one point, so the idea that Russian security concerns are purely a cover for stopping neighbors from joining alliances is ridiculous.

No, it is not. If not for NATO, Russia by now would have started war with the Baltic countries, probably even gained quick victory because they are smaller than Russia.

As for the fault of the west, some are saying that Hitler got to the power because of hyperinflation. Other economists are quick to argue that it was actually due to austerity policy that followed it. In any case, we can analyse what could have other countries done to prevent fascist Germany. But the arguments that we only had to convince the Jews in Germany to stop predatory banking practices and the WWII would be averted are wrong on too many levels.

The same is about Russia. What the west could have done is to support post-Soviet countries more to avoid crash of their economy. I don't know how feasible it was but at least it is open for debate.

Many rationalists support crypto because they consider that it will help to avoid government control to buy nootropics, participate in prediction markets etc. My advice is that instead of supporting crypto it is better to lobby politicians to allow to do these things legally and openly. That may take longer time and be harder to achieve but it will be much better because negative externalities from crypto are too severe and damaging that they cancel all the benefits that crypto could give us.

Many of these things are legal in other countries and they are not as great as many rationalists think. I am in Latvia now; piracetam and phenibut are manufactured by a local pharmaceutical company here, they are not only legal but doctors routinely prescribe them. What I think about them is that their effectiveness is very low. Healthcare professionals consider them as low class antidepresants/anxiolytics. They have very few adverse effects but basically they do very little.

If 50% of antidepressant effect is due to placebo effect, then prescribing something to people with moderate depression/anxiety will have 50% improvement rate. Doctors initially select medicines with less side-effects and switch to more serious antidepresants when they are not effective. It would be good if other countries used them as well but in the big scheme, they matter very little that it is not worth to use crypto to illegally buy them.

I didn't understand your comparisons either. So, I just emphasized the basic truth.

You can never predict the future...

And you all are probably better historians than me anyway.

That's not really true. At some point Russia's GDP was even higher than Latvia's. Belarus is also relatively stable and more prosperous than Ukraine.

The EU membership boosted the growth of their members quite considerably.

Of course, you could say that readiness to join the EU was also a big impetus for necessary reforms. Turkey was going that way too. But since they clearly decided not to join the EU, their growth stalled.

We haven't done RCTs with seatbelts, but I can easily imagine them being very positive in favour of seatbelts even in case of some occasional non-adherence in the intervention group.

This is just to show what mistake rationalists made about masks. Some still are trying to claim that “masks work despite the evidence that they don't” whatever that is supposed to mean.

Some may use Bayesian method (my favourite). In my view, Cochrane report strongly decreases the odds. Whatever way you go, the threshold for mask mandates was never reached.

The Cochrane report came out just now but the policy for mask mandates was made without it. The policy was wrong not because in hindsight we have the report but because it encroached on our freedoms without sufficient evidence that it was necessary.

Maybe masks filter things efficiently (just for the sake of argument) but it doesn't matter in practice because people cannot wear them 24 hours without stop and will get exposed to unfiltered air at some time. If the end result is that mask wearers get respiratory infections at almost the same rate as the rest, what is the point?

Also we are supposed to see the big picture, not just some technical point. Mask mandates would be wrong even if they were effective.

I don't know who Tony Bobulinski is and how trustable he is. The fact that Tucker quotes him doesn't add anything. It is just mostly gossip which may be correct or may not. It doesn't update my priors much.

Maybe I am going the way that Taleb calls via negativa. I am careful and exclude things I don't have enough positive information about. That eliminates most of disaster modes (of course, it also makes me to lose some potentially great deals too).

Even more weird reasoning coming. The second paragraph is a clear contradiction of the first. Hitler hadn't attacked the USSR in 1940. He had a non-aggression pact. Clearly, it must be prima facie evidence that he lacks the motive to attack the USSR. Except that he did just a few months later. What changed? Probably nothing, he was only busy with other things or waiting for more opportune moment.

All those places have serious issues.