official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Bing tries to provide references.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I noticed it myself though. Like, browse the webs on the toilet, make a mental note to look up something when back at the computer, completely forget because of the doorway on the way.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
A 200-meter pyre for 1,200 sheep doesn't stand against the magical pyres at Treblinka that could cremate 7,000 people using a "few dry branches" or no fuel at all! So it goes.
It is a physical fact that a human body releases several times more heat when burned that is required to evaporate all the water it contains (the main heat sink, everything else is a rounding error). This means that the more bodies you burn at once, the less extra fuel you need per body, on the margin. You have not disputed this claim at all, except by asking GPT if a single body can be burned with minimal extra fuel.
And then there's the issue of comparing apples to oranges: how much more efficient the Germans became after tons of trial and error (as mentioned in your own sources) and how much lower were their standards for the acceptable result of cremation compared to the USDA (not to mention human crematoriums).
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Australia is famous for its large number of venomous species. It also doesn't have any mustelidae. Honey badgers would be very successsful.
I really don't think honey badgers will be able to evolve resistance to the entire palette of Australians venomous critters, much less come pre-equipped.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Objective truth does not require that people accept it; it is enough to be correct. "I am correct and you must admit it" is the ego speaking.
Not really. In a democracy other people's opinions directly affect you and yours. In a forum that aspires to implement the "better" parts of democracy the same applies, as far as not having your opinions silenced in various ways goes.
So if there's a substantial number of people who'd rather argue that grass isn't green than admit that they were wrong, your options are a) use democratic means to crush them, b) switch to a less democratic political system where their wrong opinions don't matter, or c) vote with your feet towards a community that's more amenable to a or b.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
A lens does a Fourier conversion: it maps directions (of the incoming rays) into locations (on the focal plane), summing stuff up.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Not shading, the tops of the towers look like we are looking at them from below, while the castle itself is arranged in isometric perspective. It shouldn't be too hard to draw complementary crenellations--if anyone actually wants to use the resulting image.
official_techsupport
who/whom
3mo ago
They are making correct arguments that fail only in a very small subset of problems, those with information acquisition that is affected by the decisions.
I disagree that this is a very small subset of problems, the majority of real life problems let you decide to wait and collect more information or decide how many resources you're willing to bet. See examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
For example, I think I first noticed this problem many years ago in one of Scott's linkdumps where he disapprovingly linked to Obama saying that CIA told him that such and such thing had a 70% probability but really they had no good information so it was a coinflip. And Scott was indignant, 70% is 70% what more do you need to know before you authorize some military operation, even the President doesn't understand probability smdh. In my opinion Obama was right, if technically imprecise, while Scott was wrong, which demonstrates the danger of having a little knowledge and also the need for more awareness.
is not easy to communicate succinctly.
You say this as if it's not Bayesians' fault that they have not developed (or got into a habit of using) a succinct way of conveying how much of the estimate comes from the prior and how much from the previous updates. I would understand if it was an acknowledged hard problem in need of community's attention, but for example Yudkowsky sequences don't mention it at all.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
I'm reading the webnovel A Practical Guide to Evil on @official_techsupport's recommendation.
For the record while I can recommend several webnovels, I've never read this one and also have a very low tolerance for badly written stuff.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
If your political tribe requires you to deny simple laws of physics, find better one.
Okay, look, imagine that you wake up in an alternate reality where there's a flourishing scientific field studying beneficial effects of smoking tobacco (it was real for a while, a guy who invented like a third of modern statistics after retiring picked up a fight with all the people saying that smoking causes lung cancer, pointing out that they use bad statistics, correlation doesn't equal causation, what if people with lung cancer pick up smoking to soothe their lungs; also nicotine might help with schizophrenia, nicotine can be a safer and better stimulant than caffeine, etc etc).
Then you discover that the 99.7% consensus of the pro-smoking scientists corresponds to the 98% of their research being funded by tobacco companies. Stop for a second, why does that raise your hackles regardless of the subject matter, whether they study smoking or AGW?
When a scientist who studies the beneficial effects of smoking on a grant from a tobacco company publishes a paper saying that tobacco causes cancer, we should all stop promoting that and cancel our entire field, a few things happen:
- His paper is not mentioned in his benefactor's speech to the company telling them how they should funnel more money into the study of the beneficial effects of smoking.
- He never receives any grants from the company ever more.
- He quits the field.
- His peers in the field universally condemn his research as flawed because they don't want to lose funding or quit the field.
- His peers in the field believe themselves to be right and their job to be producing research convincing to the public, not research discovering truth.
- If the field is politicized, his peers also believe that all opponents also want to eat fetuses or make rape legal.
This same effect of course applies to the field of climate research as the scientists working in it apply for grants to the USA Department of Energy or other state-level entities that are naturally interested in the evidence for global warming as a clear and present threat.
So unfortunately with the way the funding is set up, the entire field produces no knowledge (justified true belief). It might be true that AGW is dangerous to humanity, we know that the entire climate research community would claim that it is true regardless of whether it is true, so them claiming that it's true gives us 0 information. Simple as.
For a bit more of an expanded argument read the AGW section of https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I started developing weird pains in my right wrist, then read somewhere to pay attention to how you sleep, in particular that you don't have your palm angled at 90 degrees forward from the wrist. Then I discovered that for some reason I did this all the time, made a conscious effort to stop doing that, and had no issues since.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I think I can. I'd also ask like half of the people I play Blood on the Clocktower with regularly and they will probably agree and we will make it.
I think that if/when there's a call for it, it won't be the average ability of some particular ethnicity/faith/whatever, but self-selected (but also gatekept) people that are multiple deviations above the average in whatever traits you think are good for manning a generation ship. A random 1000 mormons have nothing on the top 1000 <insert the ethnic group you most despise> most excited about colonizing Alpha Centauri.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
The people who own making decisions about public schools: teachers, politicians, parents, administrators, do not feel the pain of being in school. The children do. In that sense, no one has skin in the game.
Yeah, that's one of my points (excepting parents, parents feel the pain of their children to some extent), you can tell that this sort of forcing people to have skin in the game can't work because they are forcing the wrong people, the children and their parents, while everyone else would actively stop any attempts to improve things and they wield the power.
I don't think this has been proposed yet, in this exact form: you can do a trick by having a cis person trapped in a trans body, as a result of an unfortunate polyjuice potion mishap or teleportation incident or whatever "easy way to change gender" the setting allows, but with a twist that they can't easily change it back for whatever reason--some extra spell stabilizing the body or a booby trap in a sci-fi setting or like some info they can't risk being destroyed.
Make sure to firmly establish their original gender, so there's no doubt that when they keep behaving and dressing etc the same way after the incident that happens half the game in, that's their true self. Have explicit quests trying to change them back and explicit evidence of them trying to ameliorate their dysphoria at least partially.
This is going to be neatly subversive, because on the one hand it's sort of gender essentialist and everyone knows that the character really started as their original gender and there's no mystery about what happened to them, but on the other hand, all right, what do we do now that their genitalia don't match their gender? And what if some people are actually born with such a mismatch in our world? Kind of like, since I know that I'm definitely right-handed, I'm open to the possibility that definitely left-handed people exist.
An interesting question is what to make their original gender: male would be more relatable for the intended audience (but you have to play it completely straight, never once veering into the fetish territory), originally-female would be more CW-salient.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
IMO Pact and Twig were more or less unsuccessful attempts at putting novel twists on Worm's awesome formula.
There's a foolproof way of keeping the reader captivated: by having a bunch of nested quests and subquests. Pact actually starts very formulaic in this respect: Blake is fighting a goblin because he was sent to do something in a graveyard by the Lord of Toronto, because he needs help getting back into his grandma's house, because he needs to read up on and figure out what's up with the karmic debt thing. Each blow in the fight is meaningful because it advances all of these quests.
One of the most fascinating things about Worm was how it repeatedly added new Main Quests, on top of and sometimes directly contradicting previous Main Quests (the infamous four word chapter comes to mind). So we start with a girl whose Main Quest is avoiding her bullies and end with literally cosmic scale stuff. And it worked perfectly!
With Pact Wildbow tried to see what happens if instead of the Main Character having to make greater and greater sacrifices to complete the new grand Main Quests, the quests themselves get progressively canceled, like, OK, this problem is beyond fixing, OK we no longer even hope to achieve that thing. Well, it turned out that the second half of the book, where the author started doing that, was just depressing and pointless.
With Twig Wildbow tried to see what happens if instead of the Main Character having all these grandiose quests, it's actually someone entirely else. Well, it turns out that the first half of the book, until the Main Character and his posse acquires enough strength and purpose, was just boring and pointless.
That's the price of doing daring experiments, more often than not you discover that there are good reasons for why nobody does this thing that seemed so cool on paper.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Is it really more likely that academics believe HBD but resolve to fight it anyway?
Yeah, when surveyed anonymously only about 15-20% believe that there's no genetic component in the Black-White achievement gap in the US.
http://lepo.it.da.ut.ee/~spihlap/snyderman@rothman.pdf - 1987 survey.
https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301886 - 2020 survey.
This contrasts with practically nobody saying this in public and consequently the public (exemplified by you here) believing that this reflects on the actual privately held beliefs of scientists.
And, specifically, if you want to see how an example of speaking power to truth looks like in this context, https://www.chronicle.com/article/racial-pseudoscience-on-the-faculty (paywall bypass: https://archive.li/ZxVYk)
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Indigestion is a common side effect of alcohol withdrawal. Alcohol helps with that.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
https://xkcd.com/512/ but for arguing on the internet.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
You might want to read this paper on Reverse Dominance Hierarchy: https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf
I got to it from https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/ which you might want to read first, as an aperitif of sorts.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat.
Do they really?
One thing the pandemic taught me is that people's experiences vary a lot by the country or state or city, but still, do they really?
Here, we had everyone masking in shops etc without much grumbling, like, all right, why not. But I remember exactly one case of a guy asking me to keep the distance and it was so weird, like dude, you actually take it that seriously? And he was apologetic asking me to step back, rather than frothing at the mouth.
So: it's entirely possible that my experience is completely different from your experience. But on the other hand I can't help but suspect that my IRL and online experiences respectively are actually very much the same as yours, but I'm better at discriminating between the two and dismissing online crazies as not representative of the people.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
If you remove the recency requirement then:
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Original Bioshock is misunderstood by most people IMO. What was the point of Ryan's final speech? If he knew the code phrase, why he decided not to use it?
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SOMA had some very visceral non-political based and reality-pilled moments which I don't want to spoil.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
"Conspiracy" is a complicated concept involving several different attributes. Consider for example CIA did 9/11 the Iran-Contra affair:
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It's coordinated and centralized.
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When/if exposed most people agree that it was immoral and bad.
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People perpetuating it know that it will be considered immoral and bad.
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It's executed in secret, so people assume that its effects (such as the crack epidemic) are exaggerated or caused by natural processes or whatever.
There are also secondary attributes, for example there's a solid argument that (1) + (2) + (3) together mean that it's hard to run a large conspiracy because every person involved increases the chance that someone snitches.
But there are also semi-conspiracies that lack some of the attributes. The Great Replacement doesn't require coordination or centralization (though people like Soros act as coordinators within their significant spheres of influence). People perpetuating it think that they are doing a good thing, they just stop at the very last step: diversity is good, we are increasing diversity of western countries, but we don't admit that more diverse = less white (which is trivially true, not a snark even) at least not when those racist white people might hear us.
The only conspiracy trait that is really fully present here is that ordinary people are not aware that there are forces working towards a particular end purposefully and industriously, and so will be surprised when that end is achieved. Oh well, most of the conspirators delude themselves about that too.
There's a lot of progressive semi-conspiracies that work like that. One can't help noticing the pattern:
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this will not happen
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this is not happening
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this is happening rarely and for random uncorrelated reasons
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this is happening and it's a good thing! (or if it's obviously bad then nobody could've predicted it, also it's a part and parcel of the hustle and bustle).
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
what do you mean by burning off horrible habits, how does that work? if somebody died having stolen on some occasions, burning in purgatory is not going to reverse any of the thefts he did. and once he gets into heaven why would he need to steal anyway and if he steals in heaven, there is nothing in christianity about being kicked out of heaven, and if there was, purgatory would no longer be needed by your rationalization.
Imagine the world as a reinforcement learning environment that's intended to produce Good Servants of God. Emphasis on willing to serve God. Now the thing is, God doesn't care at all about punishing anyone, it only cares about burning out whatever parts of one's personality that prevented them from obeying His rules. An evil person who rejected God completely will have only a few parts of his personality lifted into the Godhood. A nice person who sinned occasionally and was upset about it will have the sinning part of himself removed, as he wanted all along, and get uploaded mostly intact.
Check out Medusa's Coil, the ending is so racist it's actually hilarious!
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