official_techsupport
who/whom
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User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Ticks will stay on your body for comparatively a much longer duration than mosquitoes. I don't see how there's any actual benefit from a mosquito having any kind of analgesic property when they'll finish sucking and fly off in seconds. The benefit to a tick is much more obvious.
I understand. To reiterate, my question was: do mosquito bites become itchy because the mosquito doesn't care what happens after it has fed, so whatever it injects is optimized for short term anesthetic and anticoagulant properties, which by default causes itchiness later? Or are mosquito bites especially itchy because there is in fact some benefit in that to mosquitos or humans?
To that I received several responses basically claiming that itchiness is inevitable, because scabs itch when healing, skin itches when pierced, an immune/inflammation reaction is produced in response to introduced bacteria and foreign proteins, and so on. However ticks provide an excellent counterexample: it turns that when it's important to pierce skin without causing neither pain nor follow-up itching for days, Nature finds ways to do so, despite all of the problems above.
So then back to my original question: if it is possible to be entirely non-itchy, are mosquitos itchy simply because they don't care, or are they especially itchy for some reason?
I don't know that I've ever had a mosquitoes bite become itchy as quickly as you describe.
Well, yes, maybe not in a couple of minutes (it can be hard to determine when the bite itself occurred), but in 10-15 minutes for sure, based on the interval between me entering a mosquito infested area and realizing that I've been bitten in a bunch of places.
official_techsupport
who/whom
4mo 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
5mo ago
Looks like everyone here is no longer willing to give you any constructive feedback. Consider presenting your case on https://rdrama.net, some people might mock you, but at least you'll have engagement.
Use https://rdrama.net/signup?ref=2481 for signing up btw, I'll get a badge for referring you!
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
Or maybe it was just about stirring up enough heat that the Israel-Saudi normalisation doesn't happen. I dunno.
I don't see how this was supposed to work. A small terrorist act that causes Israel to respond disproportionally, all right. 400 paratroopers killing Israeli civilians? Again, this is a thing that you do when you have 5000 tanks ready to roll towards Tel Aviv and you want to show your potential Saudi allies that you mean business. They don't have a single tank. Saudis will be like, fuck those idiots.
I might have recommended (or would have recommended) "The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash". It has the Mule protagonist character who talks like Snakes. Also it turns out that MLP canonically has a pony with SS lightnings as her ponymark or whatever it's called. Also it's pretty good.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo 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
He rambles on for paragraph after paragraph, smugly self-assured, and at the end of it I come away with literally no idea what he's trying to say.
As in you read the whole linked article and have no idea, or gave up after the first ten or so paragraphs? Because while undeniably excessively verbose, containing frequent tangents, and actually being less about the Climategate and more about how the Climategate is yet another example of how power corrupts, it presents clear points with solid justifications.
If you're interested in something much more concise and aimed at someone who is not already on the same wavelength you might want to read the AGW section of this: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/ . It is not, strictly speaking, about the Climategate, because it predates it by a few months I think, but it predicts it presciently.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Everyone in the USA still believes that the USA is the first etc etc. The only thing that matters is the domestic response to foreign posturing. "I'm against America First" is a viable posture in America because nobody in America really believes that America could be anything but first.
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
Static isn't really a concern where I live, it's far too humid.
It's not static electricity, it's a bunch of energy stored in capacitors. It's real as you can see by unplugging the computer, then trying to switch it on -- the fans briefly start up, at least for me. But after that it should be mostly safe, if in doubt poke with a grounded screwdriver or something.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Most disagreements of note—most disagreements people care about—don't behave like the concert date or physics problem examples: people are very attached to "their own" answers.
There could be other reasons than hidden motives for that. Consider for example that one of the largest debate here recently was about a completely hypothetical situation involving red/blue pills. Or imagine a technical discussion about some software engineering problem, those can get quite heated too.
So, first of all, sufficiently complex problems tend to be like icebergs, with only a small part being easily communicable, and a lot of underwater assumptions, connections, and intuitions that are personal to you.
For example, if the concerts at that place are always on Thursdays which I know because I'm a regular there, and you have never been there before, I'm sure as hell double checking your claim. Or if your answer to the physics problem is not just different from mine but doesn't make any sense given all other stuff I learned about the problem while working on it, I'm likely to start by asking pointed questions about those discrepancies instead of humbly assuming that one of us just made an arithmetic error somewhere and that could as well be me. And of course in case of software engineering, "your approach is going to suck, I feel it in my bones as a result of decades of experience that I can't just spend years relaying to you here"...
Second, that last example doesn't fit into your model even if it does have an underlying conflict of interest. I can 100% honestly believe that my approach is superior for complicated reasons I can't articulate convincingly enough, and I don't want to waste my time implementing your inferior solution, while you honestly believe and feel the exact opposite. So that seems to be a conflict of interest, but we both can easily be 100% open about it because it's actually driven by a factual disagreement.
That's not to disagree with your main thesis, that there's a lot of "bad faith" arguments, so much that it becomes a counterproductive label. But you're both too optimistic and too pessimistic about that, because there's also a lot of hard to reconcile factual disagreements.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
We manage to cooperate surprisingly well given that one third of the players are secretly demonic entities!
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
I don't disagree, that's why I said, specifically:
I'm saying what I would do if I were the Czar of the US prison system. I'd set some inviolable rules but then let Soros and friends do their best within the rules instead of trying to micromanage everything.
I'm not sure that the Open Society Foundation and the DAs it champions would prefer a world where unrehabilitated rapists are let free with a slap on the wrist and continue raping. Maybe they do but understandably never say it aloud, maybe they do but never even admit it to themselves. Maybe they don't believe that about rapists at all, but do believe that shoplifters are just collecting involuntary reparations. Anyway they end up promoting lawlessness, in effect valuing well being of criminals above that of law abiding citizens' while I strongly value them in the opposite direction, so I and other likeminded people should realize that this is an irreconcilable value difference that allows no compromise and we should fight to win.
What I was saying however is that a well-designed system doesn't need to be run on impeccably loyal people totalitarianly selected to have the same worldview (and in fact any system that has that as a requirement will fall to sociopaths). In case of Soros and friends we only need to ensure that they have no say on when to release repeat offenders, then their interests are aligned with ours: without an option of prematurely releasing unreformed criminals they sure prefer reforming criminals (so that they don't get imprisoned again for twice as long) to not reforming them, and can be relied to do as good job at it as they can.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
I said:
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them
And again, steelman going above and beyond letting anyone to go to any school they want and forcing them to go to a racially diverse school.
Combine it with a sense of justice, and you have an adequate explanation for people trying things like busing.
You will have to spell it out for me, I don't have none.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
First of all, that's literally the first point in my list of possible explanations for why forced skin in the games fails in my examples.
But also I want to point out an important thing: I'd want a stable legitimately non-working solution. As in, imagine one of the more inconvenient possible worlds where we have implemented my proposal for solving recidivism, everything appears to work as intended, George Soros makes sure that the people he funds really believe in the cause, those people report that they get nothing but enthusiastic cooperation from the prison staff, and they keep trying protocols devised by the best sociologists and they can't get recidivism rate below 70%.
That world is pretty unfortunate, but it has one very good property: whenever someone says "hey I think that you people are doing rehabilitative justice wrong, we should abolish prisons and replace it with mutual support communes, and for starters let all recidivists out on no bail" we tell him that there's currently three pilot mutual support communes, he's free to join any of them as staff and try to do rehabilitative justice right, but no, no way no how we are restarting any of those catch and release programs. If his ideas work, they work, yay, he solved an impossible problem, the criminals don't reoffend and are not affected by our harsh recidivism laws. If not, too bad, but at least the society is safe.
It's important that if the solution doesn't work the society can be reasonably sure that it's because the problem is very hard and not for the lack of trying.
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
9mo ago
Check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_(finance)#Agricultural_commodity_price_hedging
The original purpose of futures etc was (and remains) to allow productive sectors of the economy to manage risks: if you're a farmer planning to sell some wheat, you can short wheat to limit your losses in case the price is lower than expected; if you're a baker who will need to buy some flour in the future, you might go long on it in case the price rises. Speculators provide liquidity--they compensate those farmers and bakers when things go south and buffer the losses. Some prediction market component is applied automatically, as some speculators would physically stockpile resources.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo 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
9mo ago
Anyone creating such a law would have already thought of obvious workarounds like this and done something to avoid them.
Absolutely not, see this: https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc846f2a19d87b03440848f1
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo 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)
Marxbro was a troll by the way. At one point we had a discussion about the Labor Theory of Value, I tried my best to steer it away from theorizing and keep to a concrete example of some guys on an island exchanging fishes for pots etc, and eventually he had enough and basically said that no, he didn't want to explain this or that, he was doing it to get a rise out of people like me. Or at least that's how I remember it, it was, what, five years ago? But yeah, my impression was that he let the mask slip.
Of course, in words of a Chinese poet, if you pretend to be insane and tear your clothes and run into the garden, are you actually pretending, which also applies to single-mindedly "trolling" an internet forum for years.
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
Rdrama Bookclub Discussion Thread #1 :marseyreading:. “The Master and Margarita” Chap. 1-7
You're welcome to join, 100 pages per week is actually not a lot given how well it's written, I accidentally got to chapter 5 on Monday night lol. Also apparently people are very surprised that rather than Dostoyevsky it's more like Douglas Adams with some extra dark humor.
The discussion is pretty good too!
You can pirate the supposedly best English translation here: https://libgen.is/fiction/819D3E8A110577E3C53018814ECAAACD, I checked out the first chapter, I guess it's about as good as you could expect a translation to be. Anyways, people seem to really enjoy it!
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
GPT failed me on this, so I'm asking you folks: Find a sci-fi short story about a politician who was denied rejuvenation treatment and started a campaign against it in revenge, only to discover that being elderly he forgot to check mail and missed a letter offering permanent immortality as a space colonist. That plot twist came after he talked to a friend who explained that the only reason the treatment didn't grant permanent immortality was because of the lack of living space, once the space colonization issues were solved everyone would be allowed to become immortal.
Btw as a result of arguing with people in the BotCcord, I managed to convince myself that Red is actually the prosocial choice.
The selfishness of the Red choice is a bit of a red herring, you can modify the scenario where you are choosing the pills for your underage children while having won a lottery that guarantees your survival in a Red world. The problem remains.
The actual scary worlds are where 10-50% of people choose Blue. This is the nightmare scenario that we want to avoid at all costs, including killing 1% of suicidal people, idiots, etc--if that actually works.
After I pointed that out, I got weird arguments from Blue people that they were certain that Blue would win anyway, but somehow this didn't make them choose Red just in case.
A sort of Kant's Universalizability/one-boxing in Newcomb's problem came up too: you should choose Blue so that people like you choose Blue and Blue wins. But by the same logic you're also morally responsible for killing everyone who chose Blue in a 49% Blue world.
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