official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo 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.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo 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
8mo ago
How would this get any good outcome? Does the George Soros fund care about helping prisoners, or do they want to advance their political goals?
They were very successful at electing people like Kim Foxx and Chesa Boudin and George Gascón who kept and keep doing exactly what was expected of them, so if that part were somehow removed and they were forced to select for people who are good at overseeing rehabilitation initiatives because that's the only way recidivists don't get back to prison, the people the Soros Foundation would choose for that would be pretty good at it.
It's, like, 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.
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.
That's the difference between socialist and libertarian approaches I guess. A Libertarian seeks to reduce the scope of consequences of decisions to the maker of them. A Socialist seeks to increase the scope until everyone is affected including the people in power so they are forced to make decisions that are good for everyone else too. Or like everyone is forced to talk about it and make decisions that are best for everyone, because everyone's in the scope.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
Any form of rehabilitation that'd work would be too coercive for the DAs to endorse, though.
I'm sure you've heard of 'three strikes laws'? The anti-prison activists didn't 'try to rehabilitate their charges', they just fought three-strikes laws.
https://www.themotte.org/post/640/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/132062?context=8#context
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo 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
8mo ago
Oh, oh, you had drama with Hlynka, and one that sounds like it involved some very stupid things said?! Spill the tea pls!
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I totally disagree with the conclusion. First of all, we are literally living in the time where one man's vision is about to revolutionize space travel by making a rocket that can lift 100 tons of payload to LEO. Yeah it's interplanetary for now, but why not interstellar next, maybe by the next man with an itch for it?
And second, why do you need to persuade the whole society to migrate? Most of the old world people didn't migrate to America and it was their loss. The few people who did migrate multiplied and prospered. "Indirect evidence of extrasolar planets will never be enough" -- for whom? So we will have bootlicking statists like the author waiting for the government to give them credible evidence and orders to go, while adventurous types will be populating the galaxy.
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
We manage to cooperate surprisingly well given that one third of the players are secretly demonic entities!
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
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
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
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
By the way, "Mother of Learning" author wrote 3 "alternate-universe" chapters for it and started a whole new series, the first chapters of which hooked me hard: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/71045/zenith-of-sorcery
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
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
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.
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
7mo ago
The brutality and cynical tactics that Hamas uses do lead to them having lower support than they would if they were less sociopathic though.
That's the weird thing though: their cynical tactics used to be launching rockets from hospital rooftops and parading the inevitable Palestinian corpses, or having Palestinian kids shot for throwing stones, etc etc. The grift has always been provoking Israel to violence and posing as an underdog.
But this, parading enemy civilian corpses around, is a diametrically opposite thing. It's something you do when you have several thousands of tanks ready to roll over the enemy capital, you expect to win, and you want to demoralize the enemy to win easier.
So I don't know, either Hamas expects Iran to nuke Israel, or the old guard that understood the nature of the grift all retired or something and the new leadership got terminally high on their own supply.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
For starters, I think the way to go is to start a regional, anonymous group chat. As people become friendly, and reveal more of their true selves, then perhaps it can move to in-person meetups.
That sounds extremely glowy.
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.
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!
I doubt it. You don't have to be rich to Uber/Bolt everywhere. In fact by the time you can actively shape what the public is allowed/encouraged to vote for you can have a private driver.
To be honest I don't know why American cities appear so dysfunctional while other places do just fine, when I don't see how the decision-making is remotely democratic. Or maybe it is democratic but ordinary urban Americans are way more brainwashed somehow. I don't know, I know that where I leave we have very nice and cheap public transportation that is used exclusively by people who can't afford cars, but it's nice because it has these social ads playing, telling that if there's some smelly hobo (literally the ad is showing green noxious fumes!) you should immediately call the police and they will remove them. Which they do and if any politician tried to run on the platform of not infringing hobo rights, they would be laughed at by everyone.
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