official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo 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
9mo ago
By intervention I meant that hypothetical Soros-funded anti-recidivism experiment that funds all sorts of activists trying various ideas.
The alternative to that is the current situation when violent recidivists are in fact locked up for a long time on taxpayer's dime.
My point is that I'm sure that pretty much nobody, including KKK Grand Dragons, hates black people in a sense that they would actively pay to harm them. So we shouldn't worry that our hypothetical program would receive a pushback from the nonexistent group of people that prefers more black criminals around.
I'm probably a lot more willing to entertain HBD or even JQ stuff simply because asking a good faith question about either topic (and others like them) gets you shouted down, ostracized, blacklisted etc.
It's not even some psychological bias, it's a legitimate heuristic. A position can be defended with facts/logic/reason or with appeals to authority, social pressure and threats. A position that is true can be defended with both, a position that is false much is easier defended with the latter. If some position is pretty much exclusively defended with the latter, that's a good evidence that it is false.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
Btw as a result of arguing with people in the BotCcord, I managed to convince myself that Red is actually the prosocial choice.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Reddit nuked the API used by pushshift.io which they all used. So I guess no.
I asked Bing AI to help me make a Blood on the Clocktower character, here's the result: https://i.imgur.com/ZXqkSAP.png
It's an actually interesting character, I discussed it with the pals and they thought that it was quite overpowered if anything.
Also it was a flash in the pan, it took me a while to convince the AI to help me (it kept insisting that it was not a game designer for some reason), then I got this, then I got about a dozen of nonsense/boring suggestions.
On a related note, come play with us in our Blood on the Clocktower discord! https://discord.gg/wJR87pjK
It's a variation on Mafia/Werewolf but with several important distinctions that make it superior, and especially superior for internet games, and even more superior for text games with 24h/game day (but we also play voice games sometimes btw!).
First of all, everyone gets a character with an ability. Abilities are designed to be interesting and include stuff like "if you die in the night, choose a player, you learn their character". Second, dead players' characters are not announced, they can still talk with the living, and retain one last ghost vote, so if you get killed you're still fully in the game and maybe even more trusted. So you get games where everyone is engaged from the very start--because you want to privately claim your character, maybe as one of three possibilities, to some people--to the very end when you cast your ghost vote for who you think is the demon.
Lately we had some rdrama people join (including Carp himself!) so it would be nice to balance their deviousness and social reads with having more themotte folks. We were historically very balanced: https://i.imgur.com/gcotalV.png
My favorite voice game (not our group, but we have had similar shit going down): https://youtube.com/watch?v=r9BNc-nDxww?list=FLRMq6rziC28by3Xtvl8VcEg&t=246
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
This is how a high-trust society feels like.
The most interesting case I personally experienced was when I booked a small hotel 1 km from the center of Tallinn. And I was arriving after midnight so I asked them if that's OK and they said that they will leave the front door unlocked and my key on the reception table. Which they did. And, like, there was at least the computer there on the reception and who knows what else to steal, but apparently that was a good neighborhood. Needless to say, there were no checks whatsoever regarding the breakfast.
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
1yr ago
You are literally arguing against physics. Again, quick googling told me that: meat energy density is about 10MJ/kg, water heat of vaporization is about 2MJ/kg, humans are 60% water. I don't account for bones but I also don't account for fat and brains. Can you do basic math?
Your argument is that since a proper cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy, a mass cremation of 5000 bodies requires a proportionally prohibitive amount of energy. When I point out that it doesn't scale like that at all because of physics (not to mention that Nazis weren't interested in proper cremations), you make more arguments supporting that cremation of a single body requires a lot of energy.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
That aside, in real life self-described EAs universally seem to advocate for honesty based on the pretty obvious point that the ability of actors to trust one another is key to getting almost anything done ever, and is what stops society from devolving into a hobbesian war of all-against-all.
There's a problem with that: a moral system that requires you to lie about certain object-level issues also requires you to lie about all related meta-, meta-meta- and so on levels. So for example if you're intending to defraud someone for the greater good, not only you shouldn't tell them that, but if they ask "what if you were in fact intending to defraud me, would you tell me?" you should lie, and if they ask "doesn't your moral theory requires you to defraud me in this situation?" you should lie, and if they ask "does your moral theory sometimes require lying, and if so, when exactly?" you should lie.
So when you see people espousing a moral theory that seems to pretty straightforwardly say that it's OK to lie if you're reasonably sure you're not getting caught, when questioned happily confirm that yeah, it's edgy like that, but then seem to realize something and walk that back, without providing any actual principled explanation for that, like Caplan claims Singer did, then the obvious and most reasonable explanation is that they are lying on the meta-level now.
And then there's Yudkowsky who actually understood the implications early enough (at least by the point SI rebranded as MIRI and scrubbed most of the stuff about their goal being creating the AI first) but can't help leaking stuff on the meta-meta-level, talking about this bayesian conspiracy that, like, if you understand things properly you must understand not only what's at stake but also that you shouldn't talk about it. See Roko's Basilisk for a particularly clear cut example of this sort of fibbing.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
With AGI on the horizon he’s a god damn prophet.
Even more of a prophet than you probably realize. I once collected every single mention of the Butlerian Jihad from the first four books, which was surprisingly few, about a page of relevant text all together, and apparently it was not about any kind of Skynet type of situation, but the machines naturally forcing the society to be more convenient/predictable/understandable to themselves. Think along the lines of choosing extra classes in college not because of something that interests you but because you know that an AI would consider that when recommending your career, and you know that you'll accept its recommendation because it's the best for you and so on. And with the AIs optimizing the society for predictability it was robbing humanity of its future, kinda like Leto II's plan actually but without the reverse psychology part.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
The circumstances around the third largest non-nuclear explosion in history appear to be relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Chicago_disaster
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
11mo ago
For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.
To expand on how I see these things. If a flat earther comes here and not only makes arguments but engages with counter-arguments in good faith, that's all good. If they flat out ignore the strongest counter-argument, because they are literally too stupid to understand how, for example, fire works (which neandertals understood), or maybe even pretend to be that stupid (which is also stupid in its own way), then I think that:
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It's good for everyone else on the forum to be made aware that the person in question is very very stupid (or pretends to be) so arguing with them is a waste of time.
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The person in question forfeited their right to be taken seriously by not taking counter-arguments remotely seriously.
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The forum would benefit from such people being named and shamed for their real or pretend stupidity and be driven away and the land of the heathen consume them.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
First ask how much wood to cremate a body. Then ask how much wood to cremate 5,000 bodies - i.e. "hundreds of cords of wood."
"When the air could be breathed again, the doors were opened, and the Jewish workers removed the bodies. By means of a special process which Wirth had invented, they were burned in the open air without the use of fuel." (I recommend reading https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/holocaust-nazi-perspective/)
As far as I understand, burning a human body is an energy-positive process (quick googling: meat energy density is about 10MJ/kg, water heat of vaporization is about 2MJ/kg, humans are 60% water), so you only need extra fuel to start the fire and due to inefficiencies. Once you figure out how to cremate 5000 bodies at a time you definitely don't get the naive answer to the question you proposed.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
But I think there are lessons for the “anti-woke” too. That is, relative age effects are a proof-of-concept for significant arbitrary privilege being a real thing. A fair amount of anti-woke arguments claim that gender and racial disparities may disappear entirely when controlling for confounding variables (e.g. the gender wage gap or the racial policing gap).
My objections have been always on the meta-level: I don't doubt that there are some structural isms, but can we have an honest discussion about how much of inequality of outcomes is due to them and how better to approach that? We can't, and that's bad because I'm pretty sure that in several important aspects the pendulum has swung too far a long time ago and this hurts the supposed beneficiaries of anti-ism discriminatory policies as well, in unexpected ways even. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae#1990s left a lot of black and poor people homeless and with a destroyed credit rating, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_the_United_States#Race_and_gender put the majority of educated blacks in the US into a sort of indefinite indentured servitude, and having a 60:40 college+ educated female to male ratio makes dating not very fun for those women. This is what you get if you shut down open discussion because you think that the only problem is evil ciswhitemales and nothing could possibly go wrong if you shut them off and follow the road paved with good intentions.
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
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
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.
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
1yr ago
Please provide justifications for the request that are at least as strong as the impetus of the request itself.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
The linked essay makes a convincing argument for what it is.
That's definitely a position.
There's a problem with basically lying about how "rising tide rises all boats" instead of admitting that you have this position and honestly telling the people who are getting fucked that they are getting fucked at least, not to mention actual redistributive efforts in their favor.
There was a Scott's post that I was never able to find, maybe of the Links kind, where he was seriously surprised that the majority of economists in some poll admitted that removing import tariffs hurts local workers. Because when you don't ask them directly they are very good at making it seem that the fact that their models only look at the GDP and such is OK because everything else is unimportant.
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