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official_techsupport

who/whom

2 followers   follows 2 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:44:20 UTC

					

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User ID: 122

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Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.

Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.

Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.

Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)


But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.

You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.

Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?


Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:

  • Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.

  • Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.

  • You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.

  • Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.

  • Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.


Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.

The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?

This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.

A limitation of usual Bayesian reasoning.

Scott is doing his annual subscription drive and I was reminded of a (still) private post of his I disagree with: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/but-seriously-are-bloxors-greeblic

In my post on uncertainty around AI, I wrote:

If you have total uncertainty about a statement (“are bloxors greeblic?”), you should assign it a probability of 50%. If you have any other estimate, you can’t claim you’re just working off how radically uncertain it is. You need to present a specific case.

Commenters were skeptical! I agree this important topic needs more discussion:

And then he proceeded to list some of the objections and his objections to objections. The objection I'm personally most partial to was not listed, so I assume it's a sort of novel idea, at least in that (and this) community.

Suppose that in your travels you encounter a shady guy who offers you an opportunity to bet on the outcome of a coin flip. Nearby stands a yudkowsky, who tells you that according to his observations the coin is biased and the next flip is about 66% likely to land on heads. You know that yudkowskis are honest and good Bayesians, so you trust his assessment.

The shady guy flips the coin and it lands on tails. Now consider two possible worlds: in one the yudkowsky says that his new estimate is 50% heads, in another he says that he has updated to 65% heads. That's two very different worlds! It turns out that the yudkowsky has an important parameter: how many coinflips he has observed so far, and therefore how much of his estimation comes from the observations and how much from the prior, and for some reason he doesn't tell you its value!

Scott's assertion is correct in a narrow technical sense: in a world where the shady stranger forces you to make a bet at gunpoint, you are forced to use the yudkowsky's estimation and the yudkowsky is forced to use a symmetric prior that gives him a 50% probability of heads when he has not seen any flips at all yet.

However in the real world there's almost always an option to wait and collect more data, and whether you want to exercise it critically depends on the difference between "it's a 50/50 chance based on observing 100 coinflips" and "it's a 50/50 chance based solely on the prior I pulled out of my ass".

So what's going on I think is that people intuitively understand that there's this important difference and suspect that when Scott says that normally they should start with a 50/50 prior, he's trying to swindle them into accepting Bayesians' estimations without asking how sure they are about them. And rightfully so, because that's a valid and important question to ask and honestly Bayesians ought to get a habit of volunteering this information unprompted, instead of making incorrect technical arguments insinuating that the estimated probability alone should be enough for everyone.

New ACX post: Mostly Skeptical Thoughts On The Chatbot Propaganda Apocalypse, discuss!

I'll begin: this quote from philosophybear (what's his account here btw?):

The capacity of the wealthy to command vast armies of bots (GPU’s to run machine learning are expensive) will further erode what “democracy” there is on the internet. If fee structures are bought in like I described to keep bots out, that will make the internet less democratic too. My advice is to log off and start forming connections and organizations in real life now.

... made my inner Curtis Yarvin giggle hysterically. Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations. The only deviations are of the "we need fifty Stalins" kind (until they become the norm eventually). Can you imagine a Harvard professor, a New York Times editor, and the Raytheon PR department having a substantial disagreement on whether we need more trans drone pilots? I can't.

And it took people the possibility of bots faking a pale shadow of such consensus to start worrying that maybe democracy is susceptible to being secretly not the rule of the people but the rule of whoever tells the people what to believe, and the unbelievable synopticity of what we are told to believe means that this rule is being actively exercised?

Later Scott sort of touches on this a bit quoting a comment that said:

On the 'disinformation vs. establishment bot' question, check out bots interacting with climate change: 83.1% of bot tweets support activism, 16.9% skepticism according to https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674927821001490 .

The abstract ends with:

Based on the above findings, we suggest cultivating individuals’ media literacy in terms of distinguishing malicious social bots as a potential solution to deal with social bot skeptics disguised as humans, as well as making use of benign social bots for science popularization.

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.

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.

You are not just burning the meat, you are trying to cremate the skeleton to ashes. Cremation is not an energy-positive process.

That's a "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" kind of argument. I'm pretty sure that turning bones to ashes only requires a certain temperature and is also an energy positive process by itself, or if not then a rounding error compared to the heat required to evaporate the water. You're welcome to look up the chemical processes involved, for me my back of the envelope calculations and some physics-related common sense provide convincing enough proof that cremation is in fact an energy-positive process, so your "multiply the wood amount by 5000" argument is nonsense.

But you can notice there is already a contradiction in the witness testimony.

I'm OK with assuming that the Nazi judge did not relay the boasting about the cremation process by the guy who he had shot in precise enough detail.

To be fair complaining about lawn aesthetics is just as bad as adoring lawn aesthetics. Same goes for reading all that shallowness and unwarranted feeling of superiority into people you never met, vs being that shallow etc. A house like in the picture is perfectly suited for reading Dostoyevsky in, and that's the important part, no?

I also don't think that there's a problem that warrants a solution, much less a centralized solution. If someone figures out how to use resources more efficiently without compromising much more important aspects of life with their "part and parcel of hustle and bustle", let them try it somewhere! If it works, people will come and other places will emulate it! If on the other hand you operate under an assumption that people are deluded about what is best for them and must be forced into correct living conditions with an iron hand, it's overwhelmingly likely that it's you who are wrong.

On the latter note, in my experience there's an inverse relationship between the quantity and quality of interactions with neighbors and population density, in terms of inviting neighbors to your birthday party or a random bbq, vs not knowing who even lives in the apartment next door. Like, you might think that people living in separate houses naturally become a sort of haughty recluses shunning human contact, while people forced into a sort of human hive naturally form vibrant local communities--nope, for some reason it's the exact opposite in my experience.

I don't know why, maybe it's because a separate house on its plot of land is much more self-sufficient in certain senses, you don't just sleep there, you hang out there in the evenings and on weekends, your kids play there and around there, stuff like that, so naturally you interact with the neighbors all the time. While if you live in a pod and have to go to do all other activities in other designated areas, you just don't get many opportunities to interact with your pod-neighbors.

There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. 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.

If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.

Why do mosquito bites itch?

Is it entirely accidental, as in, evolution only cared about whatever stuff mosquito inject acting as an effective anesthetic for the duration of the bite, not about what happens next? Or maybe it's beneficial for humans (makes us much more alert and aggressive towards further mosquitos) or maybe even individual mosquitos due to intra-species competition?

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

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.

One thing that the Ukraine war has demonstrated is that Russian Bots are a paper tiger, probably.

I discovered a fascinating thing.

There's this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Valerius_Soranus who was executed for revealing the Secret Name of Rome. By the way, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome doesn't mention that Rome had a Secret Name. It's that secret.

Now look, here's this website https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/ straight from the pre-2000 internet, apparently selling or renting out some property in Hawaii?

But then! Then! Somehow it has this! https://hwlabadiejr.tripod.com/roma.htm

Here is an interesting question, (one that Tiberius need not have asked nor would have condoned if asked) noted by Sir Thomas Browne in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, (Book 1 Chapter 3), as arising in consequence of a statement of Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. III.65 ):

How do you not go and read everything that that guy wrote on the subject? Also apparently this website is literally the only place we can get this stuff from, there are no other hits in google or google books or ya.ru.

Lunaranus, whatever is your new name, you will enjoy it a lot.

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:

  • 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.

  • The person in question forfeited their right to be taken seriously by not taking counter-arguments remotely seriously.

  • 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.

My cats clearly don't understand how doors work.

They don't even understand that I open doors. One has learned that if she stands with paws on the door and looks at me and meows then the door opens sometimes, but I'm really not sure that she understands that it's I who opens the door, she just knows that "the door's open" tends to happen after "meow near the door". She doesn't understand "push on the door" leads to "door opens", I checked.

How would something like that work for humans? I mean, is it possible to imagine beings that are so above us as we are above cats and who affect our lives in meaningful (open doors etc) but incomprehensible ways? Like I have a literal guardian angel, I pray to it (like my cat meows to me), and then somehow things work out better for me, in an incomprehensible way. How could that work? How could an angel "opening a door" for you appear to a human?

And on the meaning side, we long ago reached the age where, per John Adams, the majority of the population could “ study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain”. They choose to collect Funko Pops, play slot machines or gacha games, watch reality TV and porn.

You and everyone else here (including @DaseindustriesLtd) are way too optimistic. You envision the failure mode of a UBI program as some recipients choosing a half-time job as a cashier over composing poems. The absolute worst possibility is them playing video games all the time.

We have had multiple attempts at UBI already, even if they weren't called that and differed in various unimportant aspects. Paris banlieues, US projects where 95% of inhabitants are on the dole--oh how you'd want them to play vidya all day instead of filling their upper levels of Maslow hierarchy with doing drugs, selling drugs, murdering other drug sellers, theft, robbery, general destruction of property, rape, riots, arson, every antisocial thing you can come up with they actually do. And they form a generationally unemployed underclass, a lot of people with no respect for labor and nothing but contempt for the hand that is feeding them. And they vote, besides burning up cars for fun.

This is the hard problem that any UBI-like proposal has to solve, not the pedestrian stuff like not preventing people from having part time jobs or removing unnecessary barriers to getting healthcare.

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).

Eh, Null is doomposting as usual.

The most disturbing thing about all this to me is how easy it is to prop a blatant falsehood via "citogenesis". Multiple reputable sources have claimed that KF drove three people to suicide, therefore it's on Wikipedia as established truth. As far as I know, this is false.

As far as I know the only way to prove that it's false to someone is to ask them who those people were, at which point they discover themselves in a very sus tangle of people repeating rumors they heard from multiple people but with no actual sources, and either get enlightened or appeal to authority of a National Security Analyst for NBC and former Assistant Director of the FBI: twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1566438538765279232 and, yeah, the response can only be that things are really that bad, sorry.

Oh, oh, you had drama with Hlynka, and one that sounds like it involved some very stupid things said?! Spill the tea pls!

The real question we are interested in: "we can have an intervention that would make this black man a productive member of society that you don't even have to pay for, or you can pay $30k/year for decades until he grows too old to do crime".

I don't know if I'm stating the obvious here, but nothing about this tells us that "urgency" is bad per se, let alone how any of it is a value of "white culture" specifically. It seems at least possible that the activist's arrest was more important than her training, even from the narrow perspective of "perpetuating racism", but Okun appears incapable of entertaining that idea.

There's a certain obvious and probably inevitable professional deformation that occurs in people in Academia (some fields more than other). Consider, for example, a philosopher. His career trajectory, his current social status and salary, are pretty much entirely determined by the opinions of his peers and superiors. If they think that he's cool, his salary will increase. Then he goes and spends his paycheck buying food and stuff, and is upset that he can't buy everything he wants.

Now, in theory, if asked, he probably could explain that the food he buys is produced by real people, delivered to the supermarket by the real people, there's a lot of effort required for all that, there's a limited amount of effort available to the society, so you can't just set everyone's salary at a million dollars per month and let them have anything they want. But his world--all his lived experiences--scream at him that you definitely could, his paycheck is a meaningless number not connected to anything in reality and set by other people who could just as well double it if they wanted, and the goods on supermarket shelves are conjured from thin air by extradimensional aliens for all he can tell.

This has obvious consequences. For example, his gut tells him that communism is totally viable and money was invented by evil people for the sole purpose of causing suffering in their lessers. His mind knows about supply-demand curves (hopefully) but in his gut he knows that it's bullshit invented by evil people, look, you take a piece of cheese from the supermarket shelf and tomorrow there's another piece of cheese there, what supply and demand? It's like when you scoop some water from a river with a bucket and it's immediately replaced with more water, sure, someone might try to charge your for that, and you might yield due to the social pressure, but in your gut you know that it's unnecessary and unfair.

Similarly, in this case Tema Okun probably lives in an academic bubble detached from the reality where stuff is made by someone, and where if all those someones suddenly decide that urgency is a useless value, she will discover that supermarket shelves stay empty and starve to death.

Meh, it's like reading a creationist forum where they pat themselves on their backs for owning people with "if we evolved from monkeys then why monkeys are still around" and naturally anyone objecting to that is getting banned and their objections removed.

When I want to enjoy watching stupid people being stupid I prefer the stuff rdrama links to, where they also get their just deserts, or at least we make fun of them there. Watching idiots idiot with no consequence is more annoying than fun.

You gotta admit though, it's a fun contrast between how you diagnosed someone who doesn't pre-match their socks with depression, autism, and a laundry list of other possible disorders, but then admit that you don't understand how someone can have all their underwear in the same color instead of matching it with their visible clothing.

It's not really OP in my opinion. It's sort of like a gimped Professor: resurrects a player but only the last executee. And like the Professor if it's out the Demon can just kill him. But on the other hand you get the whole day of info about who nominated who and who voted for who, so that could be incredibly strong.