official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
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
7mo 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
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
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
11mo ago
You do that by shredding their argument and pointing out how they ignored the strongest counter-argument last time. If they are indeed very very stupid, that will be evident without you namecalling. There is no "But they really are stupid!" exception that lets you call people stupid.
Why? You're literally telling me that I can't say that the Emperor is naked, even if he is in fact naked. I should point out that he is naked in a round-about way, hoping that everyone goes through my argument and comes to the same conclusion that I'm not allowed to state openly.
And my problem is not even that he's a Holocaust denier, I could tell you some things that I believe about that that would make you uncomfortable probably, it's that he's stupid or pretending to be stupid. Which, by the way, pretending to be stupid to confuse the discussion, is supposed to be the highest degree of anathema to you mods, but you let it slide when it comes from a literal holocaust denier because you assume that everyone who attacks him attacks him because of the object of his claims and not because of the stupidity/pretend stupidity of his arguments.
@SecureSignals is either stupid or is pretending to be stupid to spread his bullshit. This is what I truly believe and I can defend this belief with arguments if anyone is interested.
official_techsupport
who/whom
3mo ago
That was one of the objections listed in the post, Scott's response was that you should only be neutral about elementary propositions, not about compound ones ("bloxors are greeblic AND bloxors are grue").
I personally think that this entire kind of objections can be dismissed by pointing out that Bayesian math works correctly and without contradictions, and when looking at actual priors there's not much disagreement about how to choose them either, in practice. Nobody actually has arguments against assigning a symmetric prior to a coin bias, or even can muster a lot of enthusiasm to argue that you should use a gaussian instead of a uniform prior.
People get hot and bothered when they feel that someone tries to hide how much information they have actually updated on and how much is their prior.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
If your political tribe requires you to deny simple laws of physics, find better one.
Okay, look, imagine that you wake up in an alternate reality where there's a flourishing scientific field studying beneficial effects of smoking tobacco (it was real for a while, a guy who invented like a third of modern statistics after retiring picked up a fight with all the people saying that smoking causes lung cancer, pointing out that they use bad statistics, correlation doesn't equal causation, what if people with lung cancer pick up smoking to soothe their lungs; also nicotine might help with schizophrenia, nicotine can be a safer and better stimulant than caffeine, etc etc).
Then you discover that the 99.7% consensus of the pro-smoking scientists corresponds to the 98% of their research being funded by tobacco companies. Stop for a second, why does that raise your hackles regardless of the subject matter, whether they study smoking or AGW?
When a scientist who studies the beneficial effects of smoking on a grant from a tobacco company publishes a paper saying that tobacco causes cancer, we should all stop promoting that and cancel our entire field, a few things happen:
- His paper is not mentioned in his benefactor's speech to the company telling them how they should funnel more money into the study of the beneficial effects of smoking.
- He never receives any grants from the company ever more.
- He quits the field.
- His peers in the field universally condemn his research as flawed because they don't want to lose funding or quit the field.
- His peers in the field believe themselves to be right and their job to be producing research convincing to the public, not research discovering truth.
- If the field is politicized, his peers also believe that all opponents also want to eat fetuses or make rape legal.
This same effect of course applies to the field of climate research as the scientists working in it apply for grants to the USA Department of Energy or other state-level entities that are naturally interested in the evidence for global warming as a clear and present threat.
So unfortunately with the way the funding is set up, the entire field produces no knowledge (justified true belief). It might be true that AGW is dangerous to humanity, we know that the entire climate research community would claim that it is true regardless of whether it is true, so them claiming that it's true gives us 0 information. Simple as.
For a bit more of an expanded argument read the AGW section of https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I 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
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
8mo ago
Because then it doesn't have a moral authority, and you're no better than Yazidis, who believe that Satan doused the fires of hell with his tears and escaped and now rules the world, so you'd better worship him if you know what's good for you.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Turn the switch on, and people who are ordinarily perfectly reasonable are frothing at the mouth saying you're killing grandma, you're a menace to society, you're a dirty plague rat.
Do they really?
One thing the pandemic taught me is that people's experiences vary a lot by the country or state or city, but still, do they really?
Here, we had everyone masking in shops etc without much grumbling, like, all right, why not. But I remember exactly one case of a guy asking me to keep the distance and it was so weird, like dude, you actually take it that seriously? And he was apologetic asking me to step back, rather than frothing at the mouth.
So: it's entirely possible that my experience is completely different from your experience. But on the other hand I can't help but suspect that my IRL and online experiences respectively are actually very much the same as yours, but I'm better at discriminating between the two and dismissing online crazies as not representative of the people.
official_techsupport
who/whom
6mo 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
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
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
8mo ago
One thing unique to DNA/RNA is that they can be used in two distinct ways: directly copied or interpreted as instructions for building stuff. This is a pretty fundamental property because it allows constructing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing) , with the cell corresponding to the program and the DNA corresponding to the text constant in the program that the cell uses to construct a copy of the cell and also copies and inserts directly. Also it avoids the issue of, how do you replicated a hammer without using a stronger hammer to disassemble it -- instructions for building a hammer don't possess the strength of a hammer and can be examined and replicated easily.
I'm not sure that something that doesn't have this duality can be a somewhat general purpose replicator, not by default at least, and I'd expect any good paper proposing some replicator mechanism to be aware of this.
official_techsupport
who/whom
10mo ago
O, tick bites are a great example because they do not itch pretty much at all (and don't swell at first either), while mosquito bites start itching within minutes. So it is possible to anesthetize the bite location without immediately causing an immune response: why don't mosquitos do that, do they simply not care (evolutionarily speaking) or maybe there's some non-obvious benefit to it?
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
I asked Bing's Sydney. Btw, I am now pretty certain that she does in fact use GPT4 in the Creative mode. Anyways, she had some suggestions:
The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund: An example of a modern take on the noir genre, The Crow Girl is a violent story with an unreliable narrator. Detective Jeanette Kihlberg has the requisite messy personal life and cynical worldview for noir stories, and the crimes she finds herself investigating, involving mutilated, mummified children, explode into a horrifying and exhilarating mystery that spans decades and continents
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson: A bestselling and acclaimed novel that introduces Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant hacker and investigator who teams up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist to solve a decades-old disappearance of a wealthy heiress. The novel explores themes of corruption, violence, misogyny, and revenge in a dark and gripping way.
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith: A charming and humorous series that follows Precious Ramotswe, the founder and owner of Botswana’s first and only female-run detective agency. Precious uses her intuition and common sense to solve various cases, from missing husbands to wayward daughters, while also dealing with her own personal issues.
Tart Noir edited by Stella Duffy and Lauren Henderson: A collection of short stories by various female authors that showcase the subgenre of tart noir, which is characterized by strong, independent, and often sexually assertive women who are involved in crime, either as detectives, criminals, or victims. The stories range from dark and gritty to witty and humorous, but all share a noir sensibility
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.
official_techsupport
who/whom
3mo ago
How do I know that "bloxor-1 is greeblic" is elementary, if I am totally uncertain about this proposition, and I don't even understand the terms?
Skill issue.
What do you mean "correctly"?
That I, doing Bayesian math about some bets against you, will leave you poor and destitute in the long run, unless you're using Bayes too. What do you want to use instead of Bayes for the record?
the Allais paradox
My point is not that the poors are always instinctively right. My point is that they have well-honed instincts for when someone is trying to take advantage of them, and the usual Bayesian reasoning like the above rightfully triggers it, even if they don't have the concepts or the introspection to communicate to us what was that, that triggered them.
My point is that a Bayesian megamind is entirely justified in asking the yudkowsky what fraction of his prediction came from the data, and basing his bet amount on that, and grumbling about the yudkowsky being useless if he refuses to answer.
Nobody actually has arguments against assigning a symmetric prior to a coin bias
How many of the arguments in probability theory have you read to come to this judgement? Because I can think of large parts of the literature dedicated to exactly this point.
Huh?
official_techsupport
who/whom
3mo ago
They are making correct arguments that fail only in a very small subset of problems, those with information acquisition that is affected by the decisions.
I disagree that this is a very small subset of problems, the majority of real life problems let you decide to wait and collect more information or decide how many resources you're willing to bet. See examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
For example, I think I first noticed this problem many years ago in one of Scott's linkdumps where he disapprovingly linked to Obama saying that CIA told him that such and such thing had a 70% probability but really they had no good information so it was a coinflip. And Scott was indignant, 70% is 70% what more do you need to know before you authorize some military operation, even the President doesn't understand probability smdh. In my opinion Obama was right, if technically imprecise, while Scott was wrong, which demonstrates the danger of having a little knowledge and also the need for more awareness.
is not easy to communicate succinctly.
You say this as if it's not Bayesians' fault that they have not developed (or got into a habit of using) a succinct way of conveying how much of the estimate comes from the prior and how much from the previous updates. I would understand if it was an acknowledged hard problem in need of community's attention, but for example Yudkowsky sequences don't mention it at all.
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
I'm reading the webnovel A Practical Guide to Evil on @official_techsupport's recommendation.
For the record while I can recommend several webnovels, I've never read this one and also have a very low tolerance for badly written stuff.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I started developing weird pains in my right wrist, then read somewhere to pay attention to how you sleep, in particular that you don't have your palm angled at 90 degrees forward from the wrist. Then I discovered that for some reason I did this all the time, made a conscious effort to stop doing that, and had no issues since.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I think I can. I'd also ask like half of the people I play Blood on the Clocktower with regularly and they will probably agree and we will make it.
I think that if/when there's a call for it, it won't be the average ability of some particular ethnicity/faith/whatever, but self-selected (but also gatekept) people that are multiple deviations above the average in whatever traits you think are good for manning a generation ship. A random 1000 mormons have nothing on the top 1000 <insert the ethnic group you most despise> most excited about colonizing Alpha Centauri.
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.
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.
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