philosoraptor
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User ID: 285
philosoraptor
4mo ago
I tried like 8 times to write a long one and it all seemed absurd.
That's telling you something.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats
As perhaps an example of your larger point, this seemed implausibly low to me (it's about 20% smaller than the smallest full-time[1] arena in the NHL, a league with a much smaller following than MLB), so I did a quick Google and turned up a figure of 54,251, about 4.5 times your number. Where are you getting 12,000 from?
[1] I'm excluding the university arena the Arizona Coyotes are temporarily housed in, as that's not meant to be a permanent arrangement.
Murphy's responses make a lot more sense if you assume that her true objections to the sex industry are really borne out of an aesthetic or disgust aversion, and specifically only when men are the patrons.
Okay, not the most substantive point but this error, which seemed to be pretty rare at one time, is everywhere lately and it drives me nuts. "Borne" is not a fancy alternate spelling of "born", as many people seem to have suddenly concluded. It's a different word with a different meaning ("carried", more or less). You could say, for example, that Murphy's responses are "borne up by a mighty wind of righteous indignation", or something like that, though that does seem a bit purple for either Yassine or myself now that I read back over it. But in this case the word you want is just "born".
philosoraptor
9mo ago
Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
They'd almost certainly be neither surprised nor happy about this, because the assumption would be that a nuclear war had taken place. People seem to have completely forgotten the grip that threat had on the culture around that time.
philosoraptor
17d ago
That's 7% of all interracial marriages that are black man/white woman compared to 9% of interracial marriages that are white man/asian woman. Hardly a substantial difference.
It's huge when you consider the relative proportions of Black vs Asian people in the US.
philosoraptor
5mo ago
I took the point to be adjacent to the one Scott made - wow, is it really that long ago? - last December about how the media rarely lies. I don't agree with how Scott frames the observation, which I would have phrased in terms of how the ways they lie are relatively subtle - but the observation itself, as distinct from the debate over the best language to characterize it, is solid.
Skilled liars make as few statements that are straightforwardly false in a plain, literal way as they can and still spread whatever narrative they want to spread. One of the many advantages of this is that there's rarely a clear-cut smoking gun someone in the board's position can point to. Instead it's a matter of which facts they emphasize and which they omit, what they juxtapose with what in order to imply connections that may not actually exist, how they manipulate your emotions around aspects of their narrative, how they take advantage of people's trust in them, or at least willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in situations that really are ambiguous.
So while I can see how the statement you quote is poor optics, I have no trouble imagining how it could be true.
philosoraptor
6mo ago
Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.
I mostly remember them doubling down and implying that Silver was somehow super-extra-wrong and had lost credibility by saying Trump had only a 30% chance... never mind that most other pollsters were much further off (many had it more like 1%) and didn't get the same treatment.
philosoraptor
9mo ago
If this took place in 2021, it didn't involve anything recognizable as the AIs people are currently concerned about.
but 90% to 99% of Americans have spent more hours than that watching porn
I seriously doubt enough women watch porn on the regular for this to be true. Not that I care much about the larger topic (squaring Trumpism with the religious right is not a fight I have a dog in since I'm just like "A pox on both their houses!"), but that jumped out at me.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
They don't always have good advice though. I have a friend who is pretty average looking but very charming and social and always had a girlfriend. His advice to me - which I immediately recognized as bad - was to just wait because "relationships just happen".
IME that's most women's advice, too, or at least most attractive women. And from their point of view it's perfectly true, but that doesn't make it helpful for people for whom it's demonstrably not true.
Another of my most hated ones is the idea that only 7% of meaning comes from words (the rest from body language and tone). This doesn't even make any fucking sense, much less have any evidence that it's true. It's a terrible description (like, you'd have to be borderline-illiterate to go to the original source and have this as your takeaway) of a study that was making a completely different, much narrower point. (Specifically, that if your verbal and nonverbal communication don't match, people will generally believe the nonverbal portion - e.g. you say to your spouse "everything's fine!" in an angry, aggressive tone, this will not persuade them that everything's fine.)
Thinking for ten seconds about the last non-trivial conversation you had (roughly speaking, one where novel information was exchanged on a topic other than the participants' current emotional states) should be enough to disprove this idea decisively. How, you should ask yourself, could 93% of that information have been exchanged in a way that was independent of the words used? In most cases, you will find that the question not only does not have a good answer, but is hard to even make sense of.
This has not prevented the idea from showing up in training materials from major multinational corporations, not to mention the Web sites of universities that should damn well know better.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Not that there weren't recognizable proto-wokist streams within leftism at the time, but it wasn't nearly the all-encompassing thing it can seem to be now. In particular race was nowhere near as central to North American leftism before about 2014 as it is now. In fact one of the many things I (pretty leftist at least by current Motte standards) lament about the rise of wokism is the near-total absence of, not only anti-war sentiment, but of any consideration of foreign policy at all, from 2023 leftism.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Even granting the premise of your whole post, I have to make this one tiny quibble: shouldn't principles make someone predictable rather than unpredictable?
Only to people who understand those principles. My read of the political landscape today is that even the possibility of having them is just invisible to a lot of people, much less the details of any particular set.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
But I don't recall ever seeing dating advice, even from feminists, suggesting that any woman wants a proposition like "How about being my no-strings-attached fuck buddy?"
Not directly, and certainly not specifically about that topic. But there is quite a bit of "always be honest about what you want" messaging out there that, on the surface, seemingly points in that direction. Which does indeed seem disingenuous, because following that advice will rarely if ever work out well for the kind of guys who need dating advice in the first place. I don't really believe that "shit tests" are something anyone does in a conscious, deliberate way, but advice like that makes it easy to see why some people find it tempting to believe in them.
philosoraptor
1mo ago
I understood most of those individual words...
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Generally, I've seen a lot of women indicating both that is easy for men to get casual sex, and also women who indicate that it's not super easy for women to do that.
If they genuinely think that it's because they're comparing themselves only to the top few percent of men - the ones they'd actually consider for casual sex, that bar being far higher for most women than most men. At least in that context, virtually all men outside those few percent are invisible to them. It may literally not cross their minds (again, in that context) that other men besides those few percent exist.
philosoraptor
3mo ago
he does not indulge in masturbatory stylistic flourish
Maybe if you're used to his non-standard spellings and such. He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me (albeit a very clever one, though not as much so as he seems to think).
philosoraptor
5mo ago
Upper 20s is also pretty bloody hot for "room temperature". Try 20-21. Of course the basic point still stands.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
I fold in the spots where I'm 60% fave for all my money to save it for the 75% spots.
???
What does this mean, or have to do with the discussion? It's formatted as a quote but I can't find it in OP or anywhere else.
philosoraptor
2mo ago
And then wonder why the costs spiral out of control.
philosoraptor
3mo ago
I completely fail to see how pulling a number out of your ass and using it to have an opinion is in any way better than pulling a ready-made opinion out of your ass, the guiding principle is exactly the same in both cases sans the obfuscation layers.
If nothing else it forces you to stay internally consistent, at least on the specific topics the numbers cover. That's more than a lot of people seem able to manage without such tools. Nevertheless, you're not wrong that there can be an element of "garbage in, garbage out".
philosoraptor
3mo ago
Insofar as I understand Trump voters' motivations, "productive" is orthogonal, if not actively counter, to what they're looking for. Trump is essentially a big middle finger directed at (for want of a better term) the blue tribe, and many of them actively want to burn the government to the ground. This is not some rationalization I'm making up, it's a somewhat-close, if condensed, paraphrase of some of the defenses of voting for Trump that I've seen in this very space, or rather its predecessors.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
When you lead with "but studies show..." type arguments, it's at least implied. Later flipping to "but it's an ethical question, it's not about data" as soon as her empirical case starts to look dodgy does feel like a dishonest bait-and-switch, even if that's her real position and thus, from a narrow point of view, more honest.
philosoraptor
1yr ago
Wait until you see how they carve up Canada, especially Ontario. The center of the country is in Western Canada, not Central Canada. Northern Ontario is well west of Western Ontario, and (at least going by the physical map rather than, say, one that showed population density) is not particularly far north. It's confusing even for us, sometimes.
IME actual doctors are confidently wrong with some regularity too.
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