quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Nitpick:
the Catholic church in Western Europe went way too hard enforcing heresy
I am pretty sure that from their perspective, they were enforcing orthodoxy.
Also, I think the original protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin were not very much into woo. Were for the Catholic church perhaps (atheist speaking here) the most important part of Christianity was to be part of the Church, for the protestants the central part of Christianity was perhaps the bible. If Luther had had the opinion that the path to salvation went through experiencing things directly which could not be legibly communicated otherwise, I guess that he would have lead guided meditations instead of translating the bible into German. I know even less about Calvin, but my understanding is that he was likewise big on studying the gospels and living with strict rules, and light on directly gaining understanding which transcends reason.
I mean, neither of them was a deist, so they still believed in the supernatural, but my idea of a puritan service is that it is probably a bit of a dry affair, heavy on the preaching and light on hymns and songs.
By contrast, the Catholics tend to have a little bit for everyone, and that certainly includes people into spiritualism and woo. Few other branches are as much into miracles, which are at the end things you can not convince the atheists of but which you know (presumably) in your spiritual bones are true. Then you have flagellants, monks, fasting, hymns, grand cathedrals, pilgrimages and so forth, all of which are more about directly experiencing faith than through rational understanding.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Trust me - the amounts stolen in Ukraine since the first year of the war are probably $100,000,000 per day.
That would be around a quarter of their pre-war GDP, so it is less implausible than I first thought.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think it is probably from the period, I am much less convinced it is German. For one thing, the text is English. Also, the perspective is more Western Allied. For a German propagandist, the fact that the Allies were able to push back Fascist Italy would not be sufficient reason to suppose that the Allies could also push back the Wehrmacht in its homeland.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The weird thing is, they haven't even gotten rid of alignment.
I misspoke. What I meant was to say they got rid of alignment for player characters, at least if BG3 is any indication. In 3e, every character, including mortals, had an alignment which was tracked and could be detected. A decent fraction of classes (paladins, clerics, druids, probably more) had alignment restrictions, so there was a mechanical effect even in computer rpgs. (Naturally, with tabletop gaming, a DM is much likelier to intervene if a divine spellcaster strays to far from the purpose of their god, and they can do that in any edition.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Paizo has, among other things, removed slavery from the Pathfinder campaign setting because some SJWs found it offensive
Of course, Malediction is still on the book. Personally, I would much rather be worked to death in some Cheliax salt mine and face Pharasma's judgement than be summarily sent to spend even a single eon in the tender cares of Asmodeus.
I think the underlying thing is that for SJ, the topic of slavery is simply sacred, and can only be mentioned in sufficiently pious, orthodox works, and an RPG which lets you play evil characters simply does not qualify. (Of course, half of the sacredness is in the word slavery, if the game had simply called an enslaved person a serf (and perhaps gotten rid of the slave markets), most of the objections would have gone away.)
Personally, I have a strong preference that worldbuilding should include organizations whose attitude to diversity is different from a 2015 tech company. I think that fictional racism/speciecism is fine, and actually a good way to tackle these topics without stepping on the toes real world people (except for the professionally offended). Pratchett did this masterfully in Discworld with the ethnic tensions between trolls and dwarfs. Likewise, slavery and serfdom were unfortunately common in a lot of human societies long before Europeans settled in the Americas.
Nor is including a price range for slaves per se offensive. Most reasons why a DM would require this information are non-malevolent, like "can we afford to simply buy our source and set them free instead of breaking them out". Per default, the adventurer lifestyle does not lend itself to slave ownership.
Now, if the source books had made special accommodations for PCs owning slaves -- like saying and you can get a discreet obedience tattoo for your slave which will force them to obey you, I would consider that in poor taste, just as I would consider an info box on how to use the grappling rules to rape someone. But on priors, I doubt this was what happened here.
Anyhow, I am looking forward to seeing how long it will take for SJ to get universal franchise for all residents of Cheliax.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I will grant you that it is a culture war, or even more accurately, a common trope encountered both in isolation and in the context of larger culture wars. Once the sociopaths are in charge, they will be willing to open the gates for whatever side of the larger CW going on at the moment is beneficial to their goals, with little concern about the ideological compatibility with the movement they just took over.
There have been multiple large culture wars in history, but the one which is roughly SJ vs MAGA is the one which I would identify as The Culture War in the context of this thread.
My point was that WotC is better seen as a sociopath org than as a SJ org. Sure, they will happily crave to the demands of the SJ crowd if they see it as advantageous to do so, but if for some reason Trump expended enough political capital to influence D&D, they would be equally willing to write how hobgoblins are strong, smart, handsome, modest, and peace-making, but unfortunately slandered by the jealous tree-hugging elves all the time.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Okay, I should add that I have mostly encountered D&D in single-player computer RPGs. There, the impact is much lessened. First, most of the focus is on combat even more than with pen and paper D&D. Either you win an encounter, in which case the fact that you were unable to cast the ideal spell for the situation is moot, or you get a TPK, so you reload and prepare differently. Outside combat, you are not on a timer and can rest whenever you like. Where a barbarian player would certainly have their character complain about having another rest despite the party being in good shape simply so that a spellcaster can prepare a utility spell, and a DM would be quick to point out the side effects of wasting another day, NPC party members typically are much more accommodating.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Well, Trump kinda promised he would release the Epstein files while campaigning, and I think someone in his administration claimed that she had the files on her desk after he took office.
So him going "nothing to see here" makes people wonder why he has changed his mind.
For the left, this is such a good dead horse to keep flogging because "elites are raping kids" is an evergreen hit with large parts of the MAGA base.
Personally, I do not think that the files contain video evidence of him raping some 13yo. If the Biden DoJ had this level of dirt on him, they would have leaked that.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The best and brightest aren't getting kicked out by a 100k charge.
Not per se, no. But it will reduce the relative attractiveness of the US as an immigration destination.
Also, the fee is only the tip of the iceberg. It is clear that the Trump administration -- and the people who voted for him -- really get off on kicking foreigners out of the country. Sure, he is unlikely to send random knowledge workers to some El Salvador megaprison without any due process, but most people would prefer not to go to countries which do not want them, all things being equal.
I think a lot depends on the specific migrant and their relative prospects in different places. There are very likely fields where someone who could become a world class researcher in the US can only hope for a meager career outside the states, and Trump can squeeze these people's balls as hard as he wants and all they will say is thank you. In other fields, things are different, and the impact of Trump plus visa costs are enough to make Cambridge more attractive than Harvard. The fact that the universities are generally on Trump's shit list will not help matters, here.
For companies, the calculation is rather similar. The answer to "do we open another research campus in the US or elsewhere?" might be different under Obama and Trump.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
or we’ll lose
Not in an absolute sense, no. Plenty of countries are very livable without immigration. But I do not think you will keep your role as tech leaders without immigration.
What happened to the best and brightest we already imported?
Regression to the mean.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I see what is happening to D&D more like a Geek, MOP, sociopath thing than a CW battleground.
There is a reason why the birth of D&D 4 -- where WotC started to streamline things to make the game more newcomer-friendly -- drove fans to the fork of 3.5 called Pathfinder.
My exposure to D&D started with the Bioware game Neverwinter Nights (which was particularly notable for its easy to use level editor, which lead to thousands of authors creating adventures for it), so D&D 3 always seemed normal to me.
I later played the Baldur's Gate games which ran on 2nd edition, THAC0 and all.
--
Recently I have played BG3, and while I found a lot to like, I mostly hated what I saw of the underlying game mechanics. I get getting rid of skills -- characters mostly maxxed out a few skills in any case, but the changes to spellcasting felt deeply offensive.
Like, traditionally wizards and sorcerers would both have spell slots for different spell levels. However wizards had to assign spells to slots during rest at night, while sorcerers could just decide which spell of their (smaller) repertoire to cast. This created meaningful mechanical differences -- a wizard who had prepared for a specific encounter was more dangerous than a sorcerer who was in turn more dangerous than a wizard who had prepared for a very different task.
With D&D 5, there is no need to assign spells to slots any more. Instead, you have to decide which spells you want to be able to cast after rest, and are limited to a frankly ridiculously low number, I think on the order of a dozen or so in the BG3 endgame, where in 3.5 you could go into combat with six different L1 spells, six different L2 spells et cetera. (Of course, the level capping at 12 instead of the more traditional level 20 does not help either. What good is a necromancer who can not cast finger of death? Not that a FoD whose best outcome is mere damage is much fun, either.)
--
On the CW side, D&D races have always been more than halfway towards species, really. Sure, you have (fertile) half-elves and half-orcs, so a full speciation between these groups has technically not happened. (I do not consider thieflings to be evidence that devils and demons share the same species as humans any more than I consider Jesus or Greek heros to be evidence of God or Zeus sharing a species with humans, in either case it seems like magic is involved in the conception.)
Still, the D&D 'races' are clearly much further apart than most populations of homo sapiens sapiens are. And they used to get their mechanical differences, which ties the fluff around them to the game mechanics. Yes, that means that no halfling is ever going to be the realm's best melee fighter. That is life. They are 3 feet tall and weigh 20kg or so. Last time I checked, no elementary schoolers were beating up grown men at MMA either.
It seems pretty obvious to me that racial and sex-based bonuses exist in the real world. If a kid wants to become the worlds best long distance runner, but is a girl of European origin, then I am sorry to say that it seems very unlikely that she will ever beat the best male long distance runner from Kenya.
Of course, sex-based bonuses, while clearly present at least for physical (and social!) attributes in the real world, are totally absent in D&D. Women melee fighters are just as viable as men, and most non-evil societies are shockingly egalitarian compared to a medieval baseline. And as far as racial bonuses are concerned, the almost exponential scaling of power with the character level means that a STR-based halfling fighter will still be slaughtering creatures twice her size by the dozen eventually. So in a sense, the game mechanics of D&D were more woke and blank-slatist than reality for a long time.
--
The lack of alignment also strikes me as silly, it was always a defining characteristic of D&D. Sure, I can see how the Always Chaotic Evil trope might be Problematic, but this can be fixed without getting rid of the E-word altogether. Just say that most goblins follow evil goblin gods, problem solved. And of course, the cosmology of D&D has not suddenly changed merely because alignment is not a stat any more, it is pretty clear that the followers of Baal or Shar are evil even if you do not spell it out.
I also do not think that the alignment system lead to an overall reductionist morality, you could still have plenty of shades of grey. Or even two lawful good characters going to war with each other if loyalties and circumstances conspire to pit them against each other.
--
Personally, I think what killed D&D was WotC dumbing it down to increase mass appeal, not SJ. My understanding is that most fans of the earlier editions got off the bandwagon when 4e arrived. If among the myriad ways WotC are pimping out the rotting corpse of D&D is also apologizing for Gygax having done a racism somewhere, I can not say that I find that uniquely upsetting.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Damn right it is.
In a world where a byte is 6 or 9 bits, octal would be useful. But for obvious reasons world length tend to be powers of two. So we want a basis of 2^(2^n) for some n. The two choices closest to the base widely used by humans are n=2 (base 16) and n=1 (base 4), which can represent a byte in two and four digits, respectively. Relatively speaking, base 16 is closer to base 10 than base 4 is, so it is the obvious choice.
Let us say you are searching for an IPv4 address in a byte-aligned data stream. In hexadecimal, it will always be the same sequence of eight digits, for example 0xc0a810ff. Converting it to dotted quad is simple, network byte order is big endian, 0xff is 255, 0x10 is 16, 0xc0 is 1216 which is 364 which is 192, which tells us that 0xa8 is likely 168.
Now let us try the same in octal. If an oct digit ends with the least significant byte, the string we are looking for is (0o)30052010377. Otherwise, it might also be (0o)60124020776 or (0o)140250041774. Three different representation for the same sequence of bytes! (Yes, you could also use 3 digits to represent each byte separately, at the cost that 0o,000,377 +1 is not 0o,000,477 but 0o,001,000. At this point, the gains over denoting your words bytewise in decimal a la 192.168.16.255 seem slim.)
There are two reasons why programmers in this century might want to be slightly more aware of octal notation than of EBCDIC. Traditional unix file permissions (and umasks) use octal. But using chmod 755 should probably be replaced by the more verbose chmod u=rwx,go=rx (or setfacl) in any case.
The other reason to be aware of it is that it is a pitfall in C, C++. While the prefix K&R chose for hexadecimal numbers, 0x does not collide with common usage elsewhere, they made the terrible decision that octal integer constants should be marked with a leading zero of all things. (I imagine they got into a lot of disputes at gas stations when trying to pay $0060 with a $50 bill.)
Python here does the sane thing and straightforward forbids leading zeros in integer constants, instead telling you to use the 0o prefix if you really want octals.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I completely agree, the general theorem is "build a system that any idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it."
Relatedly, I believe that command line interfaces are often superior to GUIs in practice because 'users willing to use a CLI' already selects for 'users willing to ignore a certain level of detail provided by the system, unless they have a good reason to care about it'. This allows the devs to provide an adequate level of detail. fsck can confidently mention inodes trusting that users who do not know about them do not will not halt and catch fire upon encountering an unknown term.
For android, the thing which makes the use bearable to me is to lie to the device and claim that I am an android developer. Voila, shell access via adb, no-hassle file transfer from the command line, etc pp. Together with picking a phone whose manufacturer supports OEM unlocks and a custom FW with root access, it almost feels like I actually own my device.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Math isn't a great proxy for Iq anymore.
To be fair, as a math enthusiast, I really dislike how high school "math" worked, which was mostly just training kids into executing algorithms, most of which have no application in real life for almost anyone.
Numeric skills were essential in the era before computers for a lot of people. Today they are not of much practical relevance. I dearly hope that anyone who encounters 332423/234 in their professional life will have the good sense to use a computer instead of trying long division.
I mean, basic numericy is essential. If you only encounter numbers as things which you enter into your calculator, you will not have a good grasp on them. So most of elementary school math is probably fine.
But mostly of what follows was 20% motivated by requirements of science classes, 20% stuff people should probably know, and 59% pointless algorithmic wankery for its own sake.
Take long division of polynomials, which is just long division on steroids. Now, there is a lot of interesting theory for sure, how the polynomials form a ring and how you can algorithmically factor out one known root. But this is not what we focused on. Instead, we solved toy problems "Here is a cubic polynomial. You magically know that x=3 is one root. Find all the roots."
Being able to solve quadratic equations is probably ok, because they often pop up in toy physics problems, but boy did we spend a lot of time on that. Just another pointless monkey-training thing.
Likewise linear systems of equation and Gaussian elimination. Again not completely pointless, but trained to the point of pointlessness.
Or take the unit about other bases than 10. There are only two cases here with any practical relevance -- base 2 to understand how computers work and base 16 which is commonly used to represent binary numbers. Of course base 16 was judged to hard for us poor kids, and while base 2 appeared occasionally, nobody thought to teach us about bitwise operations and shifts (never mind 2-complements).
Speaking of the failure of school to teach much more relevant CS topics, IEEE 754 came out in the year I was born. You would be forgiven to think that a school preparing me for a life where floating point numbers are everywhere would have tried to teach what catastrophic cancellation means and how to avoid getting wrong results when using calculators. But no, the only accommodation made to the existence of computers was that instead of having me find pointless analytic roots of quadratic functions was that instead they trained me to use my TI-82 to find pointless numerical roots of more general functions.
Mathematics is all about proving theorems, so you might think that I liked the section about induction more, but the opposite is the case. You take a beautiful mathematical concept and turn it in another rote exercise. "Take this pointless sum formula and apply the stored algorithm 'induction' to 'prove' it."
The TL;DR version of this whining about high school math is that basically, the test questions do not require you to think. It is sufficient to be able to apply the correct algorithm learned by rote. With any real world problem, it is very unlikely that you will have an algorithm in the cache which you just have to apply, apart from "write down the problem, think really hard, write down the solution".
If we want to torture students with pointless intelligence-linked tasks, my suggestion would be to get rid of 'math' and substitute puzzles such as Sudokus. At least when trying to solve NP-complete puzzles, you sometimes have to stop and think, or try different ways to attack the problem. Which is all not the case for typical high school math problems.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?
Can't say I have. I vaguely recall something about a group calling themselves Oath Keepers (or Oathkeepers?), which may or may not be a right-wing militia organization?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
For the general population, I am with @Rov_Scam here: who cares? In the future kids will probably just store their stuff in some Microsoft cloud and ask some LLM to get them whatever they need (unless it was flagged for copyright violation in the meantime).
On the other hand, not having a concept of a file system will severely limit what you could have done with a computer so far. How do you run your hello world Python script without passing the file name to your interpreter? I mean, there are probably cloud based solutions a la Overleaf which will just run your code in a browser, but being at the mercy of some SaaS platform seems like a sad existence for any programmer indeed.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I was a bit skeptical about the 30-fold increase, because this does tell us little about the absolute numbers. It would be very easy to get such an increase by going from 0.01% to 0.3%, which would probably not herald the decline and fall of the Occident.
But the text confirms that 12.5% go to remedial classes, and a whopping 85% of those (e.g. more than 10% of the freshmen) were unable to expand (1+s)^2.
My heart goes out to their mathematics department whose professors are now busy designing special classes to fix this.
Now, I am not sure how the US university system works. Is this some weirdo sadist thing where university students enrolled in medieval English literature have to take math classes and the students enrolled in CS have to take PE and analyse poems? Or are these unlucky 10% of children left behind actually enrolled in a subject where they will need some math (e.g. anything at least as STEMy as psychology)?
If it is the former, then the solution would be to stop torturing students with subjects which are irrelevant for them. If it is the latter, remedial classes will not qualify the students, it would be like giving a class on the alphabet to fix freshmen who enrolled for law school while being illiterate. Much kinder to point them to jobs which do not require math instead (I don't think the US military would want you if you can not expand quadratics? OnlyFans? ICE grunt?).
At the risk of my inner elitist shining through, in Germany you do not find people who can not expand quadratics at universities. I had and have a low opinion on the mathematical ability of my high school classmates, math class was always more about training monkeys into following algorithms to solve problems than it was about exploring the structures of mathematics and proving theorems, but the ones which were unable to be trained to that modest standard simply did not pass the class.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
To be fair, I think that bodily autonomy generally makes a good Schelling point. There are certainly limits, few would argue that the psychotic who is stabbing himself to kill the spiders crawling inside his skin should get bodily autonomy, but for the most part respecting bodily autonomy seems like a rule which leads to beneficial outcomes.
Nor is the solution of non-interventionism in the absence of a sound mind preferred by the natural law people and cishumanists very coherent. They might excuse the mother who kills her child by refusing the measles vaccine because she does not want her child exposed to chemicals, but get really upset with a mother who does a better job of protecting her kid from chemicals, even though death from oxygen deprivation is the natural fate of a human almost anywhere in the observable universe.
At the end of the day what is an act and what is an omission depends on your subjective moral frame of inertia (obligatory xkcd). Failure to prevent the onset of puberty is not meaningfully different from purposefully inducing puberty, just like killing a patient by turning off their ventilator is not meaningfully different from killing them through the injection of pentobabitone.
Naturally, that does not mean that any intervention is good, just that there are no moral shortcuts which save you from looking at the outcomes. (On the object level, I do not have a race in the "gender interventions in minors" topic, my suspicion is that likely no short and simple rule will maximize utility.)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
There are a couple of perplexing things here. First, and most pedantically, the mention of "external barriers" implies the possible or likely existence of "internal barriers." What would that be?
For example:
- "I was in the middle of transitioning, but then I found god and knew that she would not want me to take hormones."
- "I am trans, but I am not transitioning because I do not want to put chemicals into my body."
Second, if "external barriers" like discrimination, limited "access" to gender-affirming care, and (the very non-specific) lack of support cause a person to totally halt their transition, am I allowed to question their commitment in the first place?
Sure. I mean, you are also allowed to question the sexual identity of a celibate closet gay in Kabul, or the faith of a Christian in Tehran who does not try to preach the gospel to the locals.
For most people, a faith, gender or sexual identity is not their whole utility function. There is probably a trans person somewhere who would emigrate to Somalia if that was the only country where they could transition, or be willing to murder people for their wallets if that was the only way they could affort HRT. But almost all people have more complex utility functions, where trade-offs exist.
Physics determines part of how easy or difficult maxxing certain terms in one's utility function is. If visiting the Moon was as easy as taking a tram, you can bet I would visit the Moon, and if changing your sex was as easy as picking another option in a drop-down menu before going to sleep, I would certainly experiment with being a woman. But giving the constraints of physics, both of these things have significant tradeoffs, so I am very unlikely to gaze at Earth or grow tits.
But on top of that, societies can incentivize or disincentivize the maxxing of certain terms of one's utility function ("self-actualization"). I like to eat licorice sometimes, but if my society places it on Schedule I, I will not spend half my paycheck on getting some from the darknet. Likewise, if the penalty for the possession of redhead porn was death, that would definitely affect my porn habits. Or if the government decided that unlimited vanilla ice cream was a Basic Human Right and heavily subsidized its sale, that would likely lead to me changing my ice cream habits.
If we ever get to the point as a society where we really deeply subsidize mental health services, we're going to be broke overnight. Think about that - that's creating a free service for when you feel bad. Absolutely uncapped demand.
If your model of mental health services is that they will give people whatever will make them feel better, then I totally agree that no society could afford this. "Doc, I am a bit down, but I think a {new dress|adventure holiday|blowjob|fancy dinner|MMORPG item} would cheer me up" - "Sure, let me just write you a voucher for that".
In the real world, the mental health services do not work like that. Feel free to visit a psychiatric hospital sometimes and check. Engaging with mental health services because you feel bad is like using a life buoy because you are wet. Either system is designed to keep you alive, not ensure your comfort. Unless you are wet to the point which we call "drowning", or feeling bad to the point we call "clinically depressed", your best option very likely does not involve these emergency nets.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Personally, I think that spicing together two sentences with "and" in them is the kind of thing which should never be done. That is a very different ballpark than the Reagan free trade ad, which simply elected to reorder a few sentences.
Also, this seems as pointless as making up a story about Trump eating toddlers. The unedited quotations from Trump speak for themselves (and picking soundbites out of a longer speech is 100% accepted journalism -- let Trump whine about how the quotes are not representative of the overall speech and taken out of context, nobody will give a fuck), but someone apparently thought they could make Trump look 20% more evil with their clever manipulation, with the predictable result that Trump can now claim to be the hapless victim of the evil manipulative mainstream media.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
While there exists at least one non-Republican senator who is not willing to blindly vote for any Republican proposal, a shutdown is obviously never 100% the Republicans fault in a very technical sense.
Still, the general rule in parliaments is that if you need someone's votes, you have to make them some concessions in exchange.
One might as well claim that on a technical level, both a rapist and (sober, adult) rape victim could stop a rape from happening by either stopping the act or just giving consent (at which point it would no longer be rape).
However, I am about as inclined to buy "it is the evil Democrats fault because they wanted some material concessions for their vote" as I am to buy "she is to blame because she did not give me consent", because the social expectation is neither that you vote for your opponent's budget out of the goodness of your heart nor that you must consent to any sex act others might afflict on you.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I do not see the contradiction. As an analogy, consider the Ukraine-Russian war. I think it would be fair for Ukrainians to claim that this is Putin's war. However, it seems also likely that if the top eight military officials of Ukraine conspired to unconditionally surrender to Putin, the war would be over in very short order.
Would that make you go "Ha! This shows that it was Zelenskyy's war all along, he could have stopped it any time by surrendering!"?
Now, if the Democrat party line had been that they would never vote for a budget while Trump was president, I think it would be fair to call it a Democrat shutdown. But from what I can tell, they just wanted a few token concessions around the ACA, hardly something completely outlandish. In such cases, it falls to the party which controls the government to negotiate, and their failure to do so reflected very badly on MAGA. In fact, Trump pointed out the very same thing during an Obama shutdown.
I am realist enough not to expect the Dems to watch a million Americans starve to death before they decide to "put the country before partisan politics" or "be the bigger person". But from what I have heard, the number of citizens which died from lack of SNAP benefits is basically zero.
At this point, what MAGA should do is announce that any time a bill of theirs will not pass, Noem will kill another puppy. That should be enough to get the spineless Democrats to vote for it lest they be complicit in puppy killing.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I do not have strong intuitions either way. Presumably, there is a difference between a JHP bullet hitting a steel barrier and a FMJ getting more gently stopped in ballistic gelatin.
In theory, this could be tackled through careful statistical analysis, same as DNA, so we would at least know if the results are strong or not. In practice, I suspect that methods are selected for convincing juries rather than the scientific-minded community. Hence "lie detectors" etc. I would probably read an article "bullet forensics: much more than you wanted to know", but am too lazy to research it myself.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I think that you are correct in you assessment of the probabilities. However, another consideration is that the gait analysis evidence was reported on simply because it was found to be somewhat significant, so it is subject to p-hacking considerations.
Fundamentally, I am not sure how a Bayesian should update on true but potentially adversarially selected evidence. As an intuition pump, consider two persons A and B which are in a relationship which is supposed to be exclusive. A suspects that B is cheating. B proposes to send A screenshots of their text messages. Normally, a random sample of texts which contain no evidence for misbehavior would be at least weak evidence of the absence of such misbehavior. But A will not get a random sample, but potentially a curated subset selected for being misleading. Thus A should not update at all on receiving harmless screenshots (beyond the signaling value of going through the effort of sending them, at least). If A is willing to update even a tiny bit on such a screenshot, B can take them for a ride.
On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument. Most of the evidence which we use to build a world-view does not come with a strict chain of custody to guarantee that it was randomly sampled and reported without publication bias etc.
I have no good way to resolve these two viewpoints. In criminal justice, the idea to allow both sides to make their best case certainly seems helpful.
Is the Peace of Westphalia (national sovereignty within the borders) not more like a generalization of the Peace of Augsburg? I mean, you are right that the Peace of Augsburg was technically over with the start of the 30 Year War (1618), but my laymen's gut feeling is that its concepts were somewhat recycled in the next peace.Per WP, you are correct. Subjects were free to follow any of three branches of Christianity.
Of course, the Peace of Augsburg only settled de jure what was already happening de facto since at least 1525 (when the first ruler flipped). So I would say you have a period of 120 years before religious tolerance for other Christians became the law within the Holy Roman Empire, e.g. proto-Germany. I seriously doubt that Sweden or Spain felt obliged to respect that principle in their own states, and the pope was very much not a fan.
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