rolfmoo
8mo ago
Six months later, turns out it makes people infertile.
That's still a good deal for over-65s! You could have rolled it out to all of them and still nearly eliminated the pandemic death toll. That's my whole point - sure, it wasn't worth rolling out an experimental vaccine to everyone at once, but it was obviously worth it for the most vulnerable.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
Probably not as much damage as, you know, the COVID pandemic. The null action also costs millions of lives and trillions of dollars!
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I'm arguing in favour of the vaccine. It has a much better safety profile than a lot of things - it's just because it happens to take the form of medicine that we want a frankly ridiculous safety standard.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
Really quickly by the criminally murderously slow standards of medicine, yes. But they were developed in January 2020 and took most of a year to be rolled out, while the bodies continued to mount up in the meantime, for "safety". Safety from the illness they prevent just doesn't appear on the balance sheet.
You should have been able to volunteer to take the risk of an untested vaccine in January, after the "well it doesn't kill monkeys" stage - if you're 85 that's a good idea! We could have had mountains of human data fast at very low expected risk, spun up vaccine distribution months earlier (the insanity surrounding that is a whole other rant) and nipped the whole thing in the bud.
Once you have mRNA vaccine synthesis, having a pandemic at all is a fucking embarrassment for the human race.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
I am only begrudgingly tolerant of it for religious reasons for freedom-of-religion purposes
For an adult, yes. If you are full-grown and compos mentis and you positively insist on having bits of you chopped off, well, it's your body and your life. But I don't think you have the religious freedom to do it to someone else, especially if that someone else is a helpless child.
I don't think it's an urgent issue. Comparisons with rape and the worse forms of FGM are excessive. But I do think it's wrong.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
If you genuinely can't afford to keep an orderly prison of X inmates, you need to allocate more resources or imprison <X inmates. I am not persuaded that a male raped is less of a horror than a female raped.
But in reality, I think it's just a problem of incentives - it might not be as simple as "fine prisons $1million per prison rape and watch the problem disappear", but qualitatively the problem is that to my knowledge nobody with any power actually loses anything per potential prison rape.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Cobra Kai is fun, not brainless, and sincere, and moreover it has competent storytelling and characterisation, which is an absolute breath of fresh air by the standards of a lot of current "rebooted" franchises.
rolfmoo
22d ago
I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken
I technically agree, but there's such a huge difference between even the least intelligent 1% of humans and chickens that it doesn't matter. Everest is a lot higher than Ben Nevis, but they're both obviously mountains and not molehills.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I don't think it's true that hideous modern architecture is just the genuine aesthetic vision of a different culture. Most people hate it, Texan or Californian: it's the taste, or apparent taste, of a small number of highly privileged people (architects and their sponsors).
rolfmoo
1yr ago
This would be true if all the odds were independent, but obviously the odds are not independent. This group isn't pulling at random from the whole population, or even from a certain statistically-distinguished fraction of the population. It's a group of people who congregated around a common interest, and selection effects there can be very powerful indeed.
Also, it's an April Fools joke.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Ideas for the key cities (London, Paris, Florence, Rome) including sites and excursions
On Rome - the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Vatican City are tourist traps that are nonetheless more than worth it, and indeed are practically compulsory. Regarding the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel is nice to see if possible, but frankly overrated and almost not worth the significant hassle of getting in, whereas I found the interior of the Basilica of St Peter an underrated highlight of the city. Less well-known but worthy sites run into the dozens, but one that stays with me is the Capuchin Crypt.
Florence is among the most consistently beautiful places simply to walk through. The best part of the main cathedral is the outside - the interior is a crowded disappointment by comparison, but that doesn't matter when the outside is there. I personally found the dome climb good fun and fascinating in engineering terms, but it's often a bother to organise and queue for and can be claustrophobic: the bell tower offers an equal or superior view for less bother. (It is worth seeing Florence from above - consider also Piazzale Michaelangelo for this). Fiesole is a nice day-trip if you have time.
Modern-day Naples itself is frankly unpleasant. Its surroundings are glorious. My advice would be to stay in one of the nearby towns and go into Naples and parts of the Amalfi coast by train or whatever. Whatever you do there, devote a day (starting in the early morning to avoid tourist hordes) to Pompeii. It's IMO the best possible way to appreciate those roots in classical antiquity.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
There is a not-totally-insane argument that marginally raising the sanity waterline of the culture war is an altruistic cause in and of itself. As the old saying goes, the worst thing they can possibly do is say "no", so if it's not very costly in labour terms it's worth a try.
rolfmoo
3mo ago
Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda in American, possibly?), not baking powder.
If it destroys countries or even the whole humanity, then it should be destroyed, right? The cold truth is defined as the highest value so what is the problem.
I think you either misunderstand or are deliberately misrepresenting the point to dunk on the nerds here. Obviously you shouldn't post nuclear codes on Twitter just because they're true - we're talking about the nature of beliefs. "Dangerous information exists" isn't incompatible with the idea that you should try to believe true things, and not random shit that would be convenient. That's just common sense!
Anyways, there are many ways how one can save "belief in untruth"
Nothing you said here is even remotely like belief in untruth. Trust authority figures? Also a means of determining the truth, because the whole reason you're trusting them is that you think they're right! Be sceptical of clever-sounding arguments? Don't rush to believe weird things just because you think you have evidence? That's literally just Yudkowskian rationality stated informally! He would probably say something more like that in Bayesian terms, your odds of hearing a good argument for X are not that much higher given that X is true, and also that prior probabilities exist, but it's the same damn thing.
All it takes for me to defend any belief is to set my prior to very low value so it is incredibly hard for it to be flipped in my lifetime.
I can't find it on a cursory Google, but one of the Sequence posts on this is about how confident it's reasonable to be in your priors, and "so low no reasonable evidence could ever make a difference" is, obviously, too low. Again, common sense.
Now given the utilitarianism of rationalists I do not trust them at all, there is nothing preventing them to lie to me to reach their goals of maximizing utils or whatever.
Gosh, it sounds like being so willing to lie could have bad consequences that a consequentialist might want to avoid. Seriously though, there's whole reams of decision theory stuff about how you shouldn't lie! Partly in fact for exactly this reason. A good basic sketch from the Olden Days of why in rat terms you should not in fact abandon all ethics to be "utilitarian" is here.
which would be logical step if they really believed in the Truth of apocalypse so firmly and unshakenly.
See above. It's not actually logical.
I think dropping the guru sounding shit or weird stuff
Yeah, agreed, it bothers me a lot too. Yudkowsky in particular seems to just not have much sense of... PR, image, not seeming weird, and it's very annoying. The only thing that annoys me more than LessWrong rationality is how terrible the criticisms of it are. I'd take a hundred weird mystical descriptions of common-sense reasoning over one "these people are weird and cringey which is of course equal to 'wrong' because 'wrong' is just another word for 'bad'" dunking.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I think there is a hopeless/nihilistic/no-heroes streak in some parts of contemporary culture, but mostly surrounding climate activism. (It's a narrative that flatters my prejudices to suggest that it's a cautionary tale about distorting the truth for rhetorical power "for the greater good": the exaggerated claims that global warming will end the world, rather than just be very bad, didn't galvanise people to action but created a kind of numbing despair.) "Only we are the heroes" might be a better phrasing of the problem.
I've always thought that a sequel trilogy should be about Luke starting his own Jedi order that is less oppressive than the original one, but running into the same problems that those harsh rules were created to solve. (Kids missing their families, questioning the Jedi ways, potentially creating new Anakins.)
For what it's worth, the old Expanded Universe novels were exactly this. Luke's New Jedi Order is founded on a much healthier basis and succeeds in bringing together a new Republic and creating some of the greatest Jedi in history... and also runs into some spectacular disasters, because solving problems is hard actually.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
The things you're complaining about are... The central conflict of the story. Iomedae comes from a mediaevalish world, of course she has fucked-up ideas about consent, that's the whole point! If you don't like a writing style, fair enough, if you don't want to read something before you complain about it, fine, but come on.
rolfmoo
8mo ago
I'll happily take that trade! Pure mathematics is nice, but I'll trade it for all the other beautiful things in a heartbeat. Political views: dissident SJW/liberal, strongly pro-trans-rights, anti-racist, pro-freedom of speech, pro-vaccine/anti-lockdown.
I never understood why building ugly things was supposed to be a left/liberal position. It's not the highly-privileged architects who have to live in the damn things.
And yes, aesthetics are technically subjective, but this is one of those weaselly things. Perhaps there really are architects who deeply appreciate the local Concrete Abomination and find it transcendentally beautiful and aren't just saying that as part of a complicated signalling equilibrium! People are weird sometimes! But the public in general overwhelmingly prefers beautiful things in the polls, and they're almost never built any more.
It's an undemocratic injustice foisted disproportionately on marginalised groups by a predominantly-white elite. Tear down the brutalist monstrosities and replace them with cathedrals for social justice.
(Also, they're ugly as sin and I hate them.)
rolfmoo
1yr ago
NB: I apologise if this reply seems harsh - I've tried to avoid that but see above on why I don't think straight about this.
I think this exemplifies my problem, really: it's all talked about in vague terms that can make the frighteningly insane sound perfectly reasonable.
Never mind "temporary suspension of civil liberties to save lives", which covers almost anything: how long and how bad for how many? If saving those 500000 people costs two weeks of no nightclubs, OK, I'm listening; if it costs a decade of China-style welded-indoors lockdown, no deal, molon labe etc.
But this was just never discussed. It wasn't a matter of "we'll consider these restrictions if they're projected to save at least this many lives", it was "your fundamental civil liberties are gone, you want to know what our cost-benefit analysis is, it's fuck you that's what it is".
And there's certainly no admission of failure now. If as it turns out they were crazy all along, that's critical evidence against them for the future, and I at least reserve the right to say "I told you so, clearly nobody involved in this fiasco should work in their field ever again". But it's just quietly dropped for the next Current Thing like the world didn't go insane for a few years!
rolfmoo
22d ago
Most people do care about their tribe, but it's really historically weird for your "tribe" to be "a population of millions of people who happen to share some genes in common with you".
rolfmoo
7mo ago
Just download songs and put them on your phone? How hard is that?
I used to do this, and then I got a trial Spotify subscription and never went back - what they really sell is convenience. The value to me of my time and attention is greater than their fee.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
Literally exactly zero isn't necessary - it just has to be a rounding error, like "it happened because the CCTV camera just happened to explode while all the guards were sneezing" or whatever, as opposed to the current rate of "who cares".
Prisoners having sex, especially unprotected sex that leads to childbirth, also isn't a thing that should happen. If it does, there are already procedures for state care of children of unfit parents.
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