rolfmoo
9mo ago
The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.
It's no longer verboten to criticise the lockdowns, as it was for years. I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent, but the whole population could be placed under house arrest on a whim, but there you go.
Realistically, there's not going to be a huge revelation. It's just going to quietly fade away, at best they'll be generally seen as a mildly bad response, and we'll forget all about it.
+1 for my general belief that the lockdowns were motivated more by panic, and monkey-see-monkey-do-ing China, than any actually coherent policy.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
Rationalist credo "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is deeply abnormal for human beings.
I am a very weird human being. When I first read this stuff on LessWrong as a teenager I remember being very annoyed by how smug they seemed about "hey, breaking news, you should believe true things and not false things." As an adult, yeah, fine, if anything they were understating it. I'm not pretending to be some kind of rational agent, but I don't explicitly come out and try to believe false things, what the fuck?
But I still don't understand how people can do this and it still frightens me that it's not even uncommon. They still know on the inside that it's still not true, right?? There's no Men-in-Black neuralyzer that comes along if you pretend you don't know it long enough... right?? Why does he want to believe something that isn't true?
rolfmoo
7mo ago
It might not even be dementia. Elderly people have less physical stamina and "slack in the system" in general. A bad night's sleep (not uncommon for politicians), mild food poisoning, a dizzy spell, whatever - they're all going to hit an 80-year-old harder than a 40-year-old.
People do vary a lot, so I don't find it inconceivable that there might be some octogenarians who are perfectly fit to be senior politicians. What's eerie is the increase in politicians now being so elderly. Whether or not they're fit for the role strikes me as secondary to working out the reasons for the change. And simply banning them seems very unlikely to solve the actual core problem that's producing this phenomenon.
rolfmoo
3mo ago
Bicarbonate of soda (baking soda in American, possibly?), not baking powder.
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
Absurd safety standards for medicine are the norm. Lots of things with side effects and uncertain cost-benefit profiles (like lockdowns themselves!) are acceptable when if they happened to take the form of a pill or injection they'd be ten different kinds of illegal.
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
3mo ago
Large-scale medicine is a good example of anarcho-tyranny. Malaria vaccine to save untold thousands from a painful death? Not without years and years of exhaustive development and trials and the WHO sitting with its thumb up its arse for no reason! Fuck around with lethal untested experimental viruses? Why, of course, no problem there.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
I don't know when the common understanding became that TTRPG rules are supposed to represent the in-world laws of physics, but that is not what they do and isn't in Pathfinder and never has been, going right back to OD&D. TTRPG rules are there to assist the DM in running the game, that's all. The rules for diseases are not necessarily reflective of what disease is actually like in the world and certainly don't exclude the possibility of things like acquired immunity.
Is germ theory true in Golarion? That's for the DM to decide if it ever comes up, not something to be gleaned from the rules.
Also, more importantly, the setting here is lintamande's fanfic Golarion, which differs in a few ways from the RPG setting.
Iomedae comes from a world where mass immigration and the state capacity to control it don't exist - of course she finds modern mores on it strange and horrible, it would be weird if she didn't.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
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.
rolfmoo
1yr ago
What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
Covid lockdowns. Vaccines? Very sensible. Vaccine mandates? Extreme, but I can imagine taking that position on the balance. But the idea of total loss of the most fundamental freedom - in my country, needing an excuse just to leave my house? I find it very hard to have any more sophisticated response than "fuck you and fuck your excuses", and on some deep emotional level that I can't shake it feels like everyone went completely insane at once on just this one issue.
It's especially weird because I'm pretty woke on most things. But in this case the mainstream feels totally insane and its viewpoint feels totally opaque to me, and inspires that kind of rage-and-panic reaction (which is not a pleasant thing to nearly constantly feel for more than a year).
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
Probably not as much damage as, you know, the COVID pandemic. The null action also costs millions of lives and trillions of dollars!
rolfmoo
9mo ago
I'm not clear on how this differs from "I could be happy in Heaven despite knowing there are people in Hell because my mind would be rewritten to consider this justice". A divine entity reshaping you like that could make you think of anything as justice. How would you tell the difference between this, and the Hypothetical Reverse God who condemns all Christians making you think you perfectly deserve misery?
...Also, I can't help but notice that this whole "without these specific rituals and beliefs, you suffer forever" business feels a lot more like an idea maximising pressure to spread it than the kind of thing you'd expect from the Almighty. It seems very petty, very suspiciously human, for an entity with the majesty and sheer greatness of God to hold that kind of a grudge.
Who am I to teach God mercy? Well, I don't have a torture-dimension for my enemies, so I have that going for me. I sort of feel like the Almighty should be able to outdo me here, rather than the opposite.
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".
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
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
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
7mo ago
It concerns me that "believe" and "pretend to believe" aren't very obviously flagrantly different things.
rolfmoo
7mo ago
Convincing yourself that God exists - or convincing yourself that you have convinced yourself - won't make there be a God. There just is one or there isn't. All you'd be doing is lying to yourself.
Wanting to believe things is a type error. Beliefs aren't about what you want, they're about what you think is true.
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
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).
Another excellent reason why there shouldn't be such laws.
Frankly, I'm not even sure there should be sex-segregated prisons in the first place. A prison is a place where privacy is suspended and the rule of law can and should be total. The rate of prison rape should be zero.
In reality, of course, people don't really care about prison rape and abuse when trans people aren't involved. "Don't drop the soap" is a harmless jest, unlike all other rape jokes. But the possibility that a trans person might perpetrate such a crime?
I'm extremely sceptical of the notion that the law should discriminate on the basis of sex or gender at all (isn't Justice blind?), but this particular controversy is missing the key issue.
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