Plurality failing the Independence of clones criterion so badly might suggest the easiest step forward. Switch to approval voting, where sparking a competition between "President Mediocre" vs "President AlsoMediocreButWillFireTheIdiots" no longer risks splitting the vote and getting "President Bad" elected instead (all candidate evaluations in the mind of a partisan voter, not necessarily objective), and we might then see a lot more voter control over the worst bureaucrats.
Though ... I can't actually say that that's not "coup-complete" still. It's hard for me to picture the existing parties agreeing to a voting system that will take away their insiders' power, and it's easy for me to picture a world where voters have been granted a way to remove idiot bureaucrats but never exercise that control because the marginal voters are also idiots.
roystgnr
1d ago
automatic gunfire their way
I was expecting this to be a typical "people call a semi-auto weapon 'automatic' to sound scarier" situation, but I was at least responsible enough to click on the video before jumping in with "ACKSHUALLY," and wow.
This was less than a month ago? How frequent are machine gun attacks in LA?
roystgnr
1d ago
Of course it's not just an "online" problem.
Traditional newsrooms lost 40,000 jobs in 12 years, the majority of their employees, mitigated slightly by 11,000 new online news jobs over the same period. The problem has not abated yet; we are now at around two straight decades of decline.
Online there's a "1% rule" to worry about? Ha! Offline we should be lucky to get such a huge, broad cross-section. 50K newsroom employees is 0.03% of the US workforce.
What kind of person, while watching even the first half of this collapse, was coming to the conclusion that "wow, there's the career for me!" Is this type of person someone to whom you want to outsource your epistemic hygiene? In theory we might find a few genius altruists with multi-million-dollar trust funds who decided to give up on any other financial stability for the cause of restoring honor to the Fourth Estate (but can anybody name one?); in practice we're starting with a crop of people who make bad life choices and then we're winnowing that crop down further based on whether they were pragmatic enough to rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "honor". The only redeeming feature of this mess is that the economics also want to winnow away anyone who doesn't rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "crazy political zealotry", but human psychology is such that zealotry is attention-grabbing so I'm not sure this second form of winnowing is quite as effective.
roystgnr
3d ago
There should be a lot of distance between "this is a bad shoot, the cop should be prosecuted" (maybe? but a pot of boiling water definitely counts as a threat of "great bodily harm"...) versus the hopefully less controversial "this is a bad shoot, the cop should never hold a gun again after being fired and his replacement should be trained much better". Screaming that you'll "shoot you right in your fucking face" is not how you deescalate the muttering person, screaming "drop the fucking pot" is not the order you give when you think that flying boiling water is a danger, and walking closer to the threat is not the way you keep everybody safe when you have a long range weapon and the threat is a heavy object held in the hands of a non-professional-shotputter.
roystgnr
3d ago
Yeah, baring evidence not presented yet, Cheatle just seems at worst incompetent and at best woefully hands-off, rather than malicious.
Did the congressional hearings ever explain the "sloped roof" thing? I can think of hypotheses under which she's not malicious there (it was never really a thing, some underling told her 2+2=5 and she didn't see an issue with repeating that), but the null hypothesis here still seems to be "she just made something up in the middle of an investigation", which would mean it's at least some evidence of malice. We don't get pissed at Nixon because we think he broke into the Watergate; just helping with the coverup was bad enough.
roystgnr
3d ago
They have like a 7% chance of dying within a year.
This is so accurate I feel like you must have checked the same actuarial table I pulled up; next time add the hyperlink too so your statistics aren't mistaken for hyperbole!
roystgnr
4d ago
Oh, it seems entirely reasonable to me, just a very specifically weird way to be reasonable, out of a lot of alternatives. As a choice pushed by narcissists it would make sense to me. But as a request specifically made by a blind person it's an interesting mystery.
roystgnr
4d ago
... why a color specifically? You'd think that type of clothing, hair style, distinguishing feature, or a half-dozen other things would be more relatable than color.
Was he one of the many (most?) legally blind people who still have some (ultra-blurry) color vision?
Or is it a sense of humor thing? "Hey, you know how there's this major qualia that I'll never get to experience? Could you bring it up in a way that will sound natural at first but will make you feel a little more confused and uncomfortable the longer you think about it?" That would actually be awesome.
roystgnr
5d ago
"Conflict of interest"?
She should have said something, but she may be at the bottom of the list of people who should have. It would have seemed creepy if the only person sounding the alarm about Biden was the one person with the most to potentially gain personally from that.
roystgnr
6d ago
And if you can't accept that, fuck you.
The demand to be able to curse anyone who disagrees with you with nothing to throttle you isn't really supporting the pro- "classic 'law-and-order' conservative" and anti- "demonize rather than argue" stance you're claiming here. The moderation here is correctly identifying some of your posts as bad, even when agreeing with your conclusions, because it actually is pro-order and pro-argument and anti-demonization.
roystgnr
6d ago
That's enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be arrested; not enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be fired. If Billy Bob is among your customer base and there's now only one way to make him feel safe walking down your rope aisle then maybe you do what you need to for him to feel safe.
IIRC the (ex-)Home-Depot lady didn't even go that far, it was more like "Billy Bob's favorite candidate deserves to be hanged", with Billy (and his compatriots) in no danger, but it's still defensible for a judgement call to land somewhere in between "we should just ignore this" and "we need to call the cops right now".
roystgnr
6d ago
And Buffy, though that was more of a remake than a spinoff.
Andor was arguably better than Rogue One; both were uneven with mixed beginnings saved by their endings, but Andor had better development in the middle.
roystgnr
8d ago
That would be a very dishonorable way to go out
Surely just the opposite? Being self-aware of one's own limitations, especially in a context where they sneak up on you like aging does or where they make it harder to be self-aware like cognitive problems can, is much more honorable than letting those limitations hit reality unchecked.
roystgnr
8d ago
I could easily imagine a strategist thinking "we don't need someone on that roof, we've already got snipers on two other roofs covering it", without thinking ahead to the snipers' dilemma of "there's someone on that roof now - is it one of the local cops from the building below? did our own plans change? just how suspicious does that guy have to look before I kill him?"
But the trouble is, that's not what the "strategist" reported thinking; her official thoughts were "That building in particular has a sloped roof, at its highest point. And so, there's a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof. And so, the decision was made to secure the building, from inside," and the trouble with those thoughts are that they are the most obviously false excuses that I've ever heard, and yes I am including all the "gosh he just fell out of that window" stories about Russian politicians. Sometimes people really do fall out of windows; at this point the odds are a quadrillion-to-one but who knows? But if you say you're keeping your teams off of roofs where the slope is too high, after there have already been many photos published of your teams at the same event on roofs with higher slopes, then that is an outright lie.
I still suspect that this lie was an attempt to cover up incompetence, not an attempt to cover up conspiracy - conspiracies being pre-planned, you'd expect one to come up with a less ridiculous cover story! - but lying in the middle of the investigation is still the point at which the failure here crosses the line from dereliction of duty to betrayal of it.
I continue to think that, once someone cracks keeping "chain of thought" out of the loss function, via something as simple as begin/end tokens, we'll see an improvement in performance that's the equivalent of the difference between an answer a human can give while blathering off the top of their head vs an answer a human can give by quietly thinking about it first and then thinking about how they're thinking about it and then assembling the best of those thoughts into a final verbal answer. I do not add 1234+8766 by going left-to-right, but certainly addition is also not the only place where I think about the later parts of a problem before coming to a conclusion about the earlier parts, so any kind of reversal that only applies to numbers is just a hack.
On the other hand, the longer I continue to think this, the less likely it is that someone hasn't tried to do it in enough ways to conclude that it's a failure for some subtle reason I don't understand.
roystgnr
9d ago
I loved School of Rock more than any animated movie he's ever done, so I want to agree, I just don't see how to justify that with data.
roystgnr
9d ago
I don't think he was ever A lister.
Jack Black is the 37th highest-grossing leading actor of all time. He's top 100 by just about any objective metric. His biggest stuff is voice acting in kids' movies (lead villain in a $1B+ movie last year) so he doesn't have as much face recognition as most of his peers, though.
roystgnr
9d ago
(see also Babbit)
This is much worse than Babbitt.
"It's okay to shoot at a mob engaged in violent breaking-and-entering" would have been a classic conservative talking point if not for the valence of that particular mob. It might have even been considered an especially-conservative talking point; centrists might agree with Niven's "1a) Never throw shit at an armed man." but the "why didn't you aim for the leg" crowd would hesitate at enforcing "1b) Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man."
However, "It's okay to shoot at a political rally for the wrong politician" is only defensible if the politician is Actually Literally Hitler, not Hyperbolically Literally Hitler. The election may now be Trump's to lose, now that every anti-Trump campaign message has to thread the needle between "doesn't invoke Godwin's Law at all" (in which case it might not be persuasive, given the alternative and the implicit backpedaling) versus "kinda invokes Godwin's Law" (in which case it looks like irresponsible stochastic terrorism to anybody who isn't already pro-assassination).
roystgnr
9d ago
Huh. You might be right? I remembered Namibia having significant uranium ore, but I misremembered Germany losing control there after WWII when it was really in+after WWI.
roystgnr
9d ago
I have zero evidence that any given person who locker-room-talks "too bad he missed" has had any involvement whatsoever in destroying people's lives over the past 8 years.
I'm sure most of them didn't, and I'm nearly sure all of them didn't. The number of people whose direct involvement it takes to get someone "cancelled" is frighteningly low.
But I'm also pretty sure that they didn't because of lack of opportunity rather than lack of desire, in the case of the ones who aren't joking. If you're happy about deterring your political opponents through murder then you're hardly going to draw the line at firing, are you?
So it's back to being liberal about speech. Back to Voltaire/Hall for me.
Sounds great, so long as we codify it. Put "Acts of speech shall never be considered evidence of a hostile workplace environment in a legal context" or some such into a bill, and I will vote for whoever supports it and against whoever opposes it. I'll still support the right of Home Depot to independently decide that they don't want any employees who are pro-assassination or anti-homosexuality or in whatever categories they want to use to draw the line, but I suspect that without massive lawsuit risk they'll be a lot more chill about firing employees who can keep their personal beliefs out of their work. Apply the same principle to independent contractors and businesses, and to really make it clear, add damages against anyone who files nuisance suits anyway.
But if we don't codify it? I'm not going to join in on cancel culture, but neither can I bring myself to condemn its equal application, not until the people nominally on the side of the current victims are also opposing it in a way at least as meaningful as my off-the-cuff suggestion, something that will definitely still apply after the next pendulum swing, once the jackboot is back on the other foot. I don't want to join in the (metaphorical!) bloodshed, but I can still recognize that, while shooting opposing forces as they surrender is a war crime, shooting them as they retreat is just good tactics.
roystgnr
9d ago
Dark humor is not even remotely in Tenacious D's wheelhouse.
"I can't wait to take Kage back to Hell
I'm gonna fill him with my hot demon gel"
Their second most popular song jokes about a protagonist potentially being raped for eternity by Satan.
But your point (B) is much more persuasive.
roystgnr
9d ago
Trump hasn't grown in my esteem at all (there are many virtues I think he lacks, but the abilities to take risks and project self-righteous strength are not among them), but Biden has been falling fast recently. Confusing "5%" for "$55", repeating inflammatory lies after the dangers of that were demonstrated, maybe that could be excused as a mentally slipping figurehead who nevertheless has a solid team behind him ... but is the team out to lunch too? Even "5%" is some mix of shameless pandering with economic illiteracy. More obviously, the "we wouldn't want to put somebody up on a sloped roof" lie should have been treated as probable cause for criminal investigation; every hour where it isn't even considered to be cause for firing is another hour of shame.
I also don't effectively have a vote in the Presidential election (in a very non-swing state, I get to vote for the Libertarian and plurality counting be damned), but every year I get more sympathetic to people who do. Whichever way you all vote, at least have the decency to regret ending up in this situation, and maybe get drunk afterward?
roystgnr
9d ago
Based on the info we have today? Sure.
Are we sure? The person who did the most damage to Hitler's ideals was arguably Hitler, though the mechanism is a tossup between "Let's fight on two fronts; doesn't getting involved in a land war in Asia sound fun?" versus "Let's get rid of all the Jews; what good are their wacky nuclear physics ideas ever going to be anyway?" The latter dumb idea was probably baked into the Nazi ideology, but the former dumb idea might have been a Hitler-specific mistake. If Hitler dies, do we end up with something like the Germany of today where anti-immigration polling above 20% sends the country into an introspective panic, or do we get a Germany (plus half of Poland, plus France, plus...) where hatred of The Other hasn't been so massively discredited, because its banner got taken up by somebody more competent?
roystgnr
9d ago
Even a flaky subhuman model can probably be made limited enough and wrapped in enough layers of manually-written checks to keep it safe for its builders, in which case your first paragraph is only true for a definition of "high-powered" that's literally superhuman. That's not to say it won't come true eventually, though, which makes your second paragraph more worrisome. A Prisoner's Dilemma payoff matrix can be modified continuously into a Stag Hunt matrix, with no sharp distinction between the two if we add any uncertainty to the payoffs, and if capabilities progress faster than alignment then that's what we'd expect to happen.
9/11 was a stated reason for invading Iraq, but only in an indirect way. 9/11 was treated as evidence that being reactive rather than proactive about terrorism risk was unacceptable, and from that premise even a small probability of Iraq developing serious functional WMDs was deemed to be unacceptable, because we couldn't afford to wait until "the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud", to quote the most memorable phrase.
But that's the stated reasons, and a vengeful public was not really listening closely.
"Neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or its leader to the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. Yet a sizable majority of Americans believed that Hussein aided the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives.
The same month that Congress approved the use of force resolution against Iraq, 66% of the public said that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks”; just 21% said he was not involved in 9/11."
More options
Context Copy link