roystgnr
1d ago
IMHO the best rationalists (unlike myself) are extroverted. But if you interpret "in the LW sense" as "prone to endless navel-gazing akrasia on online forums", which IMHO is only a little unfair, then that selects for introversion too.
roystgnr
1d ago
Sorting the people best at some trait into the jobs that most benefit from that trait is useful for society at large, even if every job would show some benefit.
Just because good engineers must communicate well and good journalists must understand math doesn't mean we could swap them around with no problems; the priority order differs from job to job.
And conscientious isn't quite a trait with no downsides like communication and math skills are. I've seen many a conscientious person buckle down to spend hundreds of hours brute forcing the implementation of a poorly conceived idea that a less diligent person would have pushed back on.
roystgnr
1d ago
I think "nonsense" applies a little to the pop-culture version of MBTI, where you're either e.g. "a T" or "an F". That's like having a tape measure with only one marking that tells you if you're "tall" or "short". That's not how to measure samples from a unimodal distribution! But it's still not complete nonsense, any more than our hypothetical tape measure would be; height and personality traits are still real things.
The more sophisticated tests that return results like "60%T 40%F" probably aren't as useful as OCEAN, because if you want to find the principal components of a low-dimensional manifold then Factor Analysis outperforms Jung Plus Guessin', but they're vastly better than horoscopes.
roystgnr
1d ago
roystgnr
1d ago
like many Russian soldiers he was wandering around by himself during the day
I know you said "many", not "most", so I'm not really contradicting you, but I still can't resist the traditional reply image.
Even if it's almost a tautology that the Russian soldiers we see are the ones we can see, though, you've got to wonder why those ones didn't learn better. My theory is perhaps a stupid one, too informed by my having tried out Project Zomboid recently: you make what seems like a little mistake or you get a little unlucky, your position is revealed, and you find yourself someplace that seems (and probably is) too unsafe to stay, no matter how unsafe it also is to try to carry too much equipment somewhere else while there's a horde right outside. Then you take what turns out to be the last walk of your life, but it's not the walk that killed you, it's the circumstances that pushed you to it.
roystgnr
5d ago
I'd rather not elaborate further somewhere that could be web searched some day; I'll message you privately.
roystgnr
5d ago
Do I just put my foot down and confront her, pushing her to be serious about her health?
This could horribly backfire, depending on what's underlying her behavior. I helped someone get over a very serious eating disorder, a very long time ago, and one thing that quickly became clear in that case was that the disorder had developed and been reinforced primarily because it provided a feeling of power and control in a life that had been very heavily controlled by others. Part of the solution was to logically explain just how self-destructive the disorder was, but a bigger part was to improve the level of and awareness of more wholesome ways to assert self-control, and to aid in that self-control in a way that made me seem like an ally rather than just another oppressive external source of control. I fear even the "logically explain" bit might have been counterproductive if I wasn't the sort of nerd who mostly interacts with the sorts of nerds that that kind of thing actually works on.
That all sounds ridiculously vague, partly because I'm trying to be respectful of privacy, but partly because your girlfriend may have a completely different underlying problem, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm recommending a particular fix rather than just a search for a deeper problem.
I also feel like it's cruel but necessary to point out that there may be no fix. A BMI of 16.3-and-decreasing is getting into the range typically associated with anorexia. Anorexia gets called "the most lethal mental disorder" because even when it's professionally diagnosed it's not always professionally remediable. Don't blame yourself if it turns out that you can't figure out a remedy here either. Getting her doctor and sister on the case may have been the best you could do, and encouraging and supporting them may be the best you can do now.
roystgnr
5d ago
I think appearing in a magazine which is famously providing jerk-off material is not very pure even if you don't have your tits out.
Playboy tried really hard to make itself seem much more classy than that. I recall one author (Isaac Asimov?) explaining submitting a story there as simply "they paid twice as much", but to a great extent it worked. Fahrenheit 451 was serialized in Playboy the year after it was first published. Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Ian Fleming, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer ... and big-name non-authors did long interviews to be published there: Schweitzer, MLK, Malcolm X, Sartre, Welles, Kubrick, Toynbee, Carter...
Jimmy Carter might be the best example to consider: he didn't think of himself as pure, because (as he tried to explain to Playboy, which hurt his candidacy) he was the sort of serious strait-laced Christian to take "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery" as a straightforward explanation of a sin he had needed forgiveness for, but he was basically as pure as it gets for the 1970s, and although he never got his tits or anything else out for the camera, he literally had his photo published in Playboy.
My perception upon talking to many Marxists in my time around these people is that there isn't that clear of an idea regarding how one would handle the incentive problems, coordination problems, etc that the envisioned society would face.
Well, sure. There's been a century of selection bias. The natural thing to do for a communist who thinks their idea of communism would solve its problems is to join a commune. The USA had like a hundred of them in the 19th century. Some lasted a decade or more before failing. The trouble with joining a commune is that that's the point at which you have to have ideas to solve its problems, and if you don't then you're not just being told that communism doesn't work by some capitalist jerk you can ignore, you're just not getting told that It-Wasn't-Real-Communism-Anyway doesn't work by a history book, you're getting told your specific style of communism doesn't work by reality itself.
When you're working on things as complex and fragile as entire societies, you just can't operate like this.
Part of why the few remaining communists fantasize about seizing entire nations before they get started is that that's a necessary prerequisite for certain "solutions" to the brain drain problem, but I think part of it is this selection bias: the remaining communists must have some excuse not to be communists right now, or after a decade or so of direct experience they'd stop being communists. From China to the kibbutzim, the least unsuccessful communist societies in history managed to hang on in part by becoming steadily less communist.
roystgnr
6d ago
Half the reason TheMotte is here is that Scott went viral a decade ago discussing Social Justice And Words, Words, Words.
roystgnr
6d ago
It hardly even counted as a "mod"; I think I just edited two numbers in an ASCII file.
I loved it when game companies didn't even bother compressing their text. As a kid I replaced all my Civ 1 Civilopedia entries with my own bad-imitation-of-Dave-Barry-style humor just for the hell of it.
If I was actually any good at modding, I'd have figured out how to get 5 to penalize doom stacks (something like the bombardment area-of-effect damage mechanic in SMAC?) without outright forbidding stacking. I still like 5 best overall, it's better than every other version in almost every way, but that one awful change nearly outweighs all the rest.
roystgnr
6d ago
Civ 3 really overpenalized playing "wide" instead of "tall". My father was a Civ fanatic but hated that one until I edited IIRC the corruption equation values.
Did you try Civ 5 with all the DLC? If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable, but other than that it became a great game.
roystgnr
6d ago
Why the first one specifically? Civ 2 was one of the best of the series, but it was a pure improvement over Civ 1.
I'm not even nostalgic for 2 (4 was better in every way and 5 the best overall IMHO), but if you're missing the Civ 2 ruleset and don't mind a different user interface I believe that the Freeciv default settings are pretty similar and the available feature set greater.
If you were a Civ 2 fan, can I assume you played through SM Alpha Centauri? If not then forget about the Civ series and just fix that now.
roystgnr
6d ago
And I can't justify spending that much time to myself.
My trick is to just focus on games with support for more than 2 players. If my video game time also counts as quality time with the wife and kids: boom, justified! (at least for a few hours a week - our multiplayer Civ games take months)
I played Disco Elysium though recently, and didn't regret it,
Heh, me too, though I regret the time sink a little bit. Not really something to share with the kids, though.
What gets me is, when I do have something single-player to share with the kids, I appear to have inadvertently implicitly taught them that only multiplayer games are worthwhile. Only one of my kids beat Portal, one of them never even tried it, and the third quit before even getting to the good part! Makes me feel like a failure of a geek father. If I can't get them into The Outer Wilds (which might work? it's good for spectating and ideal for turn-taking) I'm going to have to reevaluate entirely.
roystgnr
7d ago
Also, the music is much better IMO
The music in Frozen 2 is better
Am I taking crazy pills? "Non est disputandum" and all that, but still, really?
Frozen (1) was entirely supported by "Let It Go", which was so amazing (though the plot played it too straight in the end) that the flaws in the movie's plot and characterization were nothing compared to the zombie-apocalypse-level infectiousness of that song. I'm sure "Into the Unknown" managed most of the same technical feats of clever key modulation and whatever, but the lyrics and melody weren't nearly as interesting. For like a year afterward teachers were complaining that you couldn't put five kids in a room together without one of them starting to sing "Let It Go" and turning the whole group into an impromptu choir.
But even aside from the tentpole song? Frozen 2 had nothing as funny as "In Summer", and nothing as heartwrenching as "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?". I admit "Lost in the Woods" was impressively mature for a kids' movie, but I think "Love is an Open Door" would have been up there if only its irony had been a little less subtle. (of course, that time the plot managed to drive the irony in later, with a sledgehammer; modern Disney can show the problems with "love at first sight" more clearly than with "girl power leads to monologuing like a supervillain")
roystgnr
8d ago
For "worth the time" I'd nominate Monsters University, Finding Dory, the Toy Story sequels, and Ralph Breaks the Internet. My kids would add Frozen II.
The only Disney sequel (arguably) as good as or better than the original is Toy Story 3.
My kids would swear that Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (TV series sequel) was at least as good as the movie. I watched enough with them to say that's surprisingly plausible but not enough to agree or disagree.
Even with adult movies it's rare that a sequel surpasses the original, probably for the reasons you state. Aliens, Terminator 2, Last Crusade, Dark Knight, and for especially the first three it was still downhill afterward.
roystgnr
11d ago
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
roystgnr
11d ago
You don’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people don’t.
Lots of people like Bernie. After Super Tuesday, when the vote was no longer split between anybody but him and Biden, he still got millions of votes, something like a third as many primary votes as Biden. But "a third as many as Biden" isn't enough to win a Democratic primary, and he's much less popular with independents and Republicans than with Democrats.
If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him?
The 2020 "heroic action" mentioned originally was that three candidates who were doing much worse than him or Biden dropped out of the race after (significantly after, in Warren's case) their trajectory became apparent, and picked someone to endorse instead. That's not heroic action by the Democratic Party, that's just what losing candidates do to make the loss less expensive and less embarrassing.
For other less inactive forms of Party action, though? Insanity happens at this level, where people have orders of magnitude more power than average but not much more brains than average. Why did Clinton push the "pied piper" strategy with Trump? Because she didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell at winning either. If her fans overestimated Bernie's odds in the primary too, well, clearly they're just not the best estimators.
And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly,
3 to 1. Even counting the earlier votes from when the pro-Biden block was split, it was still 2 to 1.
and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth
What would it have taken? 5 to 1?
and losing the left wing of the party for good.
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
roystgnr
11d ago
Bernie obviously wasn't a Condorcet winner even among Democrat primary voter preferences, and probably would have done even more poorly in a general election, sure. But the non-creepy-to-the-public solution to this problem is to switch to an election method that's more clone-proof, not to get all the clones in a smoke-filled back room together to play "draw the short straw" or whatever. (As a point of fact I dispute the collusion interpretation in this particular case - Klobuchar was getting creamed when she dropped out, Buttigieg too, and Warren was getting creamed well before she dropped out - but in theory "Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win" can be a good sort of strategy to collude on in a plurality race, if only you don't mind how creepy it is to see collusion in an election.)
They're not going to switch, partly because even the people who try to improve election methods these days don't seem to be very smart about it (IRV is only one form of RCV, and it's not clone-proof either), and partly because any party insiders who are smart about election methods are probably smart enough to realize that escaping Duverger's law is a bad thing for political party insiders.
But making people sit through these sorts of weird "your favorite candidate dropped out before you even got a chance to vote" races is still a self-inflicted wound. If you put Democracy in the very name of your party, you're signing a "we'll be good at democracy" check that you'd better not bounce. The drop-out-when-you're-losing-badly system and even the smoke-filled-back-room system are probably improvements over plurality voting at democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader (though in hindsight it's hard to see how they could have done much worse), but they're not an improvement over plurality at democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader.
Imagine what the primary could have looked like under approval voting. Plurality's "Buttigieg dropped out before 46 states could vote because Biden had nearly half of South Carolina's voters" kinda looks pathetic, doesn't it? Even if the final outcome were unchanged, "Buttigieg stayed in until the end, but he only had 70% approval and Biden had 80%" would have been much more inspiring statistics. It's arguable whether we can do that in a general election without a constitutional amendment, but a party can do whatever weird superdelegate shit they want in the primary, and they ought to be able to make their primary better too.
roystgnr
11d ago
Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts
That's true for some people, but if you're smart enough to be an auto-didact, you're probably smart enough to have noticed just how bad most people are at simply reading. The biggest difference between you and the dumb kid isn't that you had more exposure to texts, it's that he had more exposure to tests - in theory there's at least some level of verification, even in the liberal arts, that he picked up what he was supposed to from the lectures and reading (at least from the Cliff's Notes). If you swear you did all the reading, you might be much smarter than him, but you also might be much dumber, and we've got no quick way to tell except to take your word for it, and even people who skipped the readings on game theory and mechanism design can intuit why that's not good enough.
In practice, those tests are also increasingly not good enough, and for some reason even the average human who can understand why "I'm self-reporting how good I was at learning" is bad still manages to get lost before they figure out that "We're self-reporting how good we are at teaching" is also bad, so the problem may just continue to get worse, at least until nobody respects college degrees as credentials much more than they respect high school degrees. A degree from the right college name at least may still certify that you had an SAT score in their range and didn't drop out for 4 years, but that's a really expensive SAT test; much safer to be in a field where you can take the PE Exam or grind LeetCode or something on top of getting your diploma.
roystgnr
11d ago
Biden was at least aware of and got on board with most of the radicalism. When Biden was a 2020 candidate, he was the sole voice of sanity in the Democratic primary on the question of whether the Presidency could govern like a kingship or whether it had to obey the constitution, but when Biden wanted to govern like a king and the Supreme Court stymied him he went on camera to decry the decision. Shortly after, he explained that "this is not a normal court"; the context on that also included his annoyance that the killjoys wouldn't even let Harvard violate anti-discrimination law at the expense of Asians.
Maybe he governed like a radical because senility made him fuzzy headed or easier to manipulate, but he was at least receptive enough to any manipulation that his hypothetical puppet masters had no problem letting him go on the air to speak for them afterward.
roystgnr
13d ago
I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal
The usual combo package that he brings to the table is almost tautological: you can't become crazy successful by doing a bunch of things that people incorrectly said were stupid unless you're the kind of crazy person who will do a bunch of things that people say are stupid. My standard fear about this is that, while Musk's "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough" philosophy is actually pretty great in most engineering disciplines (where you can just test things and see what fails and learn a lot regardless), it doesn't work so well when he finds himself in marketing or politics or other fields where you can't just quickly scrap a failed test with no other long-term consequences. My more speculative fear is that being that kind of usefully-crazy person might sometimes just be the first symptom of eventually being a destructively-crazy person. He still doesn't seem like he's on the cusp of going full Howard Hughes, and hopefully at some point on the "getting Trump re-elected" to "publicly insinuating Trump is a pedo" roller-coaster he learned a little epistemic humility, but who knows what the future holds?
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit
Oh, wait, that brings up a good point: at least in his oversight of xAI there's no sign of humility yet, despite his explicit worries about existential risk in the past. Hopefully they'll eventually start working harder on safety and alignment than on capabilities, but I'm not sure what they've been waiting for. When a random software update hollows out your waifu so that MechaHitler III can Assume Direct Control, don't say you weren't warned.
Well, hate for Wernher von Braun is a thing of its time. It's not quite "you had to be there", because if you were right there you didn't live long enough to hate, but maybe "you had to get news from outside the blast radius of there"? Even non-shitheads can become somewhat hostile after word gets out that "half off at Woolworth's" might now mean the other halves of the babies were still in their prams.
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