roystgnr
2yr ago
Not allying with Stalin doesn't mean the Soviets collectively drop their guns and meekly submit to slaughter.
Some of them wouldn't even have had guns to drop - a hundred billion (current) dollars of war materiel here, a hundred billion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about real support.
I admit, based on how tragically well-situated the USSR was in the aftermath of WWII, it's easy to think there must have been some lower amount of assistance that would have been a much better outcome for the world as a whole, by putting the same resources to work on the Western Front instead, but:
-
What Western Front, at that point? We didn't start assisting the USSR until a year after Dunkirk, at which point we had no beachhead and wouldn't be able to establish one for years. The choice wasn't "bleed the Nazis by supporting the Soviets" vs "bleed the Nazis ourselves", it was vs "do nothing".
-
What is the minimal lower amount of assistance that would have left us with "weakened USSR unable to drop the Iron Curtain" but not with "conquered USSR unable to keep the Nazis fighting on two fronts"? Get this one wrong and we still end up with multiple genocides (only like a third of the Soviet victims were post-WWII; by the time they became one of the Allies it was too late to save the other 2/3rds), except one of those becomes a much larger, nearly unstoppable genocide.
I suppose we'd get The Bomb and Hitler was further from catching up to that than Stalin was, so perhaps that makes both questions moot? But that only works with a lot more hindsight than anyone could have been expected to have in 1941. For that matter, even "not allying with genocidal maniacs" only makes sense with hindsight. In the 30s Duranty was getting his Pulitzer for reporting on how totally fake the Holodomor was, and in the 40s FDR was telling everyone how trustworthy he thought Stalin was. Enough people bought it that we demobilized like 85% of our military in the 2 years before the Berlin Blockade.
roystgnr
11mo 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
1yr ago
Yeah, "assuming future research doesn't have any surprises" was a predicate here, not an actually-safe assumption. Sure would have been nice if we hadn't stopped the research a decade ago.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Ah, Benford's Law. Great in other contexts, but here that one didn't pass the smell test for me; the "law" only applies if you're sampling from distributions spread over orders of magnitude, not voting districts drawn to be nearly equally sized multiplied by vote percentages centered around .5. I later learned there's a clever trick where you can look at later digits' distributions instead of the first digit's, but all the skeptics I saw in 2020 were just misapplying the basic version of the law.
I've seen final vote tallies that were obvious fakes from the numbers alone, but for elections like Saddam's or Putin's, not Trump's or Biden's.
I still heartily approve of trying to check, though. An election isn't just about getting the right result, it's also supposed to be about getting the right result in a transparently trustworthy way.
roystgnr
2yr ago
Does Chabad influence Jewish beliefs about Gentile souls? That purported inherent Jewish contempt for Gentile souls was the bailey, right? I thought "You can find such awful beliefs in one subsect's founder's centuries-old book" was a small motte to retreat to, but "The sect gives Jewish college kids community centers and only 84% of Jews aren't 'semi-regular' service attendees" is a motte so tightly walled in I can't even find a window from which to see out. Wait until you hear about the Salvation Army.
Even the "network of camps" stuff needs fleshing out. I went to (Christian) religious summer camp at one point as a kid. We never got an "unbaptized babies end up in hell" lesson there, though, despite it being fairly fundamental to the denomination's roots. Do Chabad camp attendees get the adults' "Gentile souls are crummy" lessons, or is "eh, gloss over the creepy stuff in front of the kids" a common trait?
We did get the "Abraham was great for being willing to kill his son when the voices only he could hear told him to" lesson occasionally in (again, Christian) church. Likewise for Noah's Ark and non-Noahs' Watery Graves, though that was treated as more parable than literal. I also reached the "Moses getting chided by God for not quite being genocidal enough" parts when reading the Bible by myself. There is indeed lots of really awful stuff in actual Jewish scripture! The catch is that it got eagerly adopted by billions of Christians, too, because "form moral judgments independently" and "treat all human life as equally sacred, yes even some of those outsiders" haven't been very popular among any groups. That Chabad book actually predates the last time some Christian authorities hanged a man for heresy! ("according to Ripoll, it was not necessary to hear Mass in order to save one's soul from damnation"? String him up, for that?) The claim that Judaism has "moral quandaries" is impossible to argue against, but suggesting that it's somehow special in this respect can't be done without ignoring all other human ideology, and then picking out one subsect to speak for a whole is like a willful rejection of all the tragicomedy of religious belief, Jewish belief in particular.
The answer for Bayesians is p=0.5, and they don't encode uncertainty at all.
This is false. Bayesian calculations are quite capable of differentiating between epistemic and aleatory uncertainty. See the first Google result for "Bayes theorem biased coin" for an example.
(edit to add: not a mathematically perfect example; the real calculations here treat a bias as a continuous probability space, where a Bayesian update turns into an integral equation, and instead discretizing into 101 bins so you can use basic algebra is in the grey area between "numerical analysis" and "cheating".)
roystgnr
18d ago
keeps following you around as you leave your house saying "Nybbler you raped me, I'm going to shoot you."
...
it is clearly a psychiatric matter not a criminal one.
I have identified the problem.
roystgnr
27d ago
I know that I'm often an idiot, but since "I'm currently being an idiot" is the sort of thing that interferes with my resolutions to frequently double-check whether I'm being currently being an idiot, it's frustratingly hard for me to make that knowledge actionable.
I mistook you for the top level comment author @voters-eliot-azure - my apologies.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Well, that would certainly be easier to square with the need to protect the remaining non-eliminated bombers.
Thanks. Do you have a citation for that?
roystgnr
1mo ago
You can use the greywater from the washing machine for the orchard, if you're into that kind of thing.
I love reducing waste, but a few nitpicks: you probably only want to use the rinse water, and you still want to be careful about what kind of detergent you use, and you're only going to get enough waste water from the family clothes washer to cover a tree or two, so do have additional irrigation plans for anything large enough to call an orchard.
(my parents weren't "into" that, but they were frugal and we lived in a desert, so my dad would often switch the washer drain from a sewer line to a hose-out-on-the-lawn for a load's final rinse cycle)
roystgnr
1mo ago
It did just the opposite on my phone. Could be that it's something that was tweaked for one CPU type at the expense of others?
roystgnr
2mo ago
So an arm of the revolutionary government and its precursors. State.
Proto-state, sure, with the benefit of hindsight. The actual State at the time was the government they fought against for 8 years, who wasn't their sponsor.
roystgnr
3mo ago
What makes me cranky is excluding observations because they don't fit to theories (which for all the dunking I do on DARK MATTER is what scientists would be doing if they didn't invent something like it).
We all have to do that all the time when the observations aren't replicable, though. Flying saucers, cryptids, and alien abductions are probably the big three that stuck around most in the USA in my lifetime, but they're the tip of a millennia-old folklore iceberg with a thousand different species of supernatural being at the bottom. I think what's interesting about the "supernatural observations plummeted when we invented cameras" quip is that it applies despite us inventing special effects at practically the same time. Most people who wanted to fool others could have kept doing so, and there were a few famous fakes like the Cottingley Fairies, but for the most part people making seemingly-inexplicable observations must have just been fooling themselves first. The human mind is a particularly fallible recording device.
then why is the Miracle of Calandra not enough for you?
Oh, I'm a rounding error here. I'm just one jerk on a website, but there's one or two hundred thousand amputations a year in the US. When I say "start praying for amputees", I don't mean because you want to win an online argument, I mean because if that actually works, even one percent of the time, then by spreading your knowledge of its effect you'll be improving thousands of people's lives every year. You'd have more positive impact than most medical researchers in history! You wouldn't even necessarily have to win the online argument in the process - if the mechanism was "some researcher coincidentally invents technological regeneration the next week" rather than "spontaneous regeneration spreads like a meme as people begin to have more faith" then I'd at least still allow for the possibility of coincidence - so even if God is shy, wouldn't it be worth trying? And yet either nobody's trying, or none of it is working. Either possibility has to be a little disheartening, don't you think?
I (and I am being quite serious about this) would recommend that you consider taking up prayer,
I have. Only occasionally, these days, but also "Try out the Mormons' prayer" seemed like a reasonable hypothesis to test, a couple decades ago. In that case either I got a "no, that stuff's fiction" or I got no answer, but in neither case would it seem, based on the common
understanding that God is not a magic wand
, that it would be treated as contrary evidence rather than an observation to exclude. If the billion Muslims praying 5 times a day aren't getting the same answers as them either, there's clearly a lot of room for "you're just not doing it right" in prayer.
I think what really got me, though, was seeing that they didn't take their "you can learn through prayer" hypothesis as seriously as I did.
One of the things that interested me about their theology was that their idea that some old scriptures hadn't been translated correctly meshes pretty well with my idea that the genocide in Numbers should be a "what kind of demon are the Abrahamic religions all worshiping" sort of moment for the reader, at least by the time Moses gets mad about his followers letting women and boys live. Indeed, a Mormon leader (I want to say elders here, but that's a different word in that hierarchy; maybe it was a former stake president?) brought up that translation point independently when I mentioned the problem. The epistemology of that seems a bit shaky, but I admit I was happy to see someone choose it over shaky morality.
What I didn't think of until later was ... why didn't it even occur to him to pray about it? Figuring out which religious texts are true was supposed to be the sine qua non of Mormon prayer, and yet it didn't even come up as a possibility worth trying? From the outside it's easy to see why "pray for an answer where there's one interpretation that doesn't detach you from the culture" might evoke a more easily-interpreted response among the believers and the hopeful than "pray for an answer where either way you're likely about to cause a huge rift", but I still wonder what the insider explanation would have been.
roystgnr
3mo ago
That's not crazy, but doesn't it slow down reading even more than a verbal monologue would? And what would the conversation look like? The AI reads, but also stops after each paragraph to ask questions to assess comprehension? I can't think of a mechanism that would be effective enough to work without sounding so patronizing that people would disable it.
roystgnr
3mo ago
My first thought is "brilliant; I'm going to buy some watercress seeds now and see how they grow for me", so thank you. How big do you let the plants get before you harvest?
My second thought is that there are a ton of pros and cons for outdoor hydroponics, and I'm not sure where they balance out.
On the one hand it could be better than soil planting because you have full control of pH and nutrients and drainage and you shut out weeds, and better than indoor hydroponics in most locations because you get free full-intensity sun and natural airflow and insect pollinators.
On the other hand, you don't get any more control over temperature and diseases and pests than you do with soil planting, and if it's hot enough in your location then you probably need to keep an eye on your water tank more frequently to account for extra evaporation, so you lose a little of the benefit of not having to water as often.
I guess the big question is how much you want to grow versus how much space you have in full sun. If you have a bunch of ground that's not needed for anything else, you might as well put up a raised bed and plant there. If you don't have that, but you do have a nice south-facing wall or fence, I think I'd much rather go vertical with a hydroponic system than with traditional hanging planters.
Psychologically, I think the extra work in setting up an outdoor system might make a big difference to me. When I bury a bunch of seeds and half the crops grow great but half the crops die off, it feels like a fun experiment. But if I'd built a big hydroponic system instead of a few raised beds, losing half of the result would have felt like a failure. I can't always get good output from indoor hydroponic plants, but since the "growing season" is very long and the "cleaning season" is far shorter than even our mild winter, I can just replace underperforming plants with new plantings and that doesn't feel like a failure either.
roystgnr
3mo ago
difficult to observe because of the way it does (or doesn't) interact with regular matter.
Difficult, but not impossible. The clearest candidate so far is the Bullet Cluster, where we can see the shock wave from regular matter in the galactic collision, but we can also see the lensing from a bunch of something invisible in EM (i.e. "dark") that is a major source of gravity (i.e. "matter") that managed to shoot through the collision without itself colliding so much.
has never been observed
We could argue about what counts as an observation (have I ever really seen my kids, or have I only seen the photons bouncing off them?), but we've observed something that looks dark and acts like matter, regardless of how precisely we can identify it in the future. There are other theories that try to explain galactic rotation curves (the original motivation for theorizing "dark matter") with e.g. changes to how gravity works at long ranges, but they have a much harder time explaining the Bullet Cluster.
dark matter was invented to explain the otherwise unusual expansion of the universe
This was the motivation for dark energy, not dark matter. Dark energy is a much better candidate for your metaphor here. If it's uniformly distributed in space (which it seems to be on large scales, plus or minus 10%) then the volume of the Earth would include about 6 septillion kilograms of matter and 1 milligram of dark energy. Our best candidate for dark energy right now is probably "Einstein's equations are still consistent if we add a constant, so maybe that constant is super tiny instead of zero", and even that runs into a problem where, when we try out different particle physics theories for predicting the constant, we either get "zero" or "A septillion septillion septillion septillion septillion times larger than what we see". This definitely feels more like an "invention" than a "discovery" still.
I'm not sure you want to take the "ha, scientists invent invisible things too" metaphor too far, though. The examples get cooler than the Bullet Cluster. When scientists invent such things we sometimes get discoveries like neutrinos (predicted just to try to balance particle physics equations, and nearly impossible to see because they barely interact with anything, but we can detect them now), or the planet Neptune (predicted based on irregularities in Uranus' orbit, and essentially discovered by an astronomer "with the point of his pen" before we could figure out where to point our telescopes). Even when they fail at it we still get things like General Relativity (which explains irregularities in Mercury's orbit that were once hypothesized to be due to a planet "Vulcan" even closer to the sun). Neutrino detectors are still huge and expensive, but now anyone can see Neptune with a home telescope or use the corrected-for-relativity GPS system in their phone.
Could miracles ever work the same way? You've learned about the Miracle of Calanda now; perhaps we could convince people to start praying for amputees, and we'd see claims of miraculous limb regrowth rise to match claims of e.g. miraculous cancer remission? Would you expect that to work, and start trying, and report back to us after you see it start working? I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong like that.
roystgnr
3mo ago
I think he could probably get $100 billion by pledging 300% collateral, which is his whole net worth.
According to the quote you posted, he's been borrowing 1% of his collateral when taking out personal loans, right? 33% is a much harder sell.
Elon has already successful borrowed tens of billions to Fund X/Twitter buyout.
That's a better example, I admit. His personal loans there were $6.25B backed by $62.5B of Tesla stock. I wouldn't say that deal turned out great overall for his lenders and partners, but despite that I wouldn't be surprised if he could pull off 10% again - if TSLA dropped 90% it would be at a solid P/E for a value stock, regardless of how strongly Musk was signaling that he might have lost faith in it's nominal value.
roystgnr
3mo ago
The one opposing "everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community"? The opposition itself isn't a deal-breaker (though it's clearly at least a non-central example), but the word choices to maximize emotional reaction at the expense of clarity are.
I was hoping someone would at least point out an interesting source being paraphrased. You see ML papers that talk about the infinite-width limit of neural networks, and sometimes that's just for a proof by contradiction (as OP appears to be attempting, to be fair), and sometimes it leads to math that applies asymptotically in finite-width networks ... but you can see how after a couple rounds of playing Telephone it might be read as "stupid ML cult thinks they're gonna have infinitely powerful computers!"
roystgnr
3mo ago
But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
Well, that's just because the Jedi Council knows The Truth of the Sith. (trigger warning: Yudkowsky fan fiction)
roystgnr
4mo ago
On the other hand, as a correction to the correction, I should point out that there are some very unrealistic things about math competitions too. The level of speed that's beneficial for even MathCounts sprint rounds is purely a contest thing rather than a simulation of any real-world work, and especially the "you ought to be able to answer the question before most people are done reading it" level of competition among the kids who make it to a big MathCounts countdown round is basically just a fun game show for the audience.
roystgnr
4mo ago
It is uncomfortable to be wrong and it seems a lot of girls shy away from it more than boys do, but if you're going to keep going in STEM-y stuff you're going to be wrong. You're going to be confused. You're going to not get it when other people do. She needs to be ok with that and if possible even embrace it.
Oh, wow, I can't believe I didn't think about this when talking about math competitions.
Coaching MathCounts, I think this is probably the biggest benefit I see for the kids vs a typical math class. In a class, you're given all the material before you're given the test, and the test problems are all pretty similar, and getting 100% is a reasonable expectation. In MathCounts, well, I just got the results of our chapter-level competition, and among the hundreds of top math students in a big techie city this year there was only a single kid who (barely) broke 90%. The experience of seeing problems you have no idea how to solve, and not panicking, and going on to solve the ones you can along with perhaps figuring out creative ways to solve some of the ones you initially couldn't, is huge.
He lost 48% to 50%, though, right? With Alabama something like 62% Republican, that means perhaps a quarter of Republicans there who would have voted for him didn't, and the rest held their nose and voted for him anyway.
I suspect the vast majority of his voters believed the allegations to be false, so their votes aren't evidence of evil, but willful ignorance isn't a great alternative. The guy's denials were waffling, self-contradictory, and self-incriminating. "I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother." is not the sort of thing you say when you're into adult women.
More options
Context Copy link