roystgnr
1mo ago
I think involving her in ring shopping can be bad
It does take away the chance to do a surprise proposal.
in that she'll be aware of the compromises
But this? Depends on the woman. My wife picked out a heart-cut diamond, with a tiny occlusion that made it lower priced than most diamonds its size. Her show of fondness for something that was cute and unique but kind of untraditional and weird, big but kind of flawed and cheap if you look too closely... it was a really good sign.
roystgnr
2mo ago
they were tall lanky things called 'Skinnies.'
Just to add context: these are the first enemies the protagonist is in combat against, but they switch sides and for most of the book the main conflict is the same as in the movie, humans-vs-bugs.
(for a loose definition of "the same"; e.g. in the book the humans are trying to capture a brain-bug so they can figure out how to communicate and negotiate peace rather than fight-to-the-genocide, whereas in the movie they want someone for Nazi Doogie Howser to torture)
[The Mobile Infantry] also jumped around with jump packs, powered armor and I think laser swords.
I was going to joke about you confusing Starship Troopers with Star Wars or Halo ... but I pulled down my copy to check, and what do you know, the protagonist cuts through a wall with "a knife beam at full power". I swear I just reread it a few years ago...
roystgnr
2mo ago
I always liked that, frankly. Someone gets to a point like "All prime numbers are odd; what are you, stupid?!", and the part of my brain that evaluates logic is still overriding the part of my brain that evaluates people so I reply with the obvious counterexample anyway, but then the downvote comes and it wakes me up and I drop the thread.
roystgnr
3mo ago
It's very much a heavily libertarian pro-immigration argument; the modal pro-immigration activist is a left-winger who would be utterly horrified by it.
Even before the premises about welfare for illegal immigrants became dubious, the biggest sympathetic argument against Friedman was that this sort of "tiered system" was politically unsustainable in the US. Popular morality here includes a big mixture of Newtonian ethics and the Copenhagen Interpretation, so it doesn't matter how happy it makes utilitarians to see starving foreigners upgraded to much-less-impoverished guest workers, they'll be outnumbered by voters who see starving foreigners as someone else's tragedy but welfareless voteless guest workers as unconscionable apartheid.
The modal left-winger's main pro-illegal-immigration argument is much simpler: the immigrants will suffer much less in America than they do at home, and suffering is bad, so they should all get to come to America. It's a very compelling argument when you look at just the first-order effects, I have to admit. But there are a lot of both positive and negative second-order effects, and whether any of those make this idea unsustainable in some way is a more complicated question.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Isn't this just the authoritarian/libertarian axis in the (modern, memed-to-death version of the) political compass? Though I guess on the libertarian end of that there's perhaps only an alliance of convenience between the pragmatic "these are usually the best rules for evolving better systems" believers and the idealistic "these are the human rights we must never violate" believers.
roystgnr
6mo ago
I found it about twice as long as it should have been.
Do you happen to remember how long it takes before it gets good? I thought I was a fan of Stephenson's spectrum all the way from "fun but too wacky" (e.g. Snow Crash) through "fascinating but too slow" (e.g. the Baroque Cycle), and Cryptonomicon is one of my favorite books ever ... but I put down Reamde before anything interesting had happened in it, and I've never bothered to pick it up again.
roystgnr
6mo ago
freezes some of certain kinds of hypocrisy off of you
Does it? The hypocritical (and nihilistic) interpretation, "I'm suffering and risking my life recklessly because I don't care about it, but I'd really like to find a partner who does care about me", seems like the generous one here. "Love someone who doesn't love himself" can be a bigger ask than "love someone fugly or" etc, but it's at least still a reasonable thing that can happen. Love is magic.
The alternative interpretation, "I do care about myself, this is just the level of risk and suffering that I consider appropriate for people I love", on the other hand, should make any prospective applicant for the position of "someone you love" (or worse, mother-to-your-loved-ones!) flee. There's magic and then there's foolishness.
There's a chance this will lead to self-improvement, I admit. I'm reminded of the stories of suicidal bridge jumpers who report thinking, on the way down, "all the problems that led me here really could have been solved, except for this last one". But presumably for every story from one such who got rescued there are more similar stories we'll never hear because the storyteller never made it. There's a thin line between "terrifying enough to reboot your brain" and "not terrifying enough to actually be lethal". If your brain has any reset button with a larger therapeutic index, I'd look into that one instead.
roystgnr
6mo ago
This feels like another doing it exactly backwards moment.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Half the population of the Strip?
Germany and Japan at the end of WWII got the "conquers the place completely, with it being bombed to rubble" treatment, and that had a million or so deaths a piece, but the denominator in each case was 70 or 80 million.
roystgnr
7mo ago
I would hope that too, but we both hope in vain. The same genius can discover calculus and the laws of motion and universal gravitation on the one hand and waste half his life on the occult on the other. Sometimes being smart just means that when you want to rationalize something you're really good at it.
roystgnr
7mo ago
Do you have a citation for that? It wouldn't surprise me, but when I went to look for details it seemed like there were dozens of articles about EU assistance and nothing about Israeli assistance.
roystgnr
7mo ago
Soviets were clearly stagnating in hindsight, but at the time? Direct comparisons were few and far between, and the people who had a chance to make them certainly seemed surprised enough.
"Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev," [Yeltsin] said. When he was told through his interpreter that there were thousands of items in the store for sale he didn't believe it. He had even thought that the store was staged, a show for him.
...
He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
The Soviets didn't even manage to send people to the moon, but until they were at the brink of dissolution they also didn't even admit they had been trying. Walter Cronkite even bought the Soviet line, ''It turned out there had never been a race to the Moon.'' The fact that Soviet lunar lander hardware and a Saturn-V-scale launcher had ever existed was only revealed decades later, by accident.
roystgnr
7mo ago
Did Duranty praise the purges as they occurred, or did he just praise some sanitized version of them that he credulously swallowed? Honest question; after learning about his shameful Pulitzer I've never been motivated to seek out his later reporting.
Though I'm not at all a fan of the man, even with his most damnable reporting I know about, the thesis was "there's no Holodomor", never "the Holodomor is totally awesome!" I know the Law of Merited Impossibility ("it'll never happen, and when it does you'll deserve it") is a thing, but humanity isn't universally that awful, so I think it's still a huge disappointment when someone transitions from the first to the second half rather than properly reexamining their beliefs instead. Not every mistaken person is evil too.
roystgnr
7mo ago
the Wikipedia articles are grossly inadequate.
Are they? The lists of killings and massacres in Mandatory Palestine and during the 1948 war and in Israel seem pretty thorough. Everybody was massacring the hell out of everybody else, including Irgun bombings of civilians, summary execution of Arab civilians for violating curfews they hadn't been notified of, and one massacre by IDF forces with 3 or 4 reported rapes. Fog of war, biased reporting, etc., but AFAIK nobody objective thinks there's a side without blood on their hands there. At most they try to excuse or disavow some or all of it. (Or both? I don't recall any Law of Merited Impossibility apologetics here but maybe that's just my inattention or bad memory.)
I'm not actually aware of a "People gathered in building set on fire" massacre, though. You're not thinking about the Cinema Rex fire at the start of the Iranian Revolution?
roystgnr
7mo ago
I'm so superior to these people watching reaction videos, I can't even ...
vicariously relive the excitement of seeing or playing something awesome for the first time.
Aw, damn it, you're right. This is why the reaction shots are the most moving parts of the first Falcon 9 landing and Falcon Heavy debut recaps, isn't it?
roystgnr
7mo ago
OP's wording seems to imply that "130 IQ person" and "120 IQ person" are referring to time-invariant concepts. Hence "reads books throughout" (ongoing) instead of "read books" (past tense, appropriate for someone tested as an adult) or "then reads" (future, for someone tested as a child). @TheDag can correct me, but in context it seemed that the intent of the question was "I wonder how much extreme environments could change the intelligence of someone who would have been 130 IQ in a typical environment", not "I wonder whether the higher scorer on an intelligence test would score higher on an intelligence test". Basic Gricean Maxims, isn't that? If you find a statement seemly implying something trivial or nonsensical, look for alternative possible interpretations.
roystgnr
7mo ago
Even in the boring homogeneous environments we study, IQ changes as you age, with only something like r=.66 between adult and child IQs IIRC. So it wouldn't be completely surprising if the "130 IQ person" (scored 130 on a children's test before being handed over to the wolves for some reason) turned out to be a 119 IQ person after growing up, even assuming the wolves had no effect!
roystgnr
8mo ago
He set up Robert Peters email and reached out for a call with Burisma and CCed Hunter.
Citation? I'm seeing reports of Hunter being CCed on emails to Biden @ Robert Peters (which, okay, also quite suspicious), but not from the Peters account.
roystgnr
8mo ago
Whenever I read the "20xx predictions: Calibration results" that Scott Alexander publishes, I'm always struck by how hard it would be to fairly compare differing pundits' prediction results, when any two people are naturally interested in two different sets of questions and yet some questions are much harder than others.
Then I remember that the status quo is not "pundits' predictions are published along with epistemic uncertainty levels but their annual calibration records aren't easy to compare", it's "the 'best' pundits express uncertainty qualitatively and clam up when they're proven wrong, the worst pundits make binary predictions and don't always even change their minds when they're proven wrong".
It's a shame that nobody's publishing calibration records for them. I guess that would be a public good in both the "good for the public" and "economically undersupplied" senses of the phrase. We can't even make it into a club good, since facts aren't copyrightable. Maybe this sort of thing could be supplied by harnessing culture-war-hatred? I'm imagining each pundit's supporters/detractors assiduously adding successful/failed predictions to a shared database, incentivized because they don't want that pundit's evil detractors/supporters to bias the score by only adding the opposite.
roystgnr
8mo ago
Wow, according to Wiki I'm way behind. There are thirteen novels now? I read the first four, (maybe the first three? I'm honestly not sure and that's heavily foreshadowing my next phrase...) and they seemed a little less interesting with each new entry, so I stopped paying attention. But I loved the first book. Does the series ever get that good again?
roystgnr
8mo ago
Not sure where you're getting lizard man's constant from. Her gross approval rating hovers around 40%, way higher; her net approval rating is steadily in the negative 10%-15% range. And among blues (well, Democrats) in particular her net approval rating is huge.
they like her a lot less than joe.
Americans as a whole only like her a little less, and they also dislike her a little less; his net approval rating is in the same ballpark.
I can't seem to find aggregated multiple-source data for Harris' approval among Democrats in particular. Biden still has a net approval rating of nearly 60% there. If I look for specific polls ... Here's one from 2022 with details: in their metrics she was 82/18 favorable/unfavorable among Democrats, vs Biden's 86/14, or if we count the "lean towards" answers as neutral, that left her at 67/9 vs him at 71/6. 7 or 8 points difference might not be just statistical error but I wouldn't call it "a lot".
roystgnr
8mo ago
My experience is just blip in history
Mathematically his is too, right? Not every only-child is going to have kids, and in that extreme case, a TFR below 1 (hi, South Koreans! Remember that the last one there has to turn off the lights!) is as unstable as a TFR above 4.
it is a rare transition towards inevitable modernity.
I can barely imagine what a future stable modernity is going to look like. You could tell me anything from "After the AGIs cure aging low TFR is a good thing" to "After the environment/economy/whatever collapses and the low TFR subpopulations die out, Malthus has the last laugh for the next million years", and I wouldn't be sure you were wrong...
roystgnr
8mo ago
When trying to solve the prisonner's dilemma, people don't assume the prisoners might have a rare ailment that makes them pick the opposite choice than the one they want. Because it's a model.
Game theory calls this rare ailment a "trembling hand". You're right that it's not the same model, but in some ways it's a much more interesting one, and there's lots to learn from it.
Is it even p-hacking, when it's so tricky to control for confounders here? IIRC if you just graph mortality vs outcome you get a robust "J shaped relationship", where moderate drinkers are healthier than either heavy drinkers or non-drinkers, but there are so many possible confounding variables (from the obvious "people with other reasons to worry about their health stop drinking" to "people with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to be moderate drinkers" to who knows what else) that any attempt to get a more causal result is going to necessarily end up with a bunch of arguments. It's also not entirely crazy that the effects of moderate alcohol could vary from subpopulation to subpopulation; e.g. if moderate red wine is bad for cancer risk but actually is good for heart disease risk then it might be a net mortality increase for some age/sex/athleticism levels and decrease for others.
Clearly we need an RCT where we find a few thousand moderate drinkers who aren't overly attached to the habit and have the ones who flip "heads" go cold-turkey. That's surely not going to trigger enough anti-experimentation bias to upset people, right?
More options
Context Copy link