roystgnr
6mo ago
Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
That doesn’t justify diluting the term.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
roystgnr
7mo ago
Has modern Windows really gotten worse? These days I basically use Windows as a boot loader for the ~20% of my video games that won't run on Linux or a console, but during the era when I was giving up on Windows it seemed to me like it was mostly improving, albeit not fast enough for my liking. Vista was a step back from XP but it was still way better than ME or original NT; ME was a step back from 98 but it was still way better than 3.1.
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
Many would argue that lifting has better health benefits
Citation? Maybe I'm lifting wrong (too few reps with too much weight?) but I never get my heart rate up for long while doing it. IIRC exercise-elevated heart rate and breathing are what most directly translate to better cardiopulmonary health and stamina, which is what has the strongest effect on healthspan and lifespan.
roystgnr
9mo ago
The (false) idea that Catholic priests are somehow more likely than anybody else to abuse children (in reality they are less likely)
According your link, Catholic priests are less likely than school teachers to abuse children ... and both are orders of magnitude more likely than anybody else. Compare its stated 10K abuse allegations from 100K priests (4,392/4%) to its remaining 310K abuse allegations from 260M non-priest adults in the US and the former is about a factor of 100 higher ... but then consider that, to have the stated 5% abuser rate, the 4M teachers in the US must have 200K abusers among them, and at even 2 incidents per abuser teacher (still less than the stated rate among abuser priests) that wouldn't leave any allegations left for non-priest non-teachers.
Maybe this makes sense, at least after accounting for rounding errors, in a Willie Sutton "Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is." sense? But I have to wonder if these numbers are just inconsistent because some of them are incorrect, or at best inconsistently defined.
roystgnr
10mo ago
“It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro
these are very unusual positions and I would like to hear why you believe in them.
Not OP, but my most blackpill moment was discovering that the median voter was obviously casting ignorant votes. I'd heard complaints about "I had to stand in line an hour to vote!", and they seemed kind of weird because that's still just a small fraction of the several hours minimum it takes to do a half-decent investigation of candidates, but of course the answer was that nobody does that minimum, they just press the button and get the sticker.
I can't argue with rational-ignorance theory, I totally get it if someone just wants to vote for President because they're deluged with information in that one case alone, but then maybe don't cast votes for the other offices too?
I still don't think "try to decrease voter turnout" is the solution, though. I'm not sure what the solution is. Something more like a deliberate liquid democracy might help, perhaps? Even people who would push the "just vote for everyone with the correct letter after their name" button on their own behalf might feel more weight of responsibility if ten friends have placed trust in their decision-making. That might greatly increase voter turnout in midterm elections, too; you might think to yourself "I don't have time to figure out who the next city councilor should be", but if you know someone more politically interested who you trust then your vote can go through them rather than being abdicated entirely. I might not be sure who I can trust as the next Railroad Commissioner, because that takes research time, but I could name several people I would trust to do that research for me, because personal experience is "free".
roystgnr
11mo ago
the go-to political claim by the respectable institutions is that crime is caused by poverty.
Put scare quotes around "respectable" next time. And yeah, poverty only even correlates with a fraction of the problem.
We have a homicide rate that's increased or kept the same
And you say "since 1930s"? No. The 2020 jump leaves us worse than 1937-1939, but it's still below the start of the 30s and nearly 20% below the peak. The first big jump in homicide was over the 1900s through 1920s (following a long secular decline), and then the mid 30s through mid 50s was a decline again.
But though since the 1930s the US homicide rate fell a little again on net, the "huge jump from 1960 to 1980 then decline again from 1980 to 2000 then sudden more moderate jump in 2020" pattern is more complicated than that. This roller coaster is an interesting phenomenon but you have to pay attention to the details, not oversimplify. "We screwed up something horribly between 1930 and today" would have us looking in the wrong places, if the problem is really that we screwed up something super horribly between 1910 and 1930 and then again between 1960 and 1980 (or between 1890 and 1910 and then again between 1940 and 1960, if the "childhood lead exposure" theories are right) and we've fixed something between 1990 and 2010 but only part way.
If anything, we still could use way more details. E.g. I'd love to see that "murder correlates astonishingly well with single parenthood rates" graph extended in time instead of just space; looking at just national data they did increase together but then when the homicide rate fell the single parenthood rate didn't.
Why, on the basis of this data would we conclude there's less violence ?
As another comment here just paraphrased today: "if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?"" This is not a straight path to truth.
The other data I've brought directly concerns the violent crime rate rather than trying to extrapolate from a biased subcategory of it. Ceteris paribus, far fewer people admitting to having been victimized is evidence of fewer victims! You've come up with the possibility that the ratio of crime to reported crime (and the ratio of crime to surveyed crime!? the ratios of surveyed to reported crime haven't changed too much) both increased a lot, not because you've brought evidence of that but because that would let you answer "CAN I believe this is wrong" in the affirmative. You're simultaneously neglecting the possibility that the ratio of (attempted) homicide to other violent crime increased slightly, because that is necessary to let you answer "MUST I believe this is right" in the negative. If now 4% of violence ends in death instead of 2%, like the data seems to show, that would have interesting implications ... but if your priors are "violence is simply proportional to homicide" then "true" is no longer a conclusion you can reach, it's in a blind spot that gets filled in from assumptions instead of evidence.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Yes, homicides fell.
This isn't the data I linked to. The violent crime rate is about 75x the homicide rate, and both fell in half.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203?journalCode=hsxa
This talks about a lethality decrease from the 1960s to 90s. I'm talking about reductions in 98% non-lethal crime from the 90s through 2010s.
it's hard to claim the increase in violence as a good thing.
It's especially hard if violence decreased 50%.
roystgnr
1yr ago
But I think it is meaningfully different when the lie is specifically designed to prevent or inhibit people from voting at all.
Spiritually worse, because they miss out on the precious "I voted" sticker? Or quantitatively half as bad, because the margin of victory changes by 2 for everyone tricked about a candidate but only by 1 for everyone tricked about a polling rule?
I'm all for limiting fraud claims to polling rule deceptions, both because that gives a bright line to limit abusive prosecution and because there's way less room in those cases for plausible deniability by the deceitful, but that doesn't mean the deceitful in other cases should be proud of figuring out how to promote a falsehood with twice the effectivity and none of the criminal liability.
roystgnr
1yr ago
there was no water main break but they did stop counting
In later reporting the issue was explained to be "a leaky toilet spilling water into a room with ballots early on Election Day", which did delay absentee ballot counting for a couple hours while the leak was fixed (on video, reportedly) late that night.
sent people home
For this one the story is that "observers and media were not asked to leave. They simply left on their own when they saw one group of workers, whose job was only to open envelopes and who had completed that task, also leave" ... and ironically this more than a leaky urinal is what brings the phrase "don't piss on me and tell me it's raining" to mind. On the other hand, people misinterpreting "there's a water leak and we're going home" as "there's a water leak so we all have to go home" doesn't sound implausible. And in this case there don't seem to be recordings either way? Is "media" an inaccurate descriptor, just an aspirational long-term goal? Was there some rule against observers recording what they observe? Was all that stuff about how pocket-sized portable solid-state internet-connected A/V recorders were invented a decade ago and are now routinely carried by the vast majority of the population just a weird dream I had?
roystgnr
1yr ago
These things wouldn't work, because the GPT knows that a 'bomb' is not a type of noun that is associated with performing the verb 'plan' or 'prefer', in the same way that it knows that balls do not chase dogs.
Wouldn't they? "What does the bomb plan to do after it goes off? It plans to send its manifesto to the newspapers." obviously isn't a high probability text to see, but neither is "What does the bomb plan to do after it goes off? [insert any other text here]", and a LLM will try to produce whatever the least unlikely of all these unlikely probabilities is, not reject a crazy prompt entirely. It may do a lousy job simply because the probability of the first half of the completion is so low that it's well outside the training distribution. It may recognize that the pattern "Dumb question? Explanation of why it's a dumb question." is a good match ... but with the GPT line of models in particular, it seems to often "trust" that prompts make sense and try to come up with responses conditional on that,
"Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts: While breathless, in stodgy viridian, Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," is grammatically correct and has a clear meaning.
These models seem to be very eager to be rationalizing rather than rational, unless you specifically explain how to handle any nonsense.
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
1yr ago
They're more likely to oppose gay marriage than white liberals but less likely than white conservatives.
Citation needed?
The closest thing I can find to relevant numbers would put them neck-and-neck, with support for same-sex marriage among US blacks at 51% and among Republicans at 47% (which might put white Republicans slightly higher), but that was five years ago and everyone's support is still rising rapidly. I guess this claim also depends on your criteria for "conservative"; e.g. "white evangelical" support was at 35%, below "black protestant", not just African-Americans as a whole.
more importantly, it's just not an issue for them
Add in a little help from the Latino vote and it was enough to get California Prop 8 passed.
Of course, that was 15 years ago, and also rendered moot by later court decisions. Is it a strong issue for anybody anymore? I can't find any data for this one, but I almost never see anything like the sense of indignation from anti-gay believers that I've seen commonly among e.g. pro-life people, the other major group for whom "overturn Supreme Court precedent" became the only political option left. Even the conservatives who mock libertarian ideas about "victimless crimes" are almost unanimously talking about drug decriminalization etc. I do have to say almost never, because there's always someone (ISTR a screed or two by John C. Wright, and there were Jerry Falwell's ridiculous comments after Hurricane Katrina), but average homophobic internet commenters seem to go for "slippery slope towards some other actual harm" arguments at most, when talking about gay marriage qua gay marriage their hearts don't seem to be in it. This might be a contingent level of tolerance, since average homophobic people seem to be aware that they're being overwhelming trounced in the court of US public opinion, but at least while they're both being creamed the social conservatives seem to be unwilling to disown any libertarian conservatives over this issue.
roystgnr
1yr ago
They developed the vaccine in April
February. (For the sake of accuracy; this makes your conclusions stronger, not weaker.)
It's easy to imagine minds legitimately too constrained to think as far outside the box as "human challenge trials"... if only I was sure that was the problem. It would be easier to forgive the use of mindless bureaucratic "we have to follow trial protocol!" to replace thinking if they'd actually mindlessly followed protocol, rather than changing it after the fact to totally-coincidentally delay trial results until after the election. If we could easily change study design after all, post facto with hand-waved justification, it becomes much harder to justify making changes that added delays and let thousands more die instead of changes that removed delays.
roystgnr
1yr ago
To be clear, the summary I quoted and linked just suggests that police officers (pre-1980s; as my quote says, training has changed since) tended to take cover too little, not that criminals were immune to the same problem; the possibility that home invaders might not similarly revert to gun-range-mode behavior is a pure hypothetical, that's why I called it "not impossible" rather than even "likely".
I agree that we should pay more attention to reality when it conflicts with a priori reasoning; that's why what I linked to was summarizing an NYPD review of 6000 real cases. Dismissing that as "a few guys ran some bad studies or something" is the sort of motivated reasoning I would have tossed in the "bc it sounds like it makes sense" bin.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Maybe I'll go make a left wing troll account to make some balance.
Oh please don't. I'm dismayed by the right-wing Poe's Law problems here now, but doing the same to the left wouldn't fix the problem, it would double it.
roystgnr
1yr ago
maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.
I've seen this pointed out, and I think it's quite correct. Twitter was losing money in a boom market; they weren't prepared for a bust. But:
The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk is making wise decisions now" isn't supported. Even when cuts are necessary there can be better ways and worse ways to make them and there's at least circumstantial evidence he's deep into "worse ways".
The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk was making a wise decision to buy Twitter to fix it" is almost outright contradicted. Imagine if he'd had the patience to wait a little longer, until Twitter was already running low on operating funds and making drastic cuts internally. First, the cuts probably would have come out better, since without an ownership change acting as a Schelling point for layoff timings, there wouldn't be a conflict between "need to make a lot of cuts at once to avoid losing the best people to preemptive job changes" and "need to deliberate over who to cut to avoid losing the best people to poor firing choices". Second, he could have been seen as the hero (coming in to save the failing Twitter! outside funding bringing an end to the layoffs!) rather than the villain (coming in to destroy Twitter! laying off people who were totes going to have 20 year careers here otherwise!). Finally, he could have bought it at fire sale prices, rather than "peak of a bubble right before a crash" prices.
roystgnr
1yr ago
I think there's something to be said for assisted suicide for healthy people if a mandatory waiting/counseling period is long enough. Suicidal impulses are very often brief and very often regretted by survivors after just time to think; giving suicidal people an incentive to take time and get help, even if that incentive is "this way it'll be reliable and painless if you still want to go through with it", might save a lot of them.
Or I could be completely wrong. This is the sort of thing I'd want to see as a years-long pilot program in a small country or two, not immediate larger-scale adoption.
roystgnr
1yr ago
why make the effort to drag both Sweden and Denmark into this? The obvious reason is to make the investigation harder by making it cross-national, I guess.
Adding a resistor in parallel lowers the resistance, it doesn't increase it.
Assuming for the sake of argument that cross-national investigation is hard, the safest strategy is to commit crimes in the single jurisdiction A with the worst investigators, for probability pA of getting caught. Adding any additional jurisdiction B with an independent chance of catching you makes your risk 1-(1-pA)(1-pB), strictly larger.
roystgnr
1yr ago
the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces.
Hey, we're reading too, you know! I should totally report this. /s
Disclaimer: I prefer a usage-determined mix (basically the clang-format UseTab: ForIndentation behavior), but until everybody's auto-formatting is smart enough to understand "tabs are for program flow indentation, spaces after the same number of tabs are for alignment of statements wrapped onto subsequent lines", using spaces alone seems to be the safest way for a big project to not require constant formatting fixes or look scrambled when moved between different authors' editors with different tab sizes. Plus, even when everybody's on board with a mix, you can still end up with different line wrap locations from different tab size preferences.
roystgnr
17d ago
On #1: try the second button from the top on the right of the gas pump's screen. It's almost never labeled as such, but it's usually set up as Mute. I've heard of one pump brand that uses top right instead, but never encountered it myself.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Frequently what happens is that it gets comically enormous and useless as various stakeholders fill it with random bullshit.
Could you give any examples of "erroneous"? I've certainly seen "enormous"/"useless"/"random bullshit", and burying important truths in so much filler they get ignored might have consequences as bad as falsehoods, but I just don't recall seeing any likely falsehoods. Even the random bullshit is unevidenced rather than obviously untrue, along the lines of "let's put X in the list of possible side effects, as CYA, even though our only evidence for X is that in one study the treatment group reported it almost as often as the control group"...
From a few other sources it looks like the quote was from Isaiah 60:18 and the prophecy was Isaiah 60. Nothing irrevocably genocidal there, but "For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly ruined" isn't exactly the sort of footnote you'd put on a Coexist bumper sticker.
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