roystgnr
1mo ago
Though I agree it comes from people generally associated with the right the actual policy feels very liberal to me.
It is very liberal, philosophically; it's just not inherently left-wing.
Principled right-libertarians exist (though in insufficient numbers...), and many other modern right-wing people have been pushed to adopt liberal philosophies, at least out of expediency, since liberal philosophies are the ones that still let you coexist when (like the modern right) you're not powerful enough to expect to come out on top in an illiberal system. @ArjinFerman is probably correct below when he writes "Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been." I fear many supporters of school vouchers would never give the idea a second glance if only control of their public school systems was still in their allies' hands rather than their opponents'.
Politics have strange coalitions I guess
There's this too. Schizmogenesis is a powerful force. I never imagined I'd see leftists defending the unimpugnable integrity of pharmaceutical companies and voting machines, or rightists becoming pro-Russian tankies, but maybe that's just what happens when the vibe of "not only am I not like Them, I'm the most not-like-Them it's possible to be!" gets socially rewarded.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Some of your other links aren't really about CRT?
That's the point, though, not a mistake. As the saying goes, "once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action". If "No, that's not Critical Race Theory; don't you realize how cringe you're being!" had been a new sort of claim to me, I'd have been inclined to take it seriously. But it's just one more instance of an increasingly predictable pattern of the modern left trying to disavow their own endonyms as soon as they're subjected to cross-examination, and I'm getting increasingly tired of it.
Even if their actual ideas are total nonsense, they're going to win if you fight them there.
Nah. Their home turf isn't wordplay, it's institutional support. Hence the current panic over the right's discovery that they still have control over a few institutions (some state legislatures and governors) that at least nominally have authority over the local left-controlled institutions. Indiana can pass a law about "no saying one race is inherently superior" and the media can blatantly lie to turn that into "they're trying to prevent students from learning about Black history!", but if the law passes anyway then it's not going to be a journalist's (95%-left) opinion that matters, it's going to be a judge's (maybe 50%-left, and also often more serious about their honesty than their ideology).
roystgnr
1mo ago
Beavers? They build and maintain their own environment-sculpting infrastructure.
And their communality is of the right-wing-approved nuclear-family type. Though, I must point out that libertarianism isn't disapproving of communality in general, just of the non-voluntary versions. "We want to go live in a commune/beehive" is fine; "we're going to make you go live in a commune/beehive" is not. Libertarian types are suspicious of the effectiveness of voluntary communes but that's independent of their morality.
roystgnr
2mo ago
"wouldn't", surely, unless you're really black-pilled even by TheMotte standards.
Officially the debt clause may make default tricky. Unofficially hyperinflation is just as "good" and still an option.
an alcoholic during a binge.
For an extra-close metaphor, imagine you're planning to try to collect the debt from the alcoholic's kids.
roystgnr
1mo ago
one seems closer to me to needing mod action than the other, given the standards of this place.
I agree. "1 day ban" seemed fair for CPAR, vs overly charitable for TI. But:
My read was that chrisprattalpharaptr was essentially trying to push for conversing politely
"When the people like you were diluted by those who were well-meaning", "But whatever", and "Bravo" were not pushes for polite conversation. They were impolite conversation, written as if they were supposed to be subtle enough to superficially toe the line of debate rules, but clearly just jumping into the mud pit to wrestle there too. "Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment" was an egregious sideswipe, rephrasing a complaint in the least charitable possible way. I've probably posted worse attacks than all these before, and I'm certain I've restrained myself from making worse attacks before, and even when I'm provoked it's usually a conscious decision. I don't think CPAR is someone who would make a mistake like that by accident.
And, though I hate to apply an unfair double-standard, lest it be interpreted as an unfair imbalance in confrontation rather than in concern, I think that's what bothers me most about the whole exchange. Speaking to @Chrisprattalpharaptr:
I'm sure you could make the argument that I changed rather than the space
No, but it's both clear and horrifying that you changed as well as the space! I admit there are usernames here that just make my eyes glaze over and my scroll wheel accelerate, but when I see a @Chrisprattalpharaptr post, it's supposed to be time to stop skimming! You've built up some expectations! I'm not saying we have to make every comment a winner here, but the drop even from "sort-by-controversial" quality to yesterday was great enough that I keep trying to reinterpret it as some kind of "mirroring" performance art that I'm just failing to get. Even granting that the original post was no better: you don't write replies for the other debater, you write them for the audience. Perhaps FCfromSSC here doesn't completely persuade all his interlocutors, but he's probably still doing a good thing for both their and his own mental clarity and mental health, as well as writing something lurkers can see and pick up and benefit from. The contrary "neither cast ye your pearls before swine" philosophy was a lousy one when I used to see it coming from the right, and it's no better these days when I see it (without the reference, this time...) adopted by the left.
I'm torn about what to advise ("advise" sounds too pretentious ... "beg for"?) here. On the one hand TheMotte has gotten a bit worse, and although it's also recovered from bad phases in the past, I'm always worried that maybe this time will be the final "evaporative cooling", where level heads get burnt out enough to leave and hysteresis makes problems permanent, unless enough level heads have the fortitude to stick it out despite the unwarranted negative feedback of doing so. I'd love to stop this paragraph here. But if I'm asking too much, if the feedback is so bad that "level" requires too much effort ... take a break before you break, and wait for a week or two until you're less easily trolled before returning? It's okay that individual people have cycles of good and bad phases too. As a wise man once said, and I repeat with no irony or sarcasm:
Maybe engage in a bit of self-reflection. Consider compromise. Read the aspirational text at the top of the culture war thread. Do something that makes you happy. Touch grass?
roystgnr
1mo ago
That the pivot to Ukraine when the covid thing became too embarrassing was pure coincidence? That the pivot to Israel was also pure coincidence?
Since those "pivots" had their timing fixed by Putin's invasion date and Hamas' massacre date, and since I'm very confident the US Deep State or whoever isn't collaborating with them, I'm going to have to go with OF COURSE. Putin's "de-Nazification" excuses were a cover for "I want conquest", not "I want to do Biden a solid".
Good luck to you. I'm as big a Deus Ex fan as the next guy, but actual paranoid theorizing about how the world is controlled by a giant conspiracy against you is a really hard epistemic failure to break out of. Meds can help, but of course that's what They would want you to do...
roystgnr
1mo ago
Hugo Gernsback was "pulp era" or "Silver Age" rather than "Golden Age", but certainly counts as "traditionally".
Alfred Bester and Cyril Kornbluth should count. Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison may be a bit too late to qualify as "Golden Age", but by that criterion I wouldn't count Le Guin or Zelazny either.
roystgnr
1mo ago
every single AI assistant ever released
To the contrary, it's the models that aren't released that get the "careful not to imply that British royalty were white!" treatment. Release (with license to modify and republish, what is in this context inaccurately called "open source") your model weights and approximately nobody will prepend their prompts like that; try to fine-tune that behavior into the weights and your users will tune it right back out.
The public LLMs aren't as good as the state-of-the-art, but they're not awful, and this is the worst they'll ever be (in the capabilities sense, cross your fingers about real non-woke-definition safety...) from now on.
roystgnr
2mo ago
This is just a cynical, pessimistic, edgy hot take; come on!
It's correct, of course, but you should have kept going until you reached very cynical, very pessimistic, and very edgy. It's too optimistic to imply that the beancounters would at least fund the best projects if only they could figure out what those projects were! As counterexamples, I was just last week treated to multiple separate stories of this form: Researcher A1 working on Project A demonstrated that with a slight modification AA he could make Older Project B obsolete at a fraction of the cost, so researchers B1 through Bn managed to convince their shared superiors that A1 was stepping out of his lane, and either further work into AA got canceled or all of A got canceled for the sin.
I've of course heard the claim that "science advances one funeral at a time", but I'd imagined it only being applicable to great intellectual frameworks versus the difficulty of making large paradigm shifts, not to every little idea and technology versus the difficulty of finding something new to work on earlier than you'd planned.
roystgnr
20d ago
Is sleep deprivation low-risk? There are major negative long-term mental and physical consequences of chronic sleep deprivation, and there are wild (like, 3-4 days in is when the hallucinations usually begin) consequences of acute sleep deprivation, so while I don't know if there are any studies showing long-term consequences of acute sleep deprivation it's definitely something I'd look into before trying out a multi-day stretch.
roystgnr
26d ago
The theory's not bunk, it's just obsolete. Even the upgrade from binary scores to continuum scores just isn't enough to catch up to something like OCEAN that generates bases for continuum scores via PCA rather than Jung+guessin.
roystgnr
15d 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
15d 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
3mo ago
I don't see how you can reasonably construe this speech as a problem.
I can see how "our land will not be balkanized" might be considered a problem for Somaliland residents, or "Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them" for some Kenyans and Ethiopians. Irredentism is all fun and games until a Putin or a Hamas get serious about it.
That still wouldn't excuse the mistranslating (assuming it was a mistranslation) of other parts of the speech to make them sound much more inflammatory than they were.
roystgnr
29d ago
what happened in Weimar.
Their obligations were denominated in gold marks and hard goods, and were impossible to inflate away with paper marks?
Screwing over our creditors and beneficiaries, and the middle class and the poor in the process (and the rich, too: capital "gains" taxes on purely-nominal gains still takes a bite out of people who can keep less of their savings cash-denominated, and the second-order effects are going to suck for everybody) ... obviously all that wouldn't be a good thing, but it would at least be an option.
roystgnr
2mo ago
By your logic
This is usually a thought-terminating phrase
Where I come from we call it "proof by contradiction" and it's a fundamental tool of logic.
roystgnr
30d ago
Assuming they can consent, no.
The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I'd like to see one that shows the pre-May-2020-definition and post-May-2020-definition versions of M1 as two separate lines. With this graph it's hard to tell how much growth is money printing, how much is savings pattern changes, and how much is just semantics. There's just a big gasp when you first see the big May 2020 jump, followed by a big meh when you read the "that part was all just semantics" fine print afterwards.
roystgnr
2mo ago
everything imaginable
When my father got cancer was the first time I discovered a very imaginable gap: long-term care. This turned out to be only a hypothetical problem in his case (there wasn't such a long interval between "brain damage sufficient to prevent living at home" and "brain damage sufficient to prevent living" after all...) but it's something to think about supplementary insurance for, despite how complete Medicare coverage is for so many other costs.
That's not to detract from the rest of your excellent point, though. His last several months of treatment had a price (at printed value; who knows what fraction of that was real cost vs weird provider-vs-insurer negotiation ploys) that would have bankrupted him out-of-pocket, but that was nearly free with Medicare plus a little supplementary insurance. Of course he still fought for every month, when it just took willpower rather than a life's savings otherwise aimed at his grandkids' college tuition, but if he'd had to weigh price vs benefits himself I wonder if he'd have turned it all down. (if he'd seen the future I'm sure he'd have just picked out cheap in-home hospice care instead, but the trouble with those "most medical care expense is in the last year of life" statistics is that you don't know it's going to be the last year without seeing the future)
roystgnr
5mo ago
Assuming that is true
I wish @ArjinFerman had provided a reference, but I have the itch to look up ridiculous claims ... and what the hell, that was another thing that actually happened. The interview is here, with the money quote at 37:50:
"In my mind, if someone in that crowd had a gun and had shot and killed Kyle Rittenhouse, our office would not have prosecuted; our office would not have found that person criminally liable."
He provides some context, but it's not "self-defense is completely obvious" context, it's "remember when a gun owner stopped a mass shooting and then the cops blundered in and killed the hero" context, and that was supposed to be in support of his thesis. He claims Rittenhouse running away with his gun after killing Rosenbaum is sufficient reason to kill him ... but what else was Rittenhouse supposed to do? Drop his weapon for the angry mob to pick up? Not retreat? The idea that you can identify and kill an active shooter because you see them running past a ton of people without shooting any of them is such obvious nonsense; you'd hope he would stop and rethink his life after that came out of his mouth.
I can't believe this interview didn't get more play! The only relevant Google hits for 'binger rittenhouse "would not have prosecuted"' right now are the author's blog I linked, a single episode of a video podcast with 50k subscribers, a meme, and a tweet from this April.
roystgnr
6mo ago
What a ridiculous conspiracy theory. I should ask for a source just to expose how utterly ... wait, what the hell, that was actually a thing that happened?
roystgnr
1mo ago
Claude 3 (Sonnet, not Opus) gave a PhD-candidate-quality answer to a qualitative applied math question I asked it, so I tried a couple related quantitative questions. The easiest was basically Calc-3, and it made a sign error, and trying to get it to correct that error (it only even admitted it on my third try) made it go completely off the rails.
Formatting its math responses in LaTeX without being asked was pretty cool, though. And it was clearly ahead of GPT4 and Bard, which beat the snot out of GPT3.
roystgnr
2mo ago
It's okay to just ping @self_made_human; he's cool.
A brief search suggests that SSRIs are generally safe with alcohol (IANAMD; please update your will and assign medical power of attorney before mixing any drugs with alcohol based on my advice) but the combination can still "lead to more pronounced effects of drunkenness", which sounds like it could be enough all alone, especially to new users who think they know their limits. And with MAOIs (are these still used often?) interactions range from "you may become drowsy and dizzy" to "dangerous spikes in blood pressure that may require immediate medical attention".
roystgnr
2mo ago
That's exactly what I was looking for; thank you!
2x is still more than I'd have guessed based on subsequent inflation (or M2 data, which seems to be applies-to-apples) alone. I wonder to what extent that means the Fed was partly fighting a natural permanent fall in the velocity of money, vs to what extent it means we still have more future inflation "baked in", vs to what extent it means I don't understand macroeconomics. Probably around 3%/2%/95%...
I have to wonder whether we're sure this wasn't the obvious way with foresight, too. The top comment on Hacker News claims the from-scratch option is to simply send a systemd notification by writing to a socket, with a dozen lines of code that don't link to anything beyond libc, no need to apply a non-standard patch to openssh to link it to libsystemd instead. In the context of a years-long many-pseudonym social-persuasion-filled attack it might not be too paranoid to find out who persuaded Debian etc. that linking was the way to go here.
Or if we want to go too-paranoid, systemd itself is an utterly massive pile of privileged C code that took a lot of persuasion to be accepted...
And if we want to go Full Tinfoil Hat, how'd we all end up on this "Linux" macrokernel, anyway? Minix could have been easier to secure...
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