roystgnr
2mo ago
I don’t buy into MBTI, but I think the axes are at least somewhat consistent
The problem with MBTI isn't that the axes aren't consistent. They're obsoleted by OCEAN, because "factor analysis" performs better than "Jung plus guessin'", but they're reasonably consistent and informative.
The trouble is that half the time (or 90% of the time?) you see MBTI used, the axes aren't treated as axes, they're treated as binary categories. If your MBTI test doesn't rank you from "100T, 0F" to "0T, 100F", it just calls you "T" or "F", then it's approximately as useful as a nearly-blank tape measure with a single mark to delineate the boundary between "Tall" and "Short". Yes, those are real concepts, not imaginary ones, but they're not describing bimodal distributions, so at least there should be a third category that the modal person can fit into, stably and without having to flip a coin.
roystgnr
2mo ago
He's basically taken over Trump's shitposting duties.
Oh, there's more than enough shitposting to go around.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I don't pronounce the slash, but yeah.
I also don't refer to IEC standards that often, but that reminds me that IEEE is another odd one: I've never heard it pronounced "I-E-E-E", or in fact any way but "eye triple e".
roystgnr
2mo ago
Wait, you say "I-S-O", not "iso"? How can you not pronounce the international standards ("ways we should all be the same") organization acronym like the Greek prefix meaning "the same"?
It's wild that it works, right?
I can't wrap my head around it when the mother and child were sharing every bodily fluid possible for 9 months.
Not quite - the whole point of the placenta is to share oxygen and nutrients without directly sharing blood, and apparently the Hep B virus generally doesn't make it through an undamaged placenta, or through an undamaged amniotic sac (which makes amniocentesis a risk for infected mothers), whereas some Hep B antibodies do make it through the placenta, and some accumulate in the placenta and may form a bit of a "barrier" there.
I'm not an expert in any of that, though, and it looks like part of the answer is "luck". Some viruses slip through the placenta much more easily than others, despite the obvious natural selection issues to the contrary.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Yeah, we're down to 1000 mother-to-child transmissions a year in the US. The tradeoff here is between "a lot of babies get a vaccine they could have gotten later" vs "a few babies get a disease they can't get cured later".
roystgnr
2mo ago
Hep B which they want to give children in the first hour post-birth despite no plausible method of transmission
Hep B can be transmitted from mother to child at birth, if not medically prevented.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Reading that link was interesting and disturbing but wasn't totally worth it until I made it to this comment.
roystgnr
2mo ago
This took me a second to think about, but I guess that is a distinct possibility. I was considering the "might have been version 0.0.1" case, where Covid-19 was an intermediate for a future coronavirus bioweapon, but it's not completely out of the question that someone could e.g. work on a single protein in one virus strain and splice it into a very different base virus.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I assume the argument for infant Hep B vaccination is that infection during childbirth is a major transmission method; I think around 5-10% of the population in many Asian countries are carriers, most infected this way by their mothers. IIRC the liver damage cuts life expectancy by a couple years in women and by a decade or so in men, and it's incurable.
But it's also a sexually-transmitted disease (though not much of one in places where we're all vaccinated) for whatever stigma that holds, and it's a disease that can be asymptomatic, so I guess the thinking is that it's better to have 100% of babies vaccinated immediately (the vaccine response can "outrun" the disease!) than to rely on 100% of mothers to know and admit if they're carriers.
roystgnr
2mo ago
my impression (memory fades) is that the vaccines were lauded as being more effective than they turned out to be
The vaccines were lauded as being more effective than they had already turned out to be. Pfizer's efficacy was something like 93% in the initial study, and e.g. Biden oversimplified that as badly as "You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."
They also turned out to be less effective than thought, with that 93% dropping to like 68% after only 6 months, which was enough to take us from "well some vaccinated people still get it but as long as we can push R<1 we can..." to "screw it, it's endemic now", even before Omicron changed the math further.
I'm not sure if this is "people were lying out of their teeth" rather than "voters aren't smart enough to avoid black-and-white thinking so they don't insist their president be smart enough either", but I think the takeaway is that you can probably trust independently repeated and reviewed studies of vaccine effects and you probably can't trust most popular interpretations of those studies.
roystgnr
2mo ago
But imagine betting on black and winning every time 10 times in a row.
Not just that, but betting exponentially increasing amounts on black and winning while crowds of people are insisting that you'd be stupid not to quit or stupid not to bet on red.
I fear he's currently spiraling on psychoactive drugs or something, but trying to picture things from his point of view I don't see how someone with that personal history can manage to pull himself out of making mistakes like that before it's too late. Hypothetically, if you're Musk and you think extra ketamine just gets rid of those damn depressive periods, but people are trying to tell you that they're also making your manic periods reckless, why should you listen to them? Ignoring the naysayers always worked great before!
roystgnr
2mo ago
I'm a huge fan of this Musk philosophy in his engineering ventures. Testing often-too-flawed engineering ideas as fast as you can is much cheaper and much faster than trying to come up with something flawless on the first try, and seemingly-ironically it tends to give you a less flawed final product too. I'm not sure how well that works with people rather than objects The fourth Falcon 1 wasn't working while scared that mistakes had been made that blew up the first three. The Falcon 9 landing engines weren't going to change careers because SpaceX tried out parachutes first. The machine-welded stainless steel Starship tanks aren't going to quit and find a job where composite tanks and hand-welded steel tanks don't get abused and wrecked.
I'm not sure how well the philosophy works with people. Federal government work in many cases is seen as a tradeoff: lower compensation than equivalent skills would get you in the private sector, but with better job security to make up for it. If he significantly cuts headcount without cutting output (or if Congress follows up with more deliberate cuts) then maybe making that deal worse is still fine? We'll have fewer interested applicants, but we'll also have fewer jobs we need to fill, so we won't have to raise pay to compensate for the drop in supply? But this isn't like an engineering experiment where the experimenter is the only one who learns something and failure is just one of the things we can learn; here the experimentees are learning too and failure can have more lasting consequences.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Covid would have been an insane design for a bioweapon, for the same reason a nuclear hand grenade would be a horrible thing to issue to infantry. Weapons are supposed to incapacitate the enemy while not harming the user, or at least not risking the user nearly as much. Airborne high-R0 pathogens don't work as bioweapons unless you've got a (nearly) sterilizing vaccine ready before release, not a 90%-effective vaccine ready more than a year later. The ~0.5% case fatality rate and the exponentially disproportionate harm to older people are also pretty lousy weapon design. I guess this might have been version 0.0.1, with flaws they hoped to fix after many more years of development?
they didn't know which version had escaped
This might be true, though, not because they were trying to run a bioweapon lab, but because sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has BSL-4 space, but also BSL-3 and BSL-2, and was doing coronavirus gain-of-function (wait, apologies to Fauci, I of course merely mean aingay-of-unctionfay) research in the latter. Even if Covid-19 was a natural zoonotic disease, the first attempt to investigate it would have revealed that a leak of something was a possibility, and the options at that point would be "assume it might be something nasty" or "assume that everybody who might have accidentally released something nasty has been utterly forthright about their potentially-huge mistakes", the latter of which would ironically itself have been a potentially-huge mistake.
roystgnr
2mo ago
The doors welded (or more commonly locked and bolted) shut were real. Reportedly this was all due to overzealous local officials rather than due to central CCP policy, but central CCP policy included "sending Covid-positive people to massive quarantine camps, forcibly if necessary", and it looks like they didn't back off on the camps or denounce the local paranoia until after protests in 2022, so I doubt they actually opposed the craziness. I also don't think it was deliberate propaganda, but "if only the emperor knew" has been a popular sentiment for hierarchical governments to passively exploit for millennia - you can get all the repression you want but without all the blowback you don't want, if you just let overzealous underlings do it for you and then don't interfere until or unless they go way too far.
The "dropping dead in the streets" videos I remember (and found again in a search), but I'm not sure they need addressing. There are a lot of things that can lead to someone fainting. My wife collapsed in the grocery store once just by pushing herself too hard near our first baby's due date, and a country full of old people trying to push themselves past the "996 working hour system" is likely to take a few similar casualties that you'd similarly never hear about ... except in the context of an uncertain new virus. It doesn't take a propagandist for a paranoid official to decide "just be safe, don't approach the person who fell without protection", nor for a bystander to decide "quick get a video of the guys in hazmat suits going for that collapsed person", nor for someone seeking fake internet points to decide "I can go viral with a scarier title, I'm not waiting for a death certificate". "If it bleeds it leads" is still modern news policy, it's just decentralized policy now.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I am starting to wonder if he is just... unwell.
Did you catch any of the "Musk ranting at the astronauts calling out his lies" Twitter X drama last week? How about the baby mama drama?
He's got to be unwell. The best case scenario is that he's irresponsibly upped his ketamine dosage or gotten sucked into other drugs but not yet enough to suffer permanent damage, if only there's someone (his mom??) who could intervene and not be ignored. The worst case scenarios are that either his genes have betrayed him ("Quite an astute engineer, although he's gone a little crazy later in life. I don't think he has all his cookies in the jar." - Elon Musk discussing his father Errol in 2008, and hopefully not foreshadowing anything) or that politics and memes alone are able to do this much damage.
As an American and a person worried about climate change, space exploration, AI, social media, etc., I think the "Musk genes just broke him" hypothesis is the most worrying one. E.g. although I'm sure Gwynne Shotwell would handle SpaceX just fine if Musk retired tomorrow, I'm not sure what would happen if he just kept spiraling intellectually while not abdicating any control.
As a fond long-time user of The Motte, I think the "politics memes alone just broke him" hypothesis is the terrifying one, even if it might not be irrecoverable. I pride myself on being able to read at much wilder places than this, both to learn about how others think and to sift through the dross for an occasional real insight ... but do I need to retreat, soon, before just a little bit more aging renders my brain vulnerable to even mid-quality propaganda? I'd like to think I'm not one of the typical engineer-brains who thinks logically about one field but drops rationality elsewhere, but I have to admit that the most straightforward rationalist take on this topic is probably still "Politics Is The Mind-Killer", and now I'm wondering how much of that title is an exaggeration for a cute Dune reference vs a literal description of what I've been watching happen to many once-sane people.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Avoid becoming a complainer like you would avoid getting bubonic plague.
Well, @2rafa, avoid becoming an unproductive complainer. Hopefully your spouse can be a good active listener without being a problem-solver, since that is a very useful skill when it's required, but it's not an easy one for many people. If there's a problem and we can't solve it then that's hard, and if there's a problem but we shouldn't solve it then that's utterly exasperating.
Being a productive complainer can bring some couples closer together, though. "Men love quests. Well not all men, but most men." If there's something reasonable he can do for you, and you make it clear what he should do, and you show proportional gratitude afterward, that's better than not asking it of him, not worse. This can require good communication in some cases: you can't grossly over or under emphasize how important something is to you, and he has to give you some feedback about problems of uncertain difficulty, otherwise "reasonable" and "proportional" can be too ill-defined. But hopefully you have or develop that level of communication anyway for a hundred other reasons.
The other time to not avoid complaint is when you have a serious problem that won't go away otherwise and that you can't just live with. For a tolerant person there might not be many of those, but if and when one comes up it's much better to complain as early as possible, when hopefully the problem and your level of upset (or in the worst case, resentment) about it hasn't had time to grow very much. If you try to bottle up negative emotions until you just have to let them out, then you end up trapped in a choice between revealing their full extent (which can come off as a blindsiding attack) or downplaying/"trickling" their full extent (which hurts communication, as well as making it less likely the problem will be resolved).
roystgnr
2mo ago
They seemed to have focused on probationary employees
Did they focus on probationary employees, or employees in probationary positions? I've heard a lot of claims that there are employees who got a probationary promotion, but the probationary status of "depending on performance the promotion might become permanent or you might be returned to your old job" was just replaced by "you don't have any job now".
It's interesting to ponder the selection effects, if that's true. We'd be keeping the "so obviously capable that we can't imagine undoing their promotion" employees, but also the "so obviously incapable that we wouldn't even offer a probationary promotion" ones, while hollowing out the middle a bit.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I fear a critical factor for my own happy marriage might have been "dumb luck finding the right woman", which isn't very actionable. And most of what I've learned since then has been ways to avoid or fix specific problems and conflicts, not very general tips.
But I've saved and at least tried to live by a lot of broadly-applicable advice I've read from others:
"the work in every relationship should be split 60/40, with both people trying to be the one giving 60%"
"My mom asked an elderly couple who had been married for decades what their secret was. They said that they act as if being nice to each other is a competition."
"I see so many couples who act like "Well now that we're married, I don't have to deal with the stress of self-censoring, and can be as cranky, demanding, and sharp as I wanna be." Which seems to me exactly the wrong choice. If you're married to someone, you should treat that relationship like anything else you need to last a long time: with care."
"when asked how they managed to stay together 65 years, the woman replied, "we were born in a time when, if something was broke, you fixed it ... not throw it away.""
"Your mindset changes from "Is this going to work?" to "How do we make this work?" That's it. It's both a small change and a huge change at the same time."
"Successful marriage is predicted by a consistent pattern of irrationally optimistic assumptions. That is, each spouse tends to believe, in the face of common sense and even prior evidence, that his spouse means better than he says, has kinder thoughts than seems evident from his speech, et cetera. In short, a certain amount of mutual delusion seems necessary. Although it might not be fair to call it delusional, since it seems the spouses often rise to the expectations — expected to behave better than they initially meant, they rise to it."
"Marry the version of the person you see before you right now, exactly as they are today. I cannot tell you how often I've heard "Well, I thought after we got married, s/he would get a real job / finish school / take the lawn seriously / drink less / go out less / be less of a slob / learn to manage money / take career more seriously / want to have kids" or whatever. ... I am not saying people don't change with age and maturity. I am saying: a) the ways in which they will mature are entirely unpredictable, and b) marriage is not the thing that makes that happen."
Of course, that's just the stuff applicable after you choose a worthy partner. But from what I've read from you here, my guess is you didn't have any problem doing that wisely, with luck optional.
Congratulations!
I also suspect you aren't learning anything new from the advice above, rather that you posted your question because you decided that a tiny chance of missing a little useful advice would have been worse than a large chance of wasting a little time soliciting and reading redundant or unnecessary advice. If I've guessed right, kudos; that's exactly the right attitude to go in with!
roystgnr
2mo ago
Huh; thank you. Looking around, I think "The simplicity of Prolog" makes a compelling argument ... but on the other hand it's a little disconcerting not to find any Prolog examples in e.g. The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. If it were a new language I'd assume there was a chicken-and-egg problem here, where people shy away from interesting-but-unpopular languages for economic reasons and then those languages don't become popular ... but Prolog is older than I am, as old as C, with open source implementations decades old. What's the catch?
roystgnr
2mo ago
Honestly, in my opinion their collaborations were purely win-win. If you look at the novels Pournelle wrote on his own, they were relatively dry and often a little hard to maintain interest in. If you look at the novels Niven wrote on his own, they were relatively fantastical and (except for the fantasies, where you know what you're getting into) sometimes a little hard to take seriously. Their collaborations don't all thread the needle between those SFF extremes perfectly, but they do better than either alone. There was definitely always conflict between their characters, or between their characters and the worlds/universes they built, but that's a good thing. "Inferno" in particular worked well for me solely because (spoiler alert, albeit such an extremely vague spoiler it's probably fine) they took a clash between one of Niven's major styles vs one of Pournelle's influences and really leaned into it and wrapped the whole book around it.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Telling a computer what you want it to do with such clear terminology and logical consistency that it can't possibly fuck it up is just programming.
I want to switch to whatever programming language this is describing.
I can imagine a language where I just name classes, then write a bunch of short method declarations and invariants and postconditions, and finally the compiler/AI figures out what long complicated algorithms and data structures will satisfy everything most efficiently, but right now it's still just not enough to be merely clear and consistent.
Eventually the systems will just understand intent or outright demand clarification, and fancy prompting won't add much to the equation.
This, though, is hard to argue with. It feels like skill with "prompting" is more like what you need to do to trick a language model into emulating AI, not something you'd need to do to the extent a model is actually AI.
roystgnr
2mo ago
The Lord of the Rings is more accessible to children than I'd thought it would be; IIRC I waited until my youngest was 8 or 9, but probably didn't need to. The biggest limitation for me was that I wanted to let my kids all watch the movies shortly after we finished with the books, but I wanted to start with the Hobbit movies (because that way you get LotR second as a climax rather than the Hobbit trilogy second as a disappointment), and aside from quality concerns, those movies are more graphic and gory about the violence than I'm happy with. But if you just stick with the books, the main issue with LotR for kids is that it demands a level of attention and patience that younger kids might not have yet, especially if yours just got to the point where the Hobbit wasn't too much for her. IIRC my youngest was fine with the meat of the books, but perhaps just barely, because both she and her (then 10 or 11) brother decided to skip most of the history/sociology/geography prologue. Maybe that's a good touchstone? If your daughter is so interested in hobbits that she can make it past "Concerning Pipeweed" then the rest of the books should be a breeze.
The sequel to Mote is probably worth reading, but "worth reading" is a big letdown from "one of the best science fiction books in history", so go into it with tempered expectations if you don't want to be disappointed. There are no other Niven/Pournelle collaborations as good as "Mote"; IMHO the only ones that are close in limited ways are "Footfall" (first contact, with a psychological gulf), "Lucifer's Hammer" (civilization as a character), "Inferno" (wild plot), and "Legacy of Heorot" (page turning suspense+action), but they're all more flawed in other ways.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Thanks!
How long have you had yours? I do like to drive cars into the ground, and I worry that everything but the Model S still has less than a decade of track record. On the other hand, my current 20yo car is a Hyundai, and IIRC when I bought it their track record was so bad that they had started offering extra-long warranties to try to prove to customers that their latest models weren't more of the same, and I didn't regret it.
INTX here. I like that coding.
It's been a good 20 years for me, but back then I encountered both types of tests, and the catch was that while the one administered in an educational system was a proper continuum-results test, the ones that were rapidly spreading around the internet like astrology-for-nerds were all binary-result versions. People debating MBTI validity often seemed to be talking past each other as a result, arguing about two significantly different categories of test as if they were the same because they were named the same.
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