roystgnr
10mo 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:
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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".
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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
12d 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
2mo 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
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
12d 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
1mo ago
It just says "having previously taken an oath" - shouldn't that apply to former office-holders as well, even if their term(s) ended before the insurrection?
(still doesn't seem like it should have applied to Cox, who was neither a present nor former office-holder before the Civil War)
roystgnr
1mo 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"...
roystgnr
4mo ago
The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.
You worded this as an unqualified absolute just to troll all of us who disagree with it at that extreme, didn't you?
roystgnr
6mo ago
I know I shouldn't let myself be swayed further by an argument's rhetoric than by it's logic, but Michael Shermer really found a damning framing supporting your point.
I'm still solidly "Collective punishment is bad", but I have to admit: if we could mete out omnisciently accurate individual punishment, some collectives might have a much larger fraction of punished individuals than others...
roystgnr
7mo ago
I'd agree that your alternative course of action would have been a much better idea, at least because acknowledging the importance of subtext and escalating away from plausible deniability gradually is a good way to communicate "if I were your boyfriend I probably wouldn't do anything to suddenly embarrass you". I also sympathize with anyone who feels so uncomfortable about delivering rejection that they'll avoid a person they've recently had to reject. But...
pretending to remain friends with her, when she knows you want more, which is not sustainable
"pretending"?
This sounds so much like a pot-shot Scott Alexander thought was embarrassing enough to delete:
They always use this phrasing like "Man, I thought he liked me as a person and enjoyed spending time with me. But then he said he wanted to date me! What a dirty rotten liar!" It sounds for all the world like not only are there two ladders, but that women can't even conceive of the idea of having a single ladder where liking someone and wanting to date them are correlated."
I thought that was a productive post overall because "just ask for dates in socially-recognized venues or via friends-of-friends" was a useful takeaway for some people, but if his overgeneralization actually applies to some women, then "don't reject suitors specifically because they were attracted to your personality first" might have been even more useful.
roystgnr
7mo ago
Hunter told one of the Chinese business men his father wanted to understand why he wasn’t laid yet.
I assume that "laid" was a typo for "paid", but it's Hunter, so I'm not 100% certain there...
Either way, could you link a source for this?
Honestly, I've wanted to reply to like half your comments with that same request. There's so much playing Telephone on the internet and so many people playing it poorly that my first instinct is to filter out anyone who makes a surprising claim without either an identity plus word-for-word quote or a hyperlink to the claim's source. It's bad enough when places like CNN so often do that, but if TheMotte commenters can't be held to a higher standard than mainstream reporters then what are we even doing here?
roystgnr
7mo ago
(really the only Turtledove you need tbh)
Come on; the trick to this game is to "Use simple lies that seem believable."
roystgnr
7mo ago
Were you picturing the resources all being used on Earth? Spread among a Dyson cloud of colonies, that much energy is a nice standard of living for quadrillions of people. Concentrated on Earth the waste heat would vaporize us.
roystgnr
9mo ago
I'd say you should be using a recovery plugin for your browser ... but if you go that route, make sure you check that it works here. Typio Form Recovery works for me on Reddit but not on TheMotte.
roystgnr
9mo ago
They're definitely going to be paying off some of the R&D that way. Starshield has its own separate satellites and its own network, so you'd think Starlink revenue would still have to cover marginal costs for the commercial sats, but even if Starshield never needs to piggy-back on the commercial network, I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX is getting extra cash to guarantee the presence of all that (from an asat perspective) "chaff"...
roystgnr
11mo ago
a big disaster (not extinction, or close to it, but some kind of big spectacle) that prompts serious regulation
Fingers crossed. With typical normalization of deviance this is how it happens, because eventually you push farther than is safe and that causes a spectacular disaster. But does that still hold when a disaster is an agent with obvious incentives to avoid spectacle? It could be that the first thing smart enough to cause a real disaster is also smart enough to hold back until the disaster would be irrecoverable.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Homicide isn't tracked by victimization surveys. Unless there's vampire homicides and a particularly brave interviewer, I suppose.
Is the decoupling of homicide from other violent crime during a mass panic something to be really surprised about, though? With 98% of violent crime non-lethal, it only takes a tiny change in conversion rate. If a burglar is suddenly looking at a bunch of Covid-locked-down houses that no longer ever seem to empty, it doesn't seem a priori implausible that a few percent of them are going to say "no, too risky for me" (so the violent crime rate component of robberies still drops) while a few percent are going to say "I need the money, and if it's not empty, I can fix that" (so the homicide rate skyrockets). For that matter, what happens to the other side of the equation during the post-Floyd period? A homeowner who might have said "I'll run and call the police" is now more likely to conclude "the police might just shoot me by accident" or "the police might not even show up tonight" and take things into their own hands. Still a robbery, still 1 violent crime, but maybe now it's 4% likely to turn into a homicide instead of 2%.
All this said .. could you answer my original question? "(Counter) citation needed?" I'm getting the impression that you're so confident of "an increase in violence" over these decades that no new evidence will change your mind, and I'd really like to know whether the explanation is that there's some far-more-compelling old evidence that you've neglected to mention, or whether this is just confidence not based on evidence. I can come up with a dozen reasons the latter sort of confidence might exist (witness the long tails of these responses - surely the news wouldn't hammer on a category of story 24/7 if it was about as common as deaths by lightning!) but I'm hoping to stick with the former for myself.
roystgnr
5d ago
Once there were enough non-nerds there, it wasn't the early days of the Internet anymore.
roystgnr
17d 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
Assuming they can consent, no.
The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.
roystgnr
29d 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
30d ago
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?
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.
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