roystgnr
5mo ago
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.
roystgnr
23d 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
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
1yr ago
the Tanya
Googling while wondering if you misspelled Talmud ... this is a religious philosophy book published in 1796, whose general philosophy is subscribed to by nearly 0.7% of Jewish people? The Book of Mormon is nearly as old, and represents approximately the same fraction of followers of Jesus. That doesn't prove you wrong (hey, there are tons of Book of Mormon verses that most non-Mormon Christians would agree with, too, even if they think the reason was just "Joseph Smith wrote Bible fan-fiction"), but supporting a broad claim would require citing a broader source.
If you're not making a broad claim, that's fine too, but "extremists of X can't coexist with non-X" is a depressingly broad claim in another way: you can't say it's anything special about Judaism. Muslims who think apostasy should be a capital crime are currently supermajorities in whole countries. Modern Christians are mostly better, but that seems to be a result of exhausting the alternatives first (the European Wars of Religion killed millions; some German states would have seen less population loss if they'd had another Black Plague instead) and remembering their problems (they now know that the next step beyond "we all have to be Christian" is "yeah, friend? which kind?"...). There are some religions that specifically disclaim violent and extremist ... wait, no, not Buddhists too? If you step away from religion completely, it's true that atheists have needed to find some other holy sacred all-important cause to kill millions of people for, and this seems like an improvement because then the cause at least isn't directly tied to the atheism, but it does make me fear that there's some nearly-inextricable tie to human psychology.
roystgnr
11mo ago
has issued millions of concealed carry permits
That undermines more than supports the argument for permitless carry, doesn't it? I can see a strong argument for permitless carry in states where the legislature says "shall-issue" but the licensing agency says "ooh, sorry, on your application you did/didn't close the top on the digit '4', please try again, that'll be another $200 filing fee", but if training requirements are actually providing training rather than obstruction then they don't seem like a bad idea in theory.
it doesn't cause excess violence or deaths
I don't think you can extrapolate from "Florida allows trained licensees to carry concealed and the homicide rate kept declining" to "Florida allows anyone to do so and the homicide rate won't jump" ... but "dozens of states allow anyone to do so and the homicide rate kept declining" is decent evidence. New Hampshire isn't exactly a murderous hellscape.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Doesn’t that just mean “traits” if we combine “traits that are innate plus traits that aren’t”?
I think the implied meaning in context wasn't "heritable refers to every member of A and B" but rather "heritable can refer to members of both A and B".
The typical breakdown is "genetic" vs "shared environment" vs "non-shared environment", isn't it? The shared-environment part would be considered heritable in the colloquial sense but not the biological sense, the genetic part would be heritable in both, the non-shared environment part in neither.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Can you blame them? It means something other than that, if you're using it in a legal sense rather than a biological sense. And the lawyers called dibs first, several hundred years ago; the biologists should have come up with a different word ... but they didn't, so here we are. When a scientist says something is heritable they generally mean "we found these genes" or "we did these twin studies" or something much stronger than just "we measured this correlation".
roystgnr
1yr ago
In mathematics, "implies" is how we pronounce "⇒". Your statement was mathematically false, which was a useful thing for him to point out.
If you were trying to speak a language other than mathematics, like English, in which there are more and fuzzier definitions, either use a less fuzzy word like "suggests" or "hints", or make your context clearer by avoiding other words with both math and English meanings like "variables" and "correlation".
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
10mo 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
1yr ago
If you have a suggestion that isn't "ban certain topics/arguments," let's hear it.
I've always been a fan of rate-limiting, in theory. If the "weekly" thread was a yearly thread then my reaction would probably be an excited "wow, here comes the fight again!" rather than an apprehensive "is anyone going to wade into the fight again or has everyone been exhausted to apathy now?"
roystgnr
6mo ago
constantly referring to Russians as “invaders” like some sort of marvel movie speech
Are you suggesting they're not invaders? "One who invades", and all that? Surely if an accurate description of actions makes them sound like Marvel villainy, the way to correct that is "don't take villainous actions", not "hope they won't be described accurately".
It’s a ridiculous, nationally suicidal vanity project
"Resist invasions by foreign armies" is almost definitional to being a nation. Don't do that and you're just prey.
by a former television actor
Do you really not understand that it's not inherently ridiculous for a former television actor to stand up to Russia? This is even more obviously reaching than your sartorial complaints.
roystgnr
10mo ago
Where exactly is a discontinuity of such a magnitude as to make this absurd? It's somewhere between 300 million people and 8 billion people, I gather, but ... I can't even really picture 1 million people in my head, much less calculate how many more would need to be added before we hit Democracy-bad-critical-mass. Can you? Did India cross the line yet, or does it risk doing so? Would China, if the CCP transitioned to democracy? Would a world country have been fine a few centuries ago, but it's too late now?
a single nation
The US is a single nation ... how? Looking for "a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society" isn't getting me much. 20% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, and about 40% of native English speakers aren't American. We get a million immigrants a year with their own histories; presumably they still count as American regardless. We're certainly not an ethnostate. This is the Culture War roundup, so that's out; skimming through the old tenets of American civil religion and looking for universal and/or religious levels of acceptance is doomed to fail. The US is a single country, but our hypothetical single democratic world country would check that box too.
Part of what made us (barely) hold together as a single country is the paradoxical idea that we don't have to be a single nation, that "United States" is a plural noun and not just an extra 's' for funsies, that the federal government should just be handling the friction between states, who in turn try to devolve their own power onto even smaller localities ... but that's all pretty antiquated at this point, isn't it? Opposing local control because slavery is too awful was a pretty noble rationalization, but it was less than a century from that point to "growing too much food is too awful", and it's been nearly another century since. Even when Texas state government is grousing about DC they'll happily turn around and overrule Austin city government. Who are we to say that China's citizens' votes shouldn't be overruling US mistakes or (in less common cases) vice-versa too, as the obvious next step once we finally give Californians the rest of the control over Montana they want? Is it just special pleading and status quo bias? It really does feel like "more populated places should outvote less populated ones" is a "principle" that's convenient to hold when I'm part of the majority in the more populated place and suddenly abandon when I'm part of the people expecting to be outvoted.
roystgnr
1yr ago
I admit not having any systematic evidence at hand in favor
To be fair, I looked for systematic evidence one way or another and couldn't find any either, just a few studies with small self-selected samples, nothing I'd have said was definitive even if I had never heard the phrase "replication crisis". Most of the really extreme cases of wishful thinking I can think of come from men (how will communism work, exactly? let's just finish up the revolution and then the dialectic says things will all sort themselves out!) but that's the product of even more egregious selection bias. You'd think this would be low-hanging fruit to study, but I don't blame any psychologists who would rather find a less fraught question.
roystgnr
1yr ago
if we had access to magic. Why is this worth spending time thinking about?
You're asking this of me via a glowing crystal I can hold in my hand that brings me images from around the globe.
roystgnr
5mo ago
I'd also want destruction to be off limits so long as there's anyone willing to move the monument to private property, but surely such removal should be an allowable option when it's practical. "Must we commemorate X in the public square just because our great-great-grandparents wanted to?" seems like a reasonable proposition to vote "no" to.
If for some reason we can add monuments but not remove them, though, might I suggest a design for a new line of Anti-Abduction monuments? They'll each be basically a stereotypical barred jail cell, symbolizing the ironic fate that should await those who hold innocent people against their will - and the best part is that, since the design is hollow, it can be erected without using too much space by placing it around other monuments!
roystgnr
1yr ago
Does Chabad influence Jewish beliefs about Gentile souls? That purported inherent Jewish contempt for Gentile souls was the bailey, right? I thought "You can find such awful beliefs in one subsect's founder's centuries-old book" was a small motte to retreat to, but "The sect gives Jewish college kids community centers and only 84% of Jews aren't 'semi-regular' service attendees" is a motte so tightly walled in I can't even find a window from which to see out. Wait until you hear about the Salvation Army.
Even the "network of camps" stuff needs fleshing out. I went to (Christian) religious summer camp at one point as a kid. We never got an "unbaptized babies end up in hell" lesson there, though, despite it being fairly fundamental to the denomination's roots. Do Chabad camp attendees get the adults' "Gentile souls are crummy" lessons, or is "eh, gloss over the creepy stuff in front of the kids" a common trait?
We did get the "Abraham was great for being willing to kill his son when the voices only he could hear told him to" lesson occasionally in (again, Christian) church. Likewise for Noah's Ark and non-Noahs' Watery Graves, though that was treated as more parable than literal. I also reached the "Moses getting chided by God for not quite being genocidal enough" parts when reading the Bible by myself. There is indeed lots of really awful stuff in actual Jewish scripture! The catch is that it got eagerly adopted by billions of Christians, too, because "form moral judgments independently" and "treat all human life as equally sacred, yes even some of those outsiders" haven't been very popular among any groups. That Chabad book actually predates the last time some Christian authorities hanged a man for heresy! ("according to Ripoll, it was not necessary to hear Mass in order to save one's soul from damnation"? String him up, for that?) The claim that Judaism has "moral quandaries" is impossible to argue against, but suggesting that it's somehow special in this respect can't be done without ignoring all other human ideology, and then picking out one subsect to speak for a whole is like a willful rejection of all the tragicomedy of religious belief, Jewish belief in particular.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Upvoted for bringing data, but come on: your support for "trust is genetic, not cultural" includes a graph showing levels of trust in Mexico dropping by two thirds in barely a single generation. Did Mexico just finally get colonized by untrusting Mexican people? Or have there been environmental changes (cartel violence) that didn't reflect in America? The Ciudad Juarez homicide rate went from "3x the USA" to "50x the USA" and back (briefly; it's gotten worse again) in just one decade, while on the other side of a river (and wall, and freeways...) the city of El Paso (14% non-Hispanic white, 80% Hispanic) was untouched at "1/2 the USA". It would be entirely reasonable for Hispanics on just one side of the river to get really skeptical about "trust".
roystgnr
1yr ago
The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.
No, but to the extent it provides services via humans rather than automation, it is subject to Baumol's cost disease. Ironically, the education you can afford in a country where most talented would-be-educators don't have any better options may be greater, at the same adjusted dollars-per-student price, than the education you can afford in a country where that education really pays off in other sectors of the economy. GDP isn't a good unit against which to compare this, but neither are dollars adjusted by a PPP basket which weighs mass-produced consumer goods along with skilled man-hours.
On the other hand, that's about as much of a steelman as I can come up with before noticing that the education sector may be to blame for this themselves. "Students work on computers at their own pace, teachers are on hand to work with students who are having problems the automated lessons can't handle" was how a few of my best classes were handled, experimentally, decades ago, and it's a tragedy that the closest most kids can get today is "Make a Khan Academy account, then hope you have time for it on top of whatever superannuated one-size-fits-all busywork your teachers assign instead". I'm not sure what happened over those decades, but I don't think that whole "software" thing turned out to be just a fad in the rest of the economy, so I have a suspicion that the possibility of teaching more students better even with fewer teachers was treated as a threat to unionized teachers rather than an opportunity for the kids.
roystgnr
6d 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
21d ago
Assuming they can consent, no.
The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.
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
3mo ago
Inherently? Surely not. This is just a vague heuristic, and I'd be shocked if it was actually a universal rule. It just seems that there are some pathways to "make brain quiet down now" that don't do so perfectly gently, which a priori isn't too surprising. General anesthesia and alcohol are the two other examples that come readily to mind. So when I see a new drug that has that effect, and there's no safe explanation (like for melatonin) apparent, I wonder if it's doing so unsafely.
I don't worry too much though. I've had general anesthesia once, and I wouldn't hesitate to take Benadryl after an allergic reaction, because I doubt the costs outweigh the benefits, and I had a glass of wine with dinner tonight, because YOLO.
roystgnr
5mo ago
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.
So, wishful thinking, but rebranded via the wishful-thinking of "surely it's just a female problem"? The irony is delicious.
Two days ago was the anniversary of the phrase "is it logical, is it truly logical that we really have a system that has to be 53 degrees to fly?", uttered by the manager of NASA's Solid Rocket Booster program, a month after an SRB failure at low temperatures had destroyed Challenger, two weeks after Feynman had demonstrated O-ring material becoming inflexible when chilled ... and maybe the commission was just giving Mulloy rope to hang himself, but nobody in the room full of men even stopped him to point out the logical fallacy!
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