roystgnr
8mo ago
put yourself in the shoes of a Trump who was absolutely positive that there was significant fraud in PA, GA and NV, but can't prove exactly how much. What is your best move?
Publish all the evidence that made you absolutely positive. This must not be done in "throw everything you have at the wall" Gish-Gallop style, though, because if the 5th item on your list of evidence is pretty convincing but the first 4 items turn out to be nonsense then you risk nobody bothering to read past the 2nd or 3rd.
Even if everybody agrees the evidence should have made you absolutely positive, this doesn't get you inaugurated in 2020, but it does guarantee you 2024, a stronger showing in the House and Senate from 2022 on, and mass support for election reform in your favor that could last for generations.
roystgnr
4mo ago
The hostage doesn't have a gun, but by not resisting, the hostage is enabling a criminal with a gun to get away.
By not resisting, the scientists are (checks notes) noticing that scientific studies done in a Hispanic country might help more Hispanics want to become scientists.
The hostage still isn't coming off as the better of the two here.
roystgnr
4mo 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
8mo ago
Then you ignored past evidence. As such, no reason to link it again when you can easily see for yourself if you search.
If it's easy, you should do it and paste the links here.
If it's not easy, but you expect persuadable people (at least persuadable third parties) to be reading, you should definitely do it and paste the links. (this is the case I suspect is true, as a persuadable third party who didn't see anything on the first results page for "gaza doctors access", although I vaguely recall seeing stories along these lines before)
If you don't expect anyone persuadable to be reading, why bother writing at all?
roystgnr
9mo ago
It's clearly not close to the norm in the sense of "normal distribution", but it's closer than it should be in the sense of "normative". Back when the pregnant woman got run over you could find de jure support for the victim in pre-existing Arkansas state publications, and the state police settled out of court later, but if the cop who ran her down wasn't fired then in some de facto sense wasn't any norm against that superseded by a "let the vehicular assailant get away with it if they're a cop" norm they consider more important?
roystgnr
10mo ago
Reaching back 60 years to find an example seems like strong (if unintended) support for both "certainly possible" and "it doesn't happen often".
roystgnr
3mo ago
The one opposing "everyone in the Big Yud singularity doomerist community"? The opposition itself isn't a deal-breaker (though it's clearly at least a non-central example), but the word choices to maximize emotional reaction at the expense of clarity are.
I was hoping someone would at least point out an interesting source being paraphrased. You see ML papers that talk about the infinite-width limit of neural networks, and sometimes that's just for a proof by contradiction (as OP appears to be attempting, to be fair), and sometimes it leads to math that applies asymptotically in finite-width networks ... but you can see how after a couple rounds of playing Telephone it might be read as "stupid ML cult thinks they're gonna have infinitely powerful computers!"
roystgnr
3mo ago
But it's still weird how everyone in universe takes it so seriously.
Well, that's just because the Jedi Council knows The Truth of the Sith. (trigger warning: Yudkowsky fan fiction)
roystgnr
6mo ago
I think math just inherently requires more structure
Khan Academy has pretty much solved this problem for pre-college math.
and pushing
But here ... yeah, it really depends on the kid. Letting our kids work independently (along with a charter school that is very flexible), my son got 5 or 6 years ahead in math because he loves math, his older sister got a couple years ahead because she loves the idea of getting into a good college, and his younger sister just does what she's asked to because she loves her mommy, which is going to put our "don't be pushy parents" philosophy to the test in the coming years.
roystgnr
8mo ago
It was fucking weird how Biden received a vote dump in the middle of the night.
Nah. It was so non-weird you could see it coming months in advance. It's reasonable to wonder whether the protections on mail-in ballots were sufficient, or whether other election rules like "Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once" were a bad idea, but when absentee ballots are reported all at once, in large heavily blue cities in a year when a majority of blue voters went absentee and a supermajority of red voters didn't, it would only be weird if the large vote dump wasn't massively blue.
roystgnr
2mo ago
The Nazis would not go after them
One of the first groups the Nazis went after, years before "I dunno, Madagascar?" was taken off the table for the Jews, was other Nazis.
Scapegoats are not chosen based on a rational evaluation on how much their sacrifice will actually please the Gods, they're chosen based on complicated psychological and sociological factors that can be hard to predict in advance.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Zelensky is asking for American boys to die on the steppe in Ukraine on the other side of the world.
I thought he was still just asking for materiel. When did he request troops?
roystgnr
6mo ago
Ariane? The space company with 3 launches in the past two years? That's a smaller manifest than SpaceX last week.
roystgnr
8mo ago
a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner
A lot of states didn't let mail-in ballots be processed until after election day polling closed. Reasonable if you don't want to risk preliminary count data leaking and influencing later voters, but not great if your priority is "prompt". Florida seems to have figured out how to thread the needle on that by allowing all the tricky work to be done ahead of time:
“They can determine the validity of ballots, confirm they should be counted and run them through machines,” Morley said. “They just can’t press the tally button.”
I'd still worry about possibilities of low-level fraud, since maintaining a proper chain of custody for weeks has to be a lot harder than doing so for hours, but it seems to have done wonders against possibilities of delays.
b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.
No? The first data I found claims that early voting by mail was from voters registered 31% R to 45% D (24% minor or no affiliation), versus early in-person votes from voters registered 45% R to 32% D. That's not as large as the "how could you go out in public during a pandemic" vs "are you going to be a shut-in the rest of your life" bluster to pollsters before the election would have suggested, but it's still pretty large, and that's for the state as a whole; I wouldn't be surprised if the less moderate Democrats and more moderate Republicans were disproportionately in the larger cities.
roystgnr
10mo ago
I think Musk's other companies are extremely important
This is true.
and someone else hopefully could cut the budget.
This is ... I guess true, under the unlikely premise of a majority of politicians actually caring to cut the budget?
Acquiring lots of debt is super fun at the time, forgoing debt or even acquiring debt more slowly is so much less fun that stupid people call it "austerity", and actually paying back debt is almost a ludicrous idea now. We haven't repaid more than a couple percent of the federal debt in a year since the 1920s, and that was when the debt was like 3% of GDP, not 130%. If most voters were smart enough to grasp accounting identities then they'd consider the fact that debt spending in one year means debt repayment (or at least less opportunity for debt spending) in a later year, and they'd control for that when judging economic outcomes ... but they aren't, so they don't, and thus politicians have to choose between making themselves popular by making life harder for their successors or vice-versa.
Nobody wants to pick vice-versa.
roystgnr
8mo ago
It's an election, though, not a bloody melee. In a melee you want your side to believe you've got the enemy grossly outnumbered and so there's definitely no need for any of Us to break and rout before we force Them to. In an election you want your side to believe you're tied with the enemy and so there's definitely a need for Us to get our lazy butts off the couches rather than either conceding to Them or letting our overconfidence cause an upset.
Hopefully we're just doing the exhortation thing because our psychology evolved through far less history with elections than with bloody melees (100s of years vs 100s of millennia?), not because we've had a few slightly-bloody melees recently and we want to be prepared for when they get much bloodier.
roystgnr
8mo ago
If you'd said "This fucking looks weird", I would have absolutely agreed. The rules for how ballots were counted in Wisconsin were a bad idea. Democracy derives less of its value from "the median voter is super smart and should be in charge of everything" than it does from "there are a lot of people similar to the median voter who ought to be able to trust they're not being screwed over", so predictably reducing voter trust, even if the new suspicion is unfounded, is a horribly anti-democratic mistake. The Democrats used to know this, e.g. back when opposition to voting machines was left-coded, and it's shameful that they're forgetting it when they no longer expect to be the ones who might need to be distrustful.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Oh, it seems entirely reasonable to me, just a very specifically weird way to be reasonable, out of a lot of alternatives. As a choice pushed by narcissists it would make sense to me. But as a request specifically made by a blind person it's an interesting mystery.
roystgnr
11mo ago
... why a color specifically? You'd think that type of clothing, hair style, distinguishing feature, or a half-dozen other things would be more relatable than color.
Was he one of the many (most?) legally blind people who still have some (ultra-blurry) color vision?
Or is it a sense of humor thing? "Hey, you know how there's this major qualia that I'll never get to experience? Could you bring it up in a way that will sound natural at first but will make you feel a little more confused and uncomfortable the longer you think about it?" That would actually be awesome.
roystgnr
11mo ago
That's enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be arrested; not enough to conclude the employee shouldn't be fired. If Billy Bob is among your customer base and there's now only one way to make him feel safe walking down your rope aisle then maybe you do what you need to for him to feel safe.
IIRC the (ex-)Home-Depot lady didn't even go that far, it was more like "Billy Bob's favorite candidate deserves to be hanged", with Billy (and his compatriots) in no danger, but it's still defensible for a judgement call to land somewhere in between "we should just ignore this" and "we need to call the cops right now".
roystgnr
11mo ago
Dark humor is not even remotely in Tenacious D's wheelhouse.
"I can't wait to take Kage back to Hell
I'm gonna fill him with my hot demon gel"
Their second most popular song jokes about a protagonist potentially being raped for eternity by Satan.
But your point (B) is much more persuasive.
roystgnr
27d ago
The time to become fiscally responsible by just cutting expenses was 30 years ago. Today we'd need to become fiscally responsible by cutting expenses and raising taxes. We won't voluntarily do that now either, so barring a miracle we'll eventually be forced to do it later (when lenders no longer imagine getting paid back for US treasuries and stop covering our deficits), and we'll grossly inflate away the US dollar too.
roystgnr
2mo ago
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
Yes, it is.
"P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)P(¬E)" is a tautology, true for for any valid probabilities and conditional probabilities P with events E and M. Likewise for the identity "P(¬E)=1-P(E)". Combining the two gives
P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
To say that "E is evidence for M" is to assert "P(M|E) > P(M)", and if we use that (along with "P(E)>0") we can derive the inequality
P(M) > P(M)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
Subtract "P(M)P(E)" from both sides, then divide by 1-P(E) (using "P(E)<1"), and we get
P(M) > P(M|¬E)
which is to say that "absence of E is evidence against M".
The magnitude of the evidence depends greatly on the specifics, and can be negligible, but it's never zero.
Who said anything about court? Your theory that judges are more likely to dismiss people who publish more evidence is an interesting one, but there is a reason why I said "publish", not "file". As I admitted, if the judges dismiss you then you still lose 2020, but if the voters don't then your team wins 2022 and 2024 and a lot of opportunities to prevent whatever fraud you detected from happening again. Maybe it takes time to go through evidence in the moment and make sure you're not hurting your credibility by putting credence in bad evidence too, but after three or four years have passed Vance shouldn't be dancing around when asked if Trump lost, he shouldn't be pointing to social media censorship (or whatever "big tech rigged the election" meant) as reasons why Trump morally won, he should be advertising "trumpwon2020.com" or whatever URL they picked to host all the evidence they have that Trump actually won.
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