ulyssessword
No bio...
User ID: 308
ulyssessword
1mo ago
The fact the spaces needed is so close a match for those provided is a near miracle of demand prediction.
If this article is representative, then 6-8 spaces in one subdivision of Dublin is about a 20% shortfall. I'd struggle to call that "good", nevermind a "near miracle".
You talking about genetic material being different between different populations and sub-populations doesn't mean that race is not socially constructed.
Of course it is, just like everything else. The mere fact that a category is socially constructed is utterly unremarkable. If you want to build policies from that, then you need a stronger grounding. Is it arbitrarily socially constructed, and therefore easy to change? Are there unprincipled exceptions in the social construction, that should be rectified? Is it too complex (or variable across regions and cultures) so it can't be used to communicate clearly? If you could argue that something is a bad social construction, then I'd listen to your ideas about what a good one is.
It seems we agree that social construction of race is not useless nor does it mean that there are differences between groups of people?
It has uses (I'll leave whether it's net useful unanswered), and the causation flows the other way: genetic differences caused racial classification, the classification didn't affect the genes.
A black man and a white man has more similarities in genes, just different expressions of phenotypes, which often is what is used to classify race to begin with.
What is "more" referring to?
If it's a comparison of the average black+white vs. white+white, then I'd say it's plainly incorrect.
My understanding is also that differences within one race are higher than between.
Thanks for the link. It's an interesting find, but the comparison is nigh-meaningless and shouldn't drive your decisions.
Using that same within/between comparison can lead you wildly astray: The income differences within genders are higher than between, but the wage/earnings gap is still a live issue. The life expectancy differences within countries are higher than between, but it's still used as a key indicator of progress. The temperature changes within a year are higher than between, but climate change is still concerning.
Comparing the variance between different individual things to the variance between different large aggregates will practically always say that the individuals are more distinct.
African populations have more genetic diversity within different sub-populations as an example.
That's a neat bit of trivia, but not remarkable either. Sticking with the color example, there's more diversity in wavelengths in "Red" (130 nm) than in "Green", "Yellow", and "Orange" combined (125 nm). Groups aren't always the same size, so "African" being more diverse than "European" and "Asian" combined isn't (wouldn't be?) notable.
EDIT to add: Yes, the category is socially constructed, and yes, the tea has quantum mechanical effects inside your body.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
...the conflation that social construct means it doesn't exist.
That's a very common conflation in my experience, which makes it a valid target for counterarguments.
The socially constructed definition of race includes genetic information, which means that it is a physically-grounded system instead of an arbitrary one. This puts limits on how much society can change the definitions without going off the rails.
Though I understand you are just using an example, it's not a very good one since genetic differences between races aren't always clear.
First, differences between colors aren't clear either. Light with uniformly-random wavelengths is widely agreed to be "white". What about light with 1/3 each 450 nm, 550 nm, 650 nm? It might appear identical or different depending on the situation, so we've created the color rendering index to deal with that. What about fluorescent objects? They reflect visible light in a way that's easily-describable using standard terms, but they also create some extra by converting UV light. Category differences not being clear is completely normal, and there's nothing special about genetics in that sense.
Second, it doesn't look that bad? Look at the graphs Scott included just above your quote: they sure look like clusters to me, and the line-drawing isn't too egregious. Also remember that we're looking at a 2D projection of an N-dimensional analysis, so some more differences will show up in the later principal components.
I am pretty sure ethnic differences are larger within one race than between different races.
I've heard that statement before, but I still haven't got a good explanation of what the factual claim is supposed to be. My attempts all end up in nonsense.
My first thought was "a random pair of coethnics is more genetically different than a random pair of non-coethnics humans", which seems trivially false. My second was "a random pair of coethnics is more genetically different than a random pair of archetypal members of each race", which seems like a category error for the comparison and also plausibly false (see the graph again: races have size 0.2ish, while the distances between their centers are 0.35ish).
What do you mean in a hard statistical sense by that statement?
ulyssessword
1mo ago
I am generally a fan of strict and exact legal definitions of identity X, if X is supposed to give you considerable legal privileges and perks.
I bet you that this 2018 story gets your goat:
With the new birth certificate in hand, he changed his driver's licence and insurance policy.
All to save about $91 a month.
"I'm a man, 100 per cent. Legally, I'm a woman," he said.
"I did it for cheaper car insurance."
ulyssessword
1mo ago
Do you also dispute the wavelength basis of color? It fits in perfectly:
gardenofobjections seems to not understand. Color is still a social construct. There are wavelength variations among different colors, but this doesn't mean the categories of color are not socially constructed. Who decided we are going to define one color white and another black, based on photons? He (doesn't) uses the example with Hanunoo, but this makes no sense since their categorization of color is different from the Western categorization. These color categories have a purpose and are useful for a variety of reasons, but he's not making a convincing point that color categories are not socially defined. Certain color categories are fuzzier and an American invention: whites and blacks.
Put plainly, everything is a fuzzy socially-defined category, even the categories used in the hardest of hard physics. Bringing up this argument for genetics only is an isolated demand for rigor.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
You're probably right, but I think it depends on how difficult it is for the user. If swapping AI assistants is as difficult to do as installing VLC player or LibreOffice, then it'll lose out on a substantial chunk of its potential market. If it's as difficult as switching from Google Search to DuckDuckGo, then...it'll still lose out on some potential market, but not as much.
ulyssessword
1mo ago
You can run Stable Diffusion for AI-generated images on your own computer, so I don't think running a local AI assistant is too far out of the picture. Once AI proliferation reaches the point where hobbyists can create decent models, it wouldn't be hard to "...completely ignore any and all people talking about AI alignment, AI safety, DEI and so on."
ulyssessword
2mo ago
No, you tell me.
As-is, you might as well be asking me to define iouyqrwe while also basing your arguments on it.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
Am I? Are they?
Yes, unless I'm severely misreading your tone. Even your own beliefs about HBD are "paying rent" in the Yudkowskian sense: You anticipate that adopting it would have a specific utilitarian effect.
even if HBD is true (and that is an "if") what value does "HBD Awareness" add over a colorblind meritocracy in terms of anticipated experiences?
That's a category error. HBD is a set of beliefs. Colorblind meritocracy is a set of policies.
A person that believed in blank-slatism would anticipate that a (true) colorblind meritocracy would provide demographically-equal outcomes, and might (or might not) promote those policies depending on how it lines up with their values. A person that believed in HBD would anticipate that a (true) colorblind meritocracy would provide demographically-unequal outcomes, and might (or might not) promote those policies depending on how it lines up with their values.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
an "HBD aware" set
What is that set of policies? My first thought was colorblind meritocracy, but that's obviously not what you're referring to.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
One of the less stupid notions to come out of LessWrong was the idea of making one's beliefs "pay rent"
Link.
Note that it's pay rent in anticipated experiences. Not pay rent in popular political slogans. Not pay rent with gains in social status. Not pay rent with any utilitarian benefit. You seem to be using that term exactly the opposite way of Yudkowski, as HBDers have no problem linking those beliefs to anticipated outcomes.
New update of my occasional quest to make fandom.com usable:
(ping @netstack for a continuation of here)
- Removed the useless title block at the top of each screen (more room for content)
- The top navigation bar is always visible, restoring all of the functions of the previous point while also removing the annoying pop-in
Mostly fixed an error that made the page too wide, adding a superfluous scroll bar. It can still appear on narrower screens (including my vertical monitor).EDIT: Fully fixed 2024-03-03. The two new lines of filters at the end do it. I also readjusted the width a bit.- Updated to remove the sidebar they added back in under a new name
Gallery comparing my custom blocklist, uBlock Origin defaults, and no blocking (Note that no blocking also has an autoplaying video just below the visible part, which pops to the side and follows you down the page)
Also note that the page size shrinks from 35MB (and counting. It continually streams more.) when unblocked to about 1.3 MB with my filters in place.
My filters:
fandom.com##.notifications-placeholder
fandom.com##.wds-global-footer
fandom.com##.pathfinder-wrapper
fandom.com##.page__right-rail
fandom.com##.is-loading.top-leaderboard.ad-slot-placeholder
fandom.com###WikiaBar
fandom.com###mixed-content-footer
fandom.com##.global-navigation
fandom.com##.global-footer
fandom.com##.page-side-tools__wrapper
fandom.com##.global-navigation__top
fandom.com##.page-footer
fandom.com#$#.resizable-container{width:100% !important;}
fandom.com#$#.resizable-container{max-width:1800px !important;}
fandom.com#$#.main-container{margin-left:0px !important;}
fandom.com#$#.main-container{width:100% !important;}
fandom.com##.global-explore-navigation
fandom.com##.global-registration-buttons
fandom.com#$#.fandom-sticky-header{top:0px !important;}
fandom.com#$#.fandom-sticky-header.is-visible{transform:None !important;}
fandom.com##.fandom-community-header
fandom.com#$#.community-header-wrapper{height:46px !important}
fandom.com##.left.side-bt-container
fandom.com##.right.side-bt-container
ulyssessword
2mo ago
What is the most fun outlandish one that's still remotely plausible?
Hal Finley is the Bruce Kent to Satoshi's Masculine Mongoose. He's the subject of (and a willing participant in) an elaborate frame-job that links him to Satoshi, which provides investigators a convenient excuse to stop looking.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
Not sure why it’s not working for me.
Try it while logged out (or in a private window). Reddit's blocking functionality is a bit strange.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
It's still up for me.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/ffldCo1
ulyssessword
2mo ago
You're pointing to one of the core differences at play here. Paraphrasing liberally:
Critic: JCVD movies are trash
Fan: but enjoyable trash!
vs.
Critic: True Detective is trash
Fan: This is just another example of the sexist misogynist backlash. In fact, it isn't even a genuine grassroots opinion and is part of a concerted effort by a politically-motivated brigade that can't accept reality.
It takes two to tango. Low-brow media (generally) doesn't push back against negative reviews, so any "controversies" die out immediately. Prestige media has both supporters and detractors, so they can feed off of each other in a growing cycle of escalation.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
Furiosa didn't do so well against Mad Max, even in a 6v2 fight.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
But a lot of similarly brainless beat-em-up action movies have been released with women leads over the years, often with better objective craft and quality overall, and male audiences have generally rejected all of them.
Take a list like this (or maybe one with a bit less recency bias).
Do you think those are intellectual action movies, so they don't count as brainless beat-em-up? Are they miscategorized in some way and don't actually have women leads? Do they have worse craft and quality? Are these too few counterexamples to count as "all", or else have they been been rejected (counter to my perceptions)?
As a sidenote, I've only heard of a few of JCVD's works, and none of them because of his name. Beloved action movies starring women popped into my head immediately. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a cinemaphile, but my experiences are completely opposite of the examples you've laid out in your comment.
You could always try something like the attached image. It's from https://www.tweetgen.com/create/tweet.html
EDIT: or the picture I was trying to attach, anyways. Just make it look like a tweet, block off the name and crop the metadata and it's nigh-untraceable (until someone tries googling a random sentence).
ulyssessword
2mo ago
It's not the 9th circuit (and it's not even the US), but if you go just a bit north then using hard drugs in a playground is not illegal.
The Restricting Public Consumption of Illegal Substances Act was passed by the legislature in November, allowing fines and imprisonment for people who refuse to comply with police orders not to consume drugs in certain public places.
The nurses association argued the act, which has yet to come into effect, would violate the Canadian Charter in various ways if enforced.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
I wish someone would explain what’s up with my math and 3% rate. My extrapolation feels right but something not jiving with the lower percent of deaths.
3.2% is correct. His .32% was either a typo or a calculation error.
The US has around 3.5M deaths per year, 112K/3.5M=.32% of all deaths, pretty straightforward.
3.2%
EDIT:
Also, looking at the graph, on first glance it looks like overdose deaths spiked during Covid lockdown, and are already dropping quickly.
Are we looking at the same graph (Figure 1a. 12 Month-ending Provisional Counts of Drug Overdose Deaths: United States)? That apparent downward trend has the note "Underreported due to incomplete data", and the predicted value of deaths is holding steady at 110-112k.
EDIT2: @guesswho (do pings work in edits?)
EDIT: Looks like I screwed up the math and chart stuff and it's all kind of weird. CDC says drug overdose is .32% of deaths, but that doesn't jive with their listed number of deaths in 2023, off by an order of magnitude. I'm wondering if deaths have more than one listed cause, or if some set of these numbers are projections or something.
Still not sure where you're getting .32% from. From their first paragraph, 0.032% (32.4 per 100,000) of people died of overdose deaths (mostly opioid) in 2021. If you round it off to 1/100 people dying each year, it adds up to 3% of deaths.
ulyssessword
2mo ago
From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing... They have to be if people do them.
Maybe I'm an outlier (or I was taking an insufficient dose as described in Drug users use a lot of drugs), but Opioids weren't that great unless I was in pain.
My experience made me much more sympathetic to the idea that the "opioid epidemic" is an appropriate reaction to the chronic pain epidemic (particularly among blue collar workers with physically-demanding jobs. Who would've thought.)
ulyssessword
2mo ago
I am going to die in this game-like dimension has one of the most unique worlds I've seen, even if the plot is kind of generic. It was written by a physics teacher, and it has entirely new physics: gravity pulls you to the nearest surface, cold is just as real as heat, your lungs process lavi and oxygen doesn't exist, and my personal favourite: "
Generally, the differences from earthly physics show up in a controlled scenario (such as training), then surprisingly they also show up in real situations working exactly the same way. Like, wall-running past a pit is fine because the nonexistent floor doesn't pull you down, but surely
(linebreak for formatting only)
See also: Lockdown: The Coming War on General Purpose Computing, a 2012 speech/blog post by Cory Doctorow. It's outdated by now, but this has been going on for a long time.
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