whatihear
26d ago
I think they were saying that black activists are to the left as “the good ones” are to the right, not that they are the same group.
whatihear
28d ago
The three body problems idea that aliens would want to destroy other intelligent civilization because of the potential for explosive technological growth on galactic timescales seems to make a lot of sense as a motive for someone to release death probes targeting less developed species to their immediate neighborhood.
whatihear
30d ago
I’ve seen it come up with enough regularity on personal drama subs that I think it is not actually that uncommon. Why are you so confident that it is?
Getting into a gunfight with police and traveling across a border with your own child are two wildly different things. The state has a very strong interest in dropping the hammer over the first because not doing so would be giving up it’s monopoly on force.
whatihear
30d ago
There are some cases where someone can violate a custody agreement in such a way that the courts have very little chance of reversing matters. In particular, people often get away with kidnapping their own children to a different country that either holds a different view of who ought to have custody or refuses to extradite as a general principle. In fact, this even happens between US states (I know of some cases where California has refused to uphold Texas custody agreements related to trans healthcare for the kids for example).
In that kind of circumstance, and if the ex is horrifically abusing the child, it may in fact be reasonable to pull the trigger on violating the order. Your argument is that people don’t get away with kidnapping, so they shouldn’t do it even in extreme outlier cases, but people do in fact get away with kidnapping pretty commonly when borders get in the way.
whatihear
1mo ago
Yeah that makes sense in light of the broken bones and cartilage. Apparently those injuries can happen in older individuals from hanging, but I can’t imagine he had much space to get a good drop if he did hang himself, so it still seems pretty suspicious to me.
whatihear
1mo ago
You said “a soldier” so I assumed you had some tool in mind that would allow one person to reliably strangle a victim. It does seem plausible that a crushed trachea could keep the air supply cut off after an attacker walks away, though in this case if he was killed he would have been hung afterwards which would have maintained pressure on the blood vessels as well.
Honestly for a single attacker the best tool might have been a taser to subdue him and then they could have just strangled him with the sheets since they have the stage the hanging anyway.
whatihear
1mo ago
What equipment would allow you to kill someone in seconds leaving only the marks left on Epstein? How many seconds are we talking? Getting a garrote on a resisting victim is not trivial unless you have the element of surprise, and strangulation takes a while to set in. Even after someone goes out they are not dead immediately. Whether by blood or air choke, it takes seconds to put someone out but much longer to kill.
whatihear
2mo ago
A lot of drug dealers are fronted their supply because they don’t have the cash to buy it directly. They pay for it when they get their next re-up. This is how businesses in basically every other category work, so it shouldn’t be surprising. Street peddlers in their third world also borrow their merchandise. Retail stores borrow to buy merchandise. It would be weird if drugs was the one line of business where no one used debt financing. It’s just a more competitive economic structure so it will outcompete people buying up front.
Think about it from the perspective of a cartel boss. You have 1000 kilos of coke to move. You could either distribute 5 kilos at a time to the 5 guys who can afford to pay up front and take forever to move your stuff, or you could front the product to dozens, and move it way quicker. The second obviously makes more money quicker. The fact that you’ll have to break some legs from time to time is just some overhead.
whatihear
2mo ago
This is wrong for two reasons:
- Genetic determinism does not require a deterministic universe. At this point, I don't think many people who are aware of quantum mechanics think we live in a deterministic universe, and it is totally reasonable to believe in genetic determinism WRT intelligence anyway. While intelligence can be measured, it can't be measured down to the planck length. There's a level of precision that's just impossible to achieve, and so long as genetics determine intelligence closely enough, it's fine if the biological processes are a little fuzzy because of quantum uncertainty or whatever your preferred source of non-determinism is.
- A non-material universe is orthogonal to its materiality. There is no reason that non-material objects need to be non-deterministic. For a great example of this, consider the various "hard magic" systems in fantasy books that have clear and well defined rules for magic, but contain obviously non-material objects like souls.
To be honest, I don't much care for the term "genetic determinism" in this context. I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role. In my experience the debate is between hard core blank slateists, who deny the impact of genetics at all because they understand that it would wreck the foundation of much of their worldview, and hereditarians who think that there is a mix of genetic and environmental factors. "Genetic determinism" is generally leveled as a slur against hereditarians because it's pretty silly to think that genes are the only thing that matters and that your exposure to lots of words and symbols as a kid has zero impact. Can you point to someone making a "strong argument for heritability" that really says things are 100% genetic?
whatihear
2mo ago
It’s not though. A universe containing non physical things could very easily contain organisms with wholly genetically determined intelligence. They just don’t have anything to do with one another.
Imagine a purely material universe with species A that is intelligent and has its intelligence completely determined by genetics. Now imagine that one day in that universe species B evolves and has souls (just an example of non physical things, it could be anything you like that is non physical). Nothing has changed for species A, they are still genetically determined.
whatihear
2mo ago
I don’t think that’s true at all. There are plenty of materialists who think things are environmentally determined. This is liberal blank slateism in a nutshell. The opposite of genetic determinism is environmentalism in almost all debates on intelligence. This is actually the first time that I’ve encountered someone saying that variations in intelligence originate from something non-physical like the grace of God (this seems like what you are saying, but maybe you mean something else, it does seem like an odd thing for God to do to me).
whatihear
2mo ago
Yeah totally agree. Before I believed in god, I was a superveniance functionalist (now I’m confused). I think qualia are just one more superveniant thing in that frame.
A lot of people who are not materialists and also don’t believe in god cite qualia as the reason why, so I was trying to make the case in a way that would appeal to those people. It was sloppy and I regret the error, since I don’t actually think that makes sense.
whatihear
2mo ago
materialism / genetic determinism
What do these have to do with one another? Belief in genetic determinism seems entirely compatible with belief in non physical things like god or qualia. There is no reason that god could not have created a world in which genetic determinism is true.
It seems like you want to associate these things because you want to strike a blow against materialism, but it’s just unrelated.
whatihear
3mo ago
I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science.
What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.
whatihear
5mo ago
Those just sound like system design interviews, which is something companies actually do. I’ve given and taken interviews like that. The database schema thing you mention is not quite one, but just like the answer to every whiteboarding question is a hashtable, a relational database with a reasonable schema is the core of every system design question.
I also think white boarding is a good thing to do. There are a lot of peripheral skills to being a software engineer, but if you can’t code you don’t belong in the profession. Whiteboarding is a good time boxed test of this.
I wish we would take stuff like github into account more for selfish reasons, but plenty of good talent has no open source presence so I understand why it generally isn’t factored in. I do think is a strong signal at the new grad level and should be weighed much more heavily there.
whatihear
5mo ago
Tech internships are paid, and people don’t really care about your github in my experience. Having a good one never helped me, and I’ve never been told to look at the githubs for candidates when evaluating them or seen anyone else bring it up in hiring committees.
whatihear
5mo ago
I generally like the modding on this forum, including yours, but this whole sub thread dropped my respect for you as mod pretty significantly. I’m mostly a lurker on here and I don’t really follow individual users closely enough to have prior opinions on anyone involved expect for you (and that only because mod names jump out when the mod hat goes on). I found the initial mod action jarring and unexpected, but your responses to other people pushing back were worse. You generally do a good job as far as I can tell, but I think you got this one wrong.
whatihear
10mo ago
That doesn’t matter with a correctly configured TPM though. The decryption process for the disk includes a key stored in the TPM, which is never revealed, and the TPM itself verifies the boot image (which is the thing responsible for decrypting the data).
You can definitely boot whatever you want, and even trick the user into inputting their password, but if that password is only half the decryption key, you can’t actually go in and tamper with any of the data. You could still replace it wholesale or send the password somewhere else for further attacks, so it’s not nothing, but it’s also not as bad as if the TPM was not set up to do boot attestation.
whatihear
10mo ago
Yeah, that’s true, though I think TPMs might be able to prevent that since they will check the boot image and are involved in data decryption. I’m not sure if having the BIOS password allows you to subvert that though. I think the way it works is that the key or part of the key is registered with the TPM and then it asserts about the boot image hash before releasing that key, so it is only possibly to use known good boot images to decrypt your data. Maybe having the BIOS password would allow you to reset the TPM, but I think there is no way to do that without clobbering the key it stores.
No idea if these machines have that set up though.
whatihear
10mo ago
As long as the machines use disk encryption, having the BIOS password doesn’t allow you to log in or tamper with the data. It would allow an attacker to completely blow away the data a little quicker than they could otherwise. No idea if they do use disk encryption. If they don’t that would be a bigger scandal in my book.
whatihear
11mo ago
I mostly agree. Progress is only linear in retrospect and in the minds of the people pushing for it. There is not actually some great moral lodestar that history inevitably pushes us closer to, what counts as progress is mostly about what the powerful say it is. As you point out it is not possible to provide a total ordering of policies according to progress, but I do think that the general direction of progress is fairly clear from within any given political reference frame (except those reference frames that don't even have the notion).
whatihear
11mo ago
If that was how most people thought of the term, we would hear the Amish and Mennonites and Hasidim laid out as the primary examples of reaction in our society, but we don't. Instead reactionary writers are much more likely to be referred to as reactionary. I think you have a way of using the term which doesn't match up with how everyone else uses it. If you want a term for what you are talking about, I think "trad" fits much better.
whatihear
11mo ago
Well I do think that fascists are right-progressives in the same way that Guy Standing is a left-reactionary. They were all about building a better and more efficient society. They thought their system would triumph by virtue of transcending the squabbling that held democracies back. The Nazi vision is definitely one of Progress, even if it is an alien and twisted sort of Progress. The Japanese thought they were ushering in a new and better age for Asia (or at least that's what their propaganda said).
There were elements of reaction, like the Italian dream of a neo-Roman empire or the German dusting off of old folk religions, but I think that was mostly in service of creating a newly invigorated national spirit.
The fact that left-Progressives usually try to do things that will actively made the world worse is somewhat beside the point in my view. They think their policies will make the world better, and they want to do so by innovating in how society is arranged. Maybe it wasn't obvious in my original post, but I intended there to be a note of irony in the way I was capitalizing Progress.
Japan has far fewer economic migrants than other developed countries. That has changed a little recently (and immediately prompted a turn to the right politically). Including them on this list seems unreasonable unless you count having any number of economic migrants at all. There is clearly a difference between what Japan has allowed and what Europe or the United States has allowed.
More options
Context Copy link