wlxd
9d ago
These two words represent the same thing, the “dictator” one just carries negative connotation.
wlxd
21d ago
Yeah, I don’t really want to argue for high likelihood of this scenario in Palestinian context, just that it doesn’t seem at all impossible considering the plentiful historical examples.
wlxd
21d ago
Do you imagine that a lasting peace is going to be achieved by killing thousands of innocents to get rid of Hamas?
It’s pretty easy to imagine when you look at some historical examples, eg. pacification of Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan in WWII, which in fact resulted in not only lasting peace, but in fact strong alliance with the former adversary who killed hundreds of thousands of innocents using the same tactics used by Israel today.
wlxd
1mo ago
Egan’s “Closer” (1992) story also focuses on sex change. Strongly recommended, goes in pretty hard.
wlxd
1mo ago
It is enough, you can look up their financial reports. They spend more money on donation processing than on actually hosting the website, true story.
wlxd
1mo ago
All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence.
Yes, but this does not address my argument that in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.
Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.
It’s the other way around. When you use race as evidence, you don’t do it by sequencing the DNA of the subject. No, what you do in practice is precisely using a socially constructed race as a proxy to make predictions IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing. You can’t cheaply get a lot of specific evidence about the latter, but you can use race stereotypes (which are pretty accurate) to infer these quite cheaply.
The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly.
Which is exactly the case in majority of the situations. Indeed, you apparently agree:
Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.
So where is the disagreement, exactly?
wlxd
1mo ago
There is little substance in your comment other than repeatedly claiming that racism is bad because it’s immoral, and it’s immoral because it’s evil, and it’s evil, because it’s problematic. If taking race into account when making consequential decisions about reality is considered racist, even if we only do it to the statistically justified extent, then I simply don’t agree about it being gravely immoral, because we do the exact same thing with hundreds of other characteristics all the time without an ounce of queasiness, eg. cultural origin, or education history, or density of facial tattoos, or clothing worn.
Your best argument here is where you claim that it’s too easy to assign more weight to this piece of evidence than it is actually warranted. This is true, but this is also true about other characteristics, discriminating based on such does not get such a privileged treatment, so why should I care much?
wlxd
1mo ago
By “residual value after controlling for other predictors”, I meant something like, if you have two pathologists, one of them being black tells you something additional on top of the fact of him being a pathologist, eg. that they are likely to be less competent at their job than their white counterpart.
wlxd
1mo ago
I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.
This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.
The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.
wlxd
1mo ago
A good rule of thumb is that if US signs some treaty about avoiding given type of weapons, it means it’s ineffective, but if it doesn’t, it is useful and practical. Compare, for example, chemical weapons, which US agreed to not use, with land mines or cluster munitions, which very much are a part of US arsenal, despite existence of treaties banning these: US is just not a signatory to these.
Even more cynically, the treaties that US is not a signatory to, simply are not worth much in the first place: the signatories to these simply don’t expect to fight a serious war that would require using these, so commitment to not use them is not worth much, because they will likely disregard their obligations soon as they do find themselves in one. See, for example, Ukraine, which happily uses these, despite being a signatory to Ottawa treaty.
wlxd
1mo ago
I know about these, but I can hardly believe that these static photos of the aftermath made the original poster “wince”, compared to the videos of Hamas attack. I assumed that he referred to something else.
wlxd
1mo ago
What videos from Ukraine are you referring to? I have seen a lot of videos with brutal combat footage or savage treatment of POWs, but I have not seen any comparable videos featuring civilians — worst ones are just civilians getting blown up by munitions hitting civilian areas, nothing comparable to Hamas.
wlxd
1mo ago
Internet actually brought enormous amount of consumer surplus, which simply is not reflected in GDP. If you tried to value the stuff that we today get for effectively free, like ability to stream any movie you want for peanuts, or free long-distance video calls, or free mailing, or play sophisticated video games etc according to how much these costed in, say, 1970, you’d observe that we consume thousands of dollars worth of services for free.
wlxd
1mo ago
Thiel did not get a “sweetheart deals on private company stock and bought small amounts”. He created this stock by founding a company, and made it a lot more valuable through his efforts.
wlxd
1mo ago
This is a much more reasonable comment.
A private company that doesn't make a formal disclosure can't commit securities fraud by making a false one.
Yes, but this is precisely why I phrased my comment as such:
if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas
I simply don’t see how you can argue that spending all funds on gambling in Vegas is just a business decision, anymore than you could argue that spending all investor funds on buying yourself a villa and a Lambo is just a business decision.
wlxd
1mo ago
Securities law applies to private companies as well, if you take investments and issue equity. That you make a distinction between public and private companies here suggests to me that you don’t have much idea what you are talking about.
wlxd
1mo ago
I am quite sure that if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas, that counts as a breach of fiduciary duty.
wlxd
2mo ago
Yeah, they signed agreements, and then didn’t keep to them. That’s not how you conduct diplomacy.
wlxd
2mo ago
Peace was never offered to Ukraine. Their choice was subjugation and cultural genocide at a minimum or war.
Peace with concessions is still peace, regardless of how much you insist it is not. As it is, they chose cultural and literal genocide in place of a risk of just cultural genocide. The Ukrainians are being killed by tens, likely even hundreds of thousands. With so many emigres, it is highly likely that even after cessation of hostilities, whatever remains of Ukraine will be permanently demographically crippled. It is ridiculous to argue that Ukraine being completely subjugated by Russia would mean more demographic damage than the war has caused: nothing of the sort happened to other nations subjugated by Russians (in fact, Russian nationalists today routinely complain about how often the Russian Federation acts more in the interest of the minority ethnicities than ethnic Russians).
wlxd
2mo ago
The person I replied to suggested that Ukraine should take western weapons and win the war, and gave Poland as an example of this as a successful strategy. I pointed out that Poland achieved success by peaceful diplomatic means. If the West pushed weapons into Polish hands at that time, that would have been clear warmongering, because history proved that peaceful solution was possible. I did not refer to the recent events in Ukraine as western warmongering, only the hypothetical scenario where west pushes citizens of Polish People’s Republic to war with Soviet Union.
Now, let me explicitly say here that the current western strategy of funding Ukrainian military with the explicit, openly repeated goal of weakening Russian state and military, under the assumption of good ROI in terms of monetary spend/materiel relative to achieved damage to Russia, and with zero concern for Ukrainian blood being spilled to achieve these goals, and disregard for ultimate likelihood of Ukrainian victory, very much is warmongering.
Without the western “support”, the (stupid and evil) Russian invasion would be over with by now, and much less blood would have been spilled, and wealth and livelihoods destroyed, for pretty much the same ultimate geopolitical outcome. However, the West has clearly chosen strategy of slow trickle of support to pull in and attrit Russians as much as possible.
wlxd
2mo ago
I specifically mentioned the Russian puppet state of Belarus to point out that you can do much better than Ukraine while remaining in Russian orbit. My point was that if Ukraine experienced decades of stagnation while in Russian orbit while Belarus grew, why expect much different outcomes in western orbit?
Poland well the breakup of the USSR made it not possible for them to do war so they had an easier route.
Poland left the Communist Bloc years before USSR broke up. They managed that through diplomacy and negotiations, not western warmongering. Ukraine should try the same.
wlxd
2mo ago
Can you make your clear? Are you suggesting that the person you are replying to might genuinely not be aware of that, or are you just engaging in petty language policing?
wlxd
2mo ago
What weapons the west gave to Poland that allowed it to beat Soviet military and throw their shackles? What military strategy was used?
(4) provides the option to have a large successful family. The EV is much much higher.
Why wasn’t Ukraine on this path before the war? Poland started off around where Ukraine was in early 1990s. It failed to thrive, to put it mildly, and the pre-war trajectory was not optimistic. The neighboring puppet state of Russia, Belarus, has done much better for itself.
If the plan is to build stronger ties with the West, join EU etc similarly to what Poland did, isn’t better strategy to cut the losses, stop the bleed, and negotiate peace with Russia, where you cede some territories in exchange for Russia acceding to your western strategy in future?
This is true about GRID (also known as AIDS), but not true about other STDs. Syphilis and herpes spread quite quickly among users of heterosexual casual sex. This is because HIV has relatively low likelihood of transmission in penile-vaginal intercourse, in contrast to e.g. syphilis, which spread like wildfire around the world in 16th century in a matter of a couple of decades after the initial contact was made, despite much lower population mixing coefficient at the time.
More options
Context Copy link