wlxd
1yr ago
First, this is not what they were created for. This is only one reason for which they were created. In common speech, when we say that "A is for B", it carries implication that B is the single most important reason for A, and other reasons are of little significance. Second, even if they were, in fact, originally built mostly for military transports (which they weren't, though it was important reason to build them), if they are not meant for this use case today, one can scarcely say that they are for it. At best, you can say that they were built for it.
wlxd
1yr ago
Okay, and do you have a concrete story for today? Say, all votes are on paper, the scheme is that everyone take home a carbon copy of their own ballot. What problems do you expect it to bring, today?
wlxd
1yr ago
These seem to me concerns of marginal importance to election outcomes. They might happen, but I can scarcely imagine that making vote verifiable will make these significantly worse than they already are. Like, what do you mean by “power differentials”, in concrete terms?
wlxd
1yr ago
One typically compares outcomes of identical twins vs. fraternal twins (who are as related to each other as regular siblings). If the correlation between identical twins is the same as correlation between fraternal twins, it means that it’s probably not genes that are causing the outcomes. If, instead, outcomes of identical twins are more highly correlated than outcomes of fraternal twins, that suggests that the casuality is genetic. This is because both fraternal and identical twins are sharing the same home environment (of, say, middle class home with two parents), so if it was the shared environment that was causing all of the outcomes, you wouldn’t expect the correlation between outcomes of identical twins to be different than that of fraternal twins.
wlxd
1yr ago
Sure, some indeed actually dedicate their lives to these kind of competitions, but this is not big fraction of the people partaking, and even their career is not that long. They usually move on from there to more typical places of status. I also think it's not instructive to focus on the actual winners, instead consider people in top 10, or even top 50.
wlxd
1yr ago
Frankly, I don’t find this whole angle of “who sees the body” to be very interesting. It is highly unlikely that this will affect my thinking about the issue in any significant manner. Finding someone’s body is normal, if not exactly everyday part of human existence. I don’t think that the issue of dealing with dead bodies should be the driving factor in the matter.
wlxd
1yr ago
-Much like Google, there is an incentive for starting new projects, but not necessarily finishing them,
I don't think this is a problem at Google. Google actually has rather strong focus on launching things, and the promo process strongly incentivizes it. The issue is rather with maintaining it post-launch. The typical story is that you get the project to launch, stay for a quarter or two to bask in the glory, and then move on to fresher, greener pastures.
wlxd
1yr ago
I simply thoroughly disagree with this sentiment, and I am quite certain that I am not exceptional here. The process is important, the social context is important.
I would probably go as far as to posit applicability of some sort of labor theory of value: if you print out a random photograph, nobody will value it very highly, but if you paint the contents of the photograph on canvas, it will immediately be seen as having more value. Even more so, if we build technology that allows us to make a painting with a some kind of a gantry CNC painting machine, it’s product will be seen as less valuable than something that human painted by hand.
I think the above sentiment is shared by most normies, whereas your comment exhibits rather postmodernist ideals that few people actually share, as shown by revealed preference. Why are people spending millions on original artworks, instead of hanging cheap replicas that are exactly as beautiful? Because they strongly disagree with you.
wlxd
1yr ago
Can you provide an example of a paragraph when you would want to use “stylistic quotation” ?
wlxd
3mo ago
The AI companies are working very hard on robotics as well. It's not just LLMs.
wlxd
6mo ago
Egan’s “Closer” (1992) story also focuses on sex change. Strongly recommended, goes in pretty hard.
wlxd
6mo 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
6mo 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
7mo ago
Yeah, they signed agreements, and then didn’t keep to them. That’s not how you conduct diplomacy.
Yes, you are confirming what I said: Europeans don’t cycle to work a lot. Overall, maybe something like 10% does. Large majority of them drives. Sure, the split between driving and cycling is only slightly less lopsided towards driving, but whether 5% cycles or 10% is not substantial difference.
wlxd
1yr ago
Sure, most of the crime is committed in cities, and these have most impact on national statistics, but what I point out is still a death blow to your argument as stated above:
When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans.
The places you listed do most of work in bringing up the national crime rate, but it doesn't mean that there is no "crime problem" outside of these. Heavily black areas in the South have huge crime problem, with homicide rates often nearing those of big cities with lots of crime.
wlxd
1yr ago
Vent moisture? Here where I am, the temperature is below freezing now, which is rather unusual, and my heat pump struggles a bit to keep up. Thus, I’m running a boiling pot of water non stop on big burner on my gas range, to both add extra heat with cheap gas, but also to add extra moisture, in 50% relative humidity range. Without it, and without my big air humidifier, it’s like 20%, which makes everyone in my family cough a lot and get skin issues.
wlxd
1yr ago
This is silly. The bots from the OP are fundamentally different sort of “game bot” than StarCraft or Dota or chess. This is what the industry moved on to: solving human psychology and language, directly.
wlxd
1yr ago
I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.
wlxd
1yr ago
In Xenophon (iirc, it might have been somewhere in Plato, it's been a while) Socrates considered dancing the best preparation for war, and advised it over boxing/wrestling which he thought made men too bulky and hungry to make good soldiers.
In Republic, Plato (through Socrates) only recommended music and gymnastics, not dance. I don't remember his stance on wrestling.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am very interested in hearing how much it is going to cost you. My 15 year old heat pump broke last winter, and I was considering replacing it instead of fixing, but the quotes were in $16-20k range, compared to $1000 to repair, so I decided to punt it. This is in expensive liberal coastal city.
Can you address /u/what_a_maroon ‘s argument, who points out that almost every single country other than US has loser-pays rule? If it works for them, why wouldn’t it work here?
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