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Hyperbole is bad

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you-get-an-upvote

Hyperbole is bad

1 follower   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:14:33 UTC

					

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User ID: 92

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I’m not arguing that the author isn’t woke. I’m arguing that the author never says “exercise is bad, don’t do it”, which is what you claimed, and which is not true.

If you think the rest of the article lets you similarly argue that the wokes have lost their minds, then you are welcome to use those other parts in your original post.

Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

After actually reading "The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness", I'm not sure how you can honestly think that your two extremely cherry-picked paragraphs are representative. The article is decidedly not anti-fitness (despite the click bait title), and phrasing it as

a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023

seems pretty misleading. I'm going to charitably assume you were Google-search-and-skimming for examples of outrageous outgroup behavior, and not deliberately trying to mislead us.

I think somebody being able to write those two paragraphs and also not condemn exercise goes against your thesis that the wokes are crazy, and is a nice example of somebody not being mind-killed.

What counts as a business? How many guns can you sell from your collection before you cross the threshold? How fast can you turn around and sell a gun after you buy without fear of breaking the law? This law is ambiguous on this

As OP writes it, the law is ambiguous. Hence "skirting the law" does not mean "carefully staying inside the bright red lines", it means "nobody knows if you're breaking the law until you're in court".

If you want to argue he clearly wasn't breaking the law then I'd be legitimately happy to read it, but right now I'm leaning towards "law makers trying to make it legal for you to sell your grandpa's private collection when he dies probably weren't trying to make it legal to buy and sell 150 guns, with no extenuating circumstances, in two years".

Regardless of whether EA is "themotte's outgroup" (for whatever sensible definition you want to use), it is really plain that animal EAs are Quantumfreakonomics's outgroup.

"Sneering at a member of the outgroup" seems like an apt description.

Achilles and the Tortoise isn’t a paradox due to building up something from parts. It’s a paradox due to doing it sloppily.

By analogy, there are various “proofs” that 0 = 1 that rely on bad math, but nobody would argue that the problem is with math. The problem is with people incorrectly using math.

For Achilles, the problem arises because, just as the distance covered gets cut in half, so does the time it takes to cover it.

If it takes you 1 second to cover 1 meter, 0.5 seconds to cover 0.5 meters, etc., the fact that this series never exceeds 2 says you can’t pass 2 meters in less than 2 seconds.

The "paradox" is that Achilles will never pass the tortoise, and "how far can Achilles get in 2 seconds" says nothing meaningful about this.

Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit

This is particularly jarring after Biden has made more overt moves indicating he'd like to see deescalation, most recently the (failed) UN ceasefire resolution.

Most striking to me, personally, is the overwhelmingly negative sentiment on r/neoliberal.

For those who don't know, /r/neoliberal are very pro-Biden (and anti-Trump), generally pro-free market (and hence anti-anti-capitalist), and (imo) generally see themselves as moderate Democrats. Until today I'd have characterized them as pro-Israel, but this seems like a marked change. A top 1% subreddit changing its political beliefs is pretty rare.

I want to say this foreshadows a change in broader public support, but perhaps I'm a bit late to the party -- Gallup has already shown dropping support for Israel generally:

Fifty-eight percent of Americans, down from 68% last year, have a “very” or “mostly favorable” view of Israel. This is the lowest favorable rating for Israel in over two decades. At the same time, positive opinions of the Palestinian Authority have dropped from 26% to 18%, the lowest since 2015.

(Last sentence is just to give some context: yes support for Israel has dropped, but, it's worth noting, so has support for Palestine)

And, perhaps to be expected, this is most pronounced among young people:

Young adults show the biggest decline in ratings of Israel, dropping from 64% favorable among 18- to 34-year-olds in 2023 to 38%. Middle-aged adults (those aged 35 to 54) show a smaller but still significant drop, from 66% to 55%, while there has been no meaningful change among adults aged 55 and older.

I can't imagine that whatever Israel has gained in the last year is worth the long-term cost of burning its support with the next two generations of Americans.

The speed with which the Americans committed to the ISIS story speaks in favour of Ukrainian involvement a bit.

I’m not sure why US intelligence is supposed to be slow to confirm this — the Islamic State claimed responsibility for an attack that the CIA has been waiting for them to conduct for a month (the US had issued a public warning that US citizens should avoid Russian crowds).

princess Kate announced that she has cancer. for some reason it was such an important secret that she first released a doctored photo of her with her kids

God I hate celebrity gossip. Imagine not knowing how tell your kids you have cancer while your 10-year-old reads rumors that his dad is having an affair, that his parents are getting divorced, and that his mom has an eating disorder.

mass shooting in a Russian concert hall. the US embassy was warning about an attack a couple of weeks ago. ukrainians, islamists, false flag, some other mystery group?

The Islamic State claimed responsibility and US intelligence confirmed it.

If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.

While I can buy this as a means of propagating the memes of a society, your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers. Moreover, how likely was a man to actually participate in a battle so large that routing was possible? I have a hard time believing the selection effects here would be anything but incredibly weak.

"We show that if we make an effort to reconstruct the CPI of Okun’s era [1970s]—which would have had inflation peak last year around 18%, we are able to explain 70% of the gap in consumer sentiment we saw last year."

I'm really confused at why this is supposed to be compelling. Can't you say this about any two things that changed by roughly the same size?

But maybe that's because I'm confused by what the units on "user sentiment" are in this tweet. Without that, it's not even clear why you'd expect "user sentiment" to be linearly related with inflation — if the gap between inflation metrics was higher, would he be saying this explained 110% of user sentiment?

Young people want their TikTok and will do what it takes to get it, including installing and configuring VPN. Yes, only minority is going to do it, but active minority is what always mattered.

Leaving aside the apparent assumption that there is a strong correlation between “know how and is willing to pay for and download a vpn” and “politically active”, how is going from from 30% MAUs to (eg) 3% MAUs immaterial?

Thanks. For some reason I thought Microsoft owned Capcom

large western studios have done everything in their power to eradicate attractive women in AAA releases

I don't know how anyone can believe this unless their primary source is Internet controversies, rather than playing video games.

Here are some popular games released by large American studios with attractive women: Cyberpunk, Street Fighter 6, and Overwatch 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider (et al), League of Legends (et al), Red Dead Redemption 2, Fortnite, Alan Wake 2.

I'd buy the claim that there are more, less attractive women in modern western games than there were 10 years ago, but I don't know how you can claim the The Woke are preventing American corporations from making games with attractive women at all.

Could you show me a AAA game with more than 2 women where none of the women are attractive?

All this is now verboten. All games have some random fucking girlboss lecturing you about your privilege. There are no more offline servers. All behavior is closely monitored and you get suspended. Mods get you banned. It's the worst fucking dystopia I could have ever imagined being a 90's PC gamer.

I am a white man who games fairly regularly and I have never had a lecture about my privilege, nor have I been banned.

I'm also sad about the death of LAN parties, but it feels very weird to complain that social norms (and their enforcement) on non-LAN servers are not the same as on LAN servers. On a LAN server the enforcement comes from your friends, but external enforcement is absolutely required for public servers. Rule enforcement means that League of Legends today is much more enjoyable today than it was in 2012 (because there is less flaming and intentional feeding), and definitely better than if there was no enforcement at all.

Yes, lament the death of LAN servers, but try to appreciate that a tyranny under social-defectors is not actually better than tyranny under a company preventing that defection. Ultimately public servers are common spaces, while your basement is private.

Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.

Producing heat in a place dedicated to productive political discussions is a bad idea.

You say consequentialism is self-evidently wrong, and then you define morality as “the end goal ideal state we're working towards”? And you say you support punishing intent because “it works” — ie because of it’s consequences.

It seems to me you agree with the underlying framework of consequentialism, you just insist that the label “morality” apply simultaneously to both states and actions, whereas Utilitarians throw a InvalidTypeError for the latter.

If you agree that morality is the end state we want to achieve, how can you apply the same word to apply to actions and not have it be about achieving that state?

There is a difference between saying "The world is incidentally a better place because Alice stabbed Bob in a tumor" (what Utilitarianism is happy to say) and "we shouldn't punish Alice for stabbing Bob" (what Utilitarianism does not say).

This is because Utilitarianism doesn't justify punishment on the basis of right/wrong or, indeed, even intent. It justifies it on whether the punishment would increase utility (yes, shocking).

It happens to be true, in this universe, that punishing based on intent often yields to better societies than punishing based on results. But if you lived in an upside-down universe (or were governing a weird species, say one that didn't arise from evolution) where punishing Alice increased her propensity for violence, then Utilitarianism gives you the tools to realize your moral intuitions are leading you astray – that the deontological rules that work sensibly in our universe would be actively detrimental if applied to the other one.

So no, punishing based on intent doesn't necessarily lead away from consequentialism, because it's plain that we live in a world where punishing people who merely try to inflict harm (and mitigating punishment when the perpetrator's intent is good) is a more effective social policy (or parenting policy, etc.) than ignoring people's intentions.

Could you make your comment a little more concrete?

Are you conjecturing the man in this story didn't respect his parents enough, and that that is the fault of liberal policy? Or that his parents didn't teach him self-control, and that is the fault of liberal policy? That this kind of aggravation happened less often in the 1950s because people went to church, and liberal policy is driving people away from Christianity?

Right now the your fourth option is vague, and it is appropriately supported with a vague appeal to some idealized past.

Are 3 minor pieces worth about a queen? Certainly not, what nonsense! TypeDoesNotExist. Pieces don’t have values, all that matters is checkmating your opponent.

But since I’m not the physical embodiment of a trillion trillion trillion GPUs… I’m going to need a way to model the chess game that’s a bit more sophisticated (read: “wrong”). And if you start telling me piece values don’t exist I’m going to call you out for excessive pedantry.

This is how I feel when people complain that free will is incompatible with determinism. Like, yeah, you looked at the quarks and didn’t find any free will particles, sure. But that says nothing about whether I should keep modeling other people (and myself!) as agents with goals, who run some kind of shitty statistical inference, and who respond to incentives.

I’m not the embodiment of a trillion trillion trillion GPUs, so I’m not going to be modeling my barista as a complex set of atoms when I’m ordering my coffee.

I’m equally confused that the man told his friend. “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”, indeed.

my churning viscera limits my rhetorical strategy from being much more sophisticated than…

If all you have to go on is an internal sense of revulsion, I’m not sure you should be trying to convince him the first place.

The argument that you want to disincentive teens from becoming prostitutes seems weak to me, since it seems really inefficient — how many girls are you saving from a year of prostitution in return for condemning this woman to never have a family for the next 60 years?

I’m guessing very small — probably less than 0.1. Prostitutes are pretty rare in the US so it’s hard for interventions targeted at random people to actually hit their target, and even then, how many teens are going to know she’s single because she was a prostitute (the answer is zero), and finally, your targets are unlikely to have great impulse control anyway.

Or, to make it simpler: how often did you, as a teen, think about the life of an adult you knew when making a decision? The answer is: never, because you didn’t know anything about the personal lives of more than 6 adults, and you didn’t see their lives as relevant predictors of your own life anyway.

Based on my social circle, the norm "people who are unusually financially successful compared to their parent should give something back, unless those parents were abusive" is a supermajority view even among white people.

The claim "children doing far better than their parents, financially, should give some small fraction to their parents" is miles away from the claim that most parents are entitled to a significant share of their children's income.

The controversial claim here isn't whether somebody making $500k should give $20k/year to his parents, who are making $40k each. It's that the kid making $80k/year owes his parents, (who are also making $80k/year), $10k/year for 10 years, because he owes a significant fraction of his success to 18+ years of his parents' labor.