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I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
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3d ago
I think a ban was/would be perfectly appropriate
EverythingIsFine
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3d ago
Because Dems don’t truly believe the bill will pass, they won’t feel as much a need to write a perfect bill, because its purpose is not to become law, but to be a PR cudgel. It’s a paradigm shift that matters. At least in theory. Some Dems still feel burned by the “Green New Deal” bill, so precedent exists, I’ll grant you that (that was a House effort though, and those congressmen are much less realists than senators). There’s also the weird but technically-possible scenario that the bill actually passes with the centrist Dems in the driver’s seat, but I don’t think Schumer has the leverage to pull it off.
So we’re left with the most likely scenario that I outlined above. Again, it’s a canny move and you can’t take current denunciations about it at face value. It won’t cause true infighting. Just a bit of jockeying.
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3d ago
Tell me how you really feel, Dan /s
No one has to die for it to be a crisis. You’re projecting. Lawmakers are unusually sensitive to grumpy people around Christmas. That’s all that’s required. People usually have semi-short memories when it comes to politics, but if Christmas and Thanksgiving are “ruined”? That sticks. Next year people will remember, and the vibe shift is potent. SNAP affects almost 1 in 8 people - you’re completely correct that blindly accepting that number is an overestimate, but stack it with the 1 in 14 people who fly during Christmas break, a shutdown past December 1st would cause another 1 in 7 adults to go without paychecks… these things stack up, and hit different segments of the population, not purely the poor. Many Americans if they miss a paycheck are OK, but discretionary spending IS sensitive to that stuff. Smaller Christmas gifts potentially (sudden back pay might even more than counterbalance this of course).
And that’s not even going into the vibes. People tend to view shutdowns as Congress not doing its job. That creates bitterness, since they can go “well I am working 50 hour weeks, and they are twiddling their thumbs playing blame games”, and that’s a bit of betrayal - a potent emotion that you have to be sensitive to. (Democrats aren’t immune from this either, of course, it’s possible constituents blame them, even if I think it’s not super likely to be a durable feeling)
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3d ago
Well crap, I could have sworn I saved some links but apparently not. I do have these from a blog that has a whole section on replication more generally as well as a "file-drawer" section too. Some good reads there.
I would strongly recommend reading the original Ioannidis paper at a minimum to get an idea for not just what started it all, but some of the most prominent arguments from the beginning. Also, there are a plethora of response articles and counter-responses that can also be read.
It's important to also realize that "replication crisis" has a few different meanings. One the one hand, historically and sociologically, "science" reached a broad point where people "realized" that they had to take replication failures seriously. Ever since that "crisis", we've seen a much higher awareness of the issues, as well as a bit of institutional action.
But then statistically and more precisely, the crisis can refer to a few interrelated but still distinct phenomena. You've got the "file drawer problem" and "publication bias", you've got outright fraud and faking data, you've got "p-hacking" and fishing expeditions, you've also got lackluster published methodological info that makes faithful replications impossible, you've got generalization across culture issues along with sample problems (more men than women, too many college students), lack of money for properly-powered large-sample tests, etc.
There's also a distinction between exact replication, and conceptual replication. Famously in the psychological sciences, they got an extra-big black eye because an astonishing number of famous psych studies, where the author would go on to write books and achieve wide fame and give speeches, showed to conceptually be completely bunk in real life. Power poses, shopping while hungry, finite willpower, marshmellow test, certain types of priming, Standford Prison, Mozart, implicit racial bias tests, type A and type B people, all of these have reached cult pop status and nearly all of them were misrepresented or failed to actually have the real-world implications people were told to expect.
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3d ago
I've seen it called "triangulation" before, when you bring a third party into an unrelated matter more generally.
EverythingIsFine
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3d ago
Here's my take, feel free to disregard though.
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For spending the rest of your lives together, living closer seems to me like an absolute mandatory requirement. Talk about the emotional costs of the current arrangement. Hopefully you can both get on the same page about this. I think the instinct to wait a bit for the conversation is a good one. When you do have it, though, I think there should be at least a little sense of urgency. Ask good questions.
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Frame the conversation. Moving closer, or ideally in together, will require sacrifices and compromises. Just say it like that: we're going to have to make some sacrifices and tradeoffs to make this thing happen and invest in our future, so what, concretely, would you be willing to sacrifice to make it happen? Ask her for if not specifics, then at least the sketch of it. Give her time to ponder if needed. And volunteer some things that you yourself would sacrifice.
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On a practical note, if you do move, exposure. Consider slowly easing in to the new living arrangement if possible, rather than make it a giant and abrupt move. Assuming you find a place, practice going shopping nearby, visiting restaurants, taking busses. Go together and alone. Figure out or try to preview some of the social changes that might happen. At least as far as I'm aware, the idea is usually to convince your brain and subconscious that the change is safe. Don't just argue with it, show it the safety. I don't want to oversell this armchair psycho though, because it seems you already have a therapist. Although, it may be worth trying a different one? Sometimes a slightly different personality or therapeutic approach can be helpful.
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No one is actually a mind-reader, even in long-term stable and fulfilling relationships. Explore this and see if you can find where this might be the case, because everyone acts like they are anyways. Is her perception of what your are feeling accurate? Is your perception of what she is feeling accurate? Obviously, at least in some major ways, the second is not true. I'm sure the first also might not be super true. Make things a little more explicit, which circles back to my "ask good questions". This is where therapy-like resources can be helpful. I hesitate to frame it that way, but there are plenty of good resources that can really help to make those big conversations go better. There are various "lists of questions" that can be good: stuff like "what does a win-win look like", "what's your ideal outcome and what values of yours drive that", "how can we best support each other in the decision process", etc. Feelings > facts, honestly. The nitty-gritty can come later once you're closer to the same page. A staggering number of relationship issues stem from communication challenges.
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Try to both make an effort to be honest about how strongly you feel about stuff. Hell, even put a number to it if you must. The temptation is to sugar-coat the feelings, but long-term that's not very effective. The feelings come out eventually.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3d ago
Believing the Dems are a monolith is a huge error in thinking, and one you should be ashamed of making truth be told. Comment is just pure boo outgroup. There is no universal DNC messaging anyways, even in an ideal world, because that org is currently led by an idiot who thinks internal democracy survival of the fittest will lead automatically to strong electorally-viable ideas. Which is obviously wrong/insufficient.
None of the 8 aisle crossers are up for reelection. As I point out in my comment above, punting to another shutdown in 3 months is also going to be a Republican-blamed shutdown. Polls and history have consistently shown that the party in power always receives more blame, regardless of messaging, so that’s where the inertia lies. And will continue to lie, most likely.
EverythingIsFine
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3d ago
It’s worth noting that a full Christmas SNAP crisis would be a major escalation. I realize some think the Dems should abandon “traditional politics”, but others think that the alienation and loss of trust that big of a move would cause could created some terrible effects. Like another Trump could rise, just as easily as the Dems could get a Trump of their own. A lot aren’t willing to risk that brave new world.
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3d ago
So, the critical part here is that the GOP promised a vote on a healthcare bill of the Democrats’ choosing. That’s actually a big, big deal. Usually, the minority party is victim to “gotcha votes”, where bills are written so voting no looks bad and generates material for campaign mailers. This lets the Dems pull a rare Uno Reverse and get one of their own. It means that the Democrats are banking heavily on a blue wave midterm, where the shutdown will be old news and not as impactful, but putting the GOP in a vise could pay lasting dividends - they can point to a more recent, perfectly set up vote where the GOP allows healthcare premiums to spike massively with a no vote, not just inaction. (Yes, this vote is only promised in the Senate, but that’s the biggest juice the Dems want, and the House margins are thin enough that it could theoretically still pass there)
Don't read too much into big potential-candidate name panning the deal. They have to do that. It’s free for them. It allows face saving. And if a shutdown created even more holiday travel chaos, all incumbents would have suffered.
Also health care costs going up is still ultimately going to be attributed to the party in charge. We are already seeing this in action - Trump is out there claiming that costs are down for average Americans, and people aren’t buying it. He’s sounding more and more like a traditional politician and that will hurt him.
Also, the Dems got promises for back pay and rehiring of fired workers. That wasn’t at all a given! Even more, certain specific agencies will shut down again potentially in January - well, most honestly. All but the FDA, Ag, VA, part military, that’s not many. So most will shut down again and that will happen closer to midterm primaries.
This is definitely a tactical win for Democrats.
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8d ago
First of all, I get you on at least some level. The personal side of me notices that there have been times even within the last few years where quite literally I am only alive because I didn't want to inflict suffering on my family and friends. And honestly I think that's a totally fine and complete reason to keep existing. I'm not sure your exact situation, but hopefully something similar applies.
The religious/more generalized-spiritual side of me says that you should spend some time helping others if you have nothing to be thankful for. Literally and physically volunteer. Despite its spiritual roots, I'm pretty sure this is a quite practical suggestion as well. Pessimistically, say we agree with your claim that you enjoy quite literally nothing and are quite literally miserable 24/7... you can still find a degree of purpose by helping others, which is real.
(On that note, I'd suggest - though I haven't personally read yet - Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, which might jive with your situation a bit.)
The heartless statistics side of me says that regular exercise is quite literally just as if not more effective than meds or therapy, so... do that. Stupid, annoying, but clearly works. It's almost literally the most durable scientific finding in all of depression research, despite being one of the hardest to do for obvious reasons (it may be useful to recruit someone to bully you into it, or do it with you - be vulnerable and ask). The statistics of these kinds of states are weird - for example, I intellectually know, it's an established fact, that if I don't get enough sleep, I get extremely depressed at night before bed. That knowledge doesn't quite help in that actual moment, not a ton, but that does slightly help me frame what's "real" properly.
The more neuroscience/quirky side of me suggests that you break out of mental ruts in a deliberate way. For example, I was also recently recommended, of all things, a book called Impro, a set of essays about improv, but as a life-outlook kind of book. One exercise therein is silly but I do believe it "works": Simply spend a few minutes walking around the room and shouting out loud the wrong names for things. Allegedly, this can help you experience the world more vividly for a few moments. I'm not sure that particular exercise is of value to you, but the general concept of "do something deliberately weird or crazy" might be. Frame things differently, and be a little extreme about it. How this might manifest for you? Do something extremely quirky or way outside the norm as a birthday activity. Show up at a local coffee shop and start complimenting strangers. Go to the bank, withdraw a ton of single dollar bills, and give them away to people. Dress up for some banal errands. That kind of thing.
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8d ago
I’m absolutely horrified. But much like how Trump won despite his horrific comments, there’s more to elections than merely comments like that. I’m fervently hoping it’s not a sign of things to come.
I’m not totally convinced that this provided an actual positive bump for Jones though. Would need to look into it more.
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8d ago
Do you think the enormous population of federal workers in Virginia combined with the DOGE and shutdown stuff is wholly or only partially responsible for the wave?
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8d ago
then people finger-wag over "but Jesus said be nice!" as if that was the whole of the Gospel.
Okay, sure. But. Really you do need both the “great commandments in the law”, Jesus was pretty darn clear about it:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Yes, duty to God comes before duty to your neighbor. That’s quite Biblical and Christian. But you can’t look at the actual collected words of Jesus and with a straight face and say it’s only “primarily” about serving God. You must have both. That they are ordered priorities does not grant leave to ignore the second on mere fear of being lazy on the first.
It seems you seem to be saying that overemphasizing love for your neighbor as a PR strategy will backfire by confusing Christians themselves about their own priorities? I don’t really buy that. It’s incredibly common for groups to have PR strategies slightly different than their own internal goals. Yes, bleedthrough can happen, but it doesn’t seem so existential to me.
While secular do-gooding doesn’t convert anyone, it is in a loose sense a prerequisite. Someone must think you’re a ‘good person’ before taking an interest in the more faith-oriented aspects. Any theory about Christianity making a comeback must acknowledge this, what to me seems a pretty fundamental fact.
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8d ago
Trump didn’t do very well among evangelical Christians in the 2016 primary, but he did win evangelical support in the general election – running, of course, against Hillary Clinton. Picking Mike Pence as his running mate didn’t hurt. Trump promised to look after our interests. We mostly didn’t believe him; I don’t think he even knew what our interests were. But he rolled back Obama’s attacks, and he appointed conservative-leaning Supreme Court justices who would later overturn Roe v. Wade.
I view this as an almost definitional/textbook deal with the devil. “What’s the harm,” evangelicals say, “if we grant power to an entity that we think we can control, who is evil, if it grants us short term wins?” I’ve seen this reasoning before. “We can control the Devil, and avoid his temptations, and look at all the power it will grant us!” Trump’s amoral and even explicitly anti-Christian character is well known and most evangelicals - the ones aside from a minority that fell into the personality cult (idol worship) - seemed to have concluded exactly this: who cares if he is personally odious if he gives them what they want (a potential champion VP, SC dominance, generalized right wing laws)?
If for some reason it wasn’t clear, this will backfire, like it always does. The shortcut to power and respect and moral victory is always a shortcut. It’s built on a foundation of sand.
If Christians want greater respect in society, they need to live more Christlike lives and support more Christlike behavior. It is truly baffling that so many have deluded themselves from the plain teachings of the New Testament. They need to be servants. They need to offer help to the poor, associate with the downtrodden, praise and seek humility and virtue, resist the temptations of domination, pride, vanity, wrath, cover-ups, revenge, and immorality. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily imply unqualified meekness; you can be zealous to some extent if your own house is in order and if it comes from a place of love. You can make bold stands, as long as at least you’re occasionally demonstrating forgiveness. There’s a reason even Jewish law had periodic jubilees, granting debt relief and freedom, and that was the lesser law.
This is the only way an increasingly secular America will be tempted back towards a Christian path. The communities need to be strong and “so good they can’t ignore you”. Revenge is not a Christian concept. In fact the opposite. Yet some evangelicals have embraced the doctrine of revenge. And as you say, some Catholics have embraced a doctrine of domination, equally as antithetical.
Along those lines, your comment about winning respect in both fields. I think that said respect should be idealized as happening in spite of differing opinions. You know, “disagree better”, which maybe sounds short term foolish but long term is way better at persuadability. The cardinal sin of modern woke-style liberals has been burning bridges, carrying out moral purges, and claiming that differing values means exclusion and shaming is correct. In the short term they had their decade of power, but as we now see in the medium term it’s limited their coalition significantly. Conservatives and Christians alike should not make the same mistake. No-contact means no future persuadability due to decreased interaction surfaces. To be clear, exclusion can be an important Christian tool, and with good scriptural basis too; it’s just that said tool is one to be used with extreme caution.
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13d ago
Is a platformer, but Ultimate Chicken Horse is pretty fun (though far better with more like 3-4 players) where you place blocks and traps and gadgets and then run to the goal simultaneously, so if someone is winning via a certain route or too easily, you plop down a buzzsaw or something in their way.
Had some great fun with Out of Space, where you have to slowly work your way through your spaceship and "clean" the rooms and enemies to death. But you really need to do some coordination, as leaving places unclean for too long will develop little tumors that eventually turn into new alien enemies. And some later ones need to be defeated via certain means: a broom, or a mop, or water, etc. You slowly can install new stuff in your rooms that helps you as you progress through, and sometimes you lose a room back to attrition but it's usually still fine.
Vampire Survivors is an easy classic, and doesn't even require anything more than a movement stick (or WASD), but manages to be plenty fun even so.
If you have separate machines, honestly Assassin's Creed Unity turned out pretty fun if that's your kind of thing, though that's more gameplay than straight co-op.
Untitled Goose Game is an absolute gem and very funny to play with two.
Personally, I kind of like Heave Ho. You are this kind of simple two-armed dude with sticky hands, and you often need to swing along with your partner, coordinated, to jump certain gaps or "climb" around and underneath obstacles to get to the goal. Easy to screw up and funny when doing so (for most).
Hat in Time is a cute N64-like platformer with co-op, without the crazy kind of platforming, though I can't remember how crazy the camera is.
Also, honestly there are some great board games out there - BoardGameArena has quite a few, including for free (though a cheap subscription makes it easier), that you might find interesting. A lot easier when there's no setup and the stuff is all calculated for you/it's impossible to accidentally break the rules, so that can make many board games way more accessible. My parents play it all the time with each other.
A lot of people like Magicka (and sequel), but I never really got into it. Stardew Valley works pretty well on a technical level, but to me loses some of its charm especially w/r/t tasks around town.
Rubber Bandits finally is a fun cartoony one where your 3d/2d type guys try to rob various vaults.
Sorry I guess these aren't so much strategy-like games, but the above are ones that were big hits with my more casual-gaming roommates. If you're into the vibe, Stellaris can be kind of fun as a co-op game.
(And of course recently there is It Takes Two and Split Fiction - plus, if you never tried Portal 2's co-op, that's a MUST)
EverythingIsFine
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13d ago
A fun horror game recommendation from someone who hates horror movies and also most horror games: Signalis. More atmospherically and thematically creepy than jump scare-y, with great pixel-ish art reflecting a neat sci-fi Eastern German communist aesthetic, it's got some fun gameplay and some neat psychological light-touch story. It turns out I vastly prefer atmospheric-type games to the outright gross-out or jump-scare or pee-your-pants anxiety scare games. I do kind of wonder if there are many others that count. The point-and-click sounds interesting, though I usually find them far less engaging than more RPG or adventure-type games.
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13d ago
No, move him back down. Newsom did put out an endorsement that same day, and was in fact one of the first to do so, so I wouldn't give him too much credit there. So the inclusion of this text in the book is actually a smear against a potential rival and a mischaracterization. Not that I'm going to cry any rivers about it
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13d ago
Interestingly enough, it recently came out that Obama had agreed with Pelosi not to endorse Kamala too soon, as they were hoping for a mini primary. But Pelosi broke her promise early due to peer pressure. Especially since several other would-be opponents took themselves out of contention pretty quickly - I think that fact gets lost a little bit in the narrative, but that was a big deal. Day 1 consisted of Biden and the Clintons endorsing Kamala, Obama publicly urging something more deliberate (but vague), and a few governors including Newsom endorsing. Day 2 was Whitmer and Pritzker and Shapiro and Pelosi. Also, Dean Phillips endorsed but wanted a straw poll or something, but this was ignored. Day 3 was Schumer and Jeffries, and by then it's over. In other words, by the second day there wasn't any frontrunner even considering not backing Kamala, so it's kind of doubtful a primary would even have made sense.
Part of that was not so much about money, but a few filing deadlines that were only a few days away. I'm not completely sure how influential/accurate that point was, though. Ultimately, if a primary was going to happen, Biden would have had to push for it right away.
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13d ago
Biden has very little influence. He has cancer, he's bitter at people, he's blamed by almost everyone in turn, his presidential library (a useful barometer) has been receiving hardly any donations, and he never extended much trust to people outside the inner circle in the first place so it's no surprise as there weren't many true-believers to begin with. And he even managed to dumpster his own reputation in record time with stuff like breaking his promise and pardoning his family (handing an invitation to Trump on a golden fucking platter to abuse the pardon power himself). I'm a moderate, I liked Biden as a person, I even liked some of the stuff about his governance, but that last bit alone was more damning that anything else he ever did, in my eyes.
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13d ago
She's trying to sell books likely because she heard (somewhat incorrectly) that it's a good way to earn money. I mean, who is going to hire her? Maybe some kind of lazy progressive nonprofit, but that seems it.
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13d ago
To his credit, the interviewer specifically picked up on this:
One could conceivably think that he could do the job through January, 2025, but that it was not wise to think he could do the job through January, 2029, right?
It’s not my place to say.
What do you mean it’s not your place to say?
No, no, no. Wait, I’m answering the question. I did not see anything that would cause me concern. That is my answer.
Except the debate, and the other things that everyone saw?
What I’m saying to you is the debate for me was one time. I had never seen him like that before.
So basically refusing to even answer the (real, 2029) question. Sadly, not new - that was the whole initial bit, was how the Biden campaign would insist "he's fine now" and then go silent when asked if his trajectory was stable enough to last through 2029. The debate wasn't just a shocker because it was at odds with "he's fine now", but also because it established a clear downward trajectory, you didn't even need to extrapolate that much; you could simply look at the 2020 debates and the difference was obvious.
Kamala, by the way, is deliberately cultivating the "I'm going to drop out of politics" angle, it wasn't accidental. She knows that only after losing she can drop the "our politics is broken" line, and thus attempt to curry favor with the disenfranchised "fellow kids". You're probably right about the Harris angle, and furthermore since Kamala obviously doesn't have a good grasp on what kinds of things are actually persuasive, she might even blithely bring KJP back.
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14d ago
She fried her brain by too much time as Press Secretary, so her habits of deny, deflect, redirect, pretend to be "clear" are too strong when talking to journalists. Kind of fascinating from a psych perspective. I've said this before but most people don't appreciate how much politicians often end up ideologically captured by their own roles. Lots of people have this idea that every politician is a spineless weasel who will say anything to win if it matches their lane, but this is just wrong. Politicians often have silver tongues, but that's because it's an adaptive benefit on average. It doesn't have much to do with their core beliefs. Many, many politicians end up playing a role so long they come to believe it.
Part of me wonders if this is another puzzle piece behind why the Senate and Congress has been having so much trouble recently. Too much time talking to the media, and not nearly enough time locked in a room with each other. Older more historical Congresses, where you literally do need to sit your butt in a seat and listen to the speeches, had some kind of built in incentive to talk with each other, if not compromise. But nowadays, it seems like even if you do meet across the aisle, half the time it has to be in secret. Which is why that blowup a few years back about policing who could show up at certain DC restaurants was actually a big deal.
(Also, Chotiner definitely knew what he was doing posting this, as you can tell by the technically-accurate but definitely-throwing-shade summary line "Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she is becoming an Independent.")
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15d ago
(I mean mathematically correct in the sense that Kolmogorov isn't technically the only game in town with internal axiomatic consistency, though it's universal enough in use I was probably being overly pedantic there)
Because Monty Hall is inherently grounded, while Sleeping Beauty is a weird contrivance pretty much on purpose. Sleeping Beauty relies on a supposed perfect memory-erasing amnesia drug erasing one entire interview and only that one interview. It further relies on Beauty being unable to distinguish the passage of time at all, and even more confusingly we are including Beauty's answers across multiple days in our sample space! This is unintuitive. Our sample space to get 1/3 is: Beauty on Monday on Heads, Beauty on Monday on Tails, Beauty on Tuesday on Tails, yes? Most probability problems are not so casual about employing asymmetric tree diagrams across temporal positions, because the eminently natural assumption about the passage of time is that you were able to perceive it. The weird, nonexistent mind-altering drug breaks that intuition about the unbroken forward flow of time! An assumption we virtually never question in any other scenario.
So despite my best wishes I guess I'll take the bait. To be clear, I'm not so much trying to explain the halfer position as elucidating why I believe the whole debate to be kind of stupid and misguided, though I am quite sympathetic to your view.
Anyways, time flow. In other words, the halfer position rejects that it even makes sense to ask about Beauty on Tuesday, since "obviously" the sample space is only: Beauty on Monday with two possible coin flip results (i.e. guesses). The halfer position says in effect that it's impossible to consider two super-imposed Tails-guessing Beauties on both Monday and Tuesday at once. Or, phrased a different (and probably better) way, a Monday Beauty guessing tails is functionally indistinguishable from a Tuesday Beauty guessing tails, because the "divergence" in intent has already occurred! The only relevant guess is the coin.
The second illuminating follow-up question: What is our reward scheme? Do we reward Beauty for a correct answer every time she wakes up (and then steal it back when she sleeps and forgets, thus making any gain ephemeral; though optionally we may choose to sum all three of her choices for aggregate statistical reasons), or do we reward Beauty only after it's Wednesday? For the former, we are effectively rewarding each awakening, but for the latter we provoke a philosphical crisis. Is Tuesday Beauty really making a truly independent choice? Halfers might say no, of course not, "reality" already diverged. Thirders would say yes, of course, it's a new day so thus a new choice. Crisis aside, consider a Beauty who goes "screw it, I'm not playing mind games, I'm choosing heads literally every time" - for a one-time Wednesday-only reward, she wins half the time. Can we truly treat a Beauty who goes "screw it, I'm choosing Tails every time" differently? It depends on our reward scheme! In one setup it's clear this Tails-stubborn Beauty gets double winnings every Wednesday (because even though both awakenings gave the same answer, they were rewarded separately thus double dipping), while in the other she is no better off than the Heads-stubborn one (because the coin was, in fact, tails just half the time, and she's only rewarded at the end). Hopefully that teases apart why it matters.
But you see the issue here, previously obscured? Not only is this contrived, but we require some clarification here about definitions to deliver an answer. We could use a computer, but then we're merely revisiting the same problem with our programming as a design choice: when the coin comes up Tails, do Monday-Beauty and Tuesday-Beauty execute their decision-making code twice with independent randomness, or does Tuesday-Beauty simply output the duplicated cached result from Monday? We implicitly make a claim, one of the following:
- Beauty wakes up on Tuesday (because tails), so this is a new epistemic event with fresh uncertainty and new entropy. Effectively she makes a new, independent guess. The extra uncertainty might potentially be considered the self-doubt about where she is in the timeline.
- Beauty wakes up on Tuesday (because tails), but this is a stale re-run of Monday with no uncertainty, no new entropy, and no new information. Effectively she obviously makes the same guess. There is no extra uncertainty because she has an almost predestination view of fate.
This whole setup is odd, because typically in a probability problem, identical epistemic states with identical available information should have identical probability outputs/beliefs, right? Yet in one of these cases, we're saying the two events are separate because 'someone said so'. Or maybe more accurately, in one case we're talking about epistemic states of knowledge, and in the other we're talking about specific events. Scope is subtly different. The problem has laundered in a sneaking modeling choice without you realizing it. Your choice of model literally determines if additional randomness is injected into the system or not, and thus influences the long-run probability you will find. This is especially clear when you add simple rewards like I described.
But anyways real life does not contain weird situations like these reminiscent of quantum physics. Monty Hall can be modeled strictly mechanically, and in a loose sense so can Sleeping Beauty... but how you represent said model is not a settled question. Is the experiment truly "reset" when we move from Monday to Tuesday? Again that's really a purely philosophical question, not a mathematical one. The presence of a belief-having chooser like Beauty is required for us to even talk about "beliefs" and "rational bets" and all that stuff. This is the doubly case when it comes to time. It's one of the most frustrating aspects of statistics and probability: we cannot actually run perfectly authentic, true counterfactuals, because time runs in one direction. Just like science fiction can only theorize and imagine what would happen in multiverses or if we perfectly cloned a human mind, probability also struggles to perfectly map to reality and human perception because of the aforementioned triple concept divergence in what we mean when we say "probability".
Maybe I'm being too harsh on this thought experiment, but I have little patience for them when they so obviously diverge from reality. We shouldn't be surprised that setting up an unintuitive situation produces unintuitive answers.
I did the math about a year ago and guess what? At least if we're talking about amnesty creating eventual citizens who eventually vote and vote Democratic at disproportionate rates, the numbers simply don't work and would have had only a minor impact at best in turning California blue. So, I'm sorry if that's a long held belief of yours but it doesn't seem true.
It's probably more a mix of tech boom + urbanization + marginal changes in demographic makeup + a few more local concerns + national trends. It's worth noting how fast this was, though, and that makes me suspect the last two especially: +16 R for Reagan in the 1984 wave, to +3.5 R for Bush Sr 1988, to a total collapse to -13.5 (Ross Perot shenanigans though) as Clinton took the state for good in 1992 with about the same margin again in 1996. A bungled post-Reagan, post-amnesty GOP push for a 1994 anti-immigrant bill is often cited... but that post-dates the first massive swing against Bush and Republicans. So unless you mean that somehow that amnesty almost singlehandedly turned pre-existing Reagan fans against Bush Sr, I don't see it. California only went about 2 to 3 points more Democratic than expected (the 4-year swing as compared to national trends) in 1988, the closest election after the 1986 amnesty. Even if you think that "unique" delta is purely the result of amnesty, it's still only a drop in the pond compared the overall swing and certainly wasn't the sole difference even remotely. An easier holistic explanation is right there: Bush was an East Coast insider. And you probably had some early stirrings of social liberalism gaining ground. Looking again at the numbers, it seems to me that a mix of Bush Sr's weaknesses plus the Clinton era is more responsible than anything else (in 1996, actually, since Clinton did better than 1992 generally, you could actually characterize it as a small amount of backsliding, but 2000 seemed to cement the vote differential as noticeably Democratic).
I'm sure you could do more analysis with more local knowledge and county data, not just presidential numbers, but I'm pretty sure the explanatory power of the lazy equation above is pretty high, and doesn't leave much room for a uniquely amnesty blame-game.
Not guaranteed, but I think the manner in which the Dem response bill comes together is going to be highly informative about how the Dem dynamics are going to look for the next year or so.
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