magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
You can override WD, though. You're making the choice not to, because you think it might be malware.
Windows has gotten significantly worse about anti-user features since 10, but you can still run code MS doesn't like AFAIK (can't speak to Win11, as MS is on my hatelist since they started bankrolling OpenAI).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
That's a little bit reductive; there are a lot of things on that "or" list, some of which are perfectly fine. Deducing that I have one of the traits on that "or" list from my significant walks to the supermarket would be correct (specifically, I don't have a driver's licence; I'm absent-minded and don't think I'd make a great driver).
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Yeah, I will say they might literally be the ONLY exchange I know of that was fully expecting, well in advance, the need to navigate regulatory environments and fight off attempts by regulators to bully them, and the plan was more than "ignore it until they're kicking the door in to serve a warrant."
...which is sometimes a rational choice, because the penalty for getting caught is frequently less than the gains from crime. Changpeng Zhao seems to be doing alright for himself.
Seriously, more countries need to have the penalty of "all your money are belong to us" on the table for financial criminals and/or actually use it.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.
What? No, that's not true. Granting the (very substantial) premise, the conclusion is obviously going to be "don't let these people run society", but that only requires disenfranchisement, not deportation (except in the edge case of a supermajority that can overthrow the disenfranchising government).
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
Or maybe you just can't stop yourself from expressing it in maximally vitriolic ways.
He doesn't, though. AFAICS @WhiningCoil is a lot less vitriolic than SteveKirkland or Bernd.
Like, yeah, he might not be the most pleasant person to have around, but neither is @The_Nybbler. WC's not, TTBOMK, a flaming jackass who tries to drive out his opponents and claim the space.
magic9mushroom
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11d ago
I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts.
Two days ago.
Less than a day ago.
"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."
Both from @Amadan.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
why do you have it confused?
I don't.
You said "calculate utility correctly". To calculate utility correctly requires knowing the truth. Different worldstates result in different expected utilities for the same course of action, so a utilitarian with a bad understanding of reality will act suboptimally according to his own utility metric - often wildly so. The obvious example is that genocide looks utile if you think the relevant demographic are all evil.
Hence, "lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly" = "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth".
This is distinct from "lies can be utile", which is broader and covers things like people having different utility metrics and/or people not actually being utilitarians and/or direct, non-choice-based belief effects (e.g. stress). That condition of "if you need there to be lots of utilitarians" is actually relevant to my point, y'know.
magic9mushroom
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13d ago
I don't think later-no-harm is a good outcome.
Inherently, no, but later-harm produces tactical voting. Worse, it produces tactical voting in a mass-producible way; political parties will figure out which full ballot by their supporters will be best for them, and push it hard. Full how-to-vote cards are a thing in Australia, but the parties don't push them all that hard due to later-no-harm.
Now, yes, later-no-harm is incompatible with a bunch of other criteria, which is annoying. But, well, impossibility theorem.
IRV among them is particularly bad for counting
I mean, yes, the O(N!) worst-case is a pain. I will say that it's not nearly as bad in practice as the worst-case; a good number of seats in Australia have [#2 > all votes other than for #1 and #2], which simplifies it to 2 buckets (and a lot of the rest have [#3 > all votes other than #1/#2/#3], which simplifies it to 6 buckets). Usually the AEC can predict this ahead of time; they do a full recount if their prediction is wrong, of course, but most seats are known within hours.
(STV absolutely always is a nightmare, though; we use it for our Senate, and it takes over a week to count. AIUI it's worse in terms of tactical voting, too.)
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
· Edited 12d ago
Or lies can cause people to calculate utility correctly, especially if they have some sort of bias.
I mean, this is basically just saying "sometimes lying results in people believing the truth". And, okay, this is not actually impossible, but it's not very likely, especially in the long run. COVID is the obvious recent example of people trying this shit and it blowing up in their faces.
More generally, you say "I am not sure why rationalists cannot understand this argument". Notice that if you're not sure why somebody doesn't accept something, one of the possible answers is in fact "they understand it just fine, but there's a counterargument that they understand and you don't".
Spoiler alert: there's literally a Yudkowsky article from 2008 about this. And another. Probably others I haven't read or can't recall offhand!
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
Also, every single Condorcet method is clone independent if there exists a Condorcet winner (which polling suggests is over 90% of elections).
Yes. There's a solid argument for some of the better Condorcet-completion methods as better than IRV, despite them failing later-no-harm. Approval is not a Condorcet method.
In terms of the benefit you get from tactical voting, it is pretty similar across the two methods (both about 10-20% of what you get in FPTP).
I... suspect you're not counting things as tactical that are, in fact, tactical. Honest voting in approval is approving everyone better than some fixed standard of goodness. This usually doesn't split the viable candidates (i.e. you approve all of them or disapprove all of them), which means your vote is fully wasted (just as with voting third-party in plurality). To make your vote count, it usually has to be tactical - to take note of which candidates are viable and choose a cutoff that splits them.
IRV has tactical voting a little bit of the time for some voters. Approval has tactical voting literally all of the time for most voters.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
I do not understand why rationalist love this sentence as it obviously goes against their main moral philosophy of utilitarianism.
If you are the Czar and you're the only one who needs to be a utilitarian, sure. If you need there to be lots of utilitarians, then assuming some commonality of interests lies are terrible because they cause people to calculate utility incorrectly. All moral systems are somewhat sensitive to false information, of course, but utilitarianism is particularly and notoriously so.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
I think you may be confusing IRV and STV. STV is the multi-winner version of IRV, intended to produce proportional representation.
As for defending IRV:
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Clone independence is a huge deal. It is a much-bigger deal than what sort of candidates get elected, because it gives an escape valve against leaders going corrupt (since a clone can steal their seat). Approval voting is also clone-independent, but there are a ton of voting systems that aren't.
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Approval voting has a massive tactical voting problem. Specifically, an approval cutoff (that is, when you rank the candidates in order of preference, the point at which you stop approving) that does not divide the viable candidates wastes your vote. This is in play most of the time for most voters. Rampant tactical voting cases are bad because they disenfranchise the honest and principled in favour of the unscrupulous, and the world has more than enough of that. Its tactical voting problem is not as bad as plurality, but it is close. Now, of course, there is no system that never has tactical voting except for random-ballot (i.e., pick a ballot paper at random, and whoever's on that ballot wins), but IRV does much better than most in this regard; in most cases voting your true preferences is correct.
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IRV does not directly advantage compromise candidates. However, it's one of a few systems that if paired with compulsory voting invoke the Median Voter Theorem, and that does tend to produce compromise candidates. I'm not sure that approval does; I think maybe it might if everyone were to vote his/her true preferences, but that's not going to happen because of #2.
magic9mushroom
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14d ago
(but then why have representatives in the first place?)
The good answer used to be "because the infrastructure doesn't exist to do direct democracy on a greater-than-city scale".
The okay answer with major caveats is "because unitary executives are more effective at getting shit done than a Roman system". This obviously only applies to the executive branch.
The bad answer which I suspect is like 80% of why we still have parliaments is "there is no procedure in most nations for abolishing a parliament without the parliament's own consent, which 100% of its members are strongly incentivised not to give".
magic9mushroom
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15d ago
· Edited 14d ago
People [...] age.
The problem's not "they will turn 30". The problem's in "they turned 30 before you started dating them". If you want four kids, you want to give the woman a rest between pregnancies, and it takes a couple of years before you get close enough to make babies, you're looking at the last pregnancy starting around age 38. That's starting to get dicey in terms of fertility. Certainly, you're going to have problems if you want to date a woman much over 30 (I say woman, because men can in fact have kids in their 50s or 60s, although not so much 70s because they might be dead by then).
You might be thinking that "wanting four kids" is unrealistic. My answer to that is: a society in which this is unrealistic is a society that will die out. Women need to have over 2 kids on average to replace themselves - because slightly more men than women are born - and we're in a technological state where "having kids accidentally" is not really a thing due to contraception but "not having kids accidentally" very much is. So a large chunk of people need to be intending 4+ kids in order to get the average up to 2.1 or so. If this isn't realistic, halt and catch fire; something needs to be done to fix that ASAP as a matter of societal survival, which is of course the position you're arguing against.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
I mean, I knew about the first of those three, but the latter two are decent points. Thanks.
magic9mushroom
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18d ago
· Edited 18d ago
Similar to the push about the harm that adults having sex with kids isn't from the sex, it's from the social stigma around it which teaches the child to be ashamed and that they were harmed.
The people who push that attitude want to fuck kids without consequences.
No, I don't. One does not have to be personally benefitted by a hypothesis to believe it.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
This is also dragging in another one of my hobbyhorses: "whaaat's the haaarm in a few druuuugs, bitta fun, should be legaaaal". Well, maybe legal drugs in this instance would indeed have kept the man from getting killed by the paranoid, possibly high, 'friend' who was claiming he owed a huge drug debt.
But the problem is the 'friend'. A junkie who was doing some minor dealing, probably dipping into his own supply, probably being leaned on by his suppliers (who are not nice people who think drugs are wonderful and everyone should have free access to them so we'll supply them) for the missing money, getting paranoid and trying in turn to lean on his customers with claims that they owed more money than they did. This was not somebody doing 'few druuuugs, bitta fuuuuun'. Drugs and guys like this don't mix well (neither does alcohol, I'll freely admit that). The drugs legalisers seem to push the idea that drugs are just harmless party fun and if legal nobody would ever have any bad outcomes.
This is just not the right case to be making this claim. If drugs were legal, this guy would probably not be a drug dealer (because pharma companies have standards) and wouldn't be being leaned on by his suppliers to such an extent (because pharma companies that threaten to kill people stop being legal in a hurry).
The cases that actually do still arise from legal drugs are "addict (i.e. end-user) runs out of money and becomes a career criminal to get his fix" and "stimulant-induced mania/psychosis". These are cases which are unambiguously "this is not due to prohibition; this is just due to drugs being available at all". This is why I'm against legalising meth, for instance, despite being generally in favour of legalisation, because it's fucking notorious for doing the latter (the former is somewhat more tractable in other ways). But this case is not actually one of them, and you do your position a disservice by trying to cram it into that mould.
magic9mushroom
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19d ago
Or saying he got an axe and chopped a tree apart in lieu of his interlocutor's carcass. I actually did that once (and yes, I mean both the chopping and the telling him); I think the only reason I didn't get banned was that the troll who provoked the response was the forum owner and wanted to troll me more in the future.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
I've been inactive for a hot minute, but the last time I was involved in a big HBD hullabaloo the most common position (hard to tell if it was actually a majority) was something like: "HBD is real and the societal solution to that is something like Classical Liberal Individualism."
Still pretty common.
Obviously, with all due respect, fuck socialism tho.
Just so we're clear, when I say I'm a socialist I'm saying I support at least a large degree of command economy. I'm not saying I want a totalitarian one-party state.
If you're still saying "fuck that", okay, fine. I just want to be sure we're communicating effectively.
magic9mushroom
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21d ago
Neo-Nazis: you're right, not many of them.
Trump: Trump is complicated because most Mottizens are not Trumpists, but a lot of Mottizens tend to downvote anti-Trump views because they associate it with SJ. Anti-SJ posts that also disparage Trump (particularly on a personal level) are eaten up with gusto; I have one at +17/-0.
"Right-wing extremists": it really, really depends on how you define it. The big stumbling block here is racism: obviously there are a vast number of possible views on "what genetic racial disparities in cognition/personality exist and what should we do about them", but according to SJ and much of the centre, literally any view on the topic other than "all numbers are zero" is automatically far-right extremism. And, well, "all numbers are zero" is quite an unpopular view here; it's outnumbered well over 2:1.
(Heck, they'd likely consider me far-right due to this, which is hilarious since I'm also a socialist.)
If you remove that one particular third rail... it still depends on definition (including whether your definition of "liberal" is the insane modern US one or the etymological one; there are a lot more Actual Liberals than there are SJers). There are more Actual Liberals here than there are ethnostate advocates; there are less SJers than there are people who think major reforms are needed to dismantle SJ; there are probably more SJers than people in favour of chucking bombs at SJers.
magic9mushroom
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23d ago
· Edited 23d ago
I don't think the law is bad. As Zvi said:
TikTok is not purely an op. TikTok is a legitimate highly predatory business, and also TikTok is an op.
There have been surveys showing that most TikTok users would prefer that TikTok not exist (they're still there because everyone is there and that imposes social costs on anyone who's not), never mind the non-users. It's got massively-negative externalities - and at least part of those externalities are malicious attempts by the PRC to destroy the USA.
It is one of the roles of government to destroy things with massively-negative externalities. This is one of the primary clauses of the social contract - "we'll deal with the villains in an orderly fashion, so don't murder them in the streets". Yes, not all TikTok bans would be net-positive; Zvi was an opponent of the RESTRICT Act, for instance. But this one looks good; the scum just managed to bribe their way out.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
I seem to recall putting "neutral" and then changing it to "deserves a warning" on noticing the last paragraph (because seriously, that was vicious). I also seem to recall taking so long to do it that @Amadan had already actually warned you by the time I completed the form.
(I've given out "deserves a ban" before, but all the times I can remember were death threats. There are other things that'd get it, like doxxing or advocacy of specific terrorist acts, but those are pretty rare here.)
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
· Edited 28d ago
My understanding is that it's not a hypothesis founded or invoked with nuance, which is what you're trying to insert here.
Disproof by example: I'm most favourably disposed to genetic explanations of group differences in a few specific cases.
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Sub-Saharan Africans, because of longer timescales of the main, H. s. s. component (100,000+ years of relative isolation in some cases), and because of very low hybridisation with Neanderthals (whereas everyone else has ~3%).
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Austronesians, because they're essentially the only group with substantial Denisovan ancestry.
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Shitty immune systems from those that didn't settle down until recently, because of the massive and sustained selection for plague resistance since we started building cities. I'm normally sceptical of recent-significant-change explanations, but this one has actually met the high burden of proof given the Columbian Exchange and the similar effects on Australian Aborigines, and it's a relatively-simple tweak compared to stuff "upstairs".
What's not there? I'm highly sceptical of any attempt to explain differences within Eurasia by HBD; the timescales of divergence are quite short, with in most cases significant gene-flow for the entire period, and we've all been civilised for long enough. That includes people going on about Near Easterners (except to the - relatively minor AIUI - degree that there's sub-Saharan African introgression) and, yes, Jews.
So I'm not really with @DradisPing about Iraqis being genetically unsuited to democracy, though I will note that he did also mention "deep culture" and I don't see anything wrong with that claim.
magic9mushroom
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28d ago
· Edited 24d ago
you'll start questioning the concept of childhood vaccinations or jet fuel melting steel beams.
TBF, the conspiracists are right that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel (not without a proper burner, anyway). Their mistake is in assuming that you need to melt structural supports in order to make them fail; in actual fact, steel loses most of its strength well before it actually melts.
Reminds me of a bad habit among amateur analysts trying to calculate explosive yields: not knowing the difference between pulverisation (shattering something into dust) and vaporisation. Lots of people see "the building isn't there anymore" and then blithely plug in the specific heat and heat of vaporisation for the entire mass of the building, which is a drastic overestimate because it takes a lot less energy to pulverise than to vaporise something.
I don't know what this is intended to mean. Is META an acronym for something? Or what are "metastrategies" in this context?
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