MathWizard
formerly hh26
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4d ago
1: Outlaw abortion, provide free non-abortive birth control for everyone, which is mandatory for heterosexuals until they get married, or at least sign some sort of contract with their long-term partner about how potential children will be raised.
2: School vouchers, which includes subsidies for homeschooling, provided said schools and homeschools pass certain accreditation procedures so they are actually providing a legitimate education and aren't just scamming for money.
Actually.... you asked for things out of left field, and 2 seems too normal. So to play more into the thought experiment here, let's ramp it up beyond what I'd normally advocate. Massively subsidize homeschooling. Provide free teacher training for parents, with a specialization towards teaching in small classroom sizes of children who you get to see repeatedly year after year, in every subject, and teaching kids to teach themselves. Pay enough that families can go from living on a two-working-parents income to a two-working-parents-but-one's-job-is-homeschooling-their-own-kids income. It won't even cost money, just divert it from the public schools who don't need as much because many kids have moved to homeschools. Have economists figure out every possible way that bad-faith-actors could exploit the system and figure out how to prevent it.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4d ago
In terms of scale it involves more people, but in terms of perceived threat and actionable measures it seems less threatening.
Like, JFK was assassinated. This is immediately violent. Believing that the government/CIA assassinated the president makes them dangerous bad guys who are willing to assassinate people they don't like, and potentially justifies violence against them in retaliation and/or self defense. 9/11 likewise killed lots of people, making the perpetrators dangerous and worth retaliating against (even ordinary non-conspiracists can get behind this, which is why there was so much support for military intervention in the middle east after 9/11).
The most likely response to threats of violence are accumulating weapons to defend oneself and possibly pre-emptively strike using violence. If someone points a gun at you, you point one back.
Vaccines and Flat Earth are about scientific lies. They say that the leading scientists and media are corrupt and in the pocket of the government or whoever is leading the conspiracy, and the things they say cannot be trusted. Nobody needs to die to cover up the truth, because they can be paid off instead. Now, maybe some of the variants of vaccine and Flat Earth conspiracy theories do involve the government murdering people to cover up, and those ones are potentially dangerous, but I have never heard a Flat Earther talking about assassinations, so I think it's uncommon.
The most likely response to media and scientists lying is to not trust them, and possibly have this mistrust bleed into other domains. If they're lying to you about X, why should you trust them about Y? Now this can lead to some harms such as people refusing to vaccinate themselves or their children, but this is significantly less dangerous than actual violence. If someone lies to your face, you lose respect for them and possibly try to avoid them, but very few people would respond with violence (except in weird edge cases, where it's probably not about the lie itself but about the underlying thing they were lying about).
MathWizard
formerly hh26
4d ago
Hence the word "relatively". All conspiracy theories carry some risk, via this sort of chaining, but the Flat Earth ones are indirect like this, while others like "the FBI is stalking me" have a much more direct path towards danger.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6d ago
I really like MTG Arena, because I am addicted to screens. In particular:
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It's free to play. If you want to get all the fancy cards you have to pay real money, or play the game regularly in order to complete enough daily quests to get card packs, or be good enough at drafts that you can win more stuff than you lose. But if you're okay with being slightly-underpowered, or if you scrape together enough to make one good deck and keep playing that deck, you don't have to pay a cent. And I never have. Back when I played physical magic I had to pay real money AND be underpowered compared to my friends who paid more than me.
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You can just pick up and play with someone, instantly, at home. As someone without a lot of friends, and who doesn't like going out and doing things, it's convenient to just feel like playing Magic on a whim and then a few minutes later after the game boots up I have someone to play against, and then I can stop when I'm bored, and then play another match a few hours later. It's really convenient. I guess if you and your son are playing together that's less of an issue.
But everyone is different and your situation is quite different from mine.
As a side note, how do you make things fair when playing against your son? Do you just go easy on him? Do you give him a way better deck than you and then trying to overcome the difference? My fiance and I have not had much success playing together because I've played a ton and she's played almost none and I'm too much of a tryhard I can't figure out how to avoid utterly destroying her except with incredibly patronizing handicaps, and it ends up no fun for either of us.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
6d ago
I read a comment on Reddit by someone who talked about posting Flat Earth stuff as a creative writing exercise. You get to think up clever arguments and find loopholes when arguing against people who are objectively correct, and not worry about getting your ego hurt if you're proven wrong because you're not actually taking it seriously. I browsed the Flat Earth sub for a bit after that and tried to figure out who was serious and who wasn't, though with no way to test that I have no idea how successful I was.
I think the main issue I'd have with actually participating is the propensity to delude naive and mentally ill people into joining unironically. The more people who are involved and having fun and aren't lunatics, the more legitimate the movement seems. Although on the other hand it's a relatively harmless conspiracy for people to believe, so maybe it helps steal thunder away from more dangerous conspiracies that mentally ill people might fall into, so maybe it's useful, I dunno.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
9d ago
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MathWizard
formerly hh26
13d ago
Because the test wasn't supposed to be painful, and if he did show his pain, that would be interpreted as an intentional clinical sign by the examinees, who not having access to the script, would then promptly jump to the wrong diagnosis and thus immediately fail the station.
Is that a bad outcome? If the examinees are conducting the test incorrectly such that it caused pain, and then jumping to incorrect conclusions as a result, that is something that will lead to incorrect conclusions when done in the real world on real patients, and deserves to be flunked.
Unless what you mean is that the test "officially" doesn't cause pain despite frequently causing pain in practice even when done correctly, such that the students are not to blame for the inevitable mis-diagnosis because the expected exam answers are flawed.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
13d ago
Nope. Controversial opinion here, I think coffee is a flavor not a real beverage. I absolutely love coffee-flavored desserts, ice cream, mocha, stuff like that. The only time I'll drink actual coffee is if it's in a super-sweet latte or something, with more milk and sugar than actual coffee. Essentially a warm coffee-flavored milkshake.
Or, if I'm trying to be responsible and not drink a meal's worth of calories in a cup, I'll just drink water.
I just don't get proper coffee just brewed in water with nothing or very little else. I don't think it tastes good, it's like stirring spoonfuls of cinnamon or nutmeg into your water. They taste good when combined with the right stuff, but not by themselves.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
15d ago
This seems like a flaw with the most pure form of anti-classificationism that could be addressed by a minor adjustment to a tit-for-tat strategy, which is mostly where my position is. It would be ideal if people mostly just didn't talk about race. Other people do talk about race, and therefore it makes it very difficult to communicate or model them if you just naively pretend that race doesn't exist while everyone else does. If you just let all the racists run around being racist but don't acknowledge their motivations then you can't even talk about them coherently, let alone come up with strategies to combat them.
Instead, it seems like the best strategy is to only talk about race on the meta level. You do not define categories for people, you do not treat people differently based on what categories other people put them in. But when other people put people into categories, you acknowledge that they have done so and respond accordingly, and discuss the categories that exist in their minds. People are not forgiving Mike Tyson because he is black on the object level and his black skin causes him to emit forgiveness pheromones or something, people are forgiving Mike Tyson because they have categorized him as "black" in their minds and have allowed him to inherit all of the baggage about victims and oppressors that our society associates with that. This seems acceptable to mention and criticize.
Race does matters in the real world as a self-fulfilling prophecy because people treat it like it does. But if more people adopt this form of anti-classification then discussions about race become rarer and rarer since fewer people would bring it up in the first place on the object level, and thus the amount race matters would exponentially decay as it being discussed less would make it matter less which would make it be discussed less, back and forth.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
17d ago
Did you forget my first comment that you responded to? Virtually all of mathematics is technically tautological. Any valid logical argument or proof is tautological. I suppose it depends on how you define "most", but if we weight by how often people use them, then most tautologies are not at all trivial, you just don't notice that the non-trivial ones are in fact tautologies.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
17d ago
The word you're looking for is "trivial", as opposed to "tautology", which although slightly correlated, are quite distinct. I can just as easily cherry pick an uninteresting non-tautology like "this cat is black", which is just as undeep as your example tautology.
In my opinion, the interestingness of natural selection is not merely the tautology "things which are more likely to exist are more likely to exist", but the implication: "things which are more likely to exist are more likely to exist, therefore all of biology".
The fact that such a trivial-seeming tautology emergently leads to the huge diversity of life is highly nontrivial and interesting and profound.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
17d ago
The actual mathematical definition of a tautology is a logical statement which is always true. As opposed to a conditional statement which has some free variables and might be true or false depending on the inputs of those variables. It need not be "obviously" or "trivially" true: any mathematical theorem, if packaged together with its axioms and assumptions, is technically a tautology because it's always true.
In the context of science then, a tautology is a theory which is always true, not requiring conditional variables from the real world. Natural selection of some sort is true in every conceivable universe or system with reproducing and mutating life-forms. I think this makes it more profound as a theory, rather than less.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
18d ago
It's Easter. People talk about Jesus. Most of his life occurred in the Roman Empire.
This is the main reason why I find the question rather silly. The Roman Empire could have accomplished absolutely nothing of note other than been where Jesus lived and the prevalence of Christianity in the West alone would make it reasonable to think about them in passing at least once a day.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
20d ago
This assumes an infinite supply of potential sales. In practice I would expect to optimize over some denominator which combines time and sales, emphasized differently based on how saturated the market is.
Regardless, this doesn't address the main issue that the buyer's agent and seller's agent have near-identical incentives: have quick sales with high prices. The only distinction is that the buyer's agent's ability to market their services to future clients is correlated with low prices, but I'm not sure how strong of a correlation that is.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
20d ago
Oh hey, I've been playing a bunch of Warframe and Factorio as well. I can't get enough of games with in-depth crafting systems.
Do you know of any other games with similar progression systems to Warframe? Monster Hunter is kind of similar in crafting, but I'm more interested in the mastery system: "do all the things, collect one of every single weapon/armor/companion etc, and each thing you collect adds to your exp even if you never use it."
MathWizard
formerly hh26
20d ago
Ur, Amilia, and Marked are the easiest to avoid the taboos of passively if you want to just have a free power and not dedicate your life to advancing some cause.
I'd probably go with Amilia, become the head of a magical hospital where I heal people for money (and have enough EMTs and ambulances to keep people alive until I can get to them, and get obscenely rich while simultaneously helping people. I assume that charging money for healing is a lot less pleasing and would advance the agenda less than doing it for free, but it's not strictly taboo. I think as long as I don't turn away poor people, healing anyone who comes and simply charge them proportional to their ability to pay, it'll probably be fine. I assume that the existence of other Amilia users will drop demand to reasonable levels such it won't lead to absurdly high prices like it would if you were the only one who could cure otherwise incurable disease, but one in a million multiplied by the proportion of people who choose Amilia means this will still end up with a lot of money.
Alternatively, see if the Fae power can be munchkinned for absurd amounts of money by growing rare spices or something. Depending on the growth rate and quality/quantity it can be used on at a time, it might be more profitable to heal people entirely for free to boost your strength more and earn all your money from growing stuff. Though again, profits will be mitigated by other Amilia users.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
23d ago
I don't see why that would always be true. I would expect red-leaning judges to be biased towards the red states, while blue-leaning judges would be biased towards the blue states.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
24d ago
This is a victory conditional on the belief that Republicans are more prone to putting their thumb on the scale than Democrats, rather than the other way around.
That is, if we have any two parties, A and B, and A is more prone to putting their thumb on the scale, then more leeway towards voting regulations is a victory for A, and less leeway is a victory for B.
It seems nontrivial to simply assume that the Republicans are party A, especially given their recent demands for more transparency and stricter adherence to election rules.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
24d ago
I'm not super familiar with the specific laws, but I'm pretty sure there's some sort of oversight. That is, if the Nevada State legislature suddenly coordinates and decide that all of them are permanently elected, only they are allowed to vote so they always win elections and can pick whoever they want to send to the senate/house/president, the federal government would object. I'm fairly certain they can't just overthrow their own Democracy. The Supreme Court would overrule them somehow, even if they had to stretch the text of some law or constitutional clause to make it happen.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
24d ago
How is that winning the issue? If blue and some swing states are able to exploit a lack of ID to cheat elections and remain perpetually blue, then they can win all the elections via fraud. And all the republicans can do is prevent fraud in already-red states so they don't also flip to blue.
On issues related to local governance, each State being able to do whatever it wants is a victory. But on federal issues, especially elections, that's not good enough.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
27d ago
It might be appropriate (or just tempting) to have some level of discussion, at least on the meta-level, regarding whether other people agree or disagree with the request or potential difficulties they anticipate arising from it or something.
Like, literally right now, you have in this post made a suggestion and we are having a meta level discussion about it, though it's about site content rather than a specific CW topic. As long as the discussions remained brief and meta level that would be fine, but when it comes to CW topics that's always a slippery slope.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
30d ago
The intro says
Culture war topics are accepted
so that suggests to me that simple requests for topics would fit here. I don't think it would drain energy from the main thread and, if it worked, would actually drive more discussion there, as long as the small scale questions didn't consistently spin off into a length discussion of the topic here in this thread before a big post was made.
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
What matters depends on what you're trying to extrapolate it for. If you're evaluating whether you or someone you know should purchase the product, then the value of the product matters, and intent only matters in-so-far as it correlates with the value of the product If person A is an intentional scammer then the vast majority of products they offer will have low value and high cost, so you can use that as a prior and probably dismiss all their offerings without any additional investigation.
If you're extrapolating it to the value of their other offerings then intent matters a little. An intentional scammer is going to offer bunches of scams and fail to cultivate real value. Someone who values themselves highly in a genuine way is going to attempt to offer good value even if they tend to overprice some of it, so the correlation between offerings will be weaker.
If you're extrapolating that to the value of their character, then intent matters a lot. If person A offers a bad product unintentionally, then you can't conclude they're a bad person, while if they do it intentionally then they are.
So if two people, A and B, have free videos offering advice, and then paid videos and services offering more detailed advice and individual attention for a cost, and person A is a known scammer and person B is not, you should probably avoid even the free videos from person A, because they're optimizing for advertising the scam and getting money rather than being genuinely useful, while person B is likely to offer more genuine advice in their free videos, because they believe the value of their product can speak for itself.
Ultimately, the value of the free and paid content is what actually matters, but the intent correlates strongly across content
MathWizard
formerly hh26
1mo ago
I would consider a "scammer" to be someone who deliberately tricks people into overpaying for a service above what value they would actually acquire from it. In a normal rational capitalist transaction, both the seller and consumer gain utility by transfering a good which the consumer values more highly than the seller does, for some price in between the two subjective valuations of that good. A non-scam seller genuinely helps their consumers while enriching themselves because the consumers value the good more highly than the price paid. A scam is when the seller deceives the consumer into over-valuing the good to the point that they pay a price higher than the actual value they receive once the good is obtained. Importantly, this involves actual deception: someone who unknowingly sells something to customers is like someone who unknowingly tells you false facts that they believe: they're wrong, but they're not a "liar".
I'll be honest, while I've watched a reasonable amount of Dr K. I'm not very familiar with Andrew Tate directly. Everything I know about him is third-hand, so I wouldn't place bets on my belief that he's an actual scammer, it's mostly based on vibes. His advice is largely selfish and unconcerned with helping other people as long as you maximize your own well-being at the expense of others, which is entirely self-consistent with maximizing his own well-being at the expense of others. It would be not at all hypocritical for him to scam his audience. I think. Again, I've mostly heard about him third-hand, so I could be wrong here. I'm much more confident that Dr K is not knowingly scamming others, at least in the form of deliberately deceiving or overcharging them, based on his general personality and genuineness. I believe that he believes that his customers will benefit from his services at a value higher than the cost. I don't know if that's true or not, but even if false I wouldn't consider it a "scam", in the same way that I don't believe $100 restaurants are worth the price to non-millionaires, but still aren't scams as long as they're up front about the prices.
My guess, extrapolating from my own similar albeit weaker feelings, is that it's something along the lines of corruption of virtue. Taking what should be positive qualities and wasting them or subverting them. Similar to a beautiful delicious barbecued pig falling into the dirt and feeding the flies and germs instead of a person. Turning from something nourishing and healthy to people into something that only feeds rot and disease.
That is, kindness has the potential to do good things and have value and make the world a better place. But misplaced kindness that rewards bad behavior will incentivize them and make them more prevalent. The vast majority of toxic behaviors we see in society are there not because the people who do them are stupid people who can't figure out how to be kind, but because they have been systematically rewarded for those behaviors in some way or another. Being toxic works, at least on some level for some people. To the extent that toxic behaviors are analogous to disease, systematically feeding them with misplaced kindness is comparable to someone going out and feeding expensive high quality meat to a wild rat colony, or a beautiful woman allowing mosquitoes and hookworms to feast on her blood. Not only are they wasting something good, but they are actively allowing badness to reproduce for everyone else to have to deal with. It's disgusting.
I feel less scorn and revulsion for people who do this accidentally than I would for someone doing this on purpose. And less for people doing this on a social level than with literal diseases. But it's still gross in a similar way.
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