domain:natesilver.net
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
58m ago
Politics is always compromise between the need to get things done and the need to uphold principles. Quite often because those principles lead to paradoxes and contradictory answers depending upon the questions at hand. The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.
And on it goes. Policing is a necessary evil, and using force is a necessary part of policing because criminals tend not to respond to polite requests to please stop robbing, raping, murdering, or selling drugs. That doesn’t mean you don’t have rules against overreaching, but one man’s police brutality is another man’s stopping those criminals terrorizing his neighbors.
And balancing this stuff, all these balances between two things that are goods in themselves, or at the very least avoiding some form of known bads, gets complicated very quickly. I’ll be blunt in saying that most people are unqualified for this kind of stuff because they don’t understand the issues involved. Most political conversations are vibes based bleating not even willing to engage in the entire argument, quite often undertaken by people who don’t bother to find out how things work. I put myself there, I have no idea where the highway should go, where the lines of public decency vs degenerate behavior should be drawn, how exactly to police a community without unnecessary brutality or excess permissiveness. And as such I think that politics would go much better if more people tuned out and dropped out and let people who know deal with the problems without me telling them that their solutions are not aesthetically appealing to me.
cjet79
59m ago
Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
- Children
- People with mental deficiencies
- People with demonstrably violent impulses that they cannot control
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
- It justifies drug ownership.
- It justifies legal euthanasia.
- It does not justify gun ownership if you are a socialist or communist.
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
- Inner city crime ridden areas. Not sure what to do when you have too high of a prevalence of violent people. I am willing to say that civilization has broken down in those areas, and then reiterate that gun rights are civilizational rights. If you don't have civilization, you can't have that right.
- Violent people don't always stay violent people. Testosterone is a hell of a drug, so young men are often more violent than older men. Not sure if ex-convicts should be allowed to have guns, but maybe if you don't trust them to own a gun you shouldn't trust them to be out of prison.
- The line between children and the mentally deficient and adults can be blurry in real life. 17 year olds, and 75IQ people for example. I didn't want to litigate where I think those lines should be drawn.
(Mostly) uncensored LLMs have been around for a while, but most of the first generations struggled very badly when writing more than a couple paragraphs at a time -- very prone to throwing in random new characters, looping events, physical inconsistencies, so on. That's part of why so many early tools focused on character-based roleplay; LLAMA might go off the deep end, but if you're expecting to direct it back toward your goal and it's not too disruptive to have it 'reroll' if it goes completely off the rails.
More recent tools, including pretty much all of DeepSeek's models, can handle short fiction, but either are censored, have an uncensored model but most web interfaces are censored, and/or can't be run at reasonable speeds on consumer-level hardware. That's why your link spells out what steps to introduce a jailbreak. Those jailbreaks can usually break out of some censorship (until they're countered) but at the cost of often making the models increasingly unhinged or incoherent, and they're also just a pain because of token limits. And there's an argument that some of this censorship breaks the models in weird ways, and that might persist even when a prompt is jailbroken.
((Despite that, at least in furry circles more of the recommendations have just been to use DeepSeek through some of the less-heavily-censored providers.))
By contrast, Grok3 and 4 will just do it. Upload a file with some setting, character, and tone information (cw: furry nsfw 'lore', in the magical realm sense, implications of M/M, M/F, and M/tM), give it a one-sentence description of the scene you want and some tags, and it'll quite happy throw out a thousand-plus words, following almost all the constraints I gave it, and having a clear rising action and climax (hurr hurr). It can set up part of the scene in the start of a work and then call back to it a couple hundred words later, without confusing details, and there's some obvious logical paradoxes that it handles reasonably well.
You can get output without em-dashes! It even managed a couple setting-appropriate turns of phrase that don't show up on google and are surprisingly coherent to the characters it did make (eg "Survive? Sure. Thrive? That’s on you, pup" isn't anything to write home about, but aiming it at a male gray wolf working in an idealized service sector job the day of a rush is pretty fitting).
It's still not great or even good writing, even grading on the massive curve that is smut. It's unsurprising that it fails to stand up to real greats like Rukis Croax or Robert Baird, or can't read my mind about what the characters 'should' be like, or isn't anything like the story I did write for the same setting and prompt, or doesn't know specialized names for kinks. The character tones are a little too samey, the pacing is entirely wrong for smut aimed at men and way too fast for anything aimed at women and finishes too quickly, it keeps talking about eye colors in a way that come across as Mary Sue for my demographic, it's way too omniscient a viewpoint, and it either doesn't understand how to properly describe a character to demonstrate attraction from the viewpoint character or doesn't realize that it should do so as part of written smut.
((It also can't count; I haven't had much luck getting more than 1.5k words per prompt, and Grok4 will insist that it got a requested three thousand words, and it definitely was struggling even more with the pace and paragraph formatting as it got toward that point. I haven't messed around with it having it write full stories much before, though, and part of the weirdness is probably my style recommendations.))
I dunno how many of those problems are things I just need to prompt it better, and how many are things that it can't fix even if prompted, or that could be fixed with better prompting but I don't have the words to actually write down. But they're the sorta problems that weren't anywhere close to my 'showstopper list' just a couple years ago.
And they'll do it in a couple minutes.... For as long as you trust xAI.
See here for a SFW (or at least not-smut) example with and without em-dashes. Some NSFW outputs are available on request, but it's bi furry smut, so it's probably not going to be interesting or even readable to most people here.
((though I'll caveat for fairly vanilla stuff chatGPT works and actually does a bit better with character speech, and sometimes even offers to make it erotic, if not necessarily in-line with the characters I gave it. But try to get the smut part and it fades-to-black or drops a euphemism for the actual sex scene.))
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
Although by the numbers substance abuse, divorce rates, suicide are all high for doctors (but maybe not as bad as lawyers).
First result for searching for divorce rates for doctors and lawyers. Not too far apart. I did not find any quick results for suicide comparisons or substance abuse rates.
although in the age of mass immigration, I suppose the distinction is moot.
Well that would be the point under contention wouldn't it?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
But we've already established that humans eat humans. So the dishonor is already here.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
"Yes, I murdered and butchered and ate my neighbor, but in my defense, he was not an honorable member of his species. He was a total jerk. He played loud music at night, send unsolicited dick pics to women, parked in the disabled parking spot. Surely there is nothing wrong with killing someone so dishonorable for food."
Provided he also did not return his shopping carts, I would vote to acquit.
Magusoflight
1hr ago
Veganism is fine for adults but there is med literature on how it stunts infants and kids due to nutrient deficiencies
idkwcpgw
1hr ago
A chit is a record of a debt, bringing chits is paying debt, and not a common phrase even among americans. "calling in a chit" is more common.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
For 編集, at least, kotobank has citations from a 13th-century Zen Buddhist tractate ("Historians may 編集 this into an example of [some form of meditation]..."), and a 1656 translation that evidently uses the "compilation"-editing meaning ("Having resolved to do so in last year's spring, [I?] 編集 a 20-volume book called Shinpi Ketsudanshou").
edit: I also want to dispute the novelty of かれ as a pronoun. It's simply an older (perhaps regional? I have little intuition for what just fell out of prestige language use due to the west->east power shift) form of あれ that slots regularly into the this-that(close)-that(far)-which determiner pattern: これ・それ・あれ（かれ）・だれ, この・その・あの（かの）・どの, こなた・そなた・あなた（かなた）・どなた. If you have any exposure to period-drama or fake-oldtimesey speech, you might have heard かのもの with a very emphatically up-pitched か for "that person". It didn't take long to find an example of かれ being used as a personal pronoun all the way back in the Tale of Genji.
FtSoA
1hr ago
I disagree, the last exchange of his example suggests that when you've retreated to that lowest level, someone like Scott should come along to keep nudging you up the layers
So? What's wrong with a nudge? Coercion is bad. Persuasion is fine.
But, again, isn't Scott doing the thing where he's actually arguing down from the "purists"?
The person is not left to be comfortable at their fulfillment level.
Isn't that contradicting the point of him saying the whole 10% line is a totally great place to be comfortable?
also continue to think it's interesting that he opposed this kind of shenanigan
He's trying to find a reasonable middle ground. For people like him. For the more typical person. For anyone.
Scott perceives that unbounded moral philosophy is a mug's game. So bind it a little.
What is obligatory? What is supererogatory? Reasonable people can disagree and avoid muggings.
I think the issue here is that you perceive Scott is expressing two different stances, but I see him saying the same basic thing. Figure out what the obligatory minimum, satisfice, and then anything beyond that is extra credit, but there's no reason to beat oneself up over maximization or allow a philosophical mugging.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
Indeed, and as i argued in my on post on the subject i think this element of general-applicablity/adaptability is a key component of what most people think of as "intelligence". A book may contain knowledge, but a book is generally not seen as "intelligent" in the way that say an orangutan or a human is. I also think that recognizing this neatly explains the seeming bifurcation in opinions on AI between those in "Bouba" (ie soft/non-rigorous) disciplines and "Kiki" (ie hard) disciplines where there are clear right and wrong answers.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
My bad, I misread the timeframe. I agree that significantly changes the discussion such that it's reasonable to say "you're still a redditor".
So the question is, is being a redditor (or an American) more like building a bridge, or fucking a goat?
Thank you for writing this, it cracked me up.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Seems very anti-utilitarian for others to die just for the sake of a moral taboo.
I mean... yes? Most people aren't utilitarians, so hopefully it comes as no surprise that they aren't reaching the same conclusions a utilitarian would.
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
1hr ago
divorce rates
I'd suggest that divorce (and adultery) rates are high for doctors because one of the perks of the job is that hospitals are full of young female nurses. Of all the divorced men I know, the doctors are the most likely to leave their first wife for some kind of floozy from work. This alone probably encourages staying trim!
Blueberry
1hr ago
This is how oat/soy-milk versus cow-milk was normalized in Germany. Now in the big cities almost every cafe has the option to use oatly (and near students/university oatly is the normal option).
There are some startups in Berlin trying to make casein protein from yeast. With casein one could make cheese (mozarella, gouda, cottage cheese, camenbert etc) virtually indistinguishable from cow-cheese. The current cheese alternatives all suck, especially on pizza, and are nutritionally worthless with almost no protein.
SirJohnFalstaff
I'm one of the best from the West, my name still tatted on my ex wife's chest
1hr ago
I just kind of reject ephebophile as a category.
I can imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 10. I can't really imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 18 or 21 or whatever. I don't think those people exist. I don't think really think any man exists who will sooner have sex with a morbidly obese 16 year old than modern day Jennifer Lopez (leaving aside people with fat fetishes, who in turn I don't think would pick a skinny 16 year old over a properly-plump 35 year old).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
He never asked it to not use them. If you do, most models are happy to comply, even if they slip up (ChatGPT is unusually bad about it).
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I've heard of people doing it for that reason too. The placenta ought to come out mostly sterile, or no more dirty than getting busy with a beaver. If cunnilingus won't kill you, this wouldn't either. I don't think it's actually good, at least compared to other sources of protein. When animals do it, it's to hide the traces of birth from predators, and to prevent perfectly good calories from going to waste. While archeological evidence is lacking, it's highly unlikely to be a "natural" practice. Hunter gatherers usually bury or burn the afterbirth.
If you like surreal, nightmarish art in the vein of HR Giger or Zdzislaw Beksinski, maybe check out the work of Suguru Tanaka. His stuff is very visually striking and has quite an otherworldly quality to it I quite enjoy.
Not sure if this would be up your alley though. And yes, most of the trends in visual art as of late (I would argue even since the mid-20th) have been lacklustre at best.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
As an aside, how was London?
I ended up extending my stay for a week! I'm due to fly out this Saturday morning, but only so I can make it to the Edinburgh ACX meetup.
I've had a good time. I haven't written up everything that happened, but highlights include a trip to Cambridge, Dover, catching up with @Corvos at a Wetherspoons and getting happily drunk in his company.
Overall, I've warmed to the city quite a bit. And it certainly makes where I currently live seem like a village. If only it didn't cost an arm and both of my legs. Maybe when I finish my current stage of training, and have a CV competitive with the strivers, I might try my luck.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
clear delineation between work and rest
While this can be true for some practice environments and specialties, I would hazard it is untrue more often than not.
Most doctors have some combination of research, teaching, administrative, and managerial duties all of which bleed outside of traditional work hours in the usual ways. Additionally many specialties (ex: family medicine) will involve significant time outside of work catching up on documentation and managing your in basket and so on.
It's not impossible - gas usually does little outside of work, same for things like radiology, inpatient psychiatry and so on. Especially in a hospital employed community setting. But as soon as you take on any additional responsibilities, go academic, or hang your own shingle...that goes away most of the time.
My suspicion is that doctors seem to cope well in comparison to lawyers because the sheer depth of abuse, abstruse requirements and zero flexibility in the medical student and residency days makes anything that comes after seem reasonable.*
Although by the numbers substance abuse, divorce rates, suicide are all high for doctors (but maybe not as bad as lawyers).
*"My 24s aren't that bad" is a common attending refrain. It is also insane.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Are there school-shooting-nutjobs and CEO-assassinating-nutjobs, or else are there mass-shooting-on-any-target-nutjobs?
I think there are murder-suicide oriented nutjobs, across all cultures and all time periods, and the particular expression their death-urge takes is socially mediated.
A man with the overactive murder-suicide gene born in the Arab world has an obvious path for it: he joins a jihadist group. In medieval Norway, he would go a-viking, while in Russia he would go off and become a Cossack, in the old west he would go off and fight injuns. In virtually every European country for virtually every male before 1945, at some point in his youth he'd have the opportunity to join an army and fight in a war, and if he went off to war with much desire to kill and little desire to return, he probably wouldn't make it back.
The school shooter is one of Tyler Durden's "middle children of history," with no great war or great depression he lashes out at random. He is offered no socially acceptable way to get himself killed and noticed, and picks the worst one possible. I'm a big believer that the best way to prevent school shootings is to give them another way to get themselves killed.
Corvos
1hr ago
Boo. Doesn't count!
I watched the program when it came out, I really thought I remembered him eating it but I guess not.
swallowed an entire placenta raw on a dare
This used to be a granola girl thing, didn't it? Recreating every part of a natural birth and stuff. Apparently it's quite good for the mother.
Vegetarians still aren't a majority.
(And the majority of Indians are actually lactose intolerant, even if we love milk. Around 60% of the population, if a quick Google suffices)
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