domain:experimental-history.com
thejdizzler
1d ago
I think this is because a lot of advice is extremely non-specific. General advice is not helpful for most people: you either need to modify it for your personal situation (or have the advice come from someone who knows you).
There's two different meanings of "good" being conflated here. "Is legal abortion good for the country?" is a political and a moral question; people will disagree about it largely because they have different opinions on "good" itself. But "are tariffs good for the country?" is largely an object-level question. Proponents and opponents have identical definitions of what it being "good" would look like (i.e. increased prosperity in the long term); they simply have a factual disagreement on whether tariffs will achieve that end. Granted, things aren't black and white, many questions straddle the line. But it's still a meaningful distinction to talk about.
Throwaway05
1d ago
Uhhhhhh what? You know animal and human medicine are different right?
The difficulty in the ED is rolling out training to everyone because the modality wasn't as common when most people went through Medical School and Residency.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I feel that this is rather unlikely. We did not have "rivers of blood" for ineffective and ridiculously prolonged lockdowns. We did not have a mere stream for when the vaccines turned out to be ineffective at reducing transmission (while working okay for reducing the actual damage of an infection).
Then there's the fact that Russia and China adopted mRNA vaccines several years after the West. Why would they set themselves up for failure, if they knew it was a bad vaccine and they already had their own? Why wouldn't they take their perfect opportunity to screw over the West by boosting claims that mRNA vaccines cause novel harms, or harm more than they help?
If a conspiracy needs buy-in from your worst enemies, for years.. Being a conspiracist is not the idea career choice for such a bureaucrat.
BahRamYou
1d ago
One way I could see it being transformative is if it puts more pressure on cities to finally improve their airport infrastructure.
Right now, it usually takes at least an hour to check in, clear security, and get to your gate. But it's highly random, so most people try to get there at least 2 hours before the flight. Even more if you're at a busy airport and trying to do something complicated.
Then on top of that, most airports are far from the city and most cities don't have very fast transit options to get there. Typically an hour to get to the airport, could be more if you're coming from far away.
Repeat again on the other side, especially for an international flight... 1 hour to get out of the airport, 1 hour to get back into the city. Minimum.
Flying from NYC to London takes about 7 hours. That's annoying, but becomes much worse then you add in around 5 hours of extra time to get from your home to the plane, and then the plane to your real destination. 12 hours, plus the jet lag and stress of travel basically kills an entire day.
Right now, we put up with all the extra waiting because there's just not enough pressure to make it better. 5 hours of waiting seems reasonable compared to 7 hours on the plane. And rich people can avoid some of that anyway by using private planes. But if Boom can get that down to 3.5 hours on a plane, I think there'd be a lot more pressure on cities to improve the overall airport experience. It's not impossible, it wasn't all that long ago that people could just drive right up to the gate and step on the plane with minimal security. We still need security of course, but we could automate a lot of it, and add valet parking and better public transit.
Combine all of that? Let's say the current model is 12 hours total from NYC to London. Boom + Better Infrastructure could get it down to 6 hours total. That really is a pretty change. It would make it a lot more practical to go to a meeting in both cities on the same day. Or work in one for the week and commute home for the weekend. Still a long trip, but only half of what it is now.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
How is "adopt the policies of your political opponents" even responding negatively to them? Whether Trump or Harris gets a 10% government stake in Intel the result is the same, the only difference is which side supports it and what justifications they use.
Nationalising companies isn't the policies of Trump's political opponents. The dominant factions of both parties claim to be against socialism and have done so since the Truman administration. The Democrats have not, in fact, sought to nationalise large companies when they were in a position to do so. The only big American nationalisations of my lifetime (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG) happened under a Republican president, although I don't think this makes George W Bush a socialist given the circumstances.
marinuso
1d ago
(And if you opponent is playing y-tits-for-a-tat where y is slightly above 1, then your optimal strategy is to reduce x further such that xy<1).
If the opponent keeps increasing Y, and you sit there decreasing X in turn according to this rule, eventually you become cooperate-bot and the opponent turns into defect-bot.
Again, I get why people justify their revenge narratives.
Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.
Bernie Sanders at least tries to explain this, because Bernie Sanders is a socialist who thinks capitalism is bad and corporations are just greedy and needs big government regulations to spank them. I've yet to see much attempt to explain it from a new conservative side, and the little I do sounds very similar to the socialist one (same way I keep seeing "greedflation" in some right wing populist spaces).
Ironically it seems to be one of the things the new right really hates. A new big government socialist minded capital hating populism that has invaded the traditional minded conservative thought and crowded out the original inhabitants.
The traditional conservative like the Reaganites would explain government imposed market distortions, the folly of protectionist policy, etc. The new conservative says "companies are greedy, they raise prices because they got even greedier"
gattsuru
1d ago
Yes. Some of that’s specific to (coastal) ranching, which has its own issues separate from human medicine, but point of care ultrasound has its pressures from a relatively remunerative group of technicians who do have a few genuine points about potential sources of error and also have serious financial incentives.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
I don't see much military use either, all that data will necessarily be related to Earth and they have a decent communication network as is. It might be an initial experiment for actual off-world datacenters, and also for processing signals collected by satellites themselves.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
And, well, it's not like there's nothing to the claim that SJ is the same sort of thing as the Nazis (by which I mean the literal NSDAP).
I would almost agree if you weren't literally using it as part of an argument for a mass killing of political opponents (one of the most Nazi like behaviors).
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
I asked if he was God
What do you define God to be? My definition of what God is is the Classical definition. "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything [i.e., "not any created thing"]. Literally God is not, because He transcends being."
(only in very esoteric ways--not in any tangible way whose difference you'd ever experience)
I don't think you understand just how significant attributes are that you think are esoteric. Classical Theism entails:
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God is closer to me than I am to myself. He is always at all times the source and grounding of my being. It's not a domino situation. It's more of a Molecules > Atoms > Elementary Particles > ... > God situation. God cannot blink out of existence. For one thing, it is not in His nature to do so. But for another thing, it would be the end of existence for everything.
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Morality and the Euthyphro dilemma. Is Goodness a standard outside God or is goodness whatever God decides? Pick one of these and there are problems. Classical Theism solves this dilemma because Goodness is tied to God's nature and to ours. It is not a standard outside God, it is not an arbitrary decision by God, it is sourced in God's nature and flows out into our own natures. You hint at this, "if God were not Good then he would not be deserving of worship." I agree! If God and Goodness are different things there is a problem worshiping Him.
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There is an order and explanation to everything. All is willed by God, there are no competing powers. There is a consistency to the universe that we can trust.
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God is unchanging and perfect. He cannot become more perfect. He already is absolutely perfect and there is no defect in Him.
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In His very nature we find the grounding and explanation of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
If you take all this away, I'm not sure what is left that is worship-worthy. I'm not going to say "nothing," because I really would need a year or so to try to fill up the holes left by rejecting Classical Theism and see where the balance lies. I do know that when I was a teen/young adult, before I began to learn about Classical Theism, I was well on my way to becoming atheistic because Open Theism just isn't satisfactory to me.
Even when there are miracles, all that tells me is that there are things we don't understand about the universe yet or that there are aliens/fairies out there with superpowers. Especially if you believe like I do that humans have a natural psychic ability. The importance of God isn't clear until I understand His relationship with everything.
And this relationship with everything wholly informs what I understand to be the goal of the Spiritual life. This comment is already long enough but if you are curious about what I mean, "Fire Within" is one of the best books on the topic.
The reason I believe in God is due to firsthand experience. That's not to say that I've met him, but I've felt his Spirit and experienced miracles that are difficult to explain otherwise.
That's great, God loves all His creatures and it is certainly possible that you have experienced His intervention in your life. Most Catholics I know would say the same. I wouldn't say there are 0 philosophical converts to Catholicism, but the more normal situation is to have an encounter with Jesus, Mary, the rest of the saints, etc.
What would you say to someone who had a direct vision of God telling her, "I am He who Is, you are she who is not?" It's a very Classical Theist way for God to describe Himself
I have definitely heard God's voice. He told me who my husband was going to be. I honestly find it more surprising that someone hasn't heard God's voice than someone has, though perhaps it is hard to recognize.
Just as I see no need to say something like "I am human, and humans have parents, therefore I have parents," since I have met my parents personally, so too do I see no need to logically prove God's existence, nor do I think that such logical proofs can or should define him.
Fair, but there are biologists who do study such things and in general I expect you trust what they say about inheritable traits. Likewise, a personal relationship with God does not preclude trying to learn more about Him through the methods we have available, and many people do interrogate this area.
Let's say you have a wife who you love. Imagine saying, "I don't need to know more about her, I love her! Asking her questions about how her day went or what she's thinking right now would be getting in the way of the personal relationship I have with her." It doesn't work that way! Instead, love generates a desire to learn more about the beloved. Philosophy is one means of truth finding.
The majority of Catholics do not study philosophy. The majority of Christians are probably not Classical Theists. Open Theism has been very common for many centuries among those who aren't into philosophy. At least it's not Moralistic Theraputic Deism, which is what most people in America fall under.
You aren't sure about our ability to come up with satisfactory axioms. That's not uncommon. You are creating philosophical axioms in your comments that I do not believe hold water - but you are likely unaware that you are doing so. Rejection of philosophy does not mean you can get away from doing philosophy. Instead it just means you are doing bad philosophy.
One uncontroversial thing we can do with philosophy is demonstrate logical contradictions. This doesn't require the underlying axioms to be correct, in fact we are proving the axioms false. This is why most theology surrounding God's nature is called Negative - or Apophatic - theology. I can say a lot about what God is not, and He is not embodied, He is not limited, He is not confined to one place. He is not composed of many parts. He is not beholden to an outside standard of Goodness.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
Fair.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.
In the presence of noise which amplifies defections (this can be unintentional defections, or one player wrongly perceiving the other player's co-operation as a defection), tit-for-tat is equivalent to defectbot. You need to play x-tits-for-a-tat for x<1 in order for a tit-for-tat-like strategy to support stable co-operation. (And if you opponent is playing y-tits-for-a-tat where y is slightly above 1, then your optimal strategy is to reduce x further such that xy<1).
In the real world (rather than Axelrod's experiments) there is obviously noise, and that the noise amplifies rather than suppresses defections is one of the oldest unfortunate facts about the human condition. So playing tit-for-tat, and even more so playing two-tits-for-a-tat, is equivalent to playing defectbot.
Right now, Trump is playing two-tits-for-a-tat, and his core supporters fully support him in this. The Democrats believe, arguably correctly, that they have been playing 0.9-tits-for-a-tat, and the "we need a fighter" debate on the Dem side is whether they should switch to playing two-tits-for-a-tat and embrace the downward spiral into continuous mutual defection.
Any attempt to have a sane conversation about this is likely to be derailed by the ultimate scissor of American politics - the 2020 election. If you believe that the 2020 election was tabulated honestly and that Biden won by more than the margin of sloppiness, then Trump's response to losing the election was the biggest defection since Reconstruction, and the milquetoast effort to prosecute the people responsible wasn't even a 0.9-tits-for-a-tat response. Whereas "The 2020 election really was rigged and the overly harsh treatment of the people who protested this is a mega-defection" was the grievance narrative at the core of Trump's 2024 primary campaign, and appears to be the words that an ambitious Republican needs to mouth to go along to get along under the 2nd Trump admin. The slightly weaker proposition that "Regardless of what actually happened in the 2020 election, the overly harsh treatment of the people who protested it is a mega-defection" is table stakes for an elected Republican in 2025 in the way that signing the Grover Norquist tax pledge was table stakes for Republicans in the 1990's. And if the 2020 election really had been rigged on the scale that Trump claimed it was, then rigging the election would itself be a mega-escalation such that a correctly calibrated 0.9-tits-for-a-tat response would be harsh enough that what Trump is doing now would count as milquetoast.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Thus, the tit-for-tat strategy which (as I understand it) outperforms all others in iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Yep, plenty of people have already explained why their revenge narrative is justified through similar arguments.
What no one has actually tried to explain though is why doing bad and stupid policies is a useful tool for revenge still. No one has yet tried to explain why it is good for government to buy up and own private enterprise. To me, it's like seeing someone burn down your house and saying "I want revenge" and then throwing molotovs at your own house.
If we believed that small government hands off policies were best for the economy, for jobs, and for national wealth (as other conservatives were arguing for decades), then doing the opposite of that is throwing molotovs at our own house is it not? We should want our country to have a strong economy with lots of jobs and growing national wealth.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Are smart phones a Bostromian 'black ball' that just makes everything worse upon being discovered?
They inflicted mobile gaming on the world. They made social media worse I think. Dating apps proliferated. Sleep disruption. Short-form video in an ugly vertical format. People are watching movies on smartphones, it's destroying film. All these companies that make you install their app (it doesn't work).
Almost everything that can be done on a smart phone is done better on a PC or laptop. Cameraphones were good enough for communicating IMO.
Google maps is actually helpful but besides that? 2 factor authentication? Seems like a net negative to me.
georgioz
1d ago
Sometimes it is interesting to which depths this phenomenon runs, how self unaware people can be. Famously Marx extensively used the word ideology as a pejorative descriptor for ways ruling class keeps workers in the dark in the class conflict. Of course he piled all that criticism while keeping Marxism itself outside of such framework, as if it was implicitly true and correct stance and thus it could not be considered an ideology by definition.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
But the people of this viewpoint believe the faux-Popperian argument for real.
I don't know about that. As a fellow disillusioned-by-liberalism, I'd say it's much less about letting totalitarians get started, as that's a response from within the liberal framework, it's that liberalism itself is folly. You can't have "separation of church and state" or "neutral" institutions, you will always promote specific values. There are some values of liberalism I admire, but others I reject wholeheartedly, hence the conflict. I'm not a fan of them pretending to be tolerant, neutral, and above it all either, but the conflict would exist regardless.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
"Look what you made me do" - man doing what he was going to do anyway.
This definitely seems to be the main explainer, but it seems to be missing something. No reply has yet even tried to explain why government needs to buy up and own private enterprise, something you would expect them to be able to do if they truly believed it was a beneficial and sound policy and were going to do it anyway.
So what's the motivator there then? I think some of it is just circling the wagons, a generic ex post facto justification for decisions that they otherwise would find alarming and dangerous for big government to do.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
It seems to me that people who have adopted what you label "revenge narratives" generally no longer believe that there is such a thing as "our country" or "our citizens". Certainly I do not.
Well if you're no longer loyal to the nation that's up to you. But America is still my home and I want what's best for us and the citizenship.
Forming, equipping, and paying a police force is "stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption" in a number of ways. It's just that it's less stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption than not having police, given the situation we find ourselves in. If the situation were different, police might not be worth it. But it isn't, so they are.
Ok so having a police force isn't stupid, inefficient and counterproductive then. If you truly believe that the shifts on conservative policy are the same, then why not explain them on the merit?
Instead of "government has to own businesses because libs", you could explain how government owning businesses and directing corporate policy across the nation now improves the health of the economy after decades of conservatives saying big government and socialist control are bad the same way you can explain how police are good.
I observe that previous governments, Democrat and Republican, have chronically failed to exercise fiscal responsibility. I observe that attempting fiscal responsibility now will cost significant votes and political power, which will naturally flow to the fiscally-irresponsible. Therefore, I conclude that while I would strongly prefer fiscal responsibility, there is no way to get there from here, and so I abandon this as a political goal because it does not appear to be practically achievable. Therefore, I no longer care about fiscal responsibility or the debt, and I apportion my political priorities and values to areas where victory seems more probable.
Not pursuing something you find untenable as a policy goal is understandable. But do you now believe that ever growing debt is a good thing? Do you now believe our growing borrowing is a smart long term fiscal decision?
If you don't think you can convince other Americans to care at all it makes sense to give up, but it wouldn't make sense to change your mind just because of that.
And yet, the evidence has shown that they cannot prevent endemic free speech violations, nor even significantly impede them. When it mattered, they could not protect my speech in any meaningful sense, nor will they be able to do so in the future. Their impact is, to a first approximation, theoretical.
You're right, random civil rights organizations can not do much in the face of a population that keeps voting for and pushing for anti free speech politicians. In this same way they will have meaningful wins here and there against Trump, but ultimately unless we can get the population on board with traditional civil liberty and the first amendment, government suppression of speech will continue to grow.
The model they operate off, where only government speech controls impinge on the first amendment, is a suicide pact that I respectfully decline to involve myself in.
That's how the founding fathers set up our system, were they suicidal? No, they were forward looking revolutionary heroes. Their primary concern is government, and even today governments across the world are the most serious form of censorship. If you don't believe that, you can go look at other countries and you'll find it's government suppression of speech in Russia, in China, in North Korea, in pretty much every single dictatorship. Even in the freer nations, crackdowns on speech like the recent UK bill are government done.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Ok, you still haven't addressed a single actual point as to why doing bad counterproductive and harmful policy to the US makes sense as a form of vengeance, just keep justifying that you want revenge.
Pitt19802
1d ago
Can I ask how old you are?
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this reads like something I might have written between 20-25 or so.
I think a big part of transitioning from the academic universe to something approximating the 'real world' is that no one is going to walk you through life.
It's on you to pull out the bits of advice that resonate with you and decide to try those out, then decide which of those you want to keep trying, which of those you want to stop trying, and what you want to try out that no one advised you to do.
You get to decide the itinerary, you get to decide the score card too.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
1d ago
More and Pompey didn't lose by playing cooperatebot against defectbot.
More never tried to fight the Reformation Parliament and the Succession Oath - it was as obvious to him as it was to everyone else that with the King's mind made up there was nothing to fight. Saint Thomas More was playing a different game, with the only prize worth having in his estimation not being of this world, so he decided that martyrdom was a better alternative to going along to get along.
I'm not going to litigate which of Pompey and Caesar defected first, but at the critical decision point they are both all-in on defection - Pompey just lost the resulting war.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
For most policy positions, the revenge effect is not there. If the other party bans abortion or immigration, you will not be tempted to do the same in retaliation.
The retaliation is mostly on procedural norms which get changed to wage the culture war. If your side is firing all the federal employees who support the other side, then my side will do the same whenever it is in power. If your side is deploying the national guard to unfriendly cities, then my side will deploy the national guard to unfriendly cities. If your side is rounding up residents and deporting them to El Salvador megaprisons without due process for having some tattoos which may or may not be gang related, then my side will interpret displaying a confederate flag as renouncing one's US citizenship and deport them to Venezuela, so your side will retaliate by doing the same for the pride flag.
Of course, it is hard to play tit-for-tat with perfect proportionality, because situations are not symmetrical. So things escalate over time.
Sorry for the nitpick but I think you phrased this backwards.
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