domain:questioner.substack.com
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
There are lots of views posted to the motte which are offensive to various sorts. I don't understand why your offense at racism should be privileged?
Actually, let's take a broader view- society tolerates, and even encourages, lots of views which are very offensive to me. Why is your offense at racism worse?
roystgnr
1hr ago
Switching voting systems would help a little bit with the issues with sequencing too. Right now, typically a handful of states decide which handful of a large candidate pack are "serious candidates" for Super Tuesday, Super Tuesday knocks it down to 2, and everybody else just gets to pick between those 2. With something like approval, the ordering of votes still matters (because you still have to vote tactically, and what that means depends on who the front-runners are), but it can be hard to impossible for an earlier state to "knock out" a candidate who's more popular in a later state. If the race's narrative and polling all looks like it's A vs B, but everybody in your state would prefer C, with plurality it's not safe to vote for C unless you don't have a preference between A and B, but with approval you can turn your A vote into an {A,C} vote without risking getting B elected, your opponents can turn your B vote into a {B,C} vote without risking getting A elected, and C can actually win.
On the other hand, running a campaign is expensive. If the early states like A and B, but later states would prefer C, even if you have enough C voters to make C the winner, you have to hope that C knows this and is willing to risk the expense of waiting on all of you. You're right that everything would be driven by polling.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr 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!
Goodguy
1hr ago
I found WhiningCoil's comment to be unpleasant, but that doesn't invalidate the site for me. My opinions about black people are much much more sympathetic than that WhiningCoil comment and they often get a decent amount of upvotes too. Sure, there are many racists here. I mean actual racists, not race realists (I don't think there is anything bad about being a race realist). So what? If you don't like those comments just skip them. This site gets enough posts per day that the mods are simply not capable of policing all content that breaks rules such as "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument", which WhiningCoil's comment certainly does. I think the mods do a decent job given how few of them there are.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
1hr ago
I had over 100k posts on the Misc. section of an mma message board where we all basically did what we do here, with a much lower base IQ.
Not once did anyone’s insults start with the Qing dynasty and the forum was much less because of the lack.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
You don't seem to understand the basic shape of a pyramid.
When the working class get turfed out of their working-class jobs, they don't smoothly transition into managerial or knowledge-economy jobs. Their communities died and once independent and hard-working people all slid into the welfare-and-fentanyl pit of despair. But you don't care about that. The fact they yearn for the old terms of their social contract is somehow a moral failing and poverty fetishism on their part, according to you.
There is no feasible way for the entire working class to move up into the managerial class for all the immigrants you seem to think are more suitable for these jobs. They are the losers of a world of open borders. They're not economic deadweight, they're your countrymen, for God's sake! You owe them your consideration, more than any immigrant or foreigner.
You can imagine Iskander Al-Turok, Qatari sheik, smugly and arrogantly say that Qataris are above the enfeebling drudgery of taking care of infants and washing toilets, as he locks his Bangladeshi maid's passport in his wall safe. What's the difference? What's the difference between an UAE princeling letting his hirelings die in the desert heat building soccer stadiums without a water break and a Californian farmer overseeing his Mexicans work sixteen hour work days?
If the people doing this work were their countrymen, they would not be treated so pitifully.
Why is this evil necessary?
With all due respect, given the choice between your respect and your contempt, I'd pick the latter. I know who you adore and admire: to be put amongst the ranks of those men would surely damn my immortal soul.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr 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.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2hr ago
No LotR experience either! Outside of half paying attention to the movies when friends/family were watching them when they first came out.
Now if you referenced Japanese pop culture I’d have a much better chance of picking that up…
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2hr ago
Here are my results from asking it the bordering states of Nebraska. Note that I ask this in a bit of a tricky way to check if the LLM is actually comprehending my question. Frontier models can almost always get it correct with the notable exception of the Wyoming test (they usually don't think a 'y' is a vowel in that word). But K2's performance is just pathetic, it's like 4o-mini levels of bad.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
2hr ago
(Never watched GoT and I have no idea who “Grima Wormtongue” is but that seems pretty anodyne as far as name calling goes.)
I did not expect someone to miss a LOTR reference on TheMotte. Ever.
roystgnr
2hr ago
You don’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people don’t.
Lots of people like Bernie. After Super Tuesday, when the vote was no longer split between anybody but him and Biden, he still got millions of votes, something like a third as many primary votes as Biden. But "a third as many as Biden" isn't enough to win a Democratic primary, and he's much less popular with independents and Republicans than with Democrats.
If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him?
The 2020 "heroic action" mentioned originally was that three candidates who were doing much worse than him or Biden dropped out of the race after (significantly after, in Warren's case) their trajectory became apparent, and picked someone to endorse instead. That's not heroic action by the Democratic Party, that's just what losing candidates do to make the loss less expensive and less embarrassing.
For other less inactive forms of Party action, though? Insanity happens at this level, where people have orders of magnitude more power than average but not much more brains than average. Why did Clinton push the "pied piper" strategy with Trump? Because she didn't think Trump had a snowball's chance in hell at winning either. If her fans overestimated Bernie's odds in the primary too, well, clearly they're just not the best estimators.
And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly,
3 to 1. Even counting the earlier votes from when the pro-Biden block was split, it was still 2 to 1.
and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth
What would it have taken? 5 to 1?
and losing the left wing of the party for good.
Despite my expression of annoyance with Duverger's Law in another comment, I do admire the way it selectively encourages people who are bad at math to disenfranchise themselves. Though this is another way in which plurality fails "democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader", the "democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader" thing is important too. It may be for the best that people who can't hack game theory end up with less influence over mechanism design.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2hr ago
· Edited 2hr ago
There shouldn’t be a specific taboo on psychologically analyzing another poster’s motivations, or making meta observations about their style of argument or topics of interest, as long as the comment otherwise meets the normal standards of cordiality. Such observations are often extremely germane to the discussion.
(Never watched GoT and I have no idea who “Grima Wormtongue” is but that seems pretty anodyne as far as name calling goes.)
aqouta
2hr ago
I do agree that another voting system might be useful but it's not even the first past the post thing, it's also that they do every state in sequence. It's actually pretty hard to design a system around this kind of thing, especially because the primary isn't just about the voting but had also kind of morphed into a narrative building function. If you get rid of them and ran it all at once then you'd have the campaigns be very driven by polling which has its own problems.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2hr ago
The value of TheMotte is precisely in the fact that it allows for cordial discussion of extremely controversial views, including racist views. The system is working as intended.
aqouta
2hr ago
They didn't. Refusing to do something stupid that is required for him to win is not a heroic effort. Bernie is not entitled to the people representing the more popular platform splitting the moderate lane 4 ways so that he can win with a minority of the vote. "why didn't you let the guy that your base didn't want lose so that his followers, who never liked you anyways would whine less" is jot a serious argument.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
So where exactly are they talking about it? They don’t say that as their agenda in most public facing platforms. Kamala didn’t run on “let’s be more socialist” nor was there a Socialist Agenda 2025 that would get that to happen. Kamala and most of the apparatus ran specifically as Anti-Trump, referring to the agenda as dangerous fascism, scaremongering about white Christian nationalism and Project 2025. They started calling JD Vance weird. And keep in mind that this was the Presidential Election Campaign, and they were pouring everything into winning, but they never really said “we want universal healthcare” or “let’s build a bunch of infrastructure” or “the government should raise the minimum wage.”
To me, this points to one of two things: either the agenda is unpopular and they know it, or they don’t have an agenda to run on. It just doesn’t make sense to say that socialism is popular and they want socialism, but they are running on Orange Man Bad Evil Fascist With Kooties.
6tjk
2hr ago
Hispanics use SNAP at a far higher rate than whites and are also more obese and less educated than whites. I don't get what the point of your anecdote is.
6tjk
2hr ago
But the way historical America existed was keeping naturalization exclusive to whites only. Why does Japan get to keep its historical standard but not America?
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
As I will never get tired of explaining - the fact that something is racist doesn't make it wrong or false.
6tjk
2hr ago
I mostly agree with you, but I think that the levels of integration mean that if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants, while any immigration-caused decline in America will be permanent because the migrants have assimilated.
AFAIK the reason the Maronites did not carve out their own state was because it would not have been economically self-sufficient, they even lobbied the French for the inclusion of Muslim-majority agricultural areas such as the Bekaa Valley into Lebanon in order to avoid a repeat of the famines that had occurred under Ottoman rule. That being said, Maronites and Lebanese Christians in general have a weird sort of self-conception as Lebanese, given that they were the ones who lobbied for their rapey Muslim Lebanese countrymen to come to Australia. I can't imagine Europeans feeling that kind of kinship to their foreign underclass.
Lizzardspawn
2hr ago
Those shirts looks badass.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2hr ago
See the original comment, since we're talking about adopting out of foster care here:
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system.
NunoSempere
2hr ago
Relatively quiet week this time:
Anthropic has a $200M contract with the US DoD , as have a few other companies
A good roundup of rumours about Xi
OpenAI agent
Israel bombs Syria
Africa records over 4,200 cholera, mpox deaths in 2025
Gunmen Kill 1,111 Nigerians, Abduct 276 in June
Syrian troops accused of executing civilians in Druze amid Israeli strikes
IDF Ordered To Strike Syrian Regime Forces Invading Druze-majority Suweida
Syria Druze reach ceasefire with central gov, though a previous one fell. Israel also fired on the central gov in Damascus
They have been negotiating with the Islamist-led authorities in Damascus since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in an attempt to achieve autonomy but have yet to reach an agreement that defines their relationship with the new Syrian state. ...reports The Guardian. Btw, the Spanish federal system, where the central government defines foreign policy, and some formerly rebellious provinces (the Basque country) don't pay federal taxes and have special priviledges (fueros) could be a good model here.
Almost 300 killed in wave of violence in Sudan's North Kordofan
Israeli-linked ringleaders and elements arrested in southwestern Iran, says Iran's news agency
Israel launches airstrikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon's Bekaa valley
US demands to know what allies would do in event of war over Taiwan
Eventually lasers will render this obsolete again, I suppose.
More options
Context Copy link