domain:natesilver.net
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
10hr ago
That being said, I like guns, and wish I lived in a jurisdiction where I could shoot beer cans with the boys over a barbecue. And not the anemic shotguns or hunting rifles can get in the UK, those bore me to tears. Give me a minigun in Vegas, and give me the salary to fire it for more than a few milliseconds.
I know you're in the UK, but if you ever swing across the pond to the US, DM me. If you're gonna be in my area I'll take you shooting. I, tragically, do not have an actual machinegun (my username can be considered more aspirational than factual) but I do have many interesting guns.
jkf
10hr ago
It reads as LLM output to me as well -- more importantly failing the everpresent tl;dr criterion.
So while I'm not sure how posting a bunch of screenshots of you chatting with an LLM is supposed to make people think that you didn't generate the post using an LLM, if it's the case that you take so much input from the LLM that your post sets off people's LLM alarms, even though you typed it all out using your own fleshy hands -- maybe you are just working a little to hard on this, and it would be better to simply give us the straight slop?
Since I couldn't read your post (my AI detector involves reading normally, which for me means a lot of skimming -- and when I start to skim after two lines and... just don't stop, I figure LLMs are involved somehow and am almost always right) my comments on the actual content will be sadly limited -- however from the perspective of an actual Canadian who knows a couple of elderly & sickish people who did choose assisted suicide I can say this:
While I'm in favour of people being "allowed" to do more or less anything they want (direct and deliberate harm to others aside), in practice the whole thing feels... not good, in the pit of my stomach -- mostly I don't like the "assisted" part all that much, nor the moral preening that seems to go along with it. Could be that people just don't know how to do this thing correctly yet, but I'm not sure that's all there is too it.
The motte is a cancer riddled 96 year-old in constant pain, marking the minutes and waiting for the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death -- the IRL bailey (IME) often seems to be rather different from that.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
10hr ago
Tylenol is somewhat uniquely dangerous, it would possibly not have been approved as over the counter in the U.S. in today's regulatory environment.
I'm not sure we'd have any OTC drugs in the US starting from zero in today's regulatory environment. Analgesics especially even get banned for prescription use (like the COX-2 inhibitors), because regulators refuse to consider that trading off risk of death against pain is valid in the first place.
That's a failing of today's regulatory environment, and has no bearing on whether I should be able to buy a big bottle of death.
My APAP related disgust is reserved for drug warriors who ensure that oxycodone with APAP is the most available formulation of oxycodone, because they consider people trying to abuse it dying horribly to be a feature and not a bug.
ulyssessword
10hr ago
As always, there's a relevant XKCD (even if it came out after the comment was posted).
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
11hr ago
We're planning a trip to Greece. Where should we go beside the obvious Parthenon / famous sites / etc?
Lizzardspawn
11hr ago
Anyone following the new South park season? You can get a sneak peak here.
https://youtube.com/@southpark/videos
Unsurprisingly they are going after Trump's administration and hard. So far the first episode was offensive incoherent mess, the second is offensive coherent mess. I hope the rise in quality will improve. They are obviously trying to bite Trump administration into retaliating and seems to be succeeding - seem to have the uncanny ability to find the snowflakes - starting with the snowflake in chief. Vance is playing it cool, so I suppose his mocking will diminish.
“This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention,” the statement read. “President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history – and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”
I am confused what is better for USA now - Trump to die now and Vance to take reigns now and only have 2 mandates or to die after the midterms and have two and 1/2.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
11hr ago
Fi is more like a programmable CPU; it can do almost anything, and the exact "software" that is being run will vary greatly between different Fi users.
So what happens when a Fi gets programmed with highly neurotic/anxious software? Are they discernible to other people as any different from an Fe?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
Think that it’s a bit silly to worry about what people think about guns, mostly because the people who are against gun don’t really know much about them. And furthermore, it doesn’t answer the question of whether or not guns are actually contextually good. If I lived in a place where the police and legal system were unable or unwilling to enforce the laws that keep people and their property safe I would want a gun because I need to protect myself and my family and my property. If I lived in Japan I wouldn’t want one because it’s pretty safe even at night.
Throwaway05
11hr ago
Tylenol is somewhat uniquely dangerous, it would possibly not have been approved as over the counter in the U.S. in today's regulatory environment.
This is for a couple of reasons.
-The therapeutic and toxic range are way too close (aka it's really easy to overdose accidentally, which does happen).
-It has significant interaction with some medical problems (aka liver metabolism). This is admittedly pretty minor in most situations.
And most importantly:
-Tylenol overdose is one of the worst possible ways to die. It is long, and slow, and for a while you think you are fine. This gives people lots of time to decline in misery knowing they made an irreversable choice. It's awful. Most other forms of overdose kill you quickly or rapidly alter your sensorium.
This creates agony on the part of the victim and their family, and also a significant amount of angst and distress in the healthcare team.
If you like you aren't paying for the minor inconvenience of harder to pull out of the packaging pills vs. fewer suicides, you are doing to reduce clinician burnout and doctors and nurses in the workforce longer.
It's also expensive to manage.
I don't think it's presumptuous to assume that most Americans understand what road markings mean. (Insert joke about the drivers in your least-favorite state.)
My state's driver manual:
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Explicitly mentions double solid white lines and broken white lines.
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Doesn't mention single solid white lines (outside of the separate context of shoulders—MUTCD § 3B.09), but they're pretty rare, outside of (1) construction zones, where they typically are accompanied by "stay in lane" signs anyway, and (2) intersection approaches, where changing lanes is forbidden under state law, as mentioned in a different part of the driver manual.
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Doesn't mention dotted white lines, but IMO an attentive motorist (or new motorist and former passenger) should have noticed the growing prevalence of these lines over the past decade.
JarJarJedi
11hr ago
And right they did. The police shouldn't get away with doing unlawful shit just because not every citizen has a law degree and keeps up to date with mountains of caselaw.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
11hr ago
Noted. You won't take back either statement - I am still dumber than a parrot (given the retreat you have been on over the last few posts I guess that's score 1 for parrots?) and you still want to see me meet a tiger outside of its cage, but you would throw rocks at it.
I am familiar with hyperbole. I am also familiar with the mechanics of shaming. I think you are too and you know that isn't a defence. Shame often uses hyperbole to express the level of emotion of the shamer and to trigger a more visceral reaction in the shamed. Can I start ending my arguments on the motte with die in a fire if I promise it's rhetorical?
On the topic of your grandma, you have my condolences. Retreating to literalism is just more condescension though, it's not an argument I will engage with, particularly when I already noted the hypothetical nature of the exercise. I will simply point out that you had the opportunity to deploy your intern model in a hypothetical with a novice user and you refused - twice now.
You have not needed to argue any of this.You're clearly capable of nuance when you want to be - over the past day you've written however many words on MIAD in that other thread and also given me a detailed breakdown of how and why you'd throw rocks at a tiger. You chose, after explaining the superiority of the intern model, not to use it. After having the discrepancy pointed out, you chose again not to use it. You can't imagine using it because it does not work as a cognitive shortcut, case closed. High five Sam Waterston. Created by Dick Wolf.
Lastly, my point about Tesla is that the fact that you are willing to pay for ChatGPT plus is a mad defence against the claim that you are evangelising on its behalf. You don't need to pay someone to advertise your product if they are already paying you, that's advertising 101 - you let the principles of brand fusion and post purchase rationalisation do their thing, eventually reinforced by the sunk cost fallacy. As these things go it's closer to a confession than it is to a defence.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
Eh, most gun deaths are either suicides in the privacy of a home, or lowlifes shooting each other for some gang related reason. The crime of passion of someone carrying a gun is pretty rare.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11hr ago
Apparently large swaths of healthy, neurotypical humans have been experiencing emotions and ethical decision making in entirely different ways from each other and no one ever told me?
I took a one week break from TheMotte because I was writing an entire freakin' novel about all the weird and wonderful facets of human subjective experience I was learning about from my study of the MBTI personality system (it's actually not a theory of "personality" per se, it's more like a theory of perceptual cognitive architecture of which personality is just a nondeterministic byproduct, but, whatever). And then I realized that if I broke the 10k word mark, there would probably be no one who would actually take the time to read it. So you're getting a hyper-condensed version of what was going to be "chapter 1", because this concept in particular was just so fascinating to me, and so immediately applicable, that I really felt compelled to share it.
I quickly learned from discussions with the MBTI community that many of us are subjectively experiencing the world in quite dramatically different ways, and I had let some of these differences go underappreciated before. This reddit thread was one the earliest signs that something interesting was going on; it asked the question, "Do you feel emotions as physical sensations or intense thoughts?" My immediate reaction was, "well obviously intense thoughts, right? Or, I guess it's a little more abstract than that, it's more like a thought plus something else that's kind of ineffable. But not a bodily sensation. What would that even mean? Stuff like 'getting red hot with anger' is just a metaphor, right? I mean, ok, I guess if you hooked me up to a machine when I was angry you could measure an increase in body heat, but I don't think I've ever been consciously aware of that in the moment. The only emotion that comes with a physical bodily sensation is anxiety. Now that one is very palpable, the characteristic stomach-twisting nausea of intense anxiety is unmistakable. Thick weights dragging you down, unable to move. One of the primary, perhaps the primary, sources of unhappiness and discomfort throughout my entire life. Surely this sensation is a universal part of the human experience, yes?"
And then I scrolled down to the replies:
I’m INFP. I would primarily say I experience emotions on a physical level in my body. Which makes sense also, as I have almost no internal dialogue. The exception would be when I am in an anxiety spin. Then I do feel in thoughts.
What the heck are you talking about how do you have it exactly backwards, also what do you mean you have no internal dialogue how can you just admit to being an NPC like that.
Ok, so what I thought was universal from birth, turned out to not be universal. Got it. What else could I have gotten wrong?
Each of the 16 MBTI personality types is classed as either an "introverted feeler (Fi for short)" or an "extroverted feeler (Fe for short)" (you can check here if you're curious which one is which). What these terms actually "mean" is... not entirely clear, because this whole thing was based on some notes that Carl Jung scribbled in a book in 1921, and people have just been kinda wingin' it since then. But I had independent reasons to believe that there was a legitimate phenomenon going on here that was worth investigating. If you just engage in a cursory "surface level" investigation for the actual definitions of Fe and Fi, you'll often be presented with something like the following: Fe means "placing the group above the individual; orienting one's value judgements based on what the group thinks, rather than what the individual personally values; acting in accordance with commonly accepted values", and Fi means "placing the individual above the group; orienting one's value judgements based on one's own internal moral compass, independent of the moral judgements of others; acting primarily to maintain one's sense of authenticity to one's own values". And those concepts seem... bizarre and not particularly helpful. Surely everyone's a bit of one and a bit of the other? Few people, under these definitions, would want to admit to being a "Fe user" (as the MBTI jargon goes). Value judgements are always a complex interplay between self and world; they are never purely internal nor purely external. Furthermore, a number of self-identified "Fe types" were making what seemed to me to be highly bizarre claims such as, "I'm not even sure if I have any opinions of my own sometimes, I can't really know what I'm feeling until I externalize it somehow". How can someone not know what they're feeling at any given time?? Nonetheless, I was intrigued enough that I had to keep digging.
The breakthrough really came when I realized that I had to stop thinking in terms of grand philosophical examples and life-defining choices and focus on how people act in ordinary, everyday, non-stressful social situations. At that point, a clearer dichotomy between "Fe" and "Fi" (or, we might say more uncharitably, "neurotic people pleasers" and "selfish assholes who seem to be unaware of the existence of other humans") starts to emerge. Michael Pierce gives probably the best "definition" of Fe and Fi (aside from my own definition that I'm going to give right after this):
A boy and a girl, being an introverted feeler and an extroverted feeler respectively, are approached by a stranger who attempts to interact with them. The extroverted feeler, the girl, acts in a way that she judges most appropriate for the situation. She finds the stranger amiable, and so she seeks to respond in a way that will be most comfortable for this particular person, or at least that will have the most effective impact on the person's feelings. Thus, she is working out her judgements of value in the moment by working with the person, and is removing herself from her calculations, focusing entirely on what is comfortable for the stranger, for them. In contrast, the introverted feeler, the boy, observes the stranger with detachment at first, somewhat shy and deciding whether the stranger's manner is appealing to him. He compares and relates the stranger's actions to what he, the introvert, personally feels is pleasant or unpleasant, and very much makes it a matter of what he himself feels and knows is right. He therefore remains much less expressive than the girl, as he is not focused on how this stranger would expect him to act, but only how he feels that he should act, and much of that action is purely psychic, as it is not the boy's primary concern to influence the stranger's feelings in any way. He'll also notice certain things the stranger does that he finds commendable, and others that are irritating to him, and these stand out as important as the boy assimilates his impressions of the man into himself and renders his judgement.
In either instance, the default instinct (in the girl's case, to act amiably, and in the boy's case, to act according to whatever is rendered by his own internal value judgements) can be overridden by rationality if the situation calls for it, but this is a picture of the default "pull of gravity" in the introverted feeler and the extroverted feeler.
The account of the introverted feeler here seems to be approaching an almost mythological level of detachment from social norms and practical concerns, an ideal standard that no mortal could ever reach. Like, barring mitigating circumstances, how can the goal of social interaction not be to make the other person feel good, or at least avoid causing offense? Hello?? But, if the accounts that I've been reading are correct, this is essentially how a great number of people go about experiencing life on a daily basis (or at least this is how they subjectively experience life, regardless of how much they must actually modulate their behavior due to social norms out of rational self-interest).
After a great deal of ruminating on various anecdata and my own personal experiences, I arrived at the following "distilled" definitions of Fi and Fe. My highly speculative hypothesis is that these are not just statistical generalizations of clusters of traits that are observed in the population, but may be related to actual neurological differences between individuals; sort of like two different architectural versions of the Human Morality Processing Chip, Intel vs AMD. Both of these architectures are very much designed for functioning in face-to-face interactions in tribal hunter-gatherer societies, and should be thought of in that context, rather than as generators of abstract moral beliefs:
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Fe is more of a quick and dirty algorithm, like an embedded system that can only do one thing: the directive is simply to minimize human suffering in the immediate physical environment, and that's about it. The Fe user takes in as much emotional data from other people in the environment as possible and unavoidably factors that data into the decision making process; negative emotional states in other people will almost always produce some level of felt discomfort, resulting is an instinctual pull towards alleviating that discomfort or extricating oneself from the situation, though obviously there will be many mitigating circumstances where this empathetic pain reaction can be blunted, e.g. in cases of self-defense. Fe users tend to feel emotions in a less intense and more transient manner than Fi users, and, speculatively, they may in some sense have less emotional introspection on average than Fi users. It seems that things are set up this way so that their own emotions will not override the "prime directive" of focusing on others' emotions, and this all seems to be tied into their tendency towards greater emotional expressiveness as well. (I tried doing an experiment myself. Normally I like to be walking around while listening to music, or at least doing something active. I tried sitting absolutely still, not even any facial expressions, while listening to a song that normally makes me quite happy. The emotional reaction did seem to be significantly blunted, almost to the point of disappearing entirely. I'd be interested to know how common this reaction is.)
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Fi is more like a programmable CPU; it can do almost anything, and the exact "software" that is being run will vary greatly between different Fi users. The "instinctual pull" in this case is towards the fulfillment of the Fi user's own judgements, and not towards the alleviation of suffering in other people. Fi users certainly can factor another person's internal subjective emotional statement into their decision making process, but this is only done contextually when the Fi user has decided that it's relevant according to their own internal value standards. It is not the same automatic, unavoidable process that it is for the Fe user. As the name "introverted feeling" implies, Fi naturally sees its own feelings as, well, introverted: private, unique, generated wholly out of the self, and therefore, not something that needs to be shared or discussed. In a sort of automatic typical-minding, the Fi user assumes that I have my feelings, you have yours, they have no particular relationship to each other, and so there's no need to express them in outward displays of emotionality. (This is not the case for the Fe user, as their emotions are quite literally dependent on the emotions of those around them.)
It is not the case that one can straightforwardly say that Fi = male and Fe = female, although that is the general trend, despite numerous exceptions. According to random images on Google image search that had data that was probably pulled out of someone's ass, the two most common MBTI types in men are ISTJ and ESTJ (both Fi types), and in women the two most common types are ISFJ and ESFJ (both Fe types).
We can now see where the earlier surface stereotype of "Fe = herd animal" came from. If your body has told you on a literal, physical level from birth that your value is dependent on the value judgements of the people around you due to the palpable discomfort you feel at the negative emotional states of others, then the general trend will be to align your more abstract moral views with the views of those around you, in order to seek their approval and minimize internal cognitive dissonance. It takes an intelligent and independent-minded individual to develop their own independent moral thinking in these circumstances. (I'm not throwing any shade at women here -- this is absolutely how my own body works too, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that this may not be a universal human experience!)
My entire life I've been perpetually flabbergasted at how so many men could just... do things, without seeming to care much for the impact that their actions have on others. These things could be anything from aggressive sexual advances on women that any reasonable person could predict would cause them distress, or it could simply be a tendency towards perpetual rudeness and bluntness in situations where I would be instinctually driven to sugarcoat my words and attempt to elicit agreement. A generalized weakening or strengthening of the anxiety response in different individuals is probably part of the explanation, but it's not an entirely satisfactory theory on its own, as one individual may be highly neurotic about one thing but not neurotic at all about others. (It is easy to imagine, for example, a ruthless corporate attorney who ruins lives for a living while also being a huge germaphobe, or perhaps he feels palpable fear over issues of immigration.)
I never really thought about the issue that deeply; I suppose I just accepted it as a fact of life. If I had a theory for how some individuals were able to act so boldly in matters of interpersonal conflict, it would have been something like... a total obliviousness to the potential consequences of their actions? As in, they just weren't "thinking" as much as me, and if they "thought" more then they would align themselves closer to me in terms of choosing to act cautiously. Or else they had access to some infinite wellspring of courage and willpower that I did not. But this new theory seems quite a bit better: some people are literally capable of just not weighting their decisions based on the emotional states of others, even in the absence of significant stressors. (This might sound like a huge "duh" moment, but keep in mind that when I talk about "weighting" data in the decision making process, I'm talking about palpable, involuntary, bodily instincts; it's very easy to typical-mind and assume that everyone is feeling the same physical sensations as you, and they're just choosing to deal with them in different ways.)
In spite of how highly speculative this concept is, I feel like it's been so immediately applicable for me that I can't throw it out. There are certain people in my life whose behavior used to mystify me; now that I understand them as "high Fi users", it suddenly all makes sense, and I'm much more empathetic to their point of view.
Anyway, that might all sound insane because I had to cut out multiple examples and intermediary reasoning steps, but if this idea sounds interesting then I'm certainly willing to discuss it further.
(As a parting gift, I was fortunate to come across this today, although it should perhaps be renamed to "Real Fe vs Fi moment")
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
Yeah, downtowns are not my cup of tea, but they’re not very dangerous- and theres no shortage of city neighborhoods you don’t want to go to for crime and danger reasons.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
Uh, Czechia has genuinely liberalized its gun laws recently- as has most of the rest of the former eastern block. I seem to recall Poland has liberalized its gun laws yet further recently, too.
Overuse or misuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic-resistant infections, which can spread to people who weren't even on said antibiotic. They can ruin the natural balance of the gut microbiome, causing Clostridium difficile infections. As you've mentioned, some unfortunate souls get nasty allergic reactions which can kill them from the anaphylactic shock. I'm talking about all the ways they can cause harm, with no carve outs.
Edit: They can also be hepatic enzyme induces or inhibitors. If not planned for, this can cause overdoses or underdoses of seemingly unrelated drugs.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
The U.S. of white america would not be as safe as Europe, or indeed Canada, unless by ‘Europe’ you mean the Balkans and some ex soviet countries. White Americans also have higher crime rates than all French or all Canadians- although black Americans have higher crime yet still.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
It’s pretty common to run on, and sometimes push through, substantial easing of gun control in Latin America.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
Just want to chime in to say that gun rights are a standard part of the Latin American populist package- usually couched as ‘you, law abiding citizen, can protect your family from crime’- thé region having extremely high crime rates.
TheDemonRazgriz
11hr ago
If it’s just morbid obesity, it’s life changing for those people, but I don’t think it’s something that’s going to spike the stock price like if you cured a common and deadly disease like cancer
There are a LOT of morbidly obese people. This would still be a major customer base.
JarJarJedi
11hr ago
As you probably know if you are an American
This reminds me of https://xkcd.com/2501/
I think these days they would argue that the reason is mostly because of synergistic analgesia (which is not incorrect) but yes I agree it's a questionable cost/benefit.
But ultimately society is organized around tradeoffs in your rights to enable you to have rights and the conveniences of civilization. Having to deal with mildly annoying blister packs or smaller bottles doesn't seem like a high price to pay for the amount of pain you can prevent.
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