domain:gurwinder.substack.com
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
Life is fragile and can be snuffed out at any moment. The day she crashed her bike I hugged her as tightly as her scrapes would allow. Not all parents are so lucky.
Ok, cool, but what policy do we implement to fix it? Because there are very much people out there trying to use this tragedy to implement a variety of policies. It's amazing how many anti-gubmint conservatives turn into nanny state liberals when a natural disaster occurs. Which is why it's important not to get too caught up in tragedies, it quickly becomes a con designed to get you to buy into an agenda.
I'm sure the crash was awful for your daughter and you both, but I'm having trouble parsing how you told the story. Are you taking an excessive parental responsibility when you say that you "forgot" to teach her about the brakes? Because it's just hard for me to imagine not going over the brakes before you even get on the bike in a "parts of the bike" kind of way, or a curious kid just asking what x does. I'm kind of assuming you did tell her about the brakes, but didn't drill using them enough that she remembered how to use the brakes quickly under pressure.
But regardless, what policy could prevent such a bike accident? Kids can't ride bikes! Parents can't teach their kids to ride bikes, they have to be enrolled in a Licensed Bicycle School! Kids can only ride bikes with complex and expensive Automatic Emergency Braking systems! The latter two are of course equivalent to "poor/disinterested kids can't ride bikes."
So sure, hug your kid. But keep your priorities straight.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
8hr ago
Nah It's all good, normies don't have the wherewithal to make stuff or trade against consensus, I'm going with John Galt on this one.
It's like this because you're in one of the rare online venues where thoroughness is rewarded, and the parent parent parent culture of LessWrong seeded ours with norms around writing massive walls of text.
Most of GP's advice is about not shooting yourself in the foot. How not to get your likes ignored. How not to have a conversation fizzle out. etc. Get to the date and enjoy spending time with women, even if they're not the women you'll end up dating long-term or marrying.
Or you could just attempt The Hock, I guess?
odd_primes
8hr ago
Dumb influencers aren't unique to TikTok. Years ago people were eating Tide Pods and posting the videos to YouTube or Facebook, and influencers have been shot while messing with strangers for "prank" videos. All of these platforms moderate content like this, but it's a cat and mouse game with users who want to evade the filters. YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are copycat services offering the same short clip style of content, with the same issues.
It's a bit hard to take the TikTok moral panic seriously when the main driving force for the ban was US tech companies mad that they were being disrupted (or looking to buy the distressed asset for a discount), and it only took off thanks to AIPAC and the ADL getting upset that TikTok refused to aggressively moderate pro-Palestine content. The content can be dumb, but I don't think a sufficient case has been made for banning the service on national security grounds.
daezor
8hr ago
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
8hr ago
higher rates of Palestinian-related content but lower rates of Uyghur-related content versus similar social media apps, among others
Is there evidence that this is not because US-based social media actively suppresses pro-Palestinian content? As for the Uyghur content, that topic has always been minuscule (and felt thoroughly astroturfed during its moment in the limelight) so who knows what is going on there. Maybe the approximately two people still making Uyghur content avoid TikTok because it is Chinese all by themselves.
No_one
9hr ago
The claimed there was a hit but the plane was only damaged, lost power or control (e.g. hydraulics leaking after hits) and then fell into Croatia. You know, the country with which they've fought a brutal war 7 years earlier.
If you're young this may seem a little odd -why would a guided missile miss... but the missile was cutting edge 1960s technology, employing 60 kilograms of high explosive to offset accuracy issues inherent in high powered but still analog command guidance over distances of up to ~40 km. It doesn't have a computer or radar seeker or anything, it's guided by commands from the user, like a huge and particularly malevolent RC toy.
We know from the reports (e.g. the other F-117 damaged and limping back to base) that the 1960s missiles, which were designed to be used against high flying and large enemy bombers were obviously not hitting stealth planes dead on and the first missile that shot down the F-117 even failed to fuse. There'd have been nothing left from an F-117 or any other plane after a close hit,
If two stealth planes were hit in the war, with one destroyed, the odds of another, much larger stealth plane getting damaged by fragments seem fairly good. Stealth planes inherently have worse flight characteristics and B-2 is a much larger, long range plane which, especially if loaded, cannot evade as well as the other war planes used against Serbia at close range back then.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9hr ago
· Edited 7hr ago
I don't think the law is bad. As Zvi said:
TikTok is not purely an op. TikTok is a legitimate highly predatory business, and also TikTok is an op.
There have been surveys showing that most TikTok users would prefer that TikTok not exist (they're still there because everyone is there and that imposes social costs on anyone who's not), never mind the non-users. It's got massively-negative externalities - and at least part of those externalities are malicious attempts by the PRC to destroy the USA.
It is one of the roles of government to destroy things with massively-negative externalities. This is one of the primary clauses of the social contract - "we'll deal with the villains in an orderly fashion, so don't murder them in the streets". Yes, not all TikTok bans would be net-positive; Zvi was an opponent of the RESTRICT Act, for instance. But this one looks good; the scum just managed to bribe their way out.
FtttG
10hr ago
But in our conditions, you get a high-trust society by cracking down on fraud, teaching kids that fraud and stealing is bad and that honesty is the best policy (yes, all the old saws), punishing fraudsters when you catch them, instructing people to be vigilant about scams, and the likes.
In the book, Dan Davies cites numerous examples in which fraud became common in a particular community (whether that's a religious affinity group or a website for trading drugs), the community dutifully responded by implementing anti-fraud protections, but because these protections imposed some kind of cost (typically monetary, but potentially also an opportunity cost in terms of time and effort), some of the people in the community elected not to use the anti-fraud protections and instead take their chances without - and because most people in the community were trustworthy, this gamble paid off most of the time. There comes at a point at which the cost of protecting oneself against being defrauded exceeds the expected return.
Consider how much documentation you have to provide when applying for a mortgage. Now imagine if you had to go through that process every time you were buying or selling something through a webshop (e.g. eBay). With such a policy in place, it would be nearly impossible to defraud someone (or be defrauded) via this webshop: but because the process is so onerous, no one would use this website and it would go out of business, departing for competitors with less rigorous protections against fraud - which, inevitably, unavoidably means that some of the people who use the competitors' websites will get ripped off.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
10hr ago
yeah it's gotten game of telephoned indeed. I heard it get called Double tapping in justin Taylor's youtube channel figuring that's probably a more "modern term" than what legal scholars from the 70s were saying...
The other place I read it is https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol108/iss3/10/ which is an article from 2006
I don't see anything in here about the question of the uniqueness of government rule enforcement being with violence/kidnapping. Mayyyybe this:
Equals in rank or station within civilized society have a fundamentally different relationship and method of conflict resolution, one which specifically prohibits or codifies the escalation to a state of war.
But it doesn't actually discuss rule enforcement. How do you do rule enforcement? Like, any example of rule enforcement? I've given two example scenarios. You can give others. How do you do it in the case of maximal-opposition?
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
10hr ago
Shooting at somebody after you've already hit them.
Shoot>Hit>Shoot again to make sure they're actually dead.
FtttG
10hr ago
Aren't low-trust societies the ones riddled with fraud and corruption?
In the sense of people voluntarily parting with their money or goods in the expectation of being paid back at a later date, no, I think this is a common misconception. You can't defraud someone without an expectation of trust, which means that fraud only happens in societies in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy, which means that bad actors in low-trust societies are forced to resort to cruder methods (theft, armed robbery etc.) to extract money from their victims.
FtttG
10hr ago
You could make the same point about "it is highly unlikely the optimal level of murder/rape/beating children to death is zero".
yes_chad.png. See this sketch: there comes a point where the marginal cost of further investment in child protection is greater than the expected return, and those resources would be better allocated elsewhere. No one thinks that spending the entire annual budget to ensure that not a single child dies a premature violent death is a sensible way to allocate resources, which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business. Alternatively, a country in which child murder literally never happens probably curtails its citizens' liberties so aggressively that it would be profoundly undesirable to live there for other reasons.
Maybe you think this point is so trivial and obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, but I actually don't think it is. During Covid, I encountered plenty of people who really did claim to believe that there was no amount of economic hardship they didn't think it was worthwhile enduring if it meant a few people in their eighties got to live an extra year or two.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.
That level of messing around with basic biology means that you're going to do better creating android bodies to implant the brains in. Plus, why would you get grandkids for the parents who let their kids be switched around from male to female to female to male to gay to straight? The confusion about "am I going to have babies or make someone else have babies" will be enormous, if you're mucking about with "biological female but interested in 'male' subjects during education so transitioned to be trans man, but now we want them to be straight to have babies"? Pregnant (trans) man if you left the original plumbing intact, but after all the hormone dosing and surgeries there may not be too much functional plumbing left. Even worse if you want to have your trans man now be able to father babies with their neo-penis, where's the viable sperm coming from?
And even after all that has been sorted out, there's the stubborn problem remaining of "people like having lots of sex but don't like having lots of babies to try and raise, they will dodge having kids if at all possible". Maybe your EXTREMELY straight men and women will all be having anal sex because that's more fun than boring old penis-in-vagina sex, especially after "between the ages of ten and twenty-two I was gay as an entire Pride parade and fucked all the guys/gals", trying to rewire psychology may be a lot tougher than "chop off the breasts, now put the breasts back with fake plastic tits".
FtttG
10hr ago
I get the point about trust being necessary, but if everyone is so trusting they can be plucked like pigeons, then eventually there won't be any trust.
Yes, and as described in the book, this is exactly what happens without sufficient protections against fraud.
The optimum is to have as little fraud as possible. No fraud at all may be impossible to achieve, given human nature, but surely trying for "as close to zero as possible" is the better option than "eh, shit happens, let the fools who fall for scams be weeded out by natural selection, it's nature's way".
"as close to zero as possible" sounds pretty much like Dan Davies's preference for how much fraud there should be in an economy.
HereAndGone
10hr ago
Yes, but then we have to explain how a high-trust world has that many fraudsters. Maybe they don't, maybe it just takes one. But in our conditions, you get a high-trust society by cracking down on fraud, teaching kids that fraud and stealing is bad and that honesty is the best policy (yes, all the old saws), punishing fraudsters when you catch them, instructing people to be vigilant about scams, and the likes.
You don't get a high-trust society by shrugging off "well some people are gonna steal, that's just how it goes". Even less with an attitude that "we need some people to be scammers, else we don't get vigorous economic development!" That's simply asking for systemic African nation levels of corruption, bribery, and stealing from the public purse when you're in power. After all, if I, General Warlord Tsombé, don't rob the treasury blind, then my people will not be reduced to abject enough levels of poverty to trigger Western aid, and that means in turns the NGOs and USAID-type bodies can't employ all the college-degree activists to deliver said aid!
HereAndGone
10hr ago
I guess the planes /decks / towing equipment aren't designed to not slide when at maximum tilt.
Given the reports of terrible procurement policies in various armed forces and how bloat, cost over-runs, and inability to deliver a working product are endemic, it might just be exactly this: "well you never said you wanted us to factor in that a ship, at sea, will be rolling and heaving and tossing and turning when we were designing for 'dead level still as a millpond nobody's shooting at us' conditions!"
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
10hr ago
At a guess: A high-trust world would be singularly susceptible to fraud, since people needn't be on their guard at all. Turning a high-trust world into a zero-fraud world requires extremely invasive surveillance. So zero-fraud implies extreme totalitarianism.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11hr ago
Has people "realised that the TikTok ban is bad"? Are there identifiable Congresscritters who have flipped that would mean that the ban would no longer have a majority? I haven't noticed anyone changing their mind on this point who hadn't just agreed a lucrative business transaction with a TikTok investor. I haven't seen anything happen that would change a sensible, normal person's mind about TikTok since the ban was passed.
Occam's razor says that Trump flipped for personal reasons (probably his relationship with TikTok investor Jeff Yass), and that the reason why Congress doesn't care is that a supermajority of Congressional Republicans defer to Trump about essentially everything.
I have a hard time imagining Obama saying "I will not have this day of triumph be overshadowed by some fucking technical failure. Make the bodies go away, I don't care how."
Not to get all conspiracy theory but it needn't be a decision Obama made, or was even aware of. Besides, Obama etc. were quite happy to set up the whole photoshoot in the Situation Room like this was some Aaron Sorkin scripted movie about The West Wing: Independence Day.
The bin Laden raid was every bit as much about propaganda as anything else, and "some of our elite force were killed by these miserable stumblebums" is not the image the originators want portrayed. "We dropped on them like the wrathful hammer of Thor, obliterated them, and came away without even a scratch" is the message of power, influence, superiority, and 'we can get you wherever you are and not even break a sweat' to be publicised. See the nonsense about what happened bin Laden's body or who exactly shot him:
After the raid, reports at the time stated that U.S. forces had taken Bin Laden's body to Afghanistan for positive identification, then buried it at sea, in accordance with Islamic law, within 24 hours of his death. Subsequent reporting has called this account into question—citing, for example, the absence of evidence that there was an imam on board the USS Carl Vinson, where the burial was said to have taken place. On 15 June 2011, U.S. federal prosecutors officially dropped all criminal charges against Bin Laden.
Dropping the charges is another symbolic piece of theatre, whatever the legal requirements; there are all kinds of objectives to be fulfilled in an incident like this beyond the merely literal.
It was widely reported by the press that Bin Laden was fatally wounded by Robert J. O'Neill; however, it has also been widely discredited by witnesses, who claim that Bin Laden was possibly already dead by the time O'Neill arrived, having been injured by an anonymous SEAL Team Six member referred to under the pseudonym "Red". According to Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, Bin Laden was struck by two suppressed shots to the side of the head from around ten feet away after leaning out of his bedroom doorway to survey Bissonnette and a point man. Once the Navy SEALs entered the bedroom, his body began convulsing and Bissonnette along with another SEAL responded by firing multiple shots into his chest.
"Yes, they killed our leader but we took vengeance by killing some of them" is not the comfort you want your enemies to take away, you want to make sure that there isn't anything that can be used to build up the mythos:
Pakistani authorities later demolished the compound in February 2012 to prevent it from becoming a neo-Islamist shrine.
Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.
Even worse would be "Yeah, they killed themselves by a screw-up". But yes, the parsimonious explanation is that "if you're a soldier, your chances of dying are higher, especially if you're flying around on different high-level dangerous missions".
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
I don’t mean just “disgusted by mainstream ideology”, I mean the kind of person who would uproot and move to an enclave specifically to forward an ideology. Escaping woke doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to move to a Nazi enclave. You could do equally as well moving to a rural town in a deep red state. Almost everyone in rural Mississippi is anti-woke, and a good number of them would be seen by city dwellers as racist. They are also fairly normal people who haven’t made being anti-woke a personality.
cae_jones
11hr ago
Bees make way better communists than humans, and there's way less competition, and they do what man was assigned to do in Genesis, and keep the gardens flourishing. This is actually starting to sound like a good idea. But there are no flowering plants in Space, and we can extend humanbee happiness several orders of magnitude via star-lifting, so either the entity who bebeeified humanity does all the space stuff while Beekind does all the life stuff, or we need to figure out how to make Space Bees work. /🧐
I disagree, there were various leftist justice reform DAs that won big in NYC, Philly etc. De Blasio was on the progressive wing of the party; he wasn't Chesa tier but effectively welcomed that movement into office.
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