domain:forecasting.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
But offworld datacentres are a really dumb idea at present tech, why would you want a massive drama getting to the servers to replace something if it breaks? Why would you want them to be hundreds, thousands of kilometres from eachother instead of networked all right next to eachother? Why would you spend rockets on them?
Starlink satellites have good enough bandwidth and Huawei has plenty of networking talent. It seems like they'd be better off sending that data to earth than processing it in space.
Space-solar isn't that cheap, China has plenty of cheap power. I just don't see it getting funded unless it's for guiding missiles over the horizon, something to do with ECM or signals intelligence that demands very low latency and orbital compute.
Throwaway05
17hr ago
How old are you?
My life before smart phones was so different. I love that I can pull out and read any book I want, I love that I don't need a separate device for music, I love that I can research anything anytime instead of writing it down and searching through my encyclopedia at home.
Have you ever tried a long road trip with a physical map?
Yeah they ruin a lot of stuff and may not be worth it but don't forget what they've added.
Throwaway05
17hr ago
I don't think you are wrong, and at the same time if you look at the NFL the majority of the coaches are quite obviously awful.
Is giving advice just that hard?
WandererintheWilderness
17hr ago
Not that principles should get in the way of doing what is right.
This is a baffling sentence. How do you define "principle", if not a belief about "what is right"?
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
17hr ago
Not quite, this is still scientism. Economics can help answer the actual object-level question, "Are tariffs an effective way of obtaining a desired outcome?" It can tell you what the trade-offs are.
But the questions of what outcomes are desirable, and what trade-offs are acceptable, are values questions.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
17hr ago
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.
In the same sense that it's "arguably correct" that the Earth is 6,000 years old. It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.
For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns, riots, and total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him. The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested. That would have been a perfect example of "revenge logic" if the whole post weren't artlessly partisan, but it's an even starker example than that. Bolton is about the most perfect patsy to sacrifice to defend "principles", to regain some clout and credibility for the next time people want to throw a show trial at Trump. And instead we just see wall-to-wall meltdowns decrying and denying any possibility of fair play.
If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.
Corvos
18hr ago
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.
But for example if free trade increased the overall prosperity of the country 10% and the financial district 200% whilst the prosperity of blue collar workers and those in the rust belt heavily decreases, ‘good for the country’ again becomes a little tricky. Especially if you start to consider the second-order effects of this policy on the finances, social structure and industry of the country.
WandererintheWilderness
18hr ago
a choice between sticking to their guns or going under
Sorry for the nitpick but I think you phrased this backwards.
thejdizzler
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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!
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr 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
18hr ago
Fair.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
18hr 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
18hr 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!
18hr 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.
Yes, but I think there is truth to the claim that many political disagreements are genuinely downstream of disagreements about the object-level questions, not value differences in the weighing of whatever associated trade-offs exist.
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