domain:mgautreau.substack.com
TracingWoodgrains
12m ago
Sorry, I don't buy it. Give one example you faced of "worse treat[ment]" anywhere near comparable in vehemence, scale, and forum support (keeping in mind that these were only some of many) or I simply do not believe you.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14m ago
@Primaprimaprima, you asked for it, here it is.
how do you have the same impact on others?
A person is wrong. Why are they wrong? Could be a lot of things. Maybe its their values, maybe they've got bad information, maybe their reasoning is off, maybe they're just malicious. Hard to say. And from the other side, someone is telling you you're wrong, maybe any or all of these are true about that person. Meaningful dialog requires common ground and credibility. Without that, there isn't really much point.
I was a Blue for a number of years, and the Blue habits of thought die hard. I once had a discussion with a family member, who is probably best described in tribal terms as a Christian, about torture and the classic "terrorist with a ticking time bomb" scenario. I argued that obviously you should torture the terrorist, because it's worth it to save the lives of everyone else on the plane. He pointed out that you can't actually "save" a life; all humans die sooner or later. I'd been arguing about these sorts of Utilitarian scenarios for years, and I had honestly never thought about it that way.
And this is where the inferential gap starts becoming visible. Both Blues and Reds can recognize that you can't "save" a life, but the understanding of what that actually means is fundamentally incompatible. The Blue understanding, in my own experience, would be something along the lines of "of course, you dummy, this is why we have QALYs, you totally need to account for the differential age and health circumstances, etc, etc, of the various passengers." The Red understanding would be closer to:
“Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods,"
...And I have zero confidence that the above communicates anything across the gap, any more than it did last time I tried. I could say that the Blue understanding is of a variable in a system, ultimately under our control, and that the Red understanding is an encounter with something vast and utterly beyond us, something that demonstrates that our aspirations to control are a childish pretense. I could say that for Blues, the problem is that your math might be wrong, and that for Reds, the problem is that you think you're in control, that your accounting of the variables actually correspond to reality in some meaningful way such that you can do math with them. I could say that Reds have a fundamental belief that death is deeply natural and that Good Deaths exist, and Blues, to a first approximation, view death itself as a pure negative and see death, at best, as a lesser evil in exigent circumstances.
And saying any of those things, I would expect Blues to disagree vociferously on all counts and throw out all sorts of reasons why I was wrong and uncharitable. And maybe they're right; all I can say is that I was deep, deep blue for many years, and the above is my best analysis of how I used to think and how I perceived other Blues thinking, even back when I agreed with them. I maintain that Blue thinking is founded on the assumption that systemic control is possible, and Red thinking is founded on the assumption that it is not.
All this to say, after spending years talking to Blue Tribe Rationalists, I was thinking like a Blue Tribe rationalist. I was thinking in terms of systemic control, doing my utilitarian calculations, shutting up and multiplying, mapping out the structure of "social conditions". For a given utility function, how do we maximize utility in the face of hostile actors? If they do this, then game theory implies we should do that, then they do such and we do so-and-so, and at every step what matters is the result. I argued with a lot of people, and all of them argued from within a similar frame, but argued that my variables were wrong or my math was wrong, and I found their arguments profoundly unpersuasive, and often increasingly radicalizing.
Hlynka rejected the whole frame. Unlike any of my other opposites, he made a solid argument that he shared my core values and my understanding of the facts, but that the calculations I'd built atop these were bullshit. He communicated, effectively, that all my appeals to game- and systems-theory were just obfuscation of the reality of my own individual choices. No one makes anyone else do anything, ever. All our actions are chosen, and we are each personally accountable for those choices. The point isn't the end result, because nothing ever ends: our choices are the only result that matters. In my case, I was choosing to embrace and nurture hatred, and I needed to stop doing that.
I had forgotten all this, and he reminded me. The funny thing is, he didn't even make this argument explicitly. I asked him what he thought we should do, given the situation. I was expecting another unpersuasive argument about how moderation would maximize the utility function better than my preferred strategy of extremism, and I was prepared to poke holes in that argument as I had dozens of times before. But his brief answer ignored such calculation entirely, and simply focused on what was the right thing to do, regardless of the results. His answer drew on many things I valued but had been ignoring for a long time, and by modelling what a better answer looked like according to my own values, he changed my mind. That changed my behavior in my conversations here and in a number of other ways not immediately visible through my interactions here.
That's the best description I can provide.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
17m ago
Most scientific and academic papers I read don’t do this though. The abstract only says their conclusion for a few criteria, sometimes only in general terms. The discussion or results section you’ll often find more complete conclusions and a lot of sentences that contain words like “surprisingly”, “unexpectedly”, “interestingly”, “one noteworthy finding”. That’s a lot of information that should be front and center rather than buried in the discussion section.
Tenaz
21m ago
Honestly that doesn't seem that bad to me. I've been treated worse for some right-leaning opinions I've expressed here. Most everyone was careful to say how much they liked and respected you despite their disagreements, and the less polite were quickly censured.
NelsonRushton
29m ago
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime
Great post. I wish you would post more.
NewCharlesInCharge
31m ago
The emails weren't merely deleted, her staffers destroyed electronics with hammers.
Yeah.. some of that is true.
My steelman for the government's actions is that they're doing what they feel is best for the country because something something Century Initiative*. Country needs population to support its social program Ponzi scheme (and I mean that with love. Free healthcare is great, but it is expensive. So is OAS). It needs to be paid for with an expanding population's taxes, and where that population lives is not Ottawa's problem. It's not Trudeau's fault most of Vancouver still looks like this.
But no. I don't think the average Canadian benefits from higher home prices. The average voter? maybe. So then you have the PM just come right out and admit it. "Home prices cannot be allowed to fall". It's generational warfare, and our politicians have picked the side their votes come from. The boomers get to retire. You get to eat the bugs.
*scroll down on their site to see the estimated population change since midnight. Do you think we've completed anywhere near that many homes? Or even started building them?
CertainlyWorse
Dedicated Pessimist
41m ago
I watched one of her other videos on Speed Dating (with which I have some experience). I agreed with just about all of her points, but they were buried in words words words. Many more than should be required to get her point across.
Hyperion
46m ago
She used a private email server to do government business a practice ubiquitous, but illegal, because it let's you sidestep FOIA requests. Look at the recent fury over Fauci doing the same. Hillary had the misfortune of having her sever hacked, unlike everyone else. But, the fortune of having all the emails deleted by a careless aide before they could be subpoenaed.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
47m ago
There's not one person in this country who has decided this is the moment to hop off the fence, "Okay, now I won't vote for the man."
Elections are won and lost by a percentage point or two. I don't think it's unreasonable to speculate that possibly one to two in a hundred American voters doesn't like Biden but won't vote for Trump after enough messaging about him now being a convicted felon. It also may not have any such effect, or have a reverse effect. Time will tell. But you're overconfident.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
50m ago
I mean, I can't speak for Smotrich, but if his goal is to crush the dream of Palestinian statehood, that project does seem to be further along now than it was on October 6.
SSCReader
51m ago
probably because they didn't think it was clear that paying Daniels was a campaign expense.
I believe not, just pointing it out because it does counter a couple of your points (that they didn't think it was clear paying an affair partner was a campaign expense) and (paying through an intermediary doesn't make it a donation).
For McDougal they held it was a campaign expense and that AMI paying it made it a donation, which therefore needed to be declared etc.
For Daniels, Trump paid back Cohen which is the difference here, not whether it was a campaign expense, or whether absent Trump paying it back it would have been a donation. Both of those were held to be true in the McDougal case. Paying the intermediary back is the difference here.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
53m ago
That is what I was thinking of, yes :)
Dean
1hr ago
Kind of a similar category to Biden's campaign secretly hoping for Trump to say the n-word or something.
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
1hr ago
Scientific papers already do this; the abstract is almost always first and it does exactly what you want.
Yes, some ideas do need to be slow-rolled (or the audience has to be primed), but that’s also so exceptional a case that it might as well not exist and even that doesn’t need to blow the twist if you do it correctly.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1hr ago
Different establishment. The establishment that cares about corporate tax cuts probably has some cultural and interpersonal overlap with the establishment that is involved in New York judicial system but it is not like that they are the same set of people with coherent agenda.
The establishment is like the Man -- fuzzy concept that sometimes have informative uses but still fuzzy, which makes it too imprecise and underdefined for other uses.
Dean
1hr ago
Michelle's comments were funny at the time, given that the contemporary Democratic/media strategy was to regularly accuse or insinuate opposition to the Obama administration was based on racism, even as the Obama administration employed political machine politics at the national level. It was very consistent with assuming a posture of moral superiority while simultaneously going low.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
That all sounds fair to me. Feel free to add stakes or keep it a gentleman's wager.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
That employee contributions to political campaigns graph that gets passed around every once in a while puts the NYPD as being as red as the marine corps, border patrol, and ‘homemakers’.
Stellula
1hr ago
they're harder to crack and wash shit off of
EXACTLY this. This is the exact reason why.
dasfoo
1hr ago
But why would SCOTUS want to "squelch" this?
Because wide latitude for states to prosecute presidential candidates is going to be extremely chaotic and destabilizing. Ideally, yes, candidates who have committed crimes should be prosecuted without favor -- but you have to acknowlege that state party operatives are going to abuse this newly validated tool in cynical and destructive ways.
EDIT: One of my most important rules-of-thumb for politics is, "Do I want a candidate/party/official I don't like or trust to have this power?" If the answer is "No," then I don't want it for my team, either.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The subsidies and large tax credits are part of what makes it a reasonable financial decision; the thirty percent credit gets to you immediately and you still have the low payment, for one thing.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
I'm glad you mentioned the eggs. My neighbor had me watch his chickens and I thought "ugh, these taste like the feed bag I was using for them instead of mellow butter, and they're harder to crack and wash shit off of"
ThisIsSin
Tomboys: transgender or transcendental?
1hr ago
2x, because that's the fastest it goes without other extensions (I go to 2.5-3x when a platform supports it). A lot of what I watch could honestly just be blog post + picture, and a lot of people talk very slowly (I'm not convinced that's intentional, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was).
I can't really do that for music channels for obvious reasons, but for anything else, the information density of video is far too low normally.
(I also read extremely quickly by most standards, too, so that might explain some of it. Now if only I could use that power when reading technical documentation...)
i don't think reporting requirements constitute any sort of expenditure limitation though. As I understand it, candidates can spend unlimited amounts on their own campaigns, they just have to report what they spent. I don't see how an obligation to document your campaign expenditures counts as an imposition on free speech.
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