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"Medicine" is itself an example of the "noncentral fallacy" you criticize: it includes great things like surgery and trauma medicine, vaccination, treatments based on actual understanding of biology like insulin, and miscellaneous drugs that are claimed to do useful things for mysterious reasons. While there are certainly effective things in that last category, like antibiotics and painkillers, the "epistemics" of the field strike me as pretty shit: if quinine were proposed as a treatment for malaria today, I expect the medical establishment to say things like "that's tree bark juice. You are not a squirrel."
The local flavor of quackery where I grew up was Ayurveda, and my view of the herbal remedies suggested by its practitioners is they're no worse than what they called "allopathy": try the thing, and if it works, it works.
Ah! Might I recommend Tengwar Artano instead? It uses the same glyphs, but includes many modern "smart font" features, such as ligatures, automatic under/overbar widths, and improved diacritic placement. (And perhaps most usefully, and my primary motivation for reëncoding it, it's easy to use it with XeLaTeX.)
Also, you probably want to use the Quenya mode mode for Namárië.
They do the same thing with "child pornography": that's mostly teenagers sexting. And a girl was convicted for it too, charged with distributing child pornography of herself: link.
Or just capitalize the "C".
"Would you destroy a better world to save this one?"
From Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota, that might be an interesting reframing of this wager: you are destroying (the chance of) a better world, more than twice as good as this one, to guarantee the survival of this one.
If you want a non-Twitter attribution link, you could use the collection of his "greatest poasts": Internet Archive. This one's on page 67.
Fisher, The arrangement of field experiments, Journal of the Ministry of Agriculture (1926):
If one in twenty does not seem high enough odds, we may, if we prefer it, draw the line at one in fifty (the 2 per cent. point), or one in a hundred (the 1 per cent. point). Personally, the writer prefers to set a low standard of significance at the 5 per cent. point, and ignore entirely all results which fail to reach this level. A scientific fact should be regarded as experimentally established only if a properly designed experiment rarely fails to give this level of significance.
This is why. Relevant smbc.
Is this a Lisp-to-Python transpiler?
Is this development unexpected enough to worth remarking upon? This is just Conquest's Second Law.
Without looking it up, I'd bet there are plenty of people who get added to this list by mistake, and can't get themselves removed, like the people who got put on the US's no-fly list, or get declared dead.
My tennis coach in high school yelled at me for prefacing line calls with "I think …" and I have taken that lesson to heart. Since then, I try to only say that if I'm extremely unsure about what I'm claiming.
has no moral implications whatsoever
I do in fact believe morality to be entirely orthogonal to "consensus" or what "many other people" want, and since you call this "selfishness," I shall return the favor and call your view, for all that you frame it as "coordination" or "scalable morality," abject bootlicking.
A roaming bandit's "do what I tell you and you get to live" could be thought of a kind of contract, I suppose, but I wouldn't consider myself bound by it if I could get away with breaching it. I consider the stationary bandits' "social contracts" not to be meaningfully different. One clue to how they're similar is how the more powerful party can go, à la Vader, "Here is a New Deal. Pray I don't renew it any further." Unilaterally reneging on such a contract when you are the weaker party would certainly be unwise, for the same reason trying to stand between a lynch mob and its intended victim would be—simple self-preservation—but I condemn the suggestion that it would be immoral.
If everyone does this, we lose civilization.
I see what you call "civilization," and I'm against it. I vaguely recall reading of a medieval Christian belief that if everyone stopped sinning for a day, Christ would return and restore the Kingdom of Heaven. This reminds me of that: would be nice, but it ain't gonna happen.
societal/governmental/democratic authority.
There is a certain type of person who would look at the mountains of skulls that Genghis Khan piled up and before judging it evil, ask whether it was a state acting or a group of individuals.
Fuck that. States/governments, "democratic" or otherwise, have absolutely no privileged moral status, and to hell with any norm that suggests otherwise, and to hell with any "civilization" that promotes such a norm.
What the state can do is wield violence far more effectively than you, so if you want to level a city, say, Beijing or Moscow, yeah, you should get the US military to do it instead of trying to do it yourself. And it can wield violence against you if you defy its will, so it's a bad idea to do so publicly, but for purely pragmatic reasons, not moral ones.
If you could do whole-brain emulation for dolphins, you should be able to generate enough data for unsupervised learning that way.
I don't understand the problem you're trying to solve.
If you just like the aesthetic of cash transactions and want to see more of them, you could just mandate all brick-and-mortar retail stores only accept cash.
If you want to save people the hassle of doing tax paperwork, and offload that to banks, that's also easy: just mandate that banks offer for free the service of filing taxes for all their customers. If you have accounts with multiple banks, they can coördinate.
If you want to stop high-frequency trading, just ban it.
One consideration is the government wouldn't want to encourage (harder-to-tax) cash transactions.
J. D. Vance's (may he live forever) tweets about AI safety and open source (from March 3, 2024), replying to Vinod Khosla's advocacy for more centralized control:
There are undoubtedly risks related to AI. One of the biggest:
A partisan group of crazy people use AI to infect every part of the information economy with left wing bias. Gemini can’t produce accurate history. ChatGPT promotes genocidal concepts.
The solution is open source
and link
If Vinod really believes AI is as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, why does ChatGPT have such an insane political bias? If you wanted to promote bipartisan efforts to regulate for safety, it's entirely counterproductive.
Any moderate or conservative who goes along with this obvious effort to entrench insane left-wing businesses is a useful idiot.
I'm not handing out favors to industrial-scale DEI bullshit because tech people are complaining about safety.
He also said in a Senate Hearing about AI (around 1:28:25 in the video. See transcript):
You know, very often, CEOs, especially of larger technology companies that I think already have advantaged positions in AI, will come and talk about the terrible safety dangers of this new technology and how Congress needs to jump up and regulate as quickly as possible. And I can't help but worry that if we do something under duress from the current incumbents, it's gonna be to the advantage of those incumbents and not to the advantage of the American consumer.
I don't see any reason to structure this agreement as an open-ended compact other states can join instead of a bilateral agreement between just California and Texas as proposed.
(The same reasoning applied to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would have its membership closed as soon as they reach a majority in electoral votes, and then completely disregard the votes of any state that didn't sign on, voting in whoever gets the most votes in member states.)
This is a little like the case of the Haruhi Problem, where a significant advance regarding the number of superpermutations was made by an anonymous poster on 4chan. In that case, the ephemerality of the post was a reasonable concern, and the solution was someone reposted the proof on ArXiv OEIS (with "Anonymous 4chan Poster" as the first author), and then cited that.
Here, you have a fixed url, so you could just follow the established conventions for citing webpages. I don't think you need any special justification for it, nor do you need to treat this as anything other than "merely another online website" (you don't think it's "snobbish or discriminatory" to pretend it's something more because you count yourself among its users?).
Why pretend, and not actually throw a stone? Or is this meant as a feint in case you can't find one lying within reach?
decreased in proportion to how many people bet on the election
No, how many male citizens twenty-one years of age do. Neither the 19th nor the 26th seem to override this.
a police force should constantly operate to perform sting operations and monitor illicit behavior
And this is where your elegant system falls apart. Are the members of this police force also randomly selected? If not, who appoints them? Do they serve for life or fixed terms? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Would it be fair to describe finitism as "a belief in at most one infinity"?
what 2% compounding annual economic growth feels like
On the flip side of this, imagine what a 2% economic contraction, year after year, for two centuries would be like. I can't find the source for this (I don't think it was Bret Devereaux), but This talk suggests that's what the Collapse of the (Western) Roman Empire would have felt like.
Even setting aside any criticism of what a "true democracy" is[1] and whether the US's is better than what China has for Americans, your claim is that it's better for everyone. I don't think there's good reason to believe this; I'd expect that foreign policy is a more relevant thing to compare, and China's is broadly more non-interventionist than America's: if you were far away from the borders of both, you're more likely to experience American bombs[2] than Chinese ones.
- ^
I suspect what you have in mind conveniently includes decidedly anti-democratic protections for minorities.
- ^
In service of noble causes like spreading democracy and human rights, protecting the rules-based international order, and stopping genocide, of course, but that's cold comfort when your family have been blown to bits.
A few of the "distinct meanings" you list are very different from the others, but many of those are pretty similar. "Values" is a pretty broad term, including everything on the "ought" side of the is–ought divide, less "high-minded or noble" preferences, and one's "ranking over possible worlds", and that's fine: it seems like a useful (and coherent!) concept to have a word for. You can be more specific with adjectives if context doesn't adequately clarify what you mean.
Seeing through heaven's eyes or not, I see no meaningful difference between the statements "I would like to sleep with that pretty girl" and "worlds in which I sleep with that pretty girl are better than the ones in which I don't, ceteris paribus." I agree this is the key difference: yes, I conflate these two meanings[1], and like the term "values" because it allows me to avoid awkward constructions like the latter when describing one's motivations.
- ^
I actually don't see two different meanings, but for the sake of argument, let's grant that they exist.
This is a lot like the time they awarded it for the invention of the blue LED, so I don't think "hype" is a good explanation. I agree it's bullshit though: it's not a physics achievement in any meaningful way.
The Chemistry one for AlphaFold seems reasonable to me.
Would you say the same thing of people saying they looked at the Wikipedia article?
Agreed, and I say the same of Errors of Types I and II, where false positive/negative are much better.
consensus over certain foundational assumptions involving set theory and infinity.
Are you referring to things like the Axiom of Choice (which is obviously true), the well-ordering principle (obviously false), and Zorn's lemma (who can say)?
Yeah, that stuff is weird.
Abraham was a complete hack who never got anything right in his whole career
I like this quote about him, by Born and von Laue in his obituary, which might be saying the same thing but more poetically:
He loved his absolute aether, his field equations, his rigid electron, just as a youth loves his first flame, whose memory no later experience can extinguish.
This bit that precedes that suggests that he holds them responsible for their choice of outlet to work for:
jobs in journalism are hard to come by, but many of you are clever, hard working, insightful individuals. You have other options. … No one forced you to do this. If you choose to, it's on you.
And I agree with this. The headline is part of the article, much like an abstract is part of the paper.
Thus it is said, "You don't hate journalists enough. You think you do, but you don't."
There was a nice t-shirt with "Some Assembly Required" whose uplifting message about these "bastions of democracy," reminiscent of Diderot's quote about priests and kings, I think about from time to time.
I think the better advice is to stop thinking they "exist to help us understand the world." Their business is gossip and lies. And they act like it.
First, I apologize for my comment about you not making an effort. That was more an expression of frustration than accusation.
Let us shelve the discussion on the semantics of judgment vs. self-righteousness. Probably too subtle to be worth bothering with.
Before the Kavanaugh affair, I thought Trump acted entirely in naked self-interest. But how he handled it showed me he was more than I had given him credit for.
a thought-policing dystopia
Yes. What do you think the "cancel culture" we've been decrying for years is?
Just to clarify, I didn't come up with the friend–enemy distinction. That's straight from Carl Schmitt.
I didn't ask whether he used the phrase. He did. My question was whether you thought he used it to describe neo-Nazis. If you did, I wouldn't blame you: that's the impression the media has been cultivating. Would it surprise you to learn Trump, a few sentences later, said explicitly, "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally"?
I don't think your resistance or lack thereof to counter-evidence about this particular quote is relevant. The question is whether you will continue to trust the people who left you with that impression when they knew better. If they show you another clip of Trump saying something you think is terrible, will you assume until proven otherwise that it isn't grossly misleading? If they claim "anonymous sources" told them things about Trump, will you believe they aren't just made up? If they make a claim about how many lies Trump told, would you take that as a reasonable estimate if they don't present you with a complete list you can inspect?
Your mistake is in assuming the statements you care about and act on are randomly sampled in the space of all statements that people make. No, they'd be adversarial examples, crafted to manipulate you.
Yes. Several. Without looking up a more complete list of conspiracy theories, I'd list the existence of the Deep State, manipulation of the historical record by the Soviet Union, and the biological reality of race and sex.
Nullius in verba. On no one's word.
No, not really. Except for the "established systems in democracy," the others have lied too much, and suppressed the truth too often. And the democracy one is secretive by design, and has done nothing earn my trust.
It don't get the impression you're making an effort to understand my position. It barely feels like you read my response. It could be my fault; I will try to be clearer.
I don't think that you should feel bad about liking someone who makes you feel less judged.
You misunderstand me completely. I was criticizing your description. Which you've just doubled down on.
it doesn't really make sense to like someone both for their morality and amorality.
Sure it does. You just need to be clear what you mean: antiheroes are a perfectly coherent thing. He's not a good guy, but he's on the right side, and he occasionally does great things.
Their "self-righteousness/judgement" is the least of my objections to the Left, especially during the Kavanaugh affair. They fabricated obviously false rape accusations against an innocent man because it might get them what they wanted, and they knew they'd get away with it. I don't think "evil" is a particularly useful term in general, but if it is to mean anything at all, it would be used to describe everyone who participated in furthering that. And they would have triumphed if Trump had done the easy thing.
My "demographics" are unlikely to be helpful in understanding my views, but fwiw: Male, South Indian heritage (though on any forms that ask, I leave that blank), either Millennial or Gen Z depending on whom you ask, middle class, atheist, advanced college degree.
much more pressing concerns than the theoretical thought-policing dystopia I fear the Left could eventually evolve into
I don't think there are any concerns more pressing than that. I also don't think it's "theoretical" or "eventually."
And since you mention McCain and Romney, you'll remember that they lost. And I assess that to be because they didn't actually care about winning, believing losing politely to be just as good.
you don't mind his rhetoric?
I like his rhetoric. Funny and blunt.
inauguration speech, which is possibly the most negative, divisive, us vs them speech
What? I take the view that politics is distinguishing between friend and enemy, but that speech wasn't that. I looked looked it up: he really only condemns the establishment/Washington.
Broadly, my suspicion is that you trust the establishment news media too much, and let their description of events affect your perceptions the way they intend. That would explain the difference adequately. Here's a good test: do you believe Trump called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 "fine people"?
As a side note,
undermined tens if not hundreds of millions of people's faith in our democratic system.
Lots of people say almost identical things about "faith in institutions" or "experts/Science!™" as well. If their faith is misplaced, undermining it is good, actually. Electronic voting and mail-in ballots are more vulnerable to large-scale fraud than traditional in-person voting. And I bet you would recognize this if this was happening elsewhere. For example, Russia now has voting online, and plans to make that universal. I expect you understand why that system is not in fact "safe and secure" even if you can't any specific fraudulent votes
I don't think that quite captures it. That makes it sound like I've done something I think I should to feel bad about. No, it's more the lack of sanctimony. The lack of … hypocrisy.[1] I despise the holier-than-thou self-righteousness of the other side, and he feels like the antithesis of that.
A related part of this is the inspirational aspect of his own behavior. Fear does not recall him from danger. Shame does not recall him from infamy.[2] He is vulgar. Rude. Uninhibited. Free.
Now, after saying all that, the Kavanaugh thing wrecks that narrative. Contrary to the meme, they weren't after him. They were trying to hurt Trump, and he just happened to be in the way. I could easily imagine someone I knew and cared about being in Kavanaugh's position, and the Democrats were casually ruining his life for their political goals. They were blatantly lying about him, and backed by the most powerful institutions in America, they were going to succeed. It felt inevitable that Trump, whom I thought to be supremely self-interested, was going to withdraw the nomination, and, for no fault of his own, a man would spend the rest of his life in ignominy. But then, Trump defied my expectations and stood up to them. Against this force that seemed inexorable, he stood. At first alone, and then the Republican Senators rallied behind him. And they won: Kavanaugh now sits the bench. I guess it doesn't sound like all that much now, but I was emotionally invested in this story as it unfolded, and the best description of what I felt is awe. The man I saw in the President's chair then was a leader fighting against impossible odds for a righteous cause. I don't think Trump is always that man, or even usually, but he can be.
Quite the opposite, it seems to me, but what you consider "misuse" and "harm" depends on what you value, I suppose.
Both aldehyde fixation and liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation are techniques easy to perform, and routinely employed in ~every biology lab for cell cultures. Reversing the latter is trivial and also routine; reversing the former is not possible with current tech.
How relevant you consider this is up to you. My guess is that people intuit that with improved technology, the relative difficulty of reversing these on the macro scale would be the same.
this is a heresy, in that it contradicts a core tenet of Christian doctrine: the exclusivity of Christ
I suspect this issue can be side-stepped if you point to some "pluralist (neo)-Hinduism" that makes Jesus an avatar of Vishnu.
it's bad for presidents to threaten people with guns
They do this indirectly all the time. This is the basis of all laws of the federal government. Yes, I think it's bad, but I don't think it'd be fundamentally any worse for Trump to point a gun at Pence than for, say, an FBI agent (acting under the aegis of the Executive Branch, i.e., the President) to point a gun at a drug dealer.
But I agree it'd have been a stupid thing to do for many reasons: the threat wouldn't be credible, he'd get removed from office even if it works, people he needs to govern would turn on him, voters will switch to supporting Democrats, … that's not winning.
Edit: This is also the basis of my criticism of the rabble-rousing on January 6. It's primarily a matter of aesthetics.
Arguing matters of law regarding transfers of power in the highest echelons of government is … misguided. It's like arguing with Reddit mods about what their rules say when they ban you. Or more classically, paraphrasing Pompey (via Plutarch), "Stop quoting laws at us. We have the swords." What the laws/rules literally say doesn't mean anything; how they're enforced is all that matters [1].
(I suppose if one were religious, one could consider the letter of the the Law sacred in some way, not to be profaned regardless of consequence or enforcement, but I am not.)
If you win, there are many ways it can be made legal. For example, the Supreme Court rules on what the law says, they say the Constitution overrides all federal laws, and the Constitution says the President has the "Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons," so he pardons himself and everyone involved [2].
The strategy Trump tried (or one very similar) worked in 1876. I consider that extremely relevant, though as I said earlier, the plan was unlikely to work in 2020. The Electoral Count Act passed in the interim mattered insofar as its threat was sufficient to dissuade Mike Pence (and probably several state governors) from coöperating, so I guess it did its job.
I don't know what you mean by "fine." I would have preferred Trump win. Some reasons for which I listed on my top-level comment.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by "legal," (according to whom?) but no, not in the slightest.
- ^
Is it even worth listing examples of times politically powerful members of the ruling class flouted laws they would have enforced harshly against commoners? Just look at the many instances during the "covid" lockdowns, for a start.
- ^
You could say their actions would still be illegal even if the law can't be enforced against them, but I consider that a distinction without a difference.
passed the ITT
@Pazzaz That's the Ideological Turing Test. I agree that really ought have been written out in full.
I reject the premises of this blatantly loaded question.
The strategy Trump attempted to win the election using alternative electors to keep Biden from getting a majority so that Congress would decide the Presidency, reprising the similar (successful) strategy employed by Hayes in 1876, was unlikely to succeed from the outset, and poorly executed to boot. So yeah, I think it was "bad" in that sense, but probably not what you mean. Do I think it was an insurrection or a putsch, or a threat to "our democracy," or anything like that? No, no more than this appeal to electors in 2016 to change their votes was a foiled plot to overthrow the government.
Would it be a restriction on freedom of speech to fire every civil servant and replace them with "our people"? I think it would.
Why does your argument about how the government is free to allocate funding however it wishes in the context of NSF grants not apply to civil servant salaries? About personal loyalty to Trump over the Constitution[1] or whatever,
you can disagree if that should be a factor, and maybe you think it's stupid to have as a requirement, but just because they have different priorities/beliefs than you doesn't mean they're stifling freedom of speech.
…
But this doesn't really impact freedom of speech, it just means they prioritize [not being critical of Trump] differently than you would. The government thinks [party loyalty] should affect [civil service positions]. You don't. Someone will always feel left out when [civil service hiring] is allocated, and feel "forced" to act in some ways to receive [employment]. But I don't see that as a restriction on "freedom of speech".
- ^
This dovetails nicely with your other argument, about him "trying to steal the last election."
Meme about the experience of using StackExchange: link.
failure to enforce copyright endangers that copyright
I believe that's true of trademarks, but not copyright.
I like Sam Harris's description (from The Key to Trump's Appeal - Episode #224):
One thing that Trump never communicates, and cannot possibly communicate, is a sense of his moral superiority. The man is totally without sanctimony. Even when his every utterance is purposed toward self-aggrandizement. Even when he appears to be denigrating his supporters. Even when he is calling himself a genius, he is never actually communicating that he is better than you, more enlightened, more decent, because he's not, and everyone knows it.
The man is just a bundle of sin and gore. And he never pretends to be anything more. Perhaps more importantly, he never even aspires to be anything more. And because of this, because he is never really judging you, he cannot possibly judge you, he offers a truly safe space for human frailty and hypocrisy and self-doubt. He offers what no priest can credibly offer, a total expiation of shame. His personal shamelessness is a kind of spiritual balm. Trump is fat Jesus. He's grab-'em-by-the-pussy Jesus. He's I'll-eat-nothing-but-cheeseburgers-if-I-want-to Jesus. He's I-want-to-punch-them-in-the-face Jesus. He's go-back-to-your-shithole-countries Jesus. He's no-apologies Jesus.
And now consider the other half of this image, what are we getting from the Left? We're getting exactly the opposite message. Pure sanctimony. Pure judgement. You are not good enough. You're guilty, not only for your own sins, but the sins of your fathers. The crimes of slavery and colonialism are on your head. And if you're a cis-white-heterosexual male—which we know is the absolute core of Trump's support—you're a racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, sexist barbarian. Tear down those statues, and bend the fucking knee. It's the juxtaposition between those two messages that is so powerful.
This sounds reasonable to me, and would adequately explain my support in 2016.
But since then, he has done something that surprised me: he stood by Brett Kavanaugh. At the cost of losing the House in the midterms, Trump backed him. I don't think any other Republican politician (at least at the time) would have done that. Neither side talks about this anymore, but I consider this the single best thing he did in office.
From a policy perspective, I generally like the decisions of his Supreme Court picks. I don't like his tariffs, but think the Democrats' policies are worse. I like his isolationism, but I don't expect it'd be implemented.
Oh, and I'm open. Respond however you want.
Hacking and bio capabilities and so forth are generally more like carjacking than torture.
According to whom? The relevant question is which concept are they closer to in the training data, and I suspect they're more "movie" activities, so they'd be classed with those. In that vein, I'd expect carjacking to be classed with murder, rape, shoplifting, drug use, digital piracy, etc. as the more "mundane" crimes.
according to a person with knowledge of his thinking
Tangentially, I wonder how often this journalese stock phrase means the "leak" comes from the person himself.
very few dollars directed to it in ways that ensures … the leadership doesn't ruin it for personal or ideological profit from the inside.
Could you elaborate on how you think dollars could be directed to prevent this? As of this writing, Godot is the latest project to do this, but much the same has happened to your examples, Wikipedia and Linux (Edit: and since you mentioned their founders, Reddit and Signal). And they're not unusual; this is typical of every major open source project. And it's not just the new "digital" projects this occurs in: in public libraries, librarians use their position in the same way.