Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
9hr ago
"Tomorrow morning, is she going to wish she didn't do this?" I think is the question they should have asked themselves, and I think it was foreseeable that this would be a wise question to consider.
Quantumfreakonomics
9hr ago
Polite society has been adding epicycles to the consent-alone (solus consensus?) model of sexual ethics for decades: People under 18 cannot consent. People under the influence of drugs cannot consent. People who are subordinate in a power hierarchy cannot consent. None of these really made any sense in the solus consensus framework, but jettisoning consent as the one true guiding light of sexual ethics would open up LGBT relationships to scrutiny, and that would be considered unconsionable.
Given the reaction to the Cornell incident, I think society is finally ready to start looking for alternative ethical models. Everyone has now seen the moons of Jupiter so to speak.
Quantumfreakonomics
14hr ago
Very few bad things show up in the aggregate death statistics. In Israel, 2023 had less deaths than 2021, 2022, 2024, or 2025. Are we to conclude that October 7th was fake, or that it was no big deal?
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Even Paxton’s estranged wife encourages people to vote for him.
This is an actual ad that I just saw on Sunday Night Football. The message is, "our candidates suck this year, but uh, we still need you to vote for us I guess."
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
My guess: In 2020 mail-in voting was huge because of the pandemic. In 2022 there was still likely a desire to "do it how we did last time" which resulted in a still-elevated level of mail-in voting. By now we have returned to the new baseline.
I will also say that I have not been impressed with the Paxton campaign in Texas. Both candidates are calling each other pedophile protectors. At least one Talarico ad used the phrase, "Epstein-style sweetheart deal," when describing Paxton's record as attorney general. Paxton is mainly attacking Talarico on trans stuff instead of the economy, and that's letting Democrats take the mantle of lowering prices.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Did God Stop Me From Rebuilding The Jerusalem Temple?: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
It was not in the course of organizing prostitution-based social activities. It was on the application form for plzdontkillus, an AI safety "content creator" bootcamp.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
I don't quite want to say that you are doing the equivalent of getting mad at someone making a pun for deceptively using language by pretending to not know what homonyms are, but you are at most one step away. There is an entire genre of Scott jokes that draw ridiculous extended parallels between modern events and biblical passages.
Yudkowski
You are also doing the meme.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
It’s hard to tell how much of the residual strangeness is due to it being AI, and how much is due to it being a very Chinese production despite being set in America. The speech and behavior of characters is similar to that of American characters in Chinese films such as The Battle at Lake Changjin.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
What's going on with the hostile response to Scott's tweet? I thought it was a pretty anodyne joke (although well below Scott's usual quality standards). Believing Christians, is this unusually offensive?
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Probably most Southerners are descended from slave owners. What percentage of the current Bundestag do you think are descended from Nazis?
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I guess it's just weird to me that the regulatory scheme is based on the internal cash flow structure within each club. If the goal is to maintain competative balance, then it would be more effective to regulate compensation paid to players and coaches instead.
Maybe this is my American capitalism-brain talking, but I don't see why it matters whether player salaries are financed by jersey sales or by capital infusion. If the club is a money pit, that is the club's problem.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
I'm still not sure what, specifically, Manchester City did wrong. This feels like some trademark European "regulatory superpower" bullshit.
I like the comparison to the Los Angeles Clippers-Kawhi Leonard scandal. The rules in the NBA are relatively straightforward. There is a maximum salary a team can pay a given player. It is against the rules for a team to provide compensation to a player outside of his salary. The NBA found that the Clippers paid third parties to pay Kawhi Leonard tens of millions of dollars in mostly-fake endorsement and sponsership deals, thus breaking the rules.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
It's hard to say. All first-hand accounts of the event deny it, but of course that's what one would expect them to say. Keep in mind that we are dealing with levels of autism that shouldn't even be possible.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I linked the wall of text because it recaps most of the better arguments that were had. I probably won’t make a full post on the subject since everyone’s getting in their dating takes in this one, and a separate thread would just be dunking on Aella.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Yeah, I think the closest thing to a solution would involve substantial government pressure to form heterosexual couples, potentially including criminal punishment for cheating.
This might not work and might have bad side effects, but every other proposed solution also wouldn’t work and would have bad side effects.
Last weekend, Aella and friends hosted SlutCon at Lighthaven in Berkeley. Described charitably, SlutCon seeks to heal gender relations by teaching socially awkward nerds how to flirt by giving them a sandbox of semi-professional “flirt girls” to practice on. This caused a lot of controversy in the community for reasons which people tended to dance around, but which boiled down to, “I don’t want the socially awkward nerds in the community to be trained to flirt with me.”
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
There is definitely a trad wife out there for you. I believe that sincerely.
You are asserting that there exists an injective function from the set of heterosexual monogamous men to the set of heterosexual monogamous women such that every woman prefers being paired to her corresponding man over remaining single or holding out (there are additional conditions, but this seems like the easiest one to break).
People underestimate how difficult the gender wars/dating problem is because they don’t think about it in the proper mathematical terms. The thing that we are looking for is a binary relation between two distinct sets that satisfies certain properties. It’s easy to make a bunch of observations such as, “men are like this, but women are like that.” Okay, what does this tell us about the function space?
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I mean, there's a reason that Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde is performed as a standalone piece. It's because the 4 hours in between is a waste of time.
I do hope that some intrepid young reporter asks Mamdani if he prefers Wagner to Mendelssohn. I wonder how many articles The Free Press could milk out of that.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
The standard print versions of the Talmud, which Jews actually study, specify "mi-Yisrael" or the soul of a Jew.
Huh, you're correct. It's right here, Sanhedrin 37a:
"The court tells the witnesses: Therefore, Adam the first man was created alone, to teach you that with regard to anyone who destroys one soul from the Jewish people, i.e., kills one Jew, the verse ascribes him blame as if he destroyed an entire world, as Adam was one person, from whom the population of an entire world came forth. And conversely, anyone who sustains one soul from the Jewish people, the verse ascribes him credit as if he sustained an entire world."
I have to admit that this is a pretty weird verse to cite. It's not particularly relevent to anything mentioned in the announcement. Seems like a plausible dogwhistle.
I get the sense that Mamdani has "cracked the code" so to speak of American politics. Helicopter money isn't enough. The politician must create a salient connection between himself, his political project, and the benefit to the people in the mind of the voter. Giving away 70,000 Met Opera tickets by lottery is, by any rational standard, retarded, but it will be more effective politically than subsidizing ticket prices or opera supply costs could ever be.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
People really hate paying $100/month for software products. It feels like you're getting ripped off even though it's literal Jetsons tech.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
We taught doped silicon how to speak English. That looks like extraordinary evidence to me.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
Do you think GPUs have sensations?
They might, depending on what program they are running. The same way a human body might or might not have sensations depending on whether or not it is alive.
I think you are getting tripped-up by the distinction between software and hardware. This is only a conceptual distinction. Software exists in the physical universe. A GPU running Mistral Small 24B is in a different physical state than a GPU running Counterstrike. One could build a custom electronic machine which has no "software" as we understand it, but which runs and can only run Mistral Small 24B. Would such a machine be more likely to experience sensation than the same functional program running on a GPU in a data center?
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
LLMs do not have sodium channels to begin with!
Yes, but they do have voltage-gated electron channels. Is there any reason to think that voltage-gated sodium channels can feel pain but voltage-gated electron channel cannot?
Allegedly this is her
More options
Context Copy link