ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I went to American grad school. I have reviewed Chinese research papers. I can't exaggerate the sneering contempt American researchers have for them. In every way trivial and not worth publishing.
I can confirm this. I have rejected many papers from solely Chinese authors, many of which are on the spectrum from "not even wrong" to "what are you even thinking that you're doing here?!" I've now accepted one, from a guy who got his PhD in China, but then spent several years on post-docs in the west before returning to China. They're definitely not stupid, but they're still really catching up. Over time, they may take over, but the state as of today, right now, is that their fundamental scientific research output is mostly hot garbage.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of hot garbage coming out of American universities, too. But in my discipline, your filtering algorithm would have very few false negatives if it just rejected everything from China... and it would be much more mixed with American submissions.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
If one wants to, absolutely. But yeah, my main point is that separating the wheat from the chaff in all of these areas is a near-impossible problem. It is plausible to say, "Some areas are important enough that we'll tolerate more graft," but of course, determining which areas are which is a political problem. You may want to preserve DoD research funding, but I don't know if KMC does. He's almost certainly right that there is graft there, too, so you probably have to convince him (or enough folks that have the ear of the President or whatever) to tolerate that graft, because you're probably not going to be able to really distinguish between the good and the bad at a low level.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Well, for one example, the biggest funder of such research is the DoD, coming in around 40%. The potential downside of killing them all and letting god determine which are his is that your country's enemies may surpass you in strength and decide to kill all of you and let god determine which are his. This is a threat that may, indeed, be the house of many grifts, but it is entirely possible that those are the stakes. If one cuts everything and then wants to see how the performance of the new system differs from that of the old, how would one measure? You don't get to access the counterfactual.
This is the case for basically all DoD spending in general. You have very few observables to determine the "real" "quality" of the expenditures. They only get meaningfully tested and measured very rarely (hopefully). DoD grift in general is legendary (as it is in every military in the world). Knowing which large acquisition or force structure is going to be useful in future fights is probably just as impossible a task as knowing which research efforts will contribute to future acquisitions/force structures. There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money? Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius? Just stop taking that money from citizens and redistributing it to sinecures for grifters, apparatchiks, and some, I presume, good people?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I mean, I don't know? There's still a lot of really good stuff happening. It's just a fundamentally hard problem to separate the good from the bad. The past approach has been, "Since we can't tell, we'll just fund pretty broadly and hope that there are at least enough good people around that some quantity of it gets oriented well; yes, we know that this will have some waste."
Obviously, the completely opposite response is, "Since we can't tell, let's just not fund any of it." I have a feeling that such a strategy probably doesn't perform better.
Any other strategy mostly comes down to people trying to figure out, "So, uh, how can we tell the difference between the good and the bad?" We then get different funding models, folks studying "progress" or "metascience", and then mostly question marks?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I'd guess that most of the money was going towards funding for woke-aligned individuals, so that's what they are fighting against.
This is going to be the real killer question. Do they have the extreme cajones that would be necessary to, when they decide to start releasing funds again, say, "...and it can't go to any organization that has a DEI/affirmative action program or otherwise discriminates on the basis of race/gender," or some set of qualifiers. It would take huge cajones, because that would immediately leave a huge number of universities, who currently get the bulk of the research dollars, totally frozen out. The stakes would be high. People would point to critical areas that basically cannot be funded. Some unis would crack; others might hold out. Either way, this would be an 'all in' play after he's already gone after this stuff that's directly within the gov't.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
~all expenditures look very reasonable if you go and talk to the program manager for half an hour.
Hoooo buddy. At multiple levels. I've just read some BAAs. I've read a variety of papers from labs who cite their federal funding on all of said papers. And I've even talked to folks about their publications and been told, "Yeah, this is pretty dumb, but it's what the BAA called for and what the PM said he wanted us to do." And yes, I've even spoken to PMs who are totally out to lunch.
The problem is that understanding such requires significant domain expertise, and if you're a high-level politician, you have \approx no way of distinguishing between advisers who actually have such expertise and will be honest with you, versus those who are out of their lane or riding a grift.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
"We won't train doctors to the regulatory standard unless taxpayers give us bundles of money to do so," is an obvious confluence of terrible interests in the private sector and government, especially when the industry has achieved significant amounts of regulatory capture. Surely, there is a better way.
Imagine this in other industries. Grocery stores get the government to set up a licencing requirement to stock shelves, with some boilerplate reasoning about food safety or something. The thing is, the only way to get licensed is to get a grocery store to give you the mandatory years of experience. And, of course, they refuse to have such positions unless the government pays them for it. I would predict that there would be fewer grocery store employees, their pay would be higher, industry profits would be higher, government outlays would be higher, prices to the consumer would be higher, and service quality would decrease.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
I think this is somewhat dependent upon inflation. I very much only think, because it's been a loooong time since I took relativity. Yes, with constant positive inflation, there will be regions of an infinite universe forever inaccessible (with the relative sizes being dependent upon the magnitude of the inflation), but if, say, we didn't understand some dynamic of inflation, and suppose it actually ground to a halt. If inflation went to actual zero, then I think that an entire infinite universe would be, in principle, accessible, given sufficient time.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
(who drinks coffee before night? Some people just are oblivious)
People who aren't schooled in the Classics?
It's always hard to understand populations. We can't just get into their brains and observe what they really think. We can see survey results, but those are tricky and sometimes only get what people think they're "allowed" to say. See also the constant discussion of "shy Tory/Trumper". As such, one ought to be very sensitive to the fact that much of the population was really just bullied into a position on the topic. It's extremely difficult to actually tease out how many people really believe it or have really internalized it as true. It is entirely possible that as people see that the exact same specious arguments are being marshaled in favor of the T (with the expectation that folks actually believed and internalized it WRT the LGB, and thus the further expectation that it will be slam dunk successful), they will find it less and less social suicide to simply reject the entire fallacious underpinning. They won't even have to immediately say, "...and yes, rejecting this underpinning means also rejecting it in the case of LGB, also." At least, not at first; not overtly. That could come more slowly, as it becomes more socially acceptable. Or, of course, as we've seen on some other issues, it could come quickly in a preference cascade.
It's just extremely difficult to know which of those possible worlds we live in, given the obviously impossibly difficult measurement problem. Obviously, any public group that is organizing and trying to build political momentum is going to focus on the issues where they think they are the strongest, but along the way, they'll be pushing for underlying worldviews that have implications. It is common for them to know what those implications are, to believe that those implications are, indeed, true, but to not want to draw attention to it until they have succeeded enough where they are strongest and subtly changed the nature of the conversation along the way.
EDIT: I forgot that I should also point to the fact that those same people are forthright about the fact that they did just bully people into believing something in order to win political victories, that they didn't really believe it themselves, that many people don't actually believe it, and they'd love it if we could just kind of forget that their sus claims were "critical", because they'd really rather that no one go back and reconsider in light of reality.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Expecting that the data we know they share isn't all the data they share is not a great leap.
You eat meat, yes? Expecting that the meat we know you eat isn't all the meat you eat is not a great leap. ...turns out, you're not just routinely assassinating domestic drug dealers... you're cannibalizing them! Big oof.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
With the same reasoning, we can conclude that the CIA and other military agencies already routinely assassinate domestic drug dealers. Ya know, if that's the kind of epistemics we're going with. Hell, I'm pretty sure we can conclude that you already routinely assassinate domestic drug dealers. Why do you do that, and why aren't more people outraged about your obscene behavior? (...not to mention your wife beating...)
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Ok, so you don't. Got it. Sounds like there are all sorts of things that NSA does that could conceivably be used in a military operation on foreign soil that cannot be used against domestic drug dealers.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Fair enough. Stationary defense has very different considerations, and it makes sense to locate fixed bases where they have the means and authority to kill anything that comes close.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
So, you have some other cite that demonstrates that they were using NSA data? Or is this just baseless speculation?
ControlsFreak
5d ago
Drones themselves are an asymmetric cost-benefit weapon: you can buy 55,000 $2k drones for the cost of one $110 million F-35. It doesn't matter if you can't buy 1 F-35 or 55,000 drones- it matters if you can buy one drone that can destroy a $110 million asset, and then repeat as needed.
This is a bit much. Yes, I agree that cheap drones have really changed a lot of things. Everything about ground maneuver, mounted and dismounted, has changed due to the threat. Helicopters are probably already nearly obsolete in significantly-contested areas. But cheap drones are not yet even close to being capable of taking out F-35s.
This is all aside from whether F-35s can really deliver much value to the conceived type of fight against the cartels; I'll mostly stay out of that one; it's a very narrow statement about the ability of one specific type of asset to directly impact one other specific type of asset.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
From your link:
Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Snowden, includes data about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law enforcement.
The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records, and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said.
Regardless of controversies about parallel construction (which is already illegal), your own cite doesn't even purport to show what you claim it shows.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
That's not at all what Snowden revealed, but lore was never meant to be real.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
people either eat more food and regain the weight
Ah, so there is an intermediate bit that lives in the silence.
metabolism slows down so much that it doesn't make a difference how little they eat
This is not true. We know, from science, how this works.
easy
I didn't hear any claims from you about things being easy or not; that's pretty subjective and hard to measure with science. You made factual claims that are scientifically false.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Simply eating fewer calories on a standard diet doesn't actually work.
This is not true. In fact, you admit as much in the silence between this period and the next sentence, because presumably something happened during this silence.
The weight always comes back because obesity is fundamentally a problem of a broken lipostat.
This does not follow. There is a missing intermediate step.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
My limited understanding of gov't budgeting is that they don't have money earmarked for personnel. I.e., there is not some pot that you can 'pull back' if they have fewer salaries to pay. (I've heard about separate head count caps, but I think those operate independently of the budget figures.) Congress attaches money to funding purposes (i.e., "Do this thing"). So unless Congress is making changes to their appropriations, they'll still get that same pot of money, and they'll still spend it... on, I guess, who knows what? Contractors, consulting, other contracts/grants, hell, they'll spend it on DEI programs if there is any gap in the language trying to shut that down. One thing I've heard from economists who analyze gov't spending is that the number one priority of those folks is spending their money, so they always have a pile of things backburnered and ready to go if they run into a surprise surplus of funds. I'm pretty skeptical that edging out a few remote workers is likely to have a remotely sizable effect on expenditures. Probably would only matter to the extent that those remote workers are actually some sort of bottleneck on funds getting out to whatever they're being spent on (and this is highly unlikely for the real big ticket items like, e.g., entitlements). In fact, to the extent that one thinks they'll be more "productive" if they're in the office in-person, the thing they're probably going to be more "productive" at is spending all their money.
So, my guess is that when we retrospectively look back on the budgetary impacts, it'll have a very small impact on salaries paid, approximately no impact on total federal expenditures, and the difference will be thrown at more and more marginal things. The long play here is convincing Congress that "look at all these marginal things that we're spending money on" and convincing them to draw back on subsequent appropriations.
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Correct, if that is your only terminal value, a la Vance's "fire everyone with an odd/even SSN" approach. Any selection/self-selection process will have its own mix of results. For example, the odd/even SSNs will be totally random, up and down the chain. Versus, for the classic example, if you lower everyone's salary, then you're selecting out the people who have better alternatives and could perhaps be more productive elsewhere, leaving yourself with probably the lower-quality folks. Versus the Schedule F approach, which targeted higher-level, policy-making positions. Versus the Musk-at-Twitter approach, where he just personally made decisions based on code commits, likely selecting on some combination of gross code output and a subjective quality/value of code assessment. Versus, say, firing people based on recent performance ratings, which mostly just lets management get rid of the people they already didn't like. Every method has its own results.
Going after remote work is going to merely inconvenience the folks who live nearby but drive disproportionate separations from those who live far away for various reasons. As @atelier points out, one might have a competing terminal value that would drive someone to want almost the opposite of this policy, but a lot depends on what your terminal values look like. My guess is that, unlike the Schedule F approach or atelier's idea, this is likely to mostly impact lower-level folks who weren't "in the club" of the top-level policy-making folks. Those folks are mostly all located pretty close, because 1) until COVID, they had to be, and 2) they're likely older and further in their career (thus higher level management) and had already established roots there and likely had less incentive to move in the last few years. This is likely to chip away at the raw numbers, but have very little impact on the power bases of the deep state.
Very possibly. They have copy/paste language, so it very well may be one of those where they grant cert on both questions and then have a variety of colloquies about whether there is any reason to interpret the same language differently. They may ultimately claim to punt on the Constitutional question, but my guess is that unless there is some form of "smoking gun" in the opinion for why they should interpret it differently, then I think the reasonable inference would be that we have significantly more certainty on the Constitutional question than we did before, and it significantly lowers the chance of a statute passing muster, either.
I would note that the only way they can really claim to punt on the Constitutional question would be if they rule against the gov't. They can't really rule for the gov't on the statutory question and then leave the Constitutional question unresolved. That's part of why they're likely to grant cert on both questions and from that point, there would be some chance of, "We're technically only resolving the statutory question against the gov't and leaving the Constitutional question open, but c'mon, it's gotta be 90+% that the Constitutional question with the exact same language will come out the same way."
ControlsFreak
8d ago
Agreed. I'd personally be completely fine with SCOTUS resolving the issue in favor of birthright citizenship, but in a way that is much more clear than the current mishmash of extremely old cases that are confusing. To me, the important part is that we get some clarity and certainty. I do hope that the number of people who are harmed in some way during the transient period between the EO and an eventual SCOTUS resolution is minimized, but I acknowledge that even if it is eventually resolved in their favor, there are likely to be some who are harmed in the transient period. With any luck, they'll settle the issue of what the ground rules are, and then it may be up to Congress to make tweaks, given the clarified underlying Constitutional law.
It's one of those few areas where I think the "Cases and Controversies" Clause is annoying. It's not enough that I would want to get rid of it, because it protects the courts from many many other issues that would be a waste of time, but it's one of the few where I would have really really loved if they could have just given an "advisory" opinion on the matter rather than having to wait until something like an EO/statute was passed to force the issue into the courts. So even if I don't necessarily like the EO, I don't think there was really any other way to get a very clear legal resolution of the matter, and since I prefer having the clarity significantly over having the issue always lurking in the background, I weakly support it, with hopes that things like TROs can mitigate most issues until a ruling comes out.
For the most part, the internet atheism wars have just died, so it doesn't come up much. Scott's relevant explanation suggests:
When it was 'obvious' and 'any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines', a good chunk of folks up and decided that the New, Obvious rough outlines were just wokeness. There was a bit of a schism, and I've found that many of the folks who were disaffected by the schism and went anti-woke instead have mostly rejected the idea that it's so obvious and such. If it was so obvious, then why are so many of their former brethren getting it so wrong? The most common result I've seen is a form of naive relativism, sometimes sprinkled with moral error theory or even just power politics dressed up as game theory (if you don't agree with "society", then we have reason to suppress and even kill you, moving the population toward some sort of 'equilibrium').
But for the most part, aside from a few old hats who went anti-woke, I'd really say that the question just mostly hasn't been considered by many of the masses. They're just not exposed to the concepts; it's not even a meaningful question to them. As Scott says, they're in it for hamartiology, not meta-ethics. They just don't even really conceive of the idea that there is meta-ethics to be done prior to hamartiology. It's just not a question that they would even think to ask, so they mostly don't care whether various schools have a position on it one way or another deep down in the theology. Yes, if you ask a queer theory prof, they can probably tell you the sect's doctrine, just as surely as if you ask a priest whether the holy spirit flows independently from both the father and the son or just from the father through the son, they can probably manage to dig up the doctrine... but who's asking? Who cares? No one thinks they can gain adherents by trying to distinguish themselves on this issue.
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