FarmReadyElephants
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User ID: 2869
FarmReadyElephants
10d ago
Nate's whole schtick is having a fixed model that he pre-commits to ahead of time. He wants to avoid as much judgement calls as he can. It gives the air of scientific objectivity. You can follow someone else that makes judgment calls as the race progresses, but will they be more accurate over time?
One way to rank forecasters would be by assigning them an error score for each prediction miss, weighted by an superlinear factor of the odds miss (say, (100%-prediction)^2). So Nate would get a small penalty for winding up at 51% for Kamala before the election compared to someone that guessed 90% for Kamala. Who would have the best score over multiple cycles?
FarmReadyElephants
16d ago
Honestly, just aging and changing priorities.
FarmReadyElephants
20d ago
I would argue that the shift from the Pride flag to the Progress Pride flag more explicitly aligns it with the hard left and makes it a more exclusionary movement. It is now a flag that excludes only one group (straight white people). And that's the flag that you see flown from government buildings and put up in school classrooms.
The Pride flag says "we're gay!". The Progress Pride flag says "We represent everybody but straight whites!". So it is kind of a short hand for the left coalition.
FarmReadyElephants
24d ago
- short term - YIMBY. Build more and restore cities. (Dems win handily)
I really don't see how this is the case. Long-term democratic cities are notorious for having draconian planning regulations. When I lived in SF, I couldn't even add an internal door inside my own house as a noise barrier without applying for a variance. And the criminal worship on team blue is just out of control. The number one issue in the way of restoring cities is that people, and especially people with children, just don't feel safe.
The cities need a committed reformist movement, probably within the Democratic party, since their policies have shut out people with children who vote Republican from living in urban areas. But on the national level, it's hard to see how the better option is the party of BLM, leading with a candidate who endorsed the riots.
FarmReadyElephants
28d ago
Part of the issue is that it happens so young that it raises serious consent problems. I saw a video of a mom taking her crying 9 year old son to get a puberty blocking implant from Dr. Olson-Kennedy. If the boy were going to have a gay tryst at 9 years old, while his mom got him ready for the date, that would set off every alarm bell.
FarmReadyElephants
2mo ago
Reddit matters, unfortunately.
When reddit came out in 2006, I was instantly enthralled. I loved the branched conversation style over single-threaded forums like PHPBB that dominated the web before. It was a new architecture for conversation, a better one. Plus, it had a smart, techie community that was fun to discuss things with.
Fast forward to today, and the world loves reddit. It's ranked as a top-10 website by traffic. Reddit is the default place to find an intelligent discussion on any niche topic. Whenever I have a medical issue, or I want to explore a new piece of technology, I go to Reddit. When I want product reviews for a pair of leather boots, I go to Google search and type "Best men's leather boots reddit". The cutting edge LLMs are being trained on reddit content. It's an important piece of the foundation of web content.
Which is unfortunate that it's moderated so poorly, and that policy comes from the top down. You know what I mean. themotte.org is one of several diaspora communities that fled reddit due to its heavy-handed, leftist moderation.
It's incredibly frustrating to use. My politics are somewhat esoteric but definitely of the right. On an occasion I'm baited into a conversation with political valence and I'll state a right-wing argument, and more often than not my account gets banned. On X, I saw screenshots of an /r/askReddit post "Republicans, why are you voting for Kamala this time?" and it had had thousands of upvotes and comments. The equivalent self-post "Democrats, why are you voting for Trump?" was banned with zero comments. If a thread is allowed to live for a few hours that draws popular heterodox views, it results in the inevitable thread lock and thousands of deleted comments to prevent "hate"
From my memory, the leftward drift of reddit seems to have occurred over the last 10 years. It hit an inflection point with the election of Trump and the ban of /r/TheDonald. It accelerated again since 2020 with BLM. That was the year that the TERFs were banned en masse (a community that mattered to me, as it helped me get over my own trans-dreaming and be happy with my gender).
Reddit's politics reflect the fact that the company is based in San Francisco. But it is left of center for San Francisco, which puts it far, far to the left of the nation.
And it's a shame! I'd love a higher-quality general purpose discussion forum. The world needs it. When Elon liberated X, that provided an important venue for free speech. But X optimizes for a high-addiction feed of quick information bites. It doesn't allow for as in-depth discussion and community building.
What would such a forum look like? I have some ideas:
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It would maintain the threaded format beloved by so many
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It would be seeded by a high quality community, such as that found here or on LessWrong
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It would have some sort of governance body that would maintain high quality of moderation for the main subs
The easiest, but not cheapest way to liberate Reddit would be to find a billionaire backer to buy it. It's a public company and its marketcap is a hair under $10 billion. The other alternative would be to try to get an alternative off the ground, perhaps building on active and healthy diaspora communities. It would be possible, for example, to give new users credit for karma they have earned on themotte or LessWrong. Selfishly, I would love a forum where I could ask questions to the high-functioning on-the-spectrum folks that populate these places. Reddit without the bottom half of its IQ spectrum would be a superior place for discussing nootropics, health, AI, and similar topics.
I'm a computer programmer. I care about providing community discussion forums. I've spent a good chunk of my life on them. I'm kinda bored at my day job and looking for a new adventure. What do you think?
FarmReadyElephants
2mo ago
My father is dying from atherosclerosis. He's in his mid 70s and having regular strokes and heart attacks. It seems like every year there's a new stent, and every time he's in the hospital it takes some of his remaining vitality away.
I'd like to avoid the same outcome! My LDL cholesterol levels are slightly elevated and I am about 40. I was taking low dose statins, but my doctor declined to renew my prescription based on a risk model that (correctly) calculates my risk of a cardiac event in the next ten years being low. However, my understanding is that the mechanical damage of arterial plaque build up is happening right now, and it's that plaque deposition that will eventually give me the cardiac events that will kill me.
I'm seeing from Peter Attia and others a focus on ApoB LDL lipoproteins in particular cause atherosclerosis and he insists that crushing your ApoB levels will eliminate the risk of heart disease. Other health influencers dispute this, and I'm not really sure who to believe.
I'm wondering if anybody else has investigated the various claims around preventing atherosclerosis and has strong opinions on them. If there is some good evidence that a therapy could work without much risk of side-effects, the upside could be substantial.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
Historically, after its conversion to Christianity, the Eastern Roman Empire became less likely to execute high status people guilty of crimes against the state and more likely to use exile, disfigurement, or imprisonment in a monastery. The reasoning was that this was a merciful punishment, since it gave the guilty time to repent of their sins.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
The shoe was on the other foot 60 years ago.
Was it? I seem to remember the Weathermen becoming college professors at prestigious universities.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
Now that things have cracked, and it only took a failed assassination attempt to do it, what is team red supposed to do otherwise?
Has it really cracked? Will this moment of right-wing cancel power last more than a few weeks?
Physical intimidation of Supreme Court Justices is another example of substituting violence or the threat thereof for the political process. Of course I don't support it. It's a shame those who did that were not made an example of, excepting the one who brought a gun to Kavanaugh's house. It's a "loophole" in our democratic system that if left open leads to the collapse of the whole system. Just like the loophole of politicians moving about the
If you're looking for a right-wing version of violating this principle, the correct example is January 6. Though it is notable that significant deterrence was inflicted on the perpetrators in that case. The justice system, acting under the cover of the media-propaganda system, was capable of punishing those who took part in it.
The situation in America is not symmetrical between Right and Left so I reject any implicit demand to find a balanced criticism of each. I live in fear of Left cancellation. All my friends who were cancelled were cancelled by the Left. People who go to university have to swear fealty to the Left. I won't pretend that the Right shares in the Left's flaws equally, because it is not true. The couple of days that you weren't allowed to wish death on Trump in public just aren't the same kind of thing as the decade+ of threat I've experienced from the Left.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
The left claims things like saying "there are only two genders" creates a culture of violence that makes society hostile towards the marginalized and that people who say it deserve to be punished to deter further harm. And I claim that celebrating a recent assassination attempt, especially in public by people of influence, is a bad thing that could make the Republic unravel.
Maybe these are rival perspectives both equally blinded by partisanship. Or maybe one is a true, time-tested fact borne out of hard-won political wisdom and the other is ephemeral revolutionary nonsense.
FarmReadyElephants
3mo ago
It's wrong to analyze this event through the lens of a cycle of escalating violence. I did it myself, before I realized that isn't what's going on.
Left-wing cancel culture is when someone loses their job for violating any norm of the Left, no matter how unpopular and niche. It can be as small as donating years prior to support a popular California ballot measure. Or it can be literally violating a norm that the Left just made up (such as the gentleman that got cancelled for making an "OK" sign out his truck window).
Right-wing cancel culture is basically nonexistent. You can't get cancelled for blaspheming Christ, for example. The man who made a work of art out of statue of Christ in a jar of his own piss received government grants. There is only a small window of power here for celebrating the recent assassination attempt on their political candidate. It will probably last only a few weeks. And it only works because mainstream leftists are willing to support the taboo. It's a good thing they are! This means we are still in a state of politics, and not in a state of war, despite all the rhetoric about Trump being an existential threat to the system.
This taboo against celebrating political assassination is not a partisan thing. It's a load-bearing taboo for our system of government. We depend on political assassinations being rare for our way of life to exist. This taboo absolutely must not erode, or we descend into a system of election by carbomb.
So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.
FarmReadyElephants
9mo ago
Having loyalties to multiple states are a special case of rival loyalties. Of course any politician is expected to be loyal to his family and his God.
FarmReadyElephants
9mo ago
Me too! (circa 300 A.D.)
FarmReadyElephants
9mo ago
The reason why Open Borders is controversial in the existing system is that migrants (or their children) are given an equal share in governance - a scarce resource currently owned by the existing population. It's not clear why the existing population should give equal shares in governance to the children of new arrivals. I expect free movement of people across borders would be more popular if this were not the case.
A prominent, vocal greengrocer taking down his "worker's of the world, unite!" sign is a big deal.
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