Imaginary_Knowledge
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User ID: 1255
Imaginary_Knowledge
1mo ago
What about a button that would disappear all murderers? Or thieves? Or whatever? I'd push the button.
Would you want more life, no matter what, at the margin? Even if adding these lives made everyone miserable? That's just the repugnant conclusion. It elevates mere breathing over quality of life and I reject it.
Imaginary_Knowledge
1mo ago
Perhaps Christianity's telescopic philanthropy was adaptive in pre-modern and early modern Europe but has become maladaptive in a globalized world.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
He's not Galt. He's Rearden.
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
The self published book ecosystem seems to have a different culture. I vaguely recall reading an article a while ago to the effect that regular masculine military science fiction published as eBooks to Amazon can be much more profitable than going through the legacy publishers and that the Bantams of the world should "cry harder".
Imaginary_Knowledge
2mo ago
I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British
Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.
legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”?
A recurring policy trope in technology policy discourse is calling for bans on emergent capabilities on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten on which the social order depends. From iron swords in the late bronze age to generative AI, elites presented with new technology say "we must ban $NEW_THING to preserve the social order!". When this agitation succeeds, it leads to technological stasis, and technological stasis reduces the area under the curve of human welfare over time.
Smart policymakers should deal with these negative "skill externalities" of new technology by writing down these previously unwritten rules and enforcing them directly, not by attempting to limit the new technology itself.
For example, we dealt with the ability for the general public to operate heavy machinery at 55MPH by creating regulatory and liability systems for automobiles, not by banning automobile disruption of railroads.
If "AI safety" advocates had applied their reactionary policies to automobiles, cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Broken link
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
Marius really wanted that seventh consulship and it killed him
Imaginary_Knowledge
3mo ago
I do approve of the editor's justification for publishing the article. Free speech above all.
Infanticide is currently legal in the Netherlands. The “Groningen Protocol” allows doctors to kill neonates at the request of their parents if they are experiencing unbearable suffering.
Huh. It's... true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_Protocol
The Groningen Protocol is a medical protocol created in September 2004 by Eduard Verhagen, the medical director of the department of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) in Groningen, the Netherlands. It contains directives with criteria under which physicians can perform "active ending of life on infants" (child euthanasia) without fear of legal prosecution
Who defines "unbearable suffering"?
The final decision about "active ending of life on infants" is not in the hands of the physicians but with the parents
Well then.
Imaginary_Knowledge
4mo ago
Deliberate errors in counting
Imaginary_Knowledge
7mo ago
One of my favorite lines in Kipling's "If":
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools
Triumph and despair really are both imposters. Nothing is as bad or as good as it might seem
Imaginary_Knowledge
7mo ago
Losers in conventional warfare often resort to unconventional warfare
Imaginary_Knowledge
8mo ago
Why shouldn't I discriminate in housing against groups less likely to pay rent?
Imaginary_Knowledge
11mo ago
Good. I can't properly express my contempt for deceleration proponents. With Sam as CEO of the new group, and with all the doomers left behind at a now-irrelevant, we're going to see a level of acceleration we've never seen before.
Imaginary_Knowledge
11mo ago
What if I want to wipe the record clean, erase any potential wrong think, and delete my account?
Imaginary_Knowledge
11mo ago
Even anonymously?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
And nukes make a world war very likely.
Why? The nuke mythology --- nuclear winter this, radiation that, Fallout, "glassing", end of civilization, etc. --- creates a level of fear and hesitation in excess of what the effects of the weapons warrant. (I recall reading something about the nuclear winter concept being essentially made up for leftist political reasons in the 1980s.) If someone were to use a nuke in anger, this mythology would collapse. We'd come to understand that a nuclear warhead is merely a bomb that makes a bigger boom than other bombs and view 70 years of anti-nuke agitation as ignorant hysteria. With the "nuclear taboo" aside, why would a nuclear strike (especially a counter-force tactical nuke) cause a world war when a destructive conventional strike wouldn't?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
I don't think undercounting can explain the prevalence in older media of fit people. Look at those old Victorian street scenes: everyone is good looking. The historical existence of this or that obese person shouldn't counter the overwhelming evidence that we've become a fat society.
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
Why would you do this thing?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
One of the aspects of the COVID situation I find most disturbing was the way decision makers as a class professed to reject the concept of a cost benefit analysis as a way to weigh potential actions. However, looking at their behavior, it's clear that almost nobody actually eschewed cost benefit analysis. (Almost: there's a famous Seattle bartender who drove his formerly renowned Wallingford bar out of business because he refused to give up COVID mask protocols after everyone else had moved on.) It was illuminating to see mass confabulation of reasoning processes and ret-conning of decision making procedures.
Ever spend time with someone who doesn't have a sense of inter-temporal consistency in analyzing his own behavior? One day, he'll be in favor of X, the next ~X, and then X again, all enthusiastically, and usually in absolute denial of having ever felt differently. If you present them with incontrovertible evidence of their having changed positions, they'll change the subject, talk over you, leave the room, and so literally anything except address the substance of what you've said. These people always have some kind of narrative that justifies (if only to themselves) their current feelings. That their narrative might make no scientific or factual or tactical sense doesn't faze them: they have a narrative, and it's enough to quell the background anxiety they must otherwise feel all the time about the wisdom of their actions.
I don't think these people are lying --- not exactly: their brains are merely censoring anything anything that interferes with weaving a story in which their present situation is consistent with their self image. They literally can't sense contrary data: their neural "operating system" filters it out at a low level and reacts to it with a fight or flight response. Imagine Blanche DuBois from "A Streetcar Named Desire".
Everyone has some element of this duplicity in them. When low IQ people behave this way, it's annoying. When high IQ people behave this way, it's dangerous. What's fascinating about COVID is that the situation elicited this behavior from essentially the entire leadership structure of society. What prompted it was of course fear --- first of the virus, then of ostracism. It makes me wonder whether the people who behave the way I describe above do so because deep down they're deathly afraid of something they can't articulate. It's sad.
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
What do you do if you're managing incompetents and you know that if you let them do something, they're going to screw it up and that you'll have to clean up the mess?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
I think it tastes great by itself.
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
GPT-N can speak Chinese. Why couldn't ERNIE speak English?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1yr ago
Can you compare Obsidian to org mode specifically? Org seems to have a lot of the advantages you highlight, and IME, the Org people aren't nearly as insane as, say, the OpenBSD people when it comes to egoistical free software BS. What specifically would I miss by sticking with Org?
Why would we distinguish these scenarios?
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