Jiro
5hr ago
we don't know how many people who didn't know that specific man and read the story inferred the story was about some other poor sap who had nothing to do with the story.
"What is inferred by people who don't know him" is a bad standard--she could have used his real name and address and people who don't know him still wouldn't know it's about him.
And most of the harm would come from the reactions of the people who do know him, anyway.
This one's an edge case where it's hard for me to imagine how I could lie to the Nazis,
I was thinking of the scenario where you voluntarily and directly reported a Jew to the Nazis. Under the standard "it's the fault of the person who reacts, not the fault of the person who provides the information" it wouldn't matter whether you provided the information voluntarily and directly.
Jiro
16hr ago
That's like Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. The actions of the character are so extreme that nobody would understand that book to mean that the real person actually did those things.
definitely the best book titled "My Struggle" ever written
To be fair, being better than the most famous book by this name is pretty easy.
Jiro
16hr ago
Let's consider her position. She writes a story loosely based on a person she briefly knew, changing most of the key details of the interaction to fit her fictional narrative.
From the description, she didn't change the key details. The details that identify him were kept. The details that she changed were the ones that now said that he did horrible things.
To whatever extent someone's predictable reaction is unjust, I place the blame on the person reacting in the unjustified manner.
That's a fair point,. so I'll change it: if it's predictable that people would react badly towards someone else (and only someone else), particularly when it's someone you're hostile towards, you're responsible. It may be worse the more reasonable the response is, but most cases I can think of don't even need to get that far.
By your reasoning, there's no need to change any details; she could have made it exactly describe the guy and as long as she said it was fiction, it would be the fault of the people reading. By your reasoning, I could say that there's a party on your lawn this weekend and if anyone comes and messes up your lawn, I have no responsibility. In fact, I could make a false police report about you committing an actual crime and as long as I've put some details in that the police could theoretically check before arresting you, it's not my fault if you get arrested. Or if you're Jewish I could report you to the Nazis--I've only given them truthful information, it's the Nazis' fault if they then decide to kill you based on it.
Jiro
1d ago
Any inference about actual reality and real humans living within it based on the text that she put down was something voluntarily done entirely by the reader.
Yes, that's something done by the reader, but that doesn't mean she has no responsibility--she wrote things in such a way that how the readers would interpret it was completely predictable.
Certainly, it's possible that this author was playing some 4D chess to libel this innocent man via plausibly deniable means? It's just not in evidence,
If she didn't do it on purpose, she was reckless enough that she bears pretty much the same moral responsibility as if she did it on purpose.
If he does not emerge from the room with the object you intend to sell, your patent is denied.
You would not allow a patent on part of a large industrial process?
For software parents, if your patent doesn't compile using what ever compiler you submitted in the application your patent is denied.
That's not a bad idea (since that part does get gamed) but that's not the real problem with software patents. The actual problem is that people can patent things that are obvious by ordinary standards, but either so obvious that nobody would bother documenting prior art, or only useful when computer technology reaches a certain point, so there is a first person to do it even though it's obvious.
If you hold the (entirely mainstream on the right) viewpoint that people who self-define as hyphenated-Americans should be excluded from positions of power and influence, deciding that this applies to people who act like Israeli-Americans is a matter of Noticing things.
Self-define is not act like. It's the difference between "they proudly call themselves a Nazi" and "they're on the right, so their policies are Nazi-like, so they're a Nazi".
I'd argue for religious requirements for political participation, much in the same way you can't be a member of the Communist Party in China without being an avowed atheist.
The only "religious requirement" should be "the voters won't vote for you if they don't like your religion (or lack thereof)" and even that can be a big problem.
And anything you hope to accomplish by this requirement could be worked around by sufficiently dishonest politicians simply by choosing a Unitarian Universalist or some other mostly secular, politically liberal, religion.
Jiro
2d ago
obviously what your coworkers are doing is exactly what someone who does support assassination of the outgroup would do. But it's also reasonable that they think he was a bad person, who didn't deserve to die, but still a bad person, and it's unfair for [insert members of progressive coalition] to let down on the criticism, lest the ideas he advanced be given undue legitimacy
One thing that helps you tell the difference between A and B here is that if the criticisms in B are made in bad faith, it's a lot more likely that someone really means A. And a lot of the B's here seem to be made in astonishingly bad faith.
Jiro
2d ago
The abstract itself is either a hilarious self-own or and even more hilarious playing-dumb post.
From the comments:
Steve Sailer
The authors are from the HBD-adjacent wings of anthropology and economics, but they worry about that being recognized (e.g., Henrich wrote an entire book never mentioning that HBD Chick had beaten him to most of his ideas on her blog over the last couple of decades), so they need to be able to point at Diversity Is Our Strength type stuff to avoid being cancelled.
Jiro
4d ago
If you give someone an object, they are now in control over its location and you are not. That's how giving people things works.
A standard which says that you must control its location implies that you can never give it to anyone.
But the difference is "This one person definitely has it and definitely it is secure" and not "well it could be anywhere".
The requirement is not limited to knowing that the gun is secure. It has to be "secured where you can control that possession" which does not allow it to be secured by someone else. Even if his cousin puts it in a gun safe, the judge can just say "You do not control that gun safe. Sorry, you are now permanently prohibited from owning guns".
Jiro
5d ago
If you gave it to your cousin, you don't know where it is, or at least, you sufficiently don't know where it is that you'd better say under oath "I don't know where it is". Your standard implies that it's not possible to give a gun to someone else temporarily at all.
Jiro
6d ago
If you think he shouldn't be owning guns, make a law which says that he shouldn't own guns. Don't twist another law that really isn't supposed to be used for that, because twisting other laws sets precedents that get applied to other people.
Jiro
6d ago
Is that actually true? There's a reason that statistics are better than anecdotes. And if you were, say, 10 years old in 1939 you'd be 96 years old today. It's unlikely you've experienced this yourself even as a statistical anomaly.
Jiro
7d ago
I can think of a number of cases where "both sides sound similar, so both sides don't care about the truth" is just blatantly false. Go find one of our local Holocaust deniers who are capable of speaking with a completely straight face, for instance. Or a creationist.
"The other side thinks the same thing about us!" is just a case of typical-minding and being a quokka. Because you are sincere doesn't mean that the other side is, and there's no shortcut that lets you make generalizations about all the cases where two sides sound the same. Sometimes the other guy really is out to get you.
Jiro
7d ago
Asking "are you a terrorist" is there so that if you say no and turn out to be a terrorist, they can deport you for lying on your application.
Jiro
8d ago
Waking up doesn't give you any information, because you already know that you will wake up. You are 100% expecting to wake up.
You're 100% likely to wake up with heads, and 200% likely to wake up with tails, and this makes a difference to the result.
My response to Scott's post is that almonds turned out to be the #2 earning food crop in 2019 and "something only earns as much as almonds" means it earns a heck of a lot. Yes, almonds really do make 4-6 times as much as tobacco. (I said that it's the #1 food crop, but I forgot about corn being used for corn syrup. About 25% of corn is not used for ethanol or animal feed, so if all of that is corn syrup, it's greater than almonds.)
The almonds example is so bad that I find it hard to imagine that Scott didn't choose it on purpose (unless he got fooled by someone else who did the same thing).
It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.
I don't think a justified homicide is a central example of "kill someone in America and get away with it".
Also, if I take that very literally (see: the media never lies, although even then it wasn't probably meant to be that literal), killing someone in self-defense prevents an unjustified homicide with a justified one. You can get away with a justified homicide, so the statement can be true without increasing the number of homicides at all.
They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad.
What's the alternative, self-defense is not allowed against people who are parents?
Jiro
8d ago
Note the phrasing:
In that case I would agree that the problem is phrased ambiguously. The per experiment probability is 50% and the per-awakening probability is 1/3.
Before the experiment, the researchers ask you what the probability of the coin coming up heads is. What's the answer? 50%, obviously. So what if they ask you after waking you up what the probability of the coin coming up heads was? It's still 50%, isn't it?
No, it isn't. Being woken up is evidence for tails. So if they ask you after waking you up, you have additional evidence that you did not have when they asked you before the experiment.
(And if your reply is "well, didn't you know in advance that you would be awoken?" the answer is that "being awake" and "knowing that you will be awake" don't provide the same evidence, because they are distributed among the outcomes differently.)
The Department of Homeland Securty is obviously biased in favor of themselves, but just like the media lying, you'd expect any factual statements they make to be correct. If they say that the guy has been previously arrested for assault, then you can bet that the guy has actually been previously arrested for assault. If that was a lie, then first of all the left would pounce on that and tell everyone that it's a lie, and second, the DHS would know this and not lie in the first place. If it's truthful, the left would be silent about it.
If the DHS had instead posted "Chicago residents say the man had been arrested for assault" you would be right to be skeptical.
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