Jiro
5d ago
The idea that Taylor Swift’s endorsement was going to sway the election was always stupid. Anyone who would be swayed to vote for Kamala Harris because Taylor Swift told them to was already going to vote for Harris.
You could apply this reasoning to any individual instance of something meant to persuade. Advertising doesn't do any good, for instance; who's going to buy Coke instead of Pepsi because they heard an ad?
Each instance of persuasion affects some people at the margin, and pushes more people closer to the margin so they can be affected by the next thing that affects people at the margin. The fact that the number is small doesn't mean that it's zero or that a lot of such things can't be significant.
Jiro
5d ago
The key difference between a groomer targeting a child and a doctor performing a surgery is their interests; the latter is doing so based on what they believe to be in the best interests of the child based on medical/scientific literature, the former is doing so for personal reasons.
The groomer most likely believes that having sex with the child is mutually beneficial and while it serves his own interests, also serves the best interests of the child.
And in the case of trans surgeries, I can easily see the doctor as thinking the surgery is good for trans activism, as well as good for the child.
Jiro
5d ago
They said the school was transitioning them. The school is not the active party in this. The kid is. The kid is transitioning. The school is merely keeping that secret. That is a fairly important distinction.
The kid's decision doesn't mean the school isn't active, because the kid is a minor and the school is responsible for him at school.
Jiro
9d ago
It's not like the bet was unclear or something -- the sporting thing to do would be to chuckle and write a cheque.
If it turns out the other guy had lost instead of winning, would he have paid up?
Getting a lawyer and a contract isn't there as a form of rubber-stamping. It's there to make sure that both parties are cooperating. If the guy sent him a piece of paper without a lawyer, he is refusing to cooperate and Nate shouldn't treat it as a valid contract.
When we're talking about mental illnesses that make people unable to discern reality or care for themselves, we're talking about a population that, to put it bluntly, needs to be made to take their medication.
Remember that the people who are going to be forcing others to take their medication are human. They are quite capable of ignoring evidence, having preconceptions, etc. and that doesn't even consider the possibility of malice, either on the part of doctors, relatives, or the government.
Every time I see the homeless beggar on the corner who can't control his movements, I feel that we've done a great deal of wrong to him and to all of us by letting him live on the street like an ancient leper and not putting him in an institution that can guarantee him a warm bed and a set of pills.
This is a seen/unseen problem. Any problems that happen by forcing people to take medication will be out of sight, unlike the homeless beggar, and you won't easily be able to look at them and say "we gotta do something about this".
Jiro
13d ago
It got all the way to public release and nobody fixed it. I don't believe for a moment that this is just someone sneaking it through. Having it get that far requires that the entire chain of people involved be either too woke or too intimidated to object.
Jiro
13d ago
From that article:
"People here think the reorder is legit. 100% sure a few items on there are causing this huge increase by some 3rd party seller or discontinued item," they explained.
Jiro
14d ago
As for the LLM thing... c'mon. Their AI is designed to remove legal liability as much as possible. That's not the same thing as being "racist."
Other companies have managed to produce AI that didn't produce the egregiously absurd results that Google's Gemini did.
Jiro
14d ago
They haven't lost it. They still control the same institutions as before, except for the actual presidency.
Jiro
14d ago
You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.
What he did was not deliberately try to make it worse which the Biden administration did. Merely doing nothing is an improvement over censoring Facebook.
Jiro
14d ago
Why not?
The answer, of course, is the deep state.
Also, "the institutions" includes mass media, social media, and large Internet companies like Google, and there's little that Trump could do about them. Yes, Musk got Twitter, but that's a single black swan event, and isn't repeatable.
Jiro
14d ago
It's going to take a huge amount of effort just to move directionally towards more fairness. Actually taking such good control of the institutions that they reach fairness, go beyond it, and tilt towards the other side is pretty much impossible.
Jiro
14d ago
Trump in office will give institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent.
Having a government which supports clamping down on dissent also gives those institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent. And it's a much better excuse.
By your reasoning, voting for Trump is bad for Trump supporters because of the backlash, but also good for Democrats, and you should be recommending to all your Democratic friends that they vote for Trump because voting for Trump helps the Democrats.
Jiro
15d ago
The likely scenario with rigging is that whoever is doing it can rig a certain amount, but not an unlimited amount. The fact that the wrong side wins doesn't disprove rigging, although it does disprove infinite-capacity rigging. This isn't Venezuela.
Jiro
18d ago
The biggest failure mode is that any legible policy like "one student from each school" makes it harder to cook the books to admit affirmative action students.
Jiro
25d ago
If you're worried about wokeness, you should honestly be voting Democrat.
If something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims from him about the opposite are concern trolling or motivated reasoning. The straightforward effect of supporting a side that is more woke is to increase wokeness.
Jiro
25d ago
Rage and hate are pretty unpalatable in anyone not already firmly on your team.
No they aren't.
Remember Scott's article about not sounding like a robot. Refusing to express rage when you've been grievously wronged makes you sound like a robot and reduces sympathy for you.
I'm saying we should have a firm ethical principle that we never authorize putting large numbers of people at the mercy of the state unless we're confident that all of the relevant decision-makers prefer positive outcomes for those people, either inherently or via incentives.
This implies we should never go to war, even defensively.
Jiro
1mo ago
it's absurd to get annoyed because a statistic designed to measure something (i.e. unemployment among people in the workforce) measures that thing,
No, it isn't absurd. Words have common definitions, which the agency can't just redefine.
If they had called it the "job-seeker-limited jobs index" or something else which can't easily be treated as though it just means the common definition of "unemployed" we wouldn't have this problem. The statistic is, by its name, "designed" to mislead.
Jiro
1mo ago
No it doesn't because you are trying to apply psychology and agency where there is none. If you're trying to understand GPT in terms of biases and intelligence you're going to have a bad time because garbage in means garbage out.
That's pointless pedantry. Saying that an AI is woke means the same thing as "that magazine is woke" or "that TV show is woke". It means that the humans who created it put things in so that the words that get to the audience express wokeness. The fact that the magazine (or AI) itself has no agency is irrelevant; it's created by humans who do.
Jiro
1mo ago
Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?
Catching one instance of sleazy behavior from a large group over a period of time generally implies that there's more than one instance, but that that was the instance that was easiest or luckiest to catch.
Jiro
1mo ago
Money is fungible. This allows an accounting trick where the government can say "we aren't reducing your taxes nor are we changing how much of the budget gets spent on each item, but we're taking the money for this program from other people and using your taxes for something else". Unless objecting to a particular expense actually leads to your taxes going down, using "other people's taxes" is indistinguishable from using yours.
You're moving the goalposts. The question was whether the school was making an active decision, not if the decision was good. I would agree that if the school "helps the kid" get chemo, the school is making an active decision there.
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