Jiro
20hr ago
Hey, most of the versions of King Arthur in Fate are not big-titted. Saber was introduced in the original F/SN visual novel with a mumbo jumbo explanation of why she was the same age as the teenage protagonist. So most versions in the game are teenage and not adult. Visually, the teenage versions are distinguished by not being big-titted.
Jiro
1d ago
Fraud in general is a method of resource allocation; giving you a half pound of flour when you paid for a pound allocates more resources to the seller. If the seller is financially in trouble, the fraud may actually be keeping his business profitable. Yet this doesn't make fraud fine.
Deliberately or recklessly denying valid claims allocates resources, but is still a form of fraud.
Jiro
6d ago
Since you don't need to be all-powerful to understand that a person has intended something but not said it, this is a fully general argument against there ever being such a thing as politeness, to anyone (deity or not). God is affronted by one and not the other for the same reason that not saying "thank you" causes people to be affronted even though they know very well that the phrase has no actual meaning.
Jiro
10d ago
This argument is like "eating sugar harms society because of health care costs". It's the taxation that imposes it on other parties, not the needle sites.
Jiro
10d ago
Trans is a special case because the trans social contagion encourages permanent harm to themselves. If they're just swerving to the right (or are gay, or a furry, or a Goth, or pretty much anything else that a parent would likely worry about) they can change their mind later and no harm will be done aside from having spent a year being Goth or whatever.
Jiro
10d ago
No, because "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make" is an overly general category that includes not only gambling, but a lot of other things that gambling opponents genuinely don't also want to restrict.
Jiro
11d ago
(After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)
Considering that a similar claim made about the Super Bowl turned out to not be real, I'm going to be skeptical of this.
Also, for every loss is a win on the other side. Does it cause a corresponding reduction, eliminating the net effect?
Jiro
14d ago
That's why people came up with the concept of "weakman". It may not be literally a strawman to treat an extreme minority opinion on the Internet as if a substantial number of people believed it, but it may as well be.
Jiro
14d ago
As mentioned in the other topic in the OP, the vastly dominant risk factor driving obscene amounts of medical spending is obesity.
I don't buy this. Everyone dies of something. The efficient way to reduce medical expenses is to die of something that kills you relatively fast. Any claim that people's actions "cause them to have medical expenses" has to be seen in this light. It's by no means clear that some activities cause medical expenses at all just because they lead to early illness and death (I believe cigarette smoking reduces medical expenses for this reason). And even if they do, are they really something we wish to discourage? (do we want to blame people for being nonsmokers because that increases their medical expenses for old age care?)
Jiro
17d ago
Okay; explain to me why left-wing protesters can't simply have George Floyd level riots and burn DC, NYC and every other major US city to the ground in response to Trump's election?
Because Floyd-level riots hurt Democratic-run and Democratic-voting areas (you yourself mention NYC--not a Republican stronghold!) and discredit the Democrats. They have some propaganda value against the right, especially when the media is sympathetic, but they probably hurt the left more than the right. This doesn't depend on prosecutions.
Perhaps I'll add, why didn't democrats rig the 2024 election given that nobody suffered consequences for rigging the election in 2020?
Because their ability to rig elections is not unlimited and they couldn't rig it by enough to push the election to the Democrats.
please give me concrete examples where our predictions about the world would differ?
"They'll allow as many Floyd-style protests as they can get away with, but they will eventually stop" is very different than preventing Floyd-style protests as much as they can. You would predict the latter. Certainly you wouldn't predict prosecutors going easy on protestors.
Indeed. I've seen you post half a dozen times here something along the lines of (and feel free to correct my paraphrasing): 'My model of the world is that the ingroup will consistently choose to harm the outgroup as much as possible.
By your reasoning, he should also predict that Biden will put on a vest full of explosives and suicide bomb Donald Trump.
Nobody will choose to harm the outgroup "as much as possible" if that means literally as much as possible regardless of the harm to themselves in the process. What they will do is harm the outgroup as much as they can without too much harm to themselves. That isn't the same thing. They did in fact tried to keep lockdowns going and they did support "abolish the police"; it's just that the political cost of continuing to do so was too great.
You've also thrown a few things in there that don't even harm the outgroup; a January 6 style protest against Trump winning the election wouldn't harm anyone in the outgroup (and the actual January 6 didn't harm anyone either, it was just an excuse for a left-wing crackdown).
Jiro
26d ago
New media isn't conventionally left or right, but the most popular versions tend to lean republican.
They do? Social media, except X, is all on the left too.
Certainly themotte didn't leave Reddit because Reddit was censoring Democrats.
Jiro
26d ago
I don't see the inherent justification for a parent to know about something which may or may not lead to a medical decision down the line, even if it's somewhat likely to.
We can't run the world on 100% certainty. By your reasoning, the school shouldn't report the child doing any dangerous things that didn't have a 100% chance of harming the child.
Jiro
27d ago
I don't understand how you justify a different name and different clothing being a step towards a medical process (justifying parents being given third party info) on the one hand but being completely innocuous on the other hand when it comes to Goth/alt culture.
"A different name and clothing is a step towards a medical process" is an observation about how humans behave in the real world, not a conclusion which needs to be justified. Humans don't behave that way with respect to Goth culture. If they did, then teachers should have to tell parents about that too, but they don't.
The teachers don't have any special knowledge about what students are going to do in the future.
They don't have 100% certain knowledge. But they do have knowledge about what sort of things are likely and what sort of things aren't, which is enough.
Jiro
28d ago
ou (and most other people) are not complaining that all the English majors and all the physicists can't leave your kids alone, because (presumably) you agree with the majority of them.
The object level question actually matters here. English and physics usually aren't controversial, and to the extent that they are, parents are justified in complaining about them too.
There is a debatable correlation between wearing Goth clothing as an adolescent and going through troubled times, but teachers do not routinely make a habit of notifying parents of such things, and rightly so.
Secret social transitions are a problem because social transitions are a step towards a medical transition, so parents should have some say in that process. Schools don't need to notify parents about Goth clothing because it doesn't lead to anything (except maybe a piercing? I don't know how common that is).
Jiro
28d ago
To the extent that they are not pushier than straights, this is a problem that happens with straights too. To the extent that they are pushier than straights, it's a problem, but it's not a problem with being gay; pushiness is not part of the definition of gay.
Jiro
28d ago
I think there are plenty of trans people who are chill, but on both the left and the right people are motivated to elevate the obnoxious, deranged activist subset of trans people.
Yet I'm sure you can name groups for which this doesn't happen much. This isn't something that automatically happens with every group; some groups have more extremists and less control over extremists, than other groups.
Jiro
28d ago
Gay men generally don't want to do things that would have a different impact on other people based on whether they are gay. The trans do. There's also a lot of worry about trans children being encouraged into irreversible treatments, which isn't a problem for gay children.
Jiro
29d ago
You can see a distribution of some that pass better than others, and notice that it tails off towards the end of the distribution so the amount that completely pass is small.
Jiro
29d ago
The secrets to enjoyment:
That's like saying that you don't care about people in church saying that the Jews eat babies, because as a Jew you don't go to church anyway.
Social media power is a problem because it can affect things that happen off of social media.
Jiro
1mo ago
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.
Jiro
1mo 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.
On the other hand, it might work like self-driving cars: the technology improves and improves, but getting to the point where it's as good as a human just isn't possible, and it stalls at some point becase it's reached its limits. I expected that to happen for self-driving cars and wasn't disappointed, and it's likely to happen for ChatGPT too.
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