Jiro
3mo ago
First of all, this is only true if the argument includes no personal observations or other claims that might be false. Second, this is only true if you're an ideal perfect arguer who notices BS 100% of the time and can never be fooled by it. If you're an actual human, you don't want to bother with someone who's likely to make a lot of invalid arguments, because you might fail to notice some of them because you're an actual human.
Also, uh, I can't get any hard numbers but I'm guessing a bunch of people died due to hospitals getting hit.
Government happens on such a large scale that anything nontrivial which is less than perfect will lead to people dying. Never mind hospitals, you can calculate statistical loss of lives just based on the economic impact. And then you can follow up by calculating statistical loss of lives based on something that has only economic impact. If we don't allow for mistakes resulting in deaths, we can't have government at all.
Our personal intuitions don't scale up here. You on your own can only cause deaths by being malicious or by being so careless that you could reasonably be expected to not be so. But if something is large scale enough, even ordinary human imperfection is enough to cause deaths. A standard which says that you should never cause deaths there is unworkable; causing deaths is inevitable.
Usually when "do this" has massive negative externalities, you want a) to have the boss get in trouble for saying that, b) to have the civil/criminal penalty for "do this" be larger than the corporate penalty for "or else".
This doesn't work when the chance of the negative externality happening is small. Past a certain point, increasing the punishment won't cause any more deterrence.
Jiro
3mo ago
If he wants to play devil's advocate, he could say he's playing devil's advocate, not pretend he actually believes what he's saying.
Jiro
3mo ago
I am one of the Elect and fully in favor of crushing the white peasants" is not a forbidden opinion
Honestly saying "I am one of the Elect and fully in favor of crushing the white peasants" may be stupid, but it isn't a forbidden opinion.
Dishonestly saying it to deliberately provoke backlash in favor of the white peasants (or to just provoke reactions, period) violates several rules, including the one about speaking plainly.
Jiro
3mo ago
But LOTT didn't really suffer any harm from it.
It's very difficult to measure how much someone is harmed by things of this sort. It was clearly used by TracingWoodgrains to discredit LoTT. I think I should not need to do some kind of media reputation analysis to calculate how much LoTT was discredited so I can say that LoTT was "harmed".
Was Scott harmed by Cade Metz? If yes, could you prove it?
Jiro
3mo ago
No, it isn't; adults that are stupider than the average teenager (including the mentally handicapped and the senile) have more rights than them, so that claim it's cognitive is incoherent.
It's cognitive, but imperfectly.
Jiro
3mo ago
If she had said 0.1 percent, it would have probably failed to inspire the same reaction.
Jiro
3mo ago
In this case, sure. But as a general rule, that doesn't work as well as you imply.
First of all, it's a matter of framing. People are likely to assume that having committed a crime predicts someone's future behavior a lot more than it actually does, particularly if the crime is described in general terms. This won't matter much if it's 19 versus 12 which is pretty bad regardless, but suppose the government lumped together some things of different severity? You're a sex criminal if you have sex with a 12 year old, but you're also a sex criminal if you accidentally expose yourself if there's no bathroom and you try to take a leak behind a building. And all that the general public sees in the criminal history is "sex criminal". The public will treat the latter guy as badly as the former. In theory they could look him up in further detail, say "well, he just took a leak behind a building", and discount their judgment appropriately, but many people will take shortcuts and not do this.
Second, it's a moral hazard if you assume an imperfect justice system. It's true that a conviction predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. It's also true that an accusation without a conviction or any evidence predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. By the same reasoning that applies to convictions, we should pay attention to accusations made without evidence. But the danger of this is obvious: it's a market for lemons situation. You don't know whether the accusation is baseless or not, but the person "selling" the accusation does, and therefore has an incentive to "sell" baseless accusations. An imperfect justice system that occasionally convicts disliked people on a three-felonies-a-day basis will face the same incentives as the person making baseless accusations.
Applying these to Trump's conviction is an exercise for the reader.
Jiro
3mo ago
Sports illustrated swimsuit models are wearing swimsuits. They're not strippers.
Jiro
3mo ago
There's a large chunk of the elites that are sympathetic to Gaza and oppose Israel, in ways that can't be explained by just being afraid.
Jiro
3mo ago
The reaction of a large chunk of Western elites to Gaza can't be explained just by being scared.
Jiro
3mo ago
Going with your cellular automata analogy, you're missing that people don't have knowledge of the global landscape, only their local neighborhood.
In the modern world, this is true for nobody relevant to the question.
Jiro
3mo ago
Somehow I doubt that Roosevelt would have endorsed that if you don't like a retail service worker, a cop, the president, and restaurant food, you should endeavor to become a service worker, a cop, and a president all at the same time, while cooking food. That's just absurd. It's completely sensible to disagree with how someone does a specific facet of their job, and expect to be taken seriously, even if you aren't willing to do their job yourself.
Telling people that they shouldn't criticize the president unless they've been in a presidential campaign just amounts to "pretty much nobody's allowed to criticize the president".
Jiro
3mo ago
Running a campaign is likely to fail for factors unrelated to whether my views are either better than or popular than the president's.
And if I disagree with both a cop and the president, should I try to become both at the same time?
Jiro
3mo ago
For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain.
On 4chan? 4chan specializes in being outrageous, which also serves as a filter to keep outsiders away. Everyone gets attacked on 4chan.
Jiro
3mo ago
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can’t see where it keeps its brain." I'm not confident that we can see where a given Administration keeps its brain.
I think that this metaphor makes a lot of sense when applied to a presidential administration, especially one riding on a movement that isn't about them, but the comparison of figurative thing to literal thing in the metaphor makes my head spin. When would you actually run into something where you don't know where it keeps its brain?
Jiro
3mo ago
The difference in this case is that the cops were holding all the cards: they're armed, she's in a nightie; they're big and beefy, she's a tiny woman.
... and that in the scenario of you walking down the street, it's very unlikely that the person rebuking you had a pot of boiling water.
Jiro
4mo ago
It's possible to disfigure a man with boiling water without immersing him in it.
Jiro
4mo ago
Believing that the president should order a hit squad on Trump implies that Trump is such a danger that that's required. Claiming that he's that dangerous encourages violence from everyone, not just from a government raiding party.
I wouldn't have this kind of problem with someone asserting that Trump should be arrested and given the death penalty after a fair trial, but not many people will say that, precisely because that doesn't imply that he needs to be killed by any means possible.
They do those things, but they don't do them in the proportions that you imply. Someone insincerely arguing for a position is much more likely to be telling you BS, even if every human will probably be telling you some BS.
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