Jiro
5mo ago
The anti-racism movement started well before the gay rights movement, so by this reasoning we should be in the middle of a massive backlash among the youth against any sort of anti-racism movements. It's fair to say that we don't have that.
Jiro
5mo ago
I flat out do not think anyone could make even a half-compelling case for Biden nationalizing Twitter.
Then pick a different example. There has to be some unlikely scenario. Let's go with your original court packing one.
You care about unlikely scenarios that happen at the 5-10% level, yet you don't care about unlikely scenarios that happen at the 3-5% level. Even assuming I fix the numbers so it isn't exactly at 5 (which is covered by both ranges), that's making a really, really, fine distinction. I simply would not be able to estimate such things with enough precision to say "well, maybe it's as high as 3-5%. but it couldn't possibly be as high as 5-10%". And I highly doubt you could really make such estimates either. It's not only subjective, but it can't be anything else; you're pulling numbers out of your hat.
Jiro
5mo ago
I think I'm still allowed to be worried about that 5-10%, because to me, that's well beyond my comfortable threshold for electing a president.
...
I'm mildly afraid that Biden will consider a court-packing plan, but this probability I place at more like 3-5%. Trump gets weighted higher at 6-10%. This is subjective, thus I don't expect people to agree.
Thatt's not just subjective, it's so subjective that your conclusion entirely depends on the subjective part. I mean, I could say "Biden has a 5-10% chance of cutting off aid to Sarael" or "Biden has a 5-10% chance of nationalizing Twitter" based on nothing whatsoever, and the percentage is small enough that it would be hard to argue exact numbers.
Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen.
Trans people want to be called by their assumed sex because they're well aware that the word for that sex already has a preexisting meaning, and they want to be treated as though that preexisting meaning applies to themselves. Claiming that words can mean anything you want is disingenuous because if the words really did mean anything you wanted, trans people would no longer want to use them. And Zack already covered all of this.
The "sir" analogy doesn't work because people who want to be called "sir" don't do so because they want to be treated like English noblemen. The word did once refer to English noblemen, but people today are not using the word because they want to get in on the English nobleman business.
What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict.
Zack's extensive posts include direct references to the Sequences recommending otherwise.
The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as ...
You are conflating "not pushing back" with "actively promoting".
Jiro
5mo ago
Can someone help me understand the continuing opposition to Citizens United?
The press misreported it for political reasons and people believed them.
Jiro
5mo ago
Journalists have a huge influence on what people think, even if they don't follow journalists every single time. Elections are not won by every single voter doing what the journalist says; tilting the balance is enough to win the election.
Jiro
5mo ago
That assumes that the phone number is there for security. It's actually there so that Google can collect information about you and correlate it with other information about you that uses the phone number. The claim that it's there for security is a lie.
Jiro
5mo ago
If you're presenting bad evidence, the solution is for you to present better evidence. Not for you to demand that someone else present better evidence. Bad evidence is not something you get to use in the absence of something better.
Jiro
5mo ago
This assumes that it is possible to not break the law. "Three felonies a day" is exaggerated only in that the number is less than three per day. It's still plenty per career.
It's saying "this is bad evidence". In the case of bad evidence it's inherently true that if it does exist, it's bad evidence, and if it doesn't exist, it's no evidence. By your reasoning, all claims that something is bad evidence are unfalsifiable.
It is not unfalsifiable, because you can dispute whether the evidence is bad. It's just that in this case, disputing that the evidence is bad would make you look foolish.
Jiro
5mo ago
Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?
Zack Davis's posts on LW lay out the case for that in exhaustive detail, though he covers Yudkowsky more than Scott.
by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.
This grants him too much charity. To put it another way, there's a motte and bailey. The "simplified rephrasing" is the motte. Like when he arged that medicine doesn't work, where the motte was that, well, medicine didn't work, and the bailey was a bunch of much less serious criticisms of medicine that are much easier to defend than "medicine doesn't work".
Jiro
5mo ago
he's one of those elite compartmentalizing textualists who consider only the issues before them, and who are not swayed by irrelevant appeals to unlitigated issues and public policy concerns.
Just like rationalists. The biggest problem with rationalist reasoning is the refusal to sanity-check ther results of arguments. Rationalists will draw absurd conclusions like insect welfare or donating one's kidney to a stranger and say "sure, I guess that's right" rather than figuring out that something has gone wrong with their reasoning process if it produces such an absurd result. See also: terrorists who fail at epistemic learned helplessness.
Public policy concerns isn't quite the right way to describe it. That makes it sound like some sort of legislation by reinterpretation like the left does. If the people who created the law wouldn't have wanted the public policy implications of your interpretation of the law, that's a failure to sanity check, that's not public policy in the sense of "I am deliberately inerpreting the law to bring about this public policy".
Jiro
5mo ago
That wasn't the only problem with the comic book version. The other problem with the comic book version is that the writers didn't agree on what was in the registration act. It could be anything from just registration to conscription, and it could or could not apply to borderline cases (like unpowered fighters). Needless to say, if you're going to have political stories, stuff like that will make a big difference, and that part was completely incoherent too.
Jiro
5mo ago
Hardcore straight porn is ugh the worst, but exploring your mommy kink with roleplay and bizarre anal insertions for the viewing pleasure of strangers is both normal and an exotic frontier you should explore assuming you're not close-minded. No, there is no sense to be made from this.
"The woke don't like straight men" is not difficult to understand.
Jiro
5mo ago
The purpose is not to engage with the arguments in the manifesto, but to understand the circumstances behind the shooting. If a shooter is motivated by politics, that's important to know, especially if the shooting is used by politicians and activists to promote something that the actual politics of the shooter might disprove.
Jiro
5mo ago
What are you talking about? You seemed to have missed the part "of course, we don't think humans qualify as vermin".
You and Nazis both think you should exterminate vermin. You don't think humans are vermin and Nazis do. So the Nazis have a distorted version of the same values as you.
Jiro
5mo ago
This isn't about moderation, but I still see the bug where replying to a comment at some level of nesting causes the reply to hang indefinitely without refreshing the comment, even though the comment has been saved.
Jiro
5mo ago
I think the thing is that these people do mostly share some distorted version of my values in the way that the Nazis don't. The Nazis tried to exterminate a people that they thought were vermin while invading their neighbors in a war of aggression.
I think we should exterminate vermin, and you probably do too. So Nazis do share a distorted version of our values. Of course, we don't think humans qualify as vermin, and Nazis do think that, but that's what makes it distorted--it's still a version.
Jiro
5mo ago
Kal-El is Hebrew for Voice of God
It's almost Hebrew for "voice of God". Which doesn't count.
(voice followed by god would be "kol el" and Hebrew grammar wouldn't let you phrase it that way to mean "voice of god" anyway.)
It sounds like Playboy may have done this, though it's hard to tell. They tried to drop nudity in 2015 (which Hefner admitted was a mistake) and had to walk it back. Then (Wikipedia):
It went online-only in 2020.
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