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
1d 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
1d 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
3d 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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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
7d 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
7d 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.)
Jiro
8d ago
The answer is tautologically the Indian programmer because of the phrase "to the degree that it matters". It is possible to think the Indian programmer should never be hired and still agree with that (the degree that it matters would then be zero).
Jiro
8d ago
It depends on the value of "mediocre". "Mediocre" could, for instance, mean "does equally good work, but demands an American salary", in which case yes. It could also mean "is slightly less efficient and the amount by which he is less efficient doesn't matter", in which case, also yes.
That argument shouldn't apply unless the US has full control over the other country's government. Otherwise the other country's government can mismanage it in such ways that people there are willing to work for very low wages, and then those people will work for low wages in our country and drive our salaries down. On the level of each individual laborer the laborer is working for peanuts in the US voluntarily, but on a level of incentives, most of them would not have done so if the other country's government had not made their country so poor.
And the other country's government, of course, is a government and as such not subject to market forces or economic efficiency.
Also, this assumes some sort of weird EA-variant. If it's economic efficiency to not hire Americans, I don't want economic efficiency. Why would I hold economic efficiency as an end in itself without regard of who gets to benefit from it? I don't treat all humans alike.
Jiro
9d ago
There is much more than just one video here.
Are all those videos from the same stream? It's easy to cherry-pick suspicious-looking things from thousands of videos.
If you started a company that could produce ten million dollars in goods, and nine other people did the same thing, but there was only room in the market for one company, it would be silly to say that one person produced 10 million and the other nine whose company failed are parasites. This should be counted as ten people producing 1 million each; if there's risk, everyone should get credit for the average amount, even if by luck some will produce more and some less.
Writing software for someone who doesn't do anything useful with it is similar. Making software, or anything that isn't a finished product, can in general be productive, yet any specific instance of it may lead to the end user producing a lot, or producing nothing at all. Which one you get depends on luck. So you should get credit for the amount of productivity that can be credited to developers like you, averaged over all possible customers, even if due to bad luck it so happens that your particular customer isn't producing anything.
(Of course, you have to be careful with reference classes. Maybe you're the only programmer who programs system X. That doesn't mean that since there's only one programmer, there's no average; you probably want to average among all programmers in some larger category.)
Jiro
10d ago
It is possible to underpolice and overpolice at the same time. It's the equivalent of anarcho-tyranny. You can underpolice against criminals and overpolice against basically innocent people (which is what "driving while black" means). You can even overpolice and underpolice against criminals at the same time if you don't catch enough of them but are brutal towards the ones you do catch.
Jiro
11d ago
Their contribution to reducing per-unit prices is a lot closer to growing one carrot than it is to inventing GMO rice.
They're contribution per unit is small, but there are a lot of units and the per unit contributions really add up. Just because it's hard to see the contribution because it's really spread out doesn't reduce the size of the contribution.
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.
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.
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