Jiro
20hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
4d 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
5d 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.
Jiro
5d ago
If the present value of their pension is 3 million and the total value of their government benefits is 5 million, that means that the value of their non-pension government benefits is 2 million. Unless a lot of those benefits are specific to them, that means that every similar retiree has $2 million of present value government benefits, which makes the claim "they have seven figures" useless to communicate information.
Jiro
5d ago
Someone making $50000 a year for 20 years will have made 7 figures, but we don't count that as "being worth seven figures". You have no reason to think they would be able to accumulate enough of that pension to reach seven figures.
Jiro
5d ago
Huge resources are thrown into shaming racists yet there are a lot of racists around.
Because it isn't aimed at actual racists.
People of the type who are really being shamed have lost a lot of influence as a result.
Though it's enraging, there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed him that you are better than him.
This is like "I'm going to do nothing to my bully to show that I'm better than him", but worse. It's indistinguishable from "I am powerless to do anything against him, and I may be forced to actually help him, but I'm rationalizing it away".
Jiro
5d ago
This should have been a 2 minute long discussion with a pharmacist at most where I tell them what drugs I want, then half an hour at my local lab where they do a few tests for me, and that's it.
This doesn't work because 1) stupid people will ask for antibiotics when they don't have good reason to expect them to work, and 2) giving out unneeded antibiotics has bad externalities. And the pharmacist can't administer a stupidity test.
And even in your case, you say that one doctor gave you a useless antibiotic before the second doctor gave you a useful one. If you go to a pharmacist, how are either you or the pharmacist going to know which one is useful and which one isn't? How are either of you going to know that your condition needs antibiotics at all, aside from you getting lucky? ("It worked for my family member, so it should work for me", and that actually being true, is luck.)
Jiro
5d ago
An extra $15k-20k a year is NOT going to bankrupt anyone worth a low seven figures.
I don't see seven figures anywhere in this.
Jiro
8d ago
He used the same insulting words that would be used when mocking. Claiming that it isn't mockery because he said the same words with a different attitude is special pleading.
Jiro
8d ago
I do dread to think what they might copy from the shit-dumping.
Well, let's think of other things the left finds as unpleasant as shit dumping. Maybe they'll call him Hitler? Or just say they like when right-wingers are assassinated?
Jiro
8d ago
A shame, this level of crudity is self-defeating
Trump isn't running for office again, unless you're Scott Alexander. And even if he was, I really doubt this would lead someone to change their vote about him (or the Republicans). Exactly how is it self-defeating?
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.
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