MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
2hr ago
It's baffling that this progressive idealogy has been allowed to persist within the black community and survive contact with deadly consequences. Luxury beliefs are ones that privileged people can hold because someone else has to pay the costs. It does not baffle me that lefty white people believe that black people are oppressed and should fight back against the oppressive beliefs, because this doesn't cause lefty white people to get killed. It does not baffle me that college educated black people believe that they are oppressed and their lower class brothers should fight the police, because the college educated black people are much less likely to get themselves killed. It does not baffle me that black people believe that white people owe them and they should be given free handouts from the government or are morally blameless when they steal things, because this benefits them.
It does baffle me that lower class black people who get are at risk of being killed by police believe they should fight the police. This is not a luxury belief, this has deadly consequences. This is the kind of thing where skin in the game usually causes people to set aside their silly biases and obviously false platitudes and go "oh crap, this is wrong, something needs to change." Even if they verbally adhere to the same ideology, people at least turn hypocrite to avoid the consequences themselves. Someone who claims that homeless people should be given free homes balks at the thought of actually sharing their own home or neighborhood. People who want more government spending even if this requires higher taxes almost always want the taxes raised on someone else. The ideologies mutate into the most consistent and coherent form that just so happens to be compatible with avoiding negative consequences for the believer. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors but you shouldn't physically fight them because they'll kill you. I would not be baffled to have black people going on about how police are evil oppressors that you should fight, and then not actually fighting them and hoping someone else will do it. I am baffled at them actually fighting the police in non-negligible numbers. The ideology, at least the version of it held and professed by black people, should have mutated to avoid this outcome the majority of the time. But it hasn't.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3hr ago
I absolutely agree. I think the vast majority of discrepancies in racial outcomes and behavior are cultural, even if genes probably play some non-zero component (my personal estimate is somewhere around 80% culture 20% genes). Such that, even if cultural interventions couldn't completely solve every issue entirely, they could solve most of them and should be paid attention to more.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3hr ago
though I suspect all but the most beaten-down milquetoast PMCs dislike showing their belly that way
Only a small fraction would have no dislike for it. But a much much broader class of people, actually the majority, would suck it up and do it anyway. Part of being a civilized adult is the ability to set aside your instincts and short-term desires and impulses in favor of the rational, long-term concerns. When I was a child and my brothers would annoy me I would hit them to make them stop. After getting in trouble enough times I learned not to do that. I don't enjoy obnoxious and annoying behavior any more than I used to, and if possible will seek non-violent solutions to end it such as politely asking, or avoiding people who do it. But at the end of the day if I am near someone being deliberately obnoxious and I can't extricate myself from the situation then I will suck it up and deal with it instead of violently attacking them. Because I am an adult and I have the emotional maturity to do that.
Every middle class white child is taught to be respectful and defer to the police. Because your natural instinct is to fight people who oppose you, especially when they're in the wrong, and this instinct leads to predictably bad results, so it requires being taught the correct behavior in this scenario so that you know when to suppress your instincts instead of following them. I am not black, I did not grow up as a black child in a black household, so I don't know first hand what they are taught. But it seems to be some combination of "the police are dangerous and will shoot you, they are your enemy" and "a real man fights their enemies instead of submitting to them like a weakling." Which even if taught as separate messages, and the latter is implicit in the culture rather than explicit, combine to create this sort of behavior.
Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!" When this is the obvious and easiest solution to the issue. It's not that minorities need to be extra submissive towards police, it's that everyone needs to submit to police, but certain subsets of minorities haven't caught on yet and need to be brought up to the same level as everyone else..
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
It could be. It could also just be economics and consumer psychology. They have a lot of good will from how high quality Hollow Knight was at $15. If they bumped Silksong up to $30 it might have generated a lot of backlash at the perceived greed of a price doubling, and halved their expected number of sales, especially after factoring in the number of people who are discovering and buying Hollowing Knight for the first time as they see everyone else getting excited about Silksong.
It could also be a combination of both. Maybe they could have had 60% as many sales at double the price and earned 20% more total profit, but didn't care enough to squeeze out that last extra bit.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
At what point can one reasonably conclude that coexistence between the Red and Blue tribes isn't possible, and there's nothing left to do but wage the culture war as hard as necessary, until one side or the other fully triumphs?
When civil war breaks out.
And what does one do after reaching that conclusion (besides leaving this site, of course, since that runs counter to the basic ethos of the Motte)?
Pick up your gun and join the side that seems slightly less evil.
Anything less should be salvageable.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Yeah this is a good point. From a certain perspective, the computer takes the place of the grunt worker and does its job for free. Programmers are the guy at the drawing board designing something brand new, and then bam you copy/paste it to a million different people's computers across the internet without having to hire thousands of grunt workers to physically build a million copies in a factory. So we're comparing different levels across industries and then wondering why the hard to automate level (design) is hard to automate.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
I've still mostly been playing Silksong. It is fantastic. It is a great followup to Hollow Knight, a great example of a sequel: more content with just enough of a new spin to keep things fresh while still staying true to all the things that made the first one great.
The thing that most confuses me is: why aren't more games like this? At this price point. It was made by 3 people. Yes, it took 7 years and probably re-used a lot of development assets from Hollow Knight but... why aren't more games like this? This level of quality to price ratio. Why can't more studios make similar games on similar budgets? You wouldn't need to charge $60 for your game if you only needed to pay 3 salaries. And on the other side, there are lots of cheap indie games that are crap in comparison. Why can't all of the 3 people studios produce games of this quality?
Obviously there's talent and inspiration and stuff that varies and this might just be an outlier of 3 geniuses who are disproportionately skilled at what they do. But what are they actually doing differently that all of the other indie studios haven't been doing?
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
I've never perceived the Socratic dialogue to have much of a point at all. It's mostly one of the following (or a combination), depending on how kind we are being to the writer:
1: Attempting to get away with strawmanning an opponent by presenting someone who starts disagreeing with you but then immediately caves and agrees with all of your counterarguments as soon as you present them.
2: Attempting to leverage pathos to trick the audience into agreeing with you more than your logical arguments alone would by building them a character who starts in their position (opposition or ignorance) and build empathy with them before the character switches to agreeing with you (causing the audience who identifies with them to subconsciously follow suit).
3: Trying to explain something in a way that's less boring than a monologue, by simulating characters and counterpoints and a skeleton of a narrative to the explanation so the explanation is presented in a more engaging way.
Theoretically if your characters are intelligent and aren't just strawmen meant to prop up the MC in the most shallow way this can work, but basically the only example I've ever seen of something like this is in some of Scott Alexander's works. The vast majority, including and especially the classics like this one, are shallow and pointless.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
Except, because it is not a literal machine but is actually humans implementing complicated emergent behavior, it does not fully embody any of those. It can be bargained with, because the humans that compose it can be bargained with: both individually and collectively. It can feel pity and remorse and fear, because the humans that compose it can feel pity and remorse and fear.
It is currently engaged in a strategy of encroachment: defecting more and more often and more severely in order to exploit the forgiveness of its opponents and see what it can get away with. But this is NOT what a defect bot does. A defect bot defects: always. A defect bot cannot pretend to be anything other than a defect bot, because it has no degrees of freedom with which to signal anything. It does not pretend to cooperate or tit for tat in an attempt to fool its opponents, it just defects.
Again, look at the world around us. Are we currently in the middle of a civil war gunning down each other in the streets? No. That's what maximum defection looks like. We're not there yet. I hope we never get there. And strategic, proportional punishment to defections without escalating maximally is a good way to fight off the encroachment without immediately getting to that state. Even if your opponents are engaged in bad-faith behavior and you need to stop them, deceiving yourself into thinking they're something other than what they are is not strategic. Exaggerations don't help you learn or prepare effective strategy. Maybe you think the appropriate punishments need to be much harsher than they currently are in order to more strongly disincentivize future defections, but this only works because the opponents are not actual defect bots (who ignore punishment and can't stop defecting ever, and can only be solved with death).
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
But human beings are almost never actually literally defectbot. A defectbot is not intelligent, it does not adapt or respond, it cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, it cannot change its behavior. It is an automaton, it always defects. A defectbot in real life is a killing machine, and I agree that the only response is to kill it before it kills you. If your opponents are humans, they are not pure defect bots. And if they were close enough to round off the difference then we would already be in a civil war killing each other. If they start marching the streets gunning down every conservative they can identify, then I agree we shouldn't sit there and let it happen. But we're not there yet, we're not very close all things considered. Maximum defect-defect leaves us with 170 million corpses minimum, likely more. Tit for Tat with forgiveness is likely to lead to far fewer.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8d ago
I think it's still connected enough that it does not count. In my opinion, part of what makes a slur a slur is that it's a version a label that carries unnecessary negative connotation when one could just as easily use a label without that connotation.
"Whore" is a slur while "prostitute" or is mostly not, because whore is used very frequently in a derogatory way, especially against non-prostitutes in an attempt to tarnish them with the shame of the occupation. "Lady of the night" is definitely not a slur despite referring to the same label, because it's deliberately euphemistic and trying not to convey negative connotations.
The actual N word is a slur because it's generally used to refer to lower class or misbehaving black people, while "black people" is not a slur because it's just referring to the group of people with no negative connotations besides those that a racist listener might already have in their mind.
Importantly, these are slurs whether you use them against the correct categories of people or not. If you call a prostitute a "whore" it's still a slur, even if the label is true. They're likely to be offended, because it's not merely that you're accurately labeling what they are, but that you're deliberately choosing a derogatory way to do so. You are labeling them AND judging them poorly. Calling someone the N word is a slur no matter what race they actually are, because you're either labeling them as a black person in a derogatory way, or you are implying they have the same negative traits that you think black people have.
Nazi can be used in a slur-like way, but as actual Nazis exist and there is no other way to refer to them, it's just a label. It does have negative connotation, but broadly those negative traits are inherent to actually Nazism. A real Nazi will not be offended when you call them a Nazi, because they are not ashamed of it: they think they are right. The offense comes primarily from normal people who hate Nazis just as much as everyone else being unfairly accused of being the thing that they hate. It's a false accusation. Just like "rapist" or "murderer" is not a slur, and yet do carry negative connotation. If you publicly accuse me of being one I will be offended. Not because I disagree with the negative connotation or think you're being rude to rapists and murderers, but because that is not what I am and I don't want to be tarnished with sins I did not commit.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
Ironically I put Clair Obscur on pause when Silksong came out because I got excited by new shiny (and I kind of needed a break). Definitely a fantastic game, but the combat and timing things seems to stress/tire me out more than RPG combat usually does and I have to be in the right mood for it, and can't really binge it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
I have not gotten stuck yet (though I don't remember the names of all the sub areas in the Citadel, so don't know if I've cleared that one yet or not). Without any spoilers, I'd recommend spending a bunch of time doing sidequests and/or exploring old areas since a lot of new stuff seems to have opened up in the Act 1 areas after you reach Act 2 and do some stuff there.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
I'm mid Act 2, and got distracted by tons of sidequests and new areas in old areas that got opened up by some upgrades I recently got. It feels like the game started pretty linear but has continued opening up and branching more as I go. Very much enjoying myself, even if I'm sometimes frustrated by what feel like unfair difficulty spikes on certain bosses.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10d ago
Meh. I can try to imagine it would be funny if you were a leftist and actually believed people it was parodying existed. But comedy needs to be relatable in some way, it requires some level of suspension of disbelief, and all I see here is playing into stereotypes the left has about the right with no bearing on reality.
But even then, I'm not convinced it's all that good even if you did believe the right were crypto Nazis. Like, watch something by Babylon Bee. They do stuff like this all the time mocking the left and even when I agree with them in principle they're not funny. It's very low-brow humor to take something someone believes at a 3, dial it up to 11, and then make fun of how ridiculous and extreme it is at 11. It's not clever, because you're just beating up strawmen.
MathWizard
Good things are good
11d ago
They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.
This makes them monsters. At least the extremist subset of them who have drunk the Koolaid enough to literally believe this enough to celebrate violence. A monster does not need to be sadistic and take joy in doing evil, sometimes they are uncaring and hungry: acting on instinct rather than reason. Sometimes they are heroes in their own minds and do monstrous things in their futile quest to enact their utopian vision. There are many different types of monster.
The classical logical chain, Modus Ponens, goes "If A then B. A is true, therefore B." A is "my opponents are Nazis", B is "violence is justified to stop them". You've identified that the leftists are correct about "If A then B" but this is only half of the picture. The leftists are half correct and half wrong, and therefore reach a wrong conclusion and behave monstrously. And it's not some minor detail that they get wrong. "My opponents are Nazis" in the strong sense required to justify violence is a bold claim. It would not be sufficient that they wear swastikas or Heil Hitler: the part of the Nazis that justifies violence against them is the violence and genocide they use. This requires strong evidence. You can't just "be taught" that my opponents are evil and blindly believe it and start attacking them. The only way to look at the world we live in and come to the conclusion that right-wing people are literal Nazis to the level of deserving political violence is to practice sociopathic, monstrous, willful ignorance. To vilify such obvious non-villains is exactly what the Nazis themselves did that enabled them to commit so much evil.
I don't believe that ignorance or stupidity justifies evil behavior. Ignorant and stupid people still have to take responsibility for their own actions. If you lack the levels of intellectual sophistication required to parse the truth in the modern media landscape then it is your duty as a good person to practice some epistemic humility. Someone who says "I think right wingers are bad people because the news told me they hate minorities and that's wrong." Is a good person, even if they're wrong on a factual level. Someone who says "Right wing people should die because the news told me they want to kill minorities" and sincerely believes it rather than merely exaggerating for rhetorical effect, is a monster.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.
I believe that was intended to be a disparaging euphemism for salad dressings.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
Some discretion is okay. But too much creates a lack of feedback. If you have a terrible law that is stupid and leads to bad results and then enforce it 1% of the time, then it becomes a tool of tyranny for corrupt administrations to selectively persecute people they dislike for other reasons and use the law as an excuse. And the average person who keeps their head down won't get targeted, won't complain, and might not even notice. If a terrible law were enforced 90% of the time then people would realize it's terrible and throw a huge fuss and the democratically elected officials would be forced to fix it. If it's almost never enforced it can sit on the books unnoticed until it can be weaponized. There are way too many laws, nobody knows all of them, and the majority of law knowledge comes from word-of-mouth. Congress could have passed a law in 1982 saying "It's illegal to own a rubber chicken" and then literally never enforced it and it's just sitting in a book somewhere waiting to be weaponized. Would you know if they had done that? Or they passed a law saying "It's illegal to own an object with these properties:" and there's some hundred paragraphs of convoluted nonsense which eventually translates to apply only to rubber chickens if you're a legal expert. I suppose if you're a company trying to start a rubber chicken factory and you hire lawyers to go over all the laws the lawyer might notice the law and tell you about it, but they'd also tell you that it's never enforced or interpreted that way and all the other rubber chicken factories ignore it, so you're fine.
But it's a weapon, and it exists because nobody notices or cares because it's not enforced. A principle that laws should be enforced most of the time prevents these weapons from sitting around at the enforcer's convenience. We should not live in a world where everybody breaks laws every day without realizing it, but selective enforcement allows this to persist. The failure modes of too much enforcement are temporarily worse than too little, but it brings transparency and forces the lawmakers to fix it, making a better long term scenario.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
I'm not going to praise Trump for his commitment to equal enforcement of laws. But the problem is not the enforcement here but the lack of enforcement elsewhere. The problem is the past decade of non-enforcement giving the company an expectation that the laws were a formality that they shouldn't take seriously, and giving all of the other companies a free pass so that they all have to skirt the laws to remain competitive.
I agree that this is a problem, but the solution is more enforcement (and more predictable enforcement), not less.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
Does nobody have respect for the rule of law? This seems related to the concept of incentivizing lying that came up again in the recent ACX review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase
If you have rules and laws and you consistently don't enforce them, then you reward and incentivize rule breakers and liars. We have immigration laws. First and foremost, we should enforce the immigration laws. Then, after doing so, if we find out that we don't have the optimal level of immigration then we should change the number of immigrants we allow.
If foreign manufacturers are forming plans to build facilities in the United States, they should form their plans with the intention of hiring primarily locals, with whatever management or trainers they bring in having legal visas. These plans should involve carefully screening hired laborers to make sure they are legal. If their plans have already factored in plans to hire illegals but are worried about getting raided and choose not to, then good. They should either reformulate their plans to follow the law, or take their business elsewhere.
If we establish a precedent of enforcing immigration laws, then investors will take them into account and the economy will equilibrize accordingly. If we then end up with more American factories, or foreign factories with American workers because a hole was opened up for them to fill, then good, and we have more jobs for Americans. If not, and there ends up being a shortage of factories because we genuinely need the foreign expertise, then we'll be able to observe that and stick some more visas in the immigration budget. And then they'll be legal, and we'll have control over how many there are.
In no world is "make harsh laws and then fail to enforce them because they are too harsh" the correct decision.
MathWizard
Good things are good
17d ago
Just got it today. I don't normally buy games when they first come out because $60 is a lot and I want to wait until they go on sale, and get enough reviews to know if it'll be worth it. But $20 for a game I'm nearly guaranteed to enjoy given how good HK is? I'm in.
Preliminary opinions are similar to yours. It feels a bit more streamlined in a way that makes it more convenient, but kind of loses some of the mystique. Same with Hornet talking instead of being a silent protagonist: it makes sense lore-wise, and might allow more options for the story to deliver, but it gives a very different feel.
It's fun to play so far though. I hope it ends up even better than HK, but even if it's slightly less good it'll still be worth the time and money.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
The issue is that the pushback is elastic: if it has enough momentum it can go far beyond the equilibrium before it gets pushed back. I don't think the social justice mobs are going to end up strong enough to push forth a violent revolution and take over the country, but if they try they might kill dozens to hundreds of people before the national guard cracks down on them hard enough to stop them (and possibly hundreds or thousands die in the ensuing chaos).
Likewise, someone who thought that Trump was an actual fascist and would try to coup the government might fear that hundreds or thousands of people would die in the ensuing chaos before enough legal force got around to stopping him.
The damage is bounded, but it's a high bound. I don't want hundreds or thousands of people to die. I don't think either scenario is especially likely to get that bad, but part of preventing it from getting there is starting the push back via complaints, critiques, and votes, before it gets there.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
I'm fairly certain Boltzmann brains are unfalsifiable. Under the theory, you think that your experience is mostly ordered only because you have randomly configured into a brain with false memories of an ordered experience.
That said, it should be treated with the same level of seriousness as other unfalsifiable theories like an invisible intangible dragon in your garage.
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
Setting the Trump issue aside, this seems overly naive to me. Laws are exploitable. Many laws are designed to be exploitable. Gerrymandering, lobbying, pork barrel spending, filibustering: these were all created by finding a tiny crack in the wording of a law that was intended for normal common sense behavior and then bending the interpretation and exploiting it towards some obviously unintended but technically legal end. Heck, 90% of the federal governments actions are "constitutional" only on the basis of deliberately misinterpreting the Commerce Clause. As long as they can convince a judge to sign off on it, literally anything could be considered legal on the basis of literally any existing law.
The law is not automatically moral, or just, or well-designed. Broadly speaking we should have respect for it and follow it because that creates a predictable and orderly society. But that's while keeping an eye on it to make sure it leads to good outcomes, and the instant it stops doing that we ought to have an emergency scramble to fix the loophole before people get used to it and think that's normal. Not that that's what they usually do, usually half the politicians are the ones exploiting the loophole and block any attempts to fix it by the other party. But that would be an appropriate response, rather than shrugging and saying "if it's legal it's intended behavior." Politicians are too good at deceitful word games for that to be true.
I am working on making my own video game... for the third time. I've started and abandoned projects like this in the past, mostly because I got bogged down in pedantic issues like making menus and saving/loading that were boring but necessary and didn't get to the actual fun part of my game design ideas, until I got bored.
I have slightly higher hopes for this one, partly because Chat GPT is making things a lot easier. I am self-taught at programming, so there's a whole bunch of features and functions that I just don't know exist or syntax that I don't remember, and I can just ask it "how do I do this?" or "I can think of three ways to solve this problem, which is considered best practice?" and it can give advice much faster than trying to dig through google and stack exchange, and often give me code snippets I can copy/paste for my specific use case. I'm finding the overall experience to be much less frustrating than before.
For the game itself, the idea is a roguelite dungeon crawler combining elements of Blue Prince, Stuck in Time, and Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. The idea being you have an RPG character with stats, you run around in a dungeon that you generate room by room by choosing one of three options and having to rotate and snap doors together, and then you do actions in each room which have a chance to pass based on your stats and cards you play to temporarily boost them against a difficulty. Each movement, room draft, or action costs you time and energy resources, failures cost health or have other negative consequences, and if you run out you die and have to restart. But with permanent meta-progress. Each unique room/action combination has a familiarity level which goes up each time you do it, and it costs you less energy based on its familiarity level. Additionally, while many of the actions give you more resources and short term powerups within a run, some of them instead cost bunches of resources but reward you with permanent meta rewards making you permanently stronger. So you run through the dungeon over and over again getting a little stronger each time, making it a little further and unlocking a little bit more.
This is one of my favorite gameplay loops in roguelites and dungeon crawlers in general. I know a lot of people don't like grinding, but I love it if it accomplishes a certain balance between grind and skill, where your progress is determined by a combination of how much stuff you've unlocked and how well you do, and doing well gives you more rewards faster. I don't expect the game to ever get polished to a point of commercial viability. Maybe if it reaches a sufficiently playable state I'll present it for free on GitHub. But the primary goal is just to make my own perfect game tailor-designed towards my own preferences where I can keep adding more content and more upgrades whenever I reach the end.
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