MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
14hr ago
I think the "criminals" aspect of this is a red herring, and the real issue is the infidelity and "messaging multiple men" part. If she was a single mother messaging one man in prison, and he wanted to become the father of her kids, there wouldn't be an issue. If she was married and messaging a dozen non-criminal men and promising them to become the father of her kids they would end up in a similar risky situation.
The solution here which seems best suited to curtail dangerous behavior and not end up applied to ordinary good-faith actors seems to be some sort of child-protecting infidelity law. Or maybe just some sort of disclosure thing: don't tell multiple people that they can parent your kids without them knowing about each other. That way more benign cases like getting a new boyfriend while a divorce is being finalized, or consensual polyamory are not affected, while secretly cheating with a dozen people who become emotionally attached to a kid and then want to fight each other and/or kidnap the kid becomes illegal.
My understanding of the alt-right is that their typical proposed solution to the problem of racial minorities is segregated ethnostates. We divide up the U.S. and each group of people gets their own country with only their own race, and from then on they suffer the consequences of their own behavior.
Less explicitly spoken, but there's also usually an undercurrent of schadenfreude where they believe the racial minorities are uncivilized savages who will create a crime-ridden hellhole without white people to subsidize them with wellfare and policing, but this is justified on account of them doing it to themselves. They don't want to directly exterminate the minorities, but some of them do secretly hope the minorities to exterminate each other and prove their racism correct in the process. But they don't especially care about the second part, because they get their white ethnostate either way. Once the minorities are out of sight, out of mind, it doesn't matter what happens to them because the white ethnostate can live up to its glorious potential or whatever.
I don't want to steelman the neo-nazis too hard, because I haven't spoken to very many of them and I suspect that lots of them are the way you describe. But I don't think most of them would be too opposed to the above approach (especially since there's some overlap with the alt-right). Some sort of plan like "Kick Palestine out and give all the land to Israel, then force all of the Jews around the world to move to Israel and they can have their own country, then remove all financial and military support from Israel and let them fend for themselves." would be the sort of plan that, on the face of it, does not require extermination. It would still be really awful for all the people who get their lives upended, and might lead to them dying if the Islamic states gang up on them, but it's not the level of hatred and evil that "Gas the Jews" is. I could have a reasoned discussion with someone who thinks me and people who are like me are ruining society and should live in our own separate society. I would get angry and heated trying to argue with someone who wants to exterminate me and people who are like me (if I thought enough people were taking them seriously and they weren't just some isolated troll). The former implies some form of thought and logic and reason, that this person is genuinely trying to make a better society and is just confused about how to do that, the latter indicates thought-terminating hatred from them as they jump to the most simple, obvious, and evil "solution".
Sidenote: there's also the even more nuanced take, which I wouldn't even consider to be "Nazi" (since I tentatively endorse it myself and most self-described Nazis wouldn't think goes far enough), but would definitely be called Nazi by some people, is that we should investigate corporations and universities and whatnot for discriminatory practices related to Jewishness with the same lens and at the same standards that we use for racial discrimination of all other kinds (ideally not quotas, but actual influence in decision-making), and punish discrimination against Jews AND in favor of Jews symmetrically (and also punish discrimination against AND in favor of white people). I think a lot of antisemitism is driven by Jews seeming to get the same double-standard of the law and society that the other minorities get: letting you get away with discriminating in favor of them but not against them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
I have literally never seen a classical Neo Nazi on here calling for the death of Jews. It's against the rules and they would be banned immediately.
I don't know exactly what you've seen, but my guess is you've seen some of the more nuanced moderate Nazi-like posters who dislike Jews and/or Jewish Supremecists but don't call for their death. And are strawmanning/patern-matching them to the more classical Nazis. I think there's a really important distinction, because first and foremost, the rational Nazi does not want you to die. They might dislike, want you to have less power and influence, might want you to leave, but they don't want you to die and if they saw you on the street they would not attack you. Second, the rational Nazi does not necessarily hate you, personally, if you are not yourself a supremecist. They might not even be a bigot at all, in the same way that an anti-woke person is not necessarily a racist.
Let me explain. Even though "Jew" is not technically a race, for most purposes we can consider it to be in the same general category and treat it the same way. This means that it should not be treated any differently from other races in terms of rights, restrictions, terms of discourse, etc. This means that Jewish Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and some but not all Jews are Supremacists, in the same way that Black Supremacists and White Supremacists exist, are bad because they are bigots, and are some but not all of their race. There is a huge difference between criticizing white/black/Jewish people universally (which makes you a bigot), and criticizing white/black/Jewish Supremacists (who are bigots worthy of being criticized). People tend to be okay at drawing this distinction for actual races, but when it comes to Jews the nuance vanishes, and any criticism of Jewishness in any form indicates Nazis.
It should hopefully be rather uncontroversial to state the following claims are true:
-Jews are disproportionately likely to be wealthy and/or in positions of power relative to their frequency in the general population.
-Jewish Supremacists exist in nonzero numbers who want to discriminate in favor of their own kind (just like all Supremacists do)
-Jewish Supremacists are less likely to be criticized or called out by polite society (the media, educated people, politicians) compared to other Supremacists, and get more defense when they are criticized (by accusing their critics of being Nazis)
Someone who takes these observations and extrapolates it too far might then conclude that Jewish Supremacists are more numerous and more influential than they actually are: collectively and conspiratorially controlling all of the media and institutions in order to ruin our society. While I don't think this is the world we live in, it is a coherent world state one could live in and would be bad. A century ago we DID live in a version of this world with White Supremacists pulling the strings to privilege white people, and that was bad, so it doesn't require a moral monster to conclude that a Jewish Supremacist world would also be bad for the exact same reasons. This does not require hating Jews, or you, or your family, in the same way that hating White Supremacist world does not require you hating me or my family. It only requires a somewhat distorted view of society, which rational debate and discussion should be able to solve.
Unless you yourself are a Supremacist, then criticisms of Jewish Supremacists are not actually criticisms of you. Unless you are a political or military leader of Israel, then criticisms of Israel's actions in war are not criticisms of you. Unless the critics are actually collectivizing to criticize all Jews, in which case you should counter them (or just sit back and watch the entirety of the motte come down on them for being stupid bigots). But if someone is being polite and precise but criticizing someone who happens to be Jewish, don't mistakenly collectivize for them and assume they hate you if that's not what they said.
Those people are welcome here. And you are also welcome here. Your own identity is not particularly relevant on the scales, just your arguments. You can unapologetically be who you are and admit to being Jewish, but unless that identity is somehow adding to the discussion via you providing anecdotes or something then we don't actually care. You won't be attacked for it, but you won't be protected for it either, unless someone is actually breaking the rules and calling for violence. Just say things and let your words speak for themselves.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Did they need to? From their perspective, it doesn't matter whether conspiracy theorists suspect them or not if the authorities don't and they get away with it. Regardless of whether it truly was a conspiracy or merely negligence, clearly we live in a world where Epstein dying under the circumstances he did die under doesn't lead to heads rolling.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Uggh, everyone always debunks the strawmen and never the more nuanced and realistic takes.
The real Epstein list (people who are actually guilty, not merely visitors) was in his head. We lost it when he died. They needed to keep him alive.
Epstein very likely killed himself in a physical sense, but there's a non-zero chance he was coerced/blackmailed/bribed into doing this, and substantial chance that the powers that be deliberately turned a blind eye to allow him to do it. And there's a 100% chance that negligence was involved and someone should be punished. Why wasn't he under direct supervision 24/7? Everyone knew he had dirt on important people. Everyone knew he was going to die under mysterious circumstances. Whoever had custody of him should have been extremely paranoid and gone above and beyond to keep him alive.
Any theory made after even event occurs to retroactively explain it lacks credibility because there's lots of degrees of freedom and ability to cherry-pick random events. Almost all conspiracy theories fall afoul of this. Epstein didn't kill himself does not. This was a theory that started before he died and predicted his death and then it happened despite the fact that people knew it would happen and could have stopped it.
Yes, Epstein probably did the deed. But they let him do it, and they probably let him do it on purpose because he knew things they didn't want public. If everything he knew was written down on physical lists that people had access to there wouldn't have been a benefit to letting him die.
This investigation does literally nothing to change my mind, it was already consistent with the theory I've held for six years, and I need no epicycles to explain this.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
Again, these are correct signals that I am sending intentionally. This IS a major part of my life. I DO spend at least 25 hours a week on anime and games. If you are looking to do "all the other stuff" that isn't gaming and anime and squeeze it around then you're not my 1 in 1000 and I don't want to marry you. That just sounds like a recipe for constant conflict and strife. While some amount of compromise is important in a relationship, and you should sometimes do things the other person wants to do for their sake, the less it's necessary because you both want the same things, the better. If one person expects to go out and do things all the time and the other wants to stay home all the time then at any point in time only one of them is getting their way. So if anyone sees this and realizes that I'm not the right person for them because I'm literally not the right person for them then good, we can both save some time and try to find someone more compatible. In practice, this did turn into me getting very few hits for precisely that reason. Most women saw my profile, made this assumption about me (correctly), they thought this was a negative trait, and then they didn't want to talk to me. Mission accomplished.
Because one did want to talk to me. Instead of dating and/or marrying someone like that, I found someone with whom I get to keep doing videogames and anime and my wife will do them with me. Well, she doesn't care for anime that much, but we play lots of games together. Sometimes we're just sitting next to each other playing completely separate games and she'll giggle as the monsters die and it's adorable. And sometimes she'll want to go somewhere and do something and I'll suck it up and go because it's not very often, because she's mostly like me and genuinely wants to be at home most of the time.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
Which is weird because you would think that online dating would be the perfect environment for introverts. I never was able to work up the courage to ask out a girl in real life. I could never quite tell when it would be creepy and unwelcome and when it would be fine, so I always erred on the side of caution. But online dating everyone is there explicitly for the purpose of meeting people and can ghost you the instant they feel uncomfortable, so I didn't have to worry about that and could just be honest about being attracted to people. And can do it from the comfort of my home and not have to go outside and meet people in real life and do public social stuff with lots of people when I'm trying to have a one on one conversation.
Maybe the issue is that most of the shy introverted women get scared off by the tons of attention and unsolicited dick pics from creepy guys even online, and then the shy introverted men are left in a sea of women who have thick enough skins to stay anyway.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
There's a difference between someone sharing all of your interests, and someone who is willing to tolerate all of your interests. Even if they don't share the same hobbies, you don't want to date someone who fundamentally is unwilling to accept a part of you. If someone is going to be scared off by me liking anime, I want to scare them off instantly, not 5 dates later when they find out. Now, granted, there is some middle ground where some people might be willing to accept anime in someone who they already know is sane and not a pedophile but would screen it off on a stranger, but that still indicates some level of judgemental that I personally would rather filter out too.
And beyond the truly negative stereotypes, it signals that you're the kind of guy who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much.
Yes, this. This is who I am, this is who I deliberately signaled that I am. The kind of person I filtered for is someone who not only doesn't have a problem with this, but sees it as a positive. The woman who I eventually found and married is the kind of woman who sits around the house all day and doesn't get out much. We have literally never gone out on a restaurant date just the two of us, because neither of us enjoys that environment and only go in a group when socially pressured by friends and family. When given the choice, we usually stay home and play games, where we both want to be.
Positives and negatives are subjective and high variance. And ultimately are scored from the single unique perspective of the person you end up with. They are not averaged. Your value as a romantic partner is not the average value ascribed to you by women collectively, but the value from the perception of the one person you actually end up with. So if you have niche interests and traits with high variance, where rather than everyone slightly disliking them, some people strongly dislike them and other rarer people strongly like them, then you want to filter for and find the people who like them, and then they become positive traits.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3d ago
One in a thousand find a gamer girl. But at the cost quite often of having hundreds of women see anime and gaming in the bio and deciding to not engage.
This is the point. It's not that for each random woman who sees your profile you roll a random die and there's a 99% chance you lose her interest. It's that for each woman when she was born and grew up life rolled a random die and there's a 99% chance that she became the kind of person who would lose interest in a man who likes anime and video games. If you want to date a woman who hates anime and videogames then I suppose you might consider scaring her off to be a bad thing, but if you want to find that gamer girl then the normie woman is an obstacle. A waste of your time. Instead of spending hours, days, years of your life sending messages and spending time with women who would have been scared off by videogames and anime but you kept by playing it cool, you could instead scare them all off and then the only people left are the gamer girls.
You don't have time to date 1000 women. If you're some super hot gigachad I suppose you could if you go on a brand new date every day for three years without breaks or repeats. But realistically, that's way too many. But if you scare 99% of them off (and not randomly, you're scaring the worst 99% off) you DO have time to message and date the remaining 10 until you find the perfect one in a thousand.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
Contrarian take: if your goal is to actually find a soul mate and not just a number of short flings, don't do this. Be yourself, aggressively. DO mention your less conventional hobbies like anime on your profile, unapologetically. Be creative and unique and weird, in a way that turns off almost everyone EXCEPT for that rare person who actually likes who you are.
I did this for several years, and 90%+ of the women I messaged ignored me completely. I barely got any responses, and the conversations I did have usually didn't lead anywhere since I was a weird goofball. And then a girl who had D&D listed in her bio responded positively to my D&D inspired pickup line and we dated for several years before eventually getting married. And now we stay at home playing board games and playing with cats instead of having to do stupid things like go hiking or eating at restaurants the way I would if I had managed to convince a normal girl to date me.
Your advice is excellent for maximizing engagement. But you will spend a lot of time dating a lot of average people who like average things if you take it too far. Obviously some of your advice is just general good advice for emphasizing your positive traits that you already have and doesn't run into this issue. But I think being authentic in a negative way (by normie standards) is actually useful to help filter out the normies and find someone else who shares your quirks.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
People like this generally do, although they rarely ever say what they mean in non-euphemistic terms.
Which makes sense. If you have the option, reducing population via less population is going to make less suffering than going around violently murdering them. It's still a form of genocide, but from the perspective of someone whose utility function literally only counts negative values it would be the one to choose.
But in terms of feasibility in the real world, unless you can manage to genetically engineer some virus that can seek out and neuter all life forms of all kinds, murderous genocide is likely to be much more feasible. An "effective negative utilitarian" should probably be trying to manipulate governments into starting WW3 in order to create a nuclear winter that blocks off the sun and "prevent food energy from being created" globally. Even if the war and starvation create more suffering in the short term, preventing new life would massively outweigh that in the long term. Kind of a... reverse repugnant conclusion.
I don't think most negative utilitarians would explicitly endorse this (though most traditional utilitarians don't endorse the regular repugnant conclusion), but given that they DO want to depopulate via non-violent means, I think it's mostly due to hyperbolic discounting.
MathWizard
Good things are good
4d ago
Clear away the flammable shrubs
Ironically, my understanding from reading on the internet is that this is actually the problem. They DO clear away flammable stuff, at least the small stuff that's feasible to clear, which means regular small fires don't happen and so larger flammable stuff accumulates and accumulates so when a fire does break out it's super crazy bad. While if they allowed small fires to happen and eat whatever has accumulated then it would be more manageable.
I hesitate to be the cold calculating math guy but.... no wait, I can't help myself, I am that guy: 80 people isn't actually that many. I mean, obviously every death is a tragedy for themselves and the people who knew them. But when you zoom out to the perspective of a country of 300 million people, it's tiny.
80 deaths * 80 QALYS lost * 365 * 24 * 60 = 11 QALMS (Quality adjusted life minutes). That is, on average preventing a catastrophe of this magnitude is worth 11 minutes of life averaged over everybody in the country. If your proposed solutions of "don't let kids be kids anymore", "take time doing flood preparedness drills" and "spend lots of money damming every river everywhere" costs more than 11 minutes per person in terms of actual time and lessened enjoyment and life lived, then it won't be worth it. (though if you can get costs lower than that it is worth it).
Google says annual flood deaths in the U.S. are ~125, so ballpark this number is approximately right, you'd have to prevent this many deaths at that cost ratio consistently every year (and you'd actually have to reduce it by that much, across the entire country, not just Summer Camps).
I think we should let kids be kids, and we should sometimes consider the inherent risks acceptable. People die, it's a thing that happens. And it's bad that it happens, but if we don't have magic finger snapping powers that make it not happen for free, then we have to consider the costs and tradeoffs. And the thing nobody wants to admit is that, mathematically, there MUST be a point where the costs are no longer worth it. You can make arguments about where that point is, but the argument has to start with the assumption that there is such a point.
I think negative utilitarians have an ethical obligation to disclose this state to people at the top of everything they write so people know to dismiss their opinions.
Did you read the composting article? His logic is basically: composting is good for worms, so then they reproduce and there's more worms, and then they experience suffering which is bad, so composting is bad. If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it implies we should genocide all life forms so they can't suffer any more. And, mathematically, if your utility function literally only counts negative values and doesn't recognize positive values then this follows.
Anyone whose moral philosophy implies that we should destroy all life is either evil, or hypocritical and illogical by only extrapolating as far as it serves their current purpose. This is why my flair is "Good things are good." Because some people literally believe the opposite. If this person says eating honey is bad for bees, the largest term in his math is probably beekeepers helping bees thrive and reproduce which means more of them exist, and all the things about artificial circumstances are probably rounding errors.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
I'll admit that I don't follow politics super closely, so could have missed something, but I have literally never heard any right wing person defend the use of fentanyl. None have ever said that fentanyl is good, or that people should have fentanyl, or even done the George Floyd thing of portraying fentanyl-users as victims of someone other than themselves.
I might be missing some large coalition of right-wing fentanyl apologists, but I think it's more likely that you're tilting at strawmen here.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
How do I accurately evaluate my worth? I'm too heavily confounded by impostor syndrome that I can't tell where it ends and my true value lies. I'm definitely below average for a Math PhD in terms of accomplishments. None of my grad-school work ended up getting published, and I've published 1-2 papers per year in my postdocs which have gotten ~5 citations each. I seem to work a lot less than my peers, and my advisor/bosses have been too busy and/or easy-going to push me, so I've kind of been coasting. That said, I am smart enough to learn stuff when I do try, and got a Math PhD, and know how to hack code together into something that compiles. I don't know what that's worth. What I do know is I'm not willing to put in the 60+ hour per week that the professors I've worked under seem to do writing grants and managing grad students and whatnot. At least not consistently, I would put in a couple long weeks if I really had to.
And I don't want to move, which drastically reduces my options. But on the other hand, the cost of living is not very high, and I'm currently DINK, so technically could survive on just my wife's job, but that wouldn't really be fair to her. On the work-life balance front I heavily lean towards the life part. Work is there so I don't starve and can afford people to do stuff like house repairs that I don't want to do.
I'm sure someone with my intelligence plus work ethic and ambition that I don't have could easily be making loads of money. However, given my constraints, is $40 an hour still an insult? My ideal position is remote, high pay per hour, few total hours, and meaningful/satisfying/moral, (I'm not phoning it in on a job that my employer expects more from), but I'm not sure what that is or if that's too many variables maximized simultaneously and I might need to compromise on some.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
Has anyone done work for Data Annotation or other similar online AI labeling jobs? I have a PhD in math, and have spent the past few years doing mathematical modeling in Postdocs only to realize that I don't really like writing and publishing papers. Some combination of not feeling like the work matters, getting bored of working on the same project for a long time without any feedback, and then eventually finding out that nobody thought my paper was interesting. Mehhhhhhh. And then I lose motivation and do lower quality work and my next paper is worse. I need to get out of academia. But I also don't really know what else I want to do. I'm good at math. I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps, all of my coding has been mathematical models that I run myself and keep tinkering with to add features whenever I want to experiment with what happens when different features or parameters of the model get tweaked.
I'm also settled down in a medium-sized town with existing but limited local career options. I have a house, and a wife who is very attached to her job and family, so remote work is vastly preferable. I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away. I very much like the flexibility of working from home.
So... at least for now, Data Annotation looks promising? The advertisement claims that it pays $40/hr for Math and Programming talents, which I think I can do (unless they're super ultra competitive and only give the good work to people better than me?). The internet consensus seems to be that it's not a scam, but you might have trouble getting enough work to do it full time. And I could work my own hours, and work on discrete completable projects that feel more gamey and give feedback.
Does anyone have direct experience with this and can provide a more accurate and detailed account? Also, I think there are a couple of other similar companies that do this, so I'm not sure whether I should apply to one of those instead if they're better somehow. Or if I should apply to multiple and split my time between them in order to get a better pickings of the higher paying work? Or do you just anti-recommend the entire thing because it's not worth it? I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions from people who have either done this or know people who have done this, or know of similar remote work for someone with my talents.
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.
My bad, that's what I meant to ask but got their names mixed up.
To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.
But why was that necessary? Shouldn't there have been an option to do the thing he tried to do? That is, have his case proceed but, because the accident occurred prior to the bankruptcy, anything that exceed the insurance value can retroactively be voided by the bankruptcy? Or is that not possible because it would make him a creditor and the bankruptcy has to figure out how to pay those out?
Wouldn't it make more sense to put a hold on the bankruptcy proceedings and handle the lawsuit first?
MathWizard
Good things are good
13d ago
If it's well-designed then a good run that gets cut short only due to scaling should yield a huge amount of meta-currency and reward you with faster progression. There's nothing that kills a roguelite for me faster than winning on literally the first try because of some combination of luck and the game being too easy on the base difficulty.
I think the main problem is that Roguelites are appealing to two different demographics simultaneously. There are the hardcore gamers who want to challenge their wits and skills and slam their heads into a wall over and over again until they get it: people who play Souls games and lots of multiplayer PvP and brutally unforgiving games, and Roguelites are often good at that. And then there are more RPG-leaning gamers like me who want to grind out levels and currency and overcome challenges through a combination of skill and tenacity, with the ability to fungibly trade one for the other. Skill should be rewarded, but skill and progress should both grow concurrently until the sum combination is enough, so that I can take risks without failures being a literally pointless waste of time with nothing to show for it. And also have an endlessly increasing difficulty so that through progress and rewards I can eventually tackle and overcome higher and higher challenges that used to be literally impossible from the beginning of the game. If the hardest challenge of your game can be beaten in 1 hour by a player of sufficient skill level, then once you reach that skill level the game has no replay value. But if you never reach that skill level then you can never clear the game no matter how hard you try. In my opinion. I understand that lots of people have different preferences than me. But this is the weird sort of interplay, where roguelites are (trying or accidentally? not sure) appealing to both types of players at the same time under the same label. So a lot of roguelites throw some token but short and unimportant meta-progression in there and just scale it so the hardcore players can quickly unlock everything and then balance the game under that assumption, which partially satisfies but partially annoys both types of players.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
Is $200k the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover? If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200k in the first place. There's no reason the amount should have been relevant for this ruling except if it would be dis-chargeable via the bankruptcy.
If it is the insurance limit then the best outcome would be the $1.6 M being the official amount awarded and the $1.4 M being retroactively discharged by the bankruptcy.
It's unfortunate that the laws aren't smart enough to do the obvious thing.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
I generally think time limits are bad in games, with a few exceptions. The fundamental problem is that it's a threat. It's a threat that, if you do poorly, you're going to have to restart the entire game from scratch. Like a final boss that, if it kills you, deletes your save file (though less volatile). I don't want to get 90% of the way through a 20 hour game only to have to start over from scratch. I rarely play games a second time unless they are exceptionally good, I'm not replaying the entirety of your game over again just because I wasn't quite good enough the first time.
The main exception I have to this is if there's meta-progression, like in Roguelites, or like Dead Rising. If you've got a 1-2 hour turn around, and I unlock new stuff every time, and the entire game is built around randomized content so it's not just the same thing again, then we're good. Or like in Dead Rising if I get stronger and it's basically a new game plus where I can solve all the problems that happened the first time around there's wayyy less risk of failing the second time around, I can take that. What I don't want is the game to tell me that the last 20 hours of play time were pointless and none of it counts for anything.
That said, I didn't have to replay Pikmin 1, because I didn't fail. If the time limit is generous enough then the majority of players don't run afoul of it. The threat looms in the background, but isn't implemented. If it's set just right then it creates stakes and pressure: the player has to act strategically and not mess up and get their party slaughtered too many times or it'll take too long to repopulate, so it feels more important to perform well. But if it's too generous then players don't feel this pressure and the time limit might as well not even exist. But Pikmin 2 was able to have a lot more content in part because of the lack of a time limit: you can keep playing the game after you "beat" it and go explore and get every last piece of treasure because there's nothing stopping you from continuing to play.
I have not yet played Pikmin 3 or 4, so I can't comment on it there, though I intend to eventually. I anticipate that the time limit in 3 will either be obnoxious if its strict, or superfluous if it's easy. There's very rarely middle ground.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
That never held water. All people, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation, can marry someone of the opposite sex of any sexual orientation. Gay men are just as free and equally allowed to marry a woman as any straight man. If the gay man doesn't want to marry a woman, that's his choice, but he's legally allowed to.
And pretty much all of the equality under the law anti-discrimination stuff has carveouts for compelling state interests. Like, say, bearing and raising children and ensuring the survival of the species.
Telling gay people that it's illegal to have sex with each other would be one thing: the state intervening in a place where it has little compelling interest or jurisdiction (an argument could be made about preventing the spread of STDs, but it's weak, and promiscuous straight people do that too). But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do. Arguing it's "equal protection under the law" is like arguing that childless people should get the same tax deductions and/or welfare aid as people with seven children because otherwise you're discriminating against the childless.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d ago
Treating people kindly and with love and trust is always the solution to any is-ought problem in any culture I've been to because it absolves yourself of the guilt of having acted unkindly or unlovingly and if someone interprets it incorrectly it is not because your underlying intentions were wrong.
This is only true if you tautologically define the term "kindly and with love and trust" to contain all of the complexities and nuances of the broader "is-ought".
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to lock your house or your car? Well, it's kind to the people inside the house, less kind to the thieves that want your stuff.
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to guard your wallet from pickpockets in a crime-ridden area and stop one if you catch them mid-theft?
Is it kind, loving, and trustful to punish someone for a crime? You can argue that it's kind to the victim, but unkind to the perpetrator being punished. Or you can make a complicated argument about how it's ultimately "kind and loving" to the perpetrator because the punishment will help them learn the error of their ways and become a better person which will ultimately be for their own good.
I'm not saying generally acting with kindness, love, and trust is wrong. They're good guidelines when to look to when trying to ground your decisions, but those words alone do not automatically solve all of the potential ethical dilemmas and tradeoffs inherent to the complexity of the real world.
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
How easy is it to smuggle a nuke, and how long would it remain viable once smuggled?
My impression of nuclear prevention and watchfulness is that it takes a lot of science and infrastructure to refine uranium into a usable state for weapons, and you can't really build all of that stuff without a lot of commotion that foreign powers will notice.
But lots of nations already have all of that infrastructure, and the country wanting nukes only needs the end product. If country A without nukes allied with country B with nukes, would country B be able to use their own infrastructure to do most of the work and then secretly pass them enough weapons grade uranium and/or assembled nuclear warheads to stick into missiles that everyone else thinks are non-nuclear? And then several years later when it became relevant they announce "Tada! We have nukes!"
Or would this be immediately caught while happening and result in massive international penalties for countries A and or B?
If each and every one of the twelve "normal" dudes is actually normal, middle of the bell curve in terms of criminality, then yeah it's going to be much safer, although it's still a non-negligible risk factor. Ordinary people can get violent if they're acting to protect their children from what they perceive as a threat (and rightly so in many cases). If instead they're chosen randomly from the distribution, then out of a dozen men you're going to get several on the low end of the bell curve. Given that 9% of men end up going to prison, you're likely to get one being an actual criminal who just hasn't been caught yet. Who might then act violent towards the others and get them pulled into trying to fight back in an attempt to protect themselves, the woman, and/or the child. Modify this again by noting that the subset of men who are likely to fall for a stunt like this are going to be below average in intelligence and general quality, so you're very likely to be pulling from the lower end of the bell curve repeatedly, even if not quite at the depths that prison would be.
It's still qualitatively the same risk scenario, the prison part does make it worse but it's merely an amplifier to the pre-existing risk.
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