MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Unless colleges themselves start dropping Gen Ed requirements (which they should), AP courses of nonsense subjects are incredibly useful because they let you bypass them in college. I took AP Psychology and AP Government in highschool, they were mostly pointless, I passed the exam, and then when I went to college I had two fewer useless class eating my time and money so I could learn math and physics. (I also took AP classes for some of those too, but that just let me fastforward to more advanced ones in my major)
I think I agree with your analogy but, rather than say "both are okay" like you might expenct, conclude "Neither is okay, at least if you're being obnoxious about it." And consistently I support social but not legal sanctions against obnoxious behavior. Someone simply passively being hot, or being rich, is a positive quality that they should be somewhat proud of, but also potentially humble as it's not entirely due to their own merit. And to the extent that it is within your own control, you should strive to be more of both and encourage people who succeed in becoming more of either.
But a hot person (of either sex) flaunting their body in revealing clothing should be perceived and treated similarly to a rich person flaunting their wealth with gaudy expensive jewelry and luxury goods. There might be a time and a place where it's appropriate to display, like at a fancy party or something, and if it just happens to be visible as a side effect of normal behavior that's fine. But if you're going around showing off in public and deliberately going out of your way to exaggerate it in order to make people jealous that's obnoxious and you should be mocked and shamed for it (in proportion to the level offense). It should still be legal, because it's not the government's responsibility to codify what "obnoxious" means, but people should recognize it for what it is and discourage it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I'm 99% convinced that the U.S. military or CIA has at least one fancy stealth aircraft that isn't public knowledge, because of course they do, it would be stupid if they didn't. And probably it has some components which are designed differently from typical aircraft, because it's advanced and experimental, and thus looks strange to people used to seeing typical aircraft. And I bet if you see it flying around, or especially if they deliberately put fancy lights on it, it would look strange and alien to someone who's not an expert.
Or rather, how could you even tell the difference in principal? If we assume the military's secret projects are at least 5-10 years ahead of public knowledge, then even things which aren't commonly known to be possible are still plausibly human. And then you take a fifty year old senator whose perceptions of even modern common knowledge are probably a few decades out of date. Have you seen China's drone shows? https://youtube.com/watch?v=VvemT96Rozc . They're fancy! In order for something to be demonstrably "non-human" it would have to be remarkably strange above and beyond this. Because humans are already capable of some pretty impressive stuff.
An actual expert with long-term firsthand experience dismantling an alien aircraft could reliably determine that it's non-human. But otherwise, you would need straight up teleportation or something to identify something as non-human from a distance: even hovering, laser beams, and sonic rays aren't out of the question for humans with billions of dollars and a slight scientific head start.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Whose push? If he's just a puppet letting someone else pull the strings, then isn't that person or group effectively the President? How do you have Democracy and accountability if the literal President is just a figurehead representing unknown people in a political party? Does every Democratic Senator vote to decide what Joe Biden's next position should be? Does Nancy Pelosi call all the shots unilaterally and functionally equivalent to being the president herself except she gets none of the blame or credit if things go badly? Is Hillary Clinton the puppetmaster and electing Joe Biden was politically equivalent to electing her? Is the CEO of CNN actually influencing Joe Biden by implicitly threatening to smear him if he doesn't do what they want? We don't know. And next election cycle, if Joe Biden steps down and another puppet steps up you might have the exact same person/people pulling their strings, bypassing term limits, and pretending to be starting fresh with a new reputation, forgetting all the mistakes they made in the past.
I very much want a President who has policies and agendas, declares what they are openly, honestly, and publicly, and then sticks to them as much as reasonably possible. Because then we the people can decide which collections of policies and agendas we actually agree with and vote for whichever President has the best. Because we the people are supposed to be in charge, not shady politicians making secret deals behind the scenes and avoiding responsibility.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Yeah. I wouldn't mind some high effort white nationalist posts so their points can be addressed and discussed and possibly rebutted in an intelligent way.
And to some extent, forcing high quality posts from people with misguided views may force them to educate themselves and accidentally de-radicalize in the process.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I'm struggling to imagine a scenario in which anything involving aliens was kept hidden for this long but didn't count as national security data to be exempted from such a clause. Like, if aliens were real and we captured their flying saucers of course that would be secret national security data! What is Scheumer's bill expected to do in the first place?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
This is another piece of evidence that if you're going to IQ test your applicants (a very good idea) you should just use Pearson or Wonderlic or another big company that specializes in these things rather than making your own homebrew test.
Except that this is precisely the pro-monopoly incentive structure that causes all the megacorps and ruins the competitive landscape and free market principles. Megacorps snatch all of the rents and economic surplus in many economic niches because they can charge monopolistic prices and any potential small competitors get lawsuited to oblivion.
Which I guess doesn't mean as an individual actor it's unwise to do it, tragedy of the commons and whatnot, but it's more evidence that something structural needs to change that enables this in the first place.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I've been reading a bunch of fiction on Royal Road, including Industrial Strength Mage, Tunnel Rat, Paranoid Mage, and A Practical Guide to Sorcery although each typically releases one chapter per week which is why I've been keeping up with all of them simultaneously. While none of them are exactly rat-fic, they scratch a similar itch with protagonists that win by thinking, planning, and outsmarting opponents, and trying to munchkin the magic system of their world in ways that other people don't.
When waiting for chapters on these I've been browsing other stuff on Royal Road, but have kind of been missing having an actual proper completed series to binge, so am probably going to find a new series from elsewhere to pick up.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I think that if we buy this argument, the solution would be for the government to directly run its own public supply with 0 or controlled nonprofit tuition costs, the same as they do with the water supply and public schools, not subsidize the costs of private universities. If the government just says "every college student gets $50k towards their tuition" and applies this equally to all schools, then the long term result is that all colleges raise their tuition by almost $50k, because that's where the new market equilibrium lies.
If instead the government has its own free universities, then all of the fancy ones need to offer a better product with cheap enough tuition in order compete.
You can't just subsidize profit-maximizing companies and naively expect them to divert all of the extra money towards the customers. That's like trickle down economics fallacies but worse.
There are no (or negligibly few) children who voluntarily have sex with adults and are happier afterwards.
Citation needed. Lots of teenagers agree to have sex with adults. Many of them later regret it, but many of them do not. I doubt there are any good statistics on it because of the highly controversial nature, but I would be willing to bet that the number that are "happier" is nonnegligible, if you're measuring happier based on the same sort of self-report that the trans children are using. Go ask a fourteen year old girl with a 30 year old boyfriend, or one who's sleeping with her gym teacher, whether she'd be "happier" without them. And for some of them they might actually be right. My ballpark guess, pulling numbers out of my ass, would be somewhere between 30-70% of underage people who have uncoerced sex with adults would "be happier" being allowed to do it, conditional on not receiving significant social or legal backlash from society, or being pressured to lie or cognitive dissonance themselves. Which is also where my ballpark guess for children who undergo medical transition is.
There isn't some magical force of nature that causes all relationships that pass the magic barrier of 18 years old to be automatically predatory and unhealthy, such that they are all actually harmful. However, I think that as a society it's useful to have Schelling point of "do not have sex with anyone under 18 for any reason", because it safeguards the significant portion who are coerced or groomed into it, or just have bad judgement and don't consider long term consequences properly because they're kids/teenagers, even if that harms the few who would be fine. If the potential harms are 5x greater than the benefits (compared to the outside option of waiting until they're 18), then from a utilitarian perspective it's worth preventing all of them if the proportion of those who would regret it are at least 1/5. We're not dooming people to never have sex ever, or never transition ever, just wait until they're 18 and have the mental and emotional maturity to figure out what they actually want long term.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I agree, but I think the rape affect is appropriate, at least with regard to trans issues. Medical transitions are a form of genital mutilation which cause massive harm similar in kind but greater in magnitude to rape. I would rather a child be groomed into sex with a pedo than groomed into undergoing medical transition, because the former would leave fewer long term irreversible trauma and could hopefully eventually be healed and recovered from.
With regards to LGB, grooming is only an appropriate accusation if the ideologues are trying to convince the children to be more sexually explicit, promiscuous, and/or think sex with adults is okay (things which would be a prelude to pedophilia). Almost nobody is accusing normal LGB people of being "groomers", and I disavow the ones who do. The efficacy of "groomer" comes from the rape affect, and in order to preserve that as a useful tool we need to use the word only in cases where that implication is accurate.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
There's no such thing as ambition, there's just 'long description of personality traits which people typically describe as ambition'.
I don't think you've said anything meaningful here other than implying that ambition is a multifaceted concept and not a single numerical value. Which of course it is, pretty much all personality traits are multifaceted and not single dimensional sliders even though people sometimes describe them as such.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Update to this post: https://www.themotte.org/post/498/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-21/101809?context=8#context
where I wanted advice on getting an engagement ring for my girlfriend. I have since proposed before getting the ring (as planned), it went wonderfully, and we are now engaged. After looking at a bunch of examples together and honing in on concepts and features she found appealing (turns out she doesn't simply like flowers, which I already knew, but she really really really likes flowers), we settled on this ring
from Taylor and Hart. It uses diamonds, but they use lab-grown diamonds, so I'm happy with that. We considered substituting some colored gems in the flower, but then there's also leaves which would look a bit weird if we made them green, but would also look weird if we colored the rest of the flower but left them white. Most importantly, my now-fiance thinks it's really pretty exactly how it is, so we don't want to change things in case it accidentally ends up looking worse.
Thank you for everyone who offered advice, regardless of whether I ended up using it or not.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Steel-manning here, because I mostly agree with you, but theoretically any sort of "told you so" can potentially be used to
1: Convince the other side that you know what you're talking about and they should listen to you on other topics
2: Convince the other side that they're wrong on this particular issue and should change their stance in order to stop digging themselves deeper into the hole.
3: Convince third parties that the other side is wrong and stupid and they should join you instead of the other side.
1 pretty much never happens in politics ever. It rarely even happens in local personal interactions, although it sometimes does. 2 can sometimes happen, and that seems like the most feasible route here. Mass immigration and demographic replacement is bad, now the left has more of a reason to agree that it's bad, even if for completely different reasons than the right, and maybe pointing this out will make them more amenable to coming together to solve the issue. 3 seems plausible. Each person has a reason or a set of reasons why they're on the side they're on, and how wholeheartedly they're on that side. I'm center-right specifically because every time one side does some insane nonsense I try to distance myself from them, and both sides do it frequently but I perceive the left as doing more damage with their crazy schemes so I distance myself more. Although most people don't treat things the same way I do, I think there is some of this effect, especially in younger and more undecided people. Even if pointing out the insane hypocracies on the left is unlikely to change the minds of people who are firmly on that side, anyone on the fence can see that and, if they agree, be more likely to become right, or at least a more intelligent left that doesn't replicate that flaw.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
My best guess is that UFOs are a combination of U.S. military or alphabet agency craft doing secret experimental flights, made up stories seeded by military and alphabet agencies to camoflage discredit the real ones, paranoid people with mental health issues making stuff up, and clickbait media agencies hopping on the bandwagon and having no journalism standards so that they can earn money from signal boosting said stories.
Maybe there are some foreign spy craft mixed in there too, but it's probably mostly domestic or imaginary.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
To be clear, my stance only applies when (a subcomponent of) the justice system is clearly and obviously corrupt. If you have a corrupt local judge/jury that can simply try murderers and declare them not guilty, which with double jeopardy makes them not guilty permanently, then what you have is worse than there literally being no local justice system, because it actively protects murderers from higher courts. I don't think prosecutors have an appeal process to higher courts when they get an unjust "not-guilty" unless there's some clear explicit corruption beyond "hopelessly racist jury".
Now, obviously there are better solutions to the detecting and ousting of corrupt local courts than just allowing vigilantism. But, conditional on someone finding themself in a situation in which the courts are clearly and obviously corrupt and the higher courts have not yet noticed or cared enough to fix the issue, then vigilantism might be the trigger needed to make them care. And, if the higher court finds that "whoops, this guy was obviously guilty, the court was negligent in finding them not guilty, and we should have stopped this corruption a long time ago, sorry", then it would be appropriate to lessen the sentence of the vigilante.
The four major goals of punishment are
1: retribution
2:rehabilitation
3:deterrence
4: incapacitation
Conditional on the higher courts finding that the victims were clearly and obviously guilty and only got free due to corruption, most of these goals don't apply to the vigilante. Retribution is less necessary because the victims, being murderous scum, deserved what they got and don't need to avenged. Rehabilitation isn't especially necessary because the vigilante is not broken or morally corrupt, they know right from wrong and only acted in violence against murderous scum. Similarly, incapacitation is entirely unnecessary: they are not at risk of re-offending unless someone else decides to kidnap and rape their daughter.
Deterrence could go either way depending on how far you generalize the behavior and the obviousness of the injustice the vigilante is fixing. We want to deter wannabe heroes who take the law into their own hands after they don't get their way in a fair trial. But I contend that vigilantism is a just and beneficial response in a corrupt system. First, imagine an oppressive regime in some foreign dictatorship rather than the American justice system, I would think it clear that if the law does not protect you then protecting yourself is better than simply bowing and being oppressed. Then imagine small pockets in America where the American justice system is secretly replaced by courts run by the evil dictatorship. Therefore, deterring vigilantism in that tiny subset of scenarios is actively bad, because it's very important to deter real criminals, and it's better that vigilantes deter them than literally no one. Vigilantism is bad only in healthy societies where the police are already fulfilling the role of deterring criminals to the point that adding vigilantes has diminishing returns and creates too many false positives to be worth it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
My own addendum
3.5: How does your answer change based on the fact that the vigilantism happened before the men were tried?
Having not seen the movie and just going on your description, I think I would be somewhat harsh on the father because he didn't even give the justice system a chance. If the men had been tried, found not guilty or gotten away with a slap on the wrist, and then the father killed them, I'd be inclined to give a similar punishment of ~10 years. Similarly if the police had failed to arrest them in the first place. I'd think that the father did the right thing morally in killing them, but that the law needs to be enforced and have consequences, and he can do his time in exchange for having his morally justified revenge.
But he didn't even let them get to trial. And, given that the all white and kind of racist jury did in fact find him not guilty, this implies that they would have been even more likely to find the original criminals guilty if he had let them (technically it would probably be a different jury, but in the same area statistically it would have the same representation).
I think vigilantism after the justice system has already failed you is much more defensible than vigilantism in anticipation of the justice system failing, unless there is a clear and repeated pattern such that you reliably know it will fail, which a single prior case does not establish. The father should get a fairly harsh sentence. Still less than an unprovoked double homicide would warrant, but quite a bit more than I would think fair for a vigilante attack when the perpetrators were not literally in police custody.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
100% on board. There exists a legitimate issue or collection of medical issues that cause distress in people related to hormones or brains or something sex related. It would be great if we could diagnose and treat these people in ways that decrease their distress.
There also exists a bunch of political nonsense about gender identities and sexualities and expressing yourself via some public identity that everyone you meet needs to know about, aknowledge, and treat you specially based on. Within this ideology, "trans" has become a cool trendy thing to identify as regardless of whether or not someone has the above condition.
Better science and unbiased application of it would allow us to accurately identify the former, give the appropriate treatment, while separately identifying the latter and... probably also giving them treatment based on their issues. Most trans-identifying people have some sort of distress that caused them to feel discomfort, even if it's not actual gender dysphoria, and if we had a clear and definitive understanding of real transgenderism we could rule it out for people who don't have it and then probe further to diagnosing and treating their actual condition (frequently autism, but not always) and get better treatment rather than using "trans" as a thought terminating cliche and sending them down the wrong treatment path.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
First, the argument is an If-Then statement. If A is the collection of four premises, and B is "pedophilia should be allowed", then my claim is that your argument is equivalent to A->B. I don't claim that A is true... at the moment. But is that the only barrier to your endorsement of pedophilia? Do you believe A->B? If pedophiles convinced a non-negligible number of doctors to verbally say "yeah, this is probably fine", would you agree that they're the experts and so that means it is actually fine?
And is it the verbal endorsement or the private thoughts? What if right now, like 10% of doctors secretly think that pedophilia is okay if the child agrees to it, but simply remain quiet because they'd lose their jobs if they said it out loud? Is Overton's window the only barrier between whether something is or is not immoral?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
You've completely ignored the comparison to age of consent for sex. Your argument would also imply that if
-A kid wants to have sex with an adult
-The kids parents agree the kid can have sex with an adult
-The adult wants to have sex with the kid
-The overall medical consensus isn't firmly certain that having sex with the adult will be traumatic to the child
then politicians should likewise have no say in overriding this decision. Do you agree with this conclusion? Should there be an option for children and adults to override age of consent laws, maybe with explicit consent forms? And if not, where is the distinction?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
This. Get them all, or get none. But above all else, the law should be consistent and predictable.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
I'm a moral absolutist, not a relativist. I believe that there is one actual objective morality that describes the thing we are talking about when we mean "right" and "wrong", and each action is either right or wrong in some universal sense. Moral philosophies that people come up with should be viewed as attempts at approximating this thing, not as actual competing definitions of the words "right" and "wrong", which is why when someone comes up with an edge case where a moral philosophy extrapolates to lead to some horrific result, the most common response is either denial "no it doesn't lead to that", or an attempt to patch the theory, or "that result is actually good because X,Y,Z" where X,Y,Z are good in some other sense (usually utilitarian). Whereas if you had relativist morality or just definitions the response "yep, I believe that that horrific result is right, because that's how I've defined 'right'".
As a result, it's perfectly logical that properly understood and robust versions of any moral philosophy should approach each other. So I could make an equal claim that properly understood, virtue ethics approaches utilitarianism (is it virtuous to cause misery and and death to people which decreases their utility?). And if someone constructed a sufficiently robust version of virtue ethics that defined virtues in a way that massively increased utilities and covered all the weird edge cases then I would be happy to endorse it. I'm not familiar with the specific works of Yud Singer or Caplan you're referring to, but if they're arguing that utilitarianism eventually just turns into standard virtue ethics then I would disagree. If they're making a claim more similar to mine then I probably agree.
But again, I think utilitarianism isn't meaningless as a way of viewing right and wrong, because people are bad at math and need to use more of it. And I think fewer epicycles need to be added to most utilitarian constructions to fix them than would need to be added to virtue ethics or other systems, so it's more useful as a starting point.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
The standard response to inconvenient truths, at least as far as I can tell, is to change the subject and not talk about them, not to actively deny them. The only time I've ever told someone to their face that I'm smarter than them was when having petty arguments as a child, usually at some point where it escalates to them calling me an idiot and me going "well actually..." and bragging about my grades and advanced math.
But I have never never never pretended to be the same or lesser intelligence than someone I'm not. Nowadays when I get complimented for being smart, I get embarassed and shrug it off as unimportant rather than bragging, but I never never never lie and pretend that it isn't true when we both know it is. There's a difference between choosing not to actively announce certain truths to avoid conflict, and lying about them to protect yourself when confronted by a hostile crowd. And there's a vast gulf between that and actively opposing and arguing against people saying the truth that you yourself secretly agree with. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's way more rare than strategic silence.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1yr ago
Better than a geocentric model of the solar system with no epicycles, which is what I'd compare most other moral philosophies to.
The over-optimization is largely solved by epistemic humility. Assume that whatever is actually good is some utility function, but you don't know what it actually is in proper detail, and so any properly defined utility function you write down might be wrong in some way, so don't over-optimize it to the exclusion of all else. I don't think this is somehow distinct from any other moral philosophy, which also lead to horrible results if taken to extremes.
The pro-life maneuver with the highest expected value, as measured by abortion reduction multiplied by probability of actually getting passed in the legislature, is to promote free birth control. Most people on the left already want this, so it shouldn't be hard to get bipartisan support. Then way more people will use it, way fewer accidental pregnancies occur, and actual abortion rates plummet regardless of whether it's legal or illegal.
This might have the bonus affect of making it much easier to pass restrictions on abortion afterwards. If fewer people have needed one or known someone who has needed one, and the only people who ever get abortions are morons who forgot to take their free birth control, people in general will be less sympathetic. Lazy people just using abortion as birth control will have cheaper alternatives and so care less. People worried about being forced to give birth to an unwanted child in some hypothetical future will be less worried because they can just use their free state-provided birth control. And the messaging that pro-life people just want to enslave women as breeders forced to give birth against their will just dissolves away because we're actively trying to prevent them from getting pregnant.
But even if nothing else changes legislatively, even if the silly pollitical warmakers would consider this a loss because the pro-choice get everything they want, this would be a massive win for pro-life and effective altruism. I don't think people trying to have tons of promiscuous sex "deserve" to have their degenerate lifestyles subsidized by my tax dollars, but I'm going to offer it anyway because "deserves" matter less than saving lives.
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