MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
At least from a Christian perspective, it's not your job to distinguish sincere converts from insincere ones, it's God's job. He can tell the difference, and if someone goes around doing sins, and then pretends to repent at the last minute for reputational gains but is insincere, then you can treat them as a legitimate convert and then when they die they go to hell anyway because God is not deceived.
That said, someone repenting of their sins, regardless of whether they are genuine or not, should still be made to face the consequences of their actions and do their best to make whole anyone who they have harmed. If a murderer repents while in prison, you can forgive them for their murder while still making them carry out the remainder of their legal prison term. If someone has stolen from you and repents, you still make them return what they stole. If someone has wild sex and ends up with three children with three different partners, they still have to raise those children and deal with the burden that places on their future relationships. Repentance should be a thorough and life changing experience that either requires someone to be sincere in order to actually choose to commit to, and so burdensome that nobody will want to do this fake get out of jail free stuff.
If the mass murderer wants to repent on his deathbed and God wants to forgive him for free, that's between the two of them. You can still put him in jail regardless of whether you believe him or not, because the insincere murderer deserves to go to jail, and the repentant murderer can go to jail as part of their repentance.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Always has been as far as I know. Some quick googling claims that at the moment if you buy an average container of ground coffee (that you brew yourself, we're not talking Starbucks here) you can get it for about 26 cents per 12 oz cup (and probably cheaper if you get the cheapest brand available and/or brew it weakly). Milk is about 4 dollars per gallon which makes ten 12 oz cups, which is 40 cents each. Order of magnitude is the same, so I can't imagine getting coffee because you "can't afford milk", you'd probably just get smaller amounts of milk, but in the past the difference was probably larger.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I tentatively expect this to shift things towards Trump.
There's an old article on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/
about how right wing politics are optimized towards surviving, ie in an apocalypse, and left wing politics are optimized for thriving when there are plenty of resources. When things are tough you make tough decisions and sacrifices in order to survive, and make stable family units that can replace the people who inevitably die. Which right wing politics are optimized for. When things are great and there's plenty to go around then you can do whatever you want and be inefficient but free and happy, and anyone trying to restrict you is doing it for selfish reasons, so you should ignore them, which left wing politics are optimized for.
Maslow's Hierarchy of needs is often depicted as a pyramid, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to tip it sideways, so the lower baser needs are on the right while the higher needs are on the left, as those are their strengths.
When things are tough, people want a tough leader who does what needs to be done, who will ensure their basic necessities, security, and establish confidence and project strength. Regardless of whether Trump is actually more effective at this than Harris, he certainly appears that way superficially. I expect more swing votes to shift towards Trump compared to the counterfactual scenario where these floods did not happen, though I have no idea how strong of an effect this will be, so not sure if it will matter or even be statistically significant.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Will they? I can see some of those skills transferring, but the patterns of behavior and the quirks and nuances that AI have are going to differ from those that a traditional English student is going to be used to. I would think that a healthy amount of computer science would help understand the underlying mechanisms of AI and thus have a better idea of how and why it misbehaves when it does and how to adjust prompts to fix that.
I expect that the value of an English degree will go up, but not enough to surpass that of a CS degree, since the value of those will also go up. Probably the best case would be people who double majored in English and CS, but I believe those are rare.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Also why the revulsion to mentally ill women isn't nearly as extreme. "This person could literally beat me to death" combined with "This person plausibly might decide to try to beat me to death" is scary.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
My point is that this will reward upper class people more than lower class people. The correlation between "overtime hours worked" and "lower class people" has no reason to persist under the paradigm. Upper class people have more leverage to negotiate with their employers for overtime shenanigans, more institutional savvy and networking to figure out that this is a loophole that exists and is worth exploiting, and higher tax brackets that make it more profitable to avoid. John Manager who is a pencil pusher earning $200k/yr working 60 hour per week is going to benefit from this, while Billy Bob who struggles to get by working 20 hours each at three different part time jobs gets nothing, because none will hire him full time and have to pay benefits. This is a regressive tax relief, and then the government has less tax revenue and either has to raise taxes elsewhere to make up the difference, or cut spending. And if you were going to do that you'd be better off with a flat income tax reduction across the board, or if you still want to cater to working class then a tax reduction to lower income tiers.
This is probably good politics because it superficially sounds like it helps working class people, because a lot of them work overtime right now and their bosses are salaried. Lots of things sound good if you only look at immediate. first order effects and ignore long term second order effects. Printing free money to hand out as stimulus during Covid while all the supply chains shut down superficially sounds like it would help too, and yet here we are.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
This overtime proposal is interesting since it only rewards people who are already working more than 40 hours a week.
Policies like this always take too static/naive of a world view. You imagine how people currently behave, and This rewards people who are "working" more than 40 hours a week after all of the employers and employees update their behavior to exploit the new system. Instead of offering a 40 hour week at $20 an hour, companies can offer $10 an hour for 40 hours and then with 10 $30/hour "overtime hours" of make-work to make up the difference. Maybe they'll have people be "on call" so it counts as overtime but doesn't actually add work.
And then the salaried people will all want to be "hourly" so they can get two thirds of their pay count as "overtime". Your $80k/yr Secretary and your $300k/yr chief engineer are going to become hourly employees whose total yearly pay just happens to coincidentally always adds up to approximately $80k and $300k respectively, but technically half of it is overtime. A lot of the more highly paid people already work more than 40 hours per week anyway, so it wouldn't be too hard for the business to fudge the values around and count their pay as overtime. And for the people who don't, again I'm sure the business could just make make-work for them to technically count as overtime, while shuffling the numbers around to keep their total pay the same, or even less, since if the employee is paying less taxes their effective pay is higher even at a lower nominal value. And that's why the companies would go through the effort of doing this. Why pay $60k for an employee when you can pay $50k to one who gets to evade taxes via loopholes?
I get the sentiment of wanting to pay blue collar workers more in a way that doesn't enable welfare leeches. But this isn't the way to do it without some serious modifications to fix the incentive structure.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
Murderers, probably. Thieves? Probably not. There's a reason we don't have the death penalty for theft: it's less bad than dying.
Also also, people who have abortions are only weakly correlated with being murderers or thieves. If I had a button that would predict the future and abort only fetuses who were guaranteed to become murderers in the future, I'd probably agonize over the morality of punishing someone for a crime they hadn't yet committed, but if guaranteed of the accuracy of the prediction I'd probably reluctantly press it. If you give me a button that kills 10 completely innocent people in exchange for each murderer it kills I would not press that button. And that's what we have.
Also, the repugnant conclusion is about trying to maximize total quantity of life, while most sane versions of utilitarianism is about trying to maximize quality of existing people. Once a fetus exists, it's a person, and so its quality of life matters too. There's a huge moral difference between failing to bring people into existence, and literally killing them
(World with 10 billion happy people) > (World with 100 billion struggling people) > (World with 10 billion happy people and 90 billion corpses)
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
I dislike my political enemies, I don't hate them so much that I wish they were dead. I don't consider lethally culling their members or potential members in order to decrease their voting base to be a worthwhile tradeoff even if it's easy or even free. If you gave me a button which would cause all of my political opponents to instantly drop dead, I would not press it. Even if you gave me a button that only caused 20% or 5% or whatever percent would be enough to swing an election in my preferred side's favor, I still would not press it, because while I do think the right would make better policies than the left, I don't think they would be so much better as to be worth the lives of that many millions of people. Except via abortion, because that actually does cost millions of lives. But conceding abortion in order to eugenically cull the left over generations in order to win in order to outlaw abortion is circular and ridiculous and wouldn't work that way.
If we are willing to invoke eugenic methods, either to reduce the number of lefty voters or just decrease the number of degenerate criminals, why not do it non-lethally? How about free birth control? Same long term outcome, but nobody has to die.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
I think the rebuttal would be to point out that she's been VP for 4 years, and neither she nor Biden nor the other Democrats have done or tried to do most of those things, and it's off-brand for them to even try. If Kamala promises to build a wall and it will be "uge! bigger and better than any wall ever built before. The best wall!" Trump will call her a liar. Now granted, Trump also didn't build a wall, but he tried, and can blame the Democrats for not letting him.
Kamala is restricted to promises that are consistent with Democrat positions, at least if she doesn't want to get called out as a blatant liar. And avoid alienating the Democrat voters.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
It's not the computing power, it's the actually putting in all the parameters. We're talking about people's preferences for which goods and services are more valuable compared to others. Which is worth more, tickets for a Taylor Swift concert, or a food dehydrator? A gallon of gas or a gallon of milk? A fancy looking shirt with a flower print or a comfy shirt that feels silky smooth? Is it worth paying an extra $5 on your grocery bill if the store is literally across the street instead of making you drive halfway across town for the cheaper store? What if it's an extra $20? Is it worth an extra $10 to get chicken flavored cat food instead of whitefish because your cat refuses to eat the latter?
All of these are variables which are going to depend on the specific customers and the idiosyncrasies of their preferences and their lifestyles. And these in turn emergently place demands on the economy. How do you know how much chicken flavored cat food to produce versus how much whitefish except via the demands placed by customers? But what if the chicken flavored cat food costs $10 more to produce (or the equivalent in terms of resources and labor), so it's inefficient and you want to disincentivize people from buying it unless they actually prefer it to the whitefish. Ie customers buy it if and only if it's actually going to improve their lives (via their cats health and happiness) by at least $10 worth of value.
How do you capture all of that, simultaneously understanding customer preferences AND incentivize customers to choose more efficient options while still allowing deviations if they want/need the more expensive version badly enough AND update in realtime as supply and demand change AND keep the manufacturers and whoever is in charge of the system from exploiting the crap out of it to enrich all their friends and political allies?
Obviously capitalism doesn't solve all of those issues entirely. But competition and the threat of bankruptcy does an excellent job of keeping things grounded in some reality. Negative feedback loops. It can get kind of bad, but if it goes too far off the rails the company goes bankrupt and gets replaced, even if nobody understands why. It's emergent. Nobody can understand and predict the entire economy at once. With capitalism you don't have to, and it mostly kinda works anyway. With socialism small problems get magnified and snowball because nobody can enrich themselves by fixing them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
There is a big skill-dependence, though, so while trying to command the economy is IMO not inherently dumb, many specific attempts to command the economy are dumb, and they can be opposed on their individual merits.
I would compare capitalism to training a LLM using reinforcement learning, while a command economy is trying to program a LLM directly, manually with only whatever inputs you type in yourself by hand. I don't know that I would describe it as "inherently dumb", but it is systematically going to fail because there is way too much data for you to handle. The modern economy is the most ridiculously complex system that any living being has ever constructed, and it's a miracle that it works as well as it does, despite all the bugs.
Capitalism's main strength is not that it rewards people who deserve to be rewarded (though it sometimes does that), it's that to aligns incentives and sends signals via prices. How are you going to figure out whether a cheap Chinese wooden spoon for $1 is a better deal than a fancy hand crafted artisan wooden spoon for $10? Or whether the cheap Chinese knife for $5 is better deal than a fancy stainless steel knife for $10? Value is created by satisfying customer preferences, and these are often implicit and hard to capture just via surveys or whatever objective list of standards your command economy is going to use. But customer preferences and buying patterns? Those are powerful. Not infinitely powerful, they can be tricked, but still pretty powerful. And automatically applied in free market capitalism. You can invent a brand new product that nobody has ever heard of before and nobody knows what properties of it are valuable or how much in relation to each other, and capitalism will automatically figure it out emergently in real time as people decide whether or not to buy it.
Your command economy is not powerful enough, it is not smart enough, it's going to have bugs. And so is the capitalist economy, but it has fewer, just like a reinforcement trained LLM is going to have fewer bugs than a hand-crafted one. And when we're in the economy bugs mean poverty.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
Well yeah. My point is, fix that directly. You don't need to do weird esoteric things with estate taxes to try to balance it out, and probably create more loopholes along the way. Just fix the actual problem.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2mo ago
Better yet, just close the loopholes on capital gains taxes.
If you buy $100 mil of stock and it grows to $1.1 bil, you have capital gains of $1 billion. Someone needs to pay capital gains taxes on that $1 billion. Figure out exactly how each wealthy family is paying less tax, and change the laws so that that process results in an identical tax burden. If you sell the stock, you pay tax. If you give the stock as a gift or inheritance, have the tax burden stay attached to that stock and then when they sell it, it gets taxed. If people take out loans using the stock as collateral, make sure the tax burden stays attached to that stock, which deflates its value because eventually some day it will be sold and whoever sells it owes the tax out of the proceeds. The only way the tax never gets paid is if the stock crashes in price, in which case the stock didn't actually generate a real profit that needs to be taxed, and nothing was dodged.
Inheritance and estate taxes shouldn't be relevant here, just tax the profit directly when it's realized, no matter who is currently holding the bag.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
It is actually making them (usually, though occasionally I get canned soup or takeout pizza). My issue is partly that doing those repeatedly gets repetitive and boring, and partly that that's too much effort to do on a whim for a snack if I haven't planned it ahead of time. Though I have been experimenting with freezing soup so I can make a whole bunch at once and then thaw some when hungry. But that only works for certain soups.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
What are the laziest healthy foods I can make. I'm fairly picky about what foods I like, but reasonably unpicky about what foods I'll tolerate. I don't have a clear concise way to list out all of them other than to say I have the palate of a five year old. Probably literally, I don't think my food preferences have changed substantially since I was a child other than an increased ability to tolerate foods I don't like.
I don't like cooking. I'm bad at it, it takes too long. I make simple things like soup or pizza, especially if I can make a bunch at once which increase the amount of food per effort, but foods which require less prep time are preferred. My go-to lazy healthy snack is raw vegetables. I will happily munch on whole tomatoes or baby carrots, which is just as easy as opening a bag of potato chips. But I need more variety, and something slightly fancier and slightly less lazy is acceptable. What are your thoughts and suggestions for maximizing health and taste per effort?
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
I'm not entirely convinced that this is inappropriate. If you pay $1 million as a one time investment to develop a software, and then sell $500,000 in licenses every year for five years, you get a profit of 2.5 - 1 = 1.5 million. Over five years that's 300,000 profit per year. Similar to if a factory bought 5 years worth of materials up front for $1 million and then spent five years producing and selling stuff for $500,000 per year. I assume that's the logic behind this regulation. Now I understand it's not realistic for a startup company to have literally no costs during that five year period, presumably they'd be doing tech support and adding new features and whatnot, but it's probably less than what their initial costs.
Further, shouldn't this actually help them pay less taxes in the long run? Unless I'm misunderstanding how corporate taxes work (which is very possible) a corporation that reports a $500k loss followed by 4 years of 500k gain is going to pay taxes on 2 mil, while a corporation with amortized costs that reports five years of 300k profit is going to pay taxes on 1.5 mil (their actual profits).
I get that it'll hurt more the first year. And if a company does actually have constant software costs every year then this will hurt the first few years before the amortization has a chance to reach equilibrium. But for companies that invest in software inconsistently as upgrades it makes sense to treat them the same way as any other infrastructure investment, which I believe are similarly amortized.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
Not a physical location, but I do a lot of my reading on Royal Road, whose demographics say readership is 70% male and 30% female, and I couldn't find the data but my guess is the authorship is something similar. It's also mostly LitRPGs and similar power progression fantasies, which is almost certainly the explanation for the discrepancy.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
provided it is a mere territorial claim with no further risk of aggression
I don't think this scenario has ever happened in the history of the world. Conquering powers that aggressively steal land from others typically only pause to consolidate their gains, reshore their power and morale, cooldown international outrage, etc, before continuing to conquer. And even if the particular nation decides not to go further, if it becomes known you explicitly have a policy of not fighting back against conquest plenty of other nations will swoop in to exploit this. Nations with no militaries and no allies very quickly cease to exist.
When we send a soldier to die in war
Nobody ever explicitly sends soldiers "to die", except in very rare and very evil exceptions. People send soldiers in the hopes that they live and their enemies die. Again, killing bad people is good, killing good people is bad. If your enemies are aggressive and unprovokedly attacking you, then they are bad and you are good, so every soldier of theirs you kill is acceptable, and every soldier of yours they kill is yet another evil they have committed. The fact that your own people die is a horrible tragedy, but the blame for it lies on the enemy for killing them, not on you for sending them in self-defense.
The argument “it is okay to kill bad people” must be rooted in something, not axiomatic. Why is it okay to kill bad people rather than jail them for life? Human life ceases to be sacred when it is a bad person? This isn’t the religious argument whatsoever.
This is pretty typical natural rights stuff, which can be religious or not depending on whether or not you believe the natural rights are inherent to humans or derived from God. Everyone is born with an inherent right to life, liberty, property, etc. Violating these is not okay. But if you willingly violate them in others then you forfeit some of yours (in various amounts depending on how harsh a perspective one has, but generally proportional to the amount that you violated from others.) Your natural rights are contingent on respecting the natural rights of others, and if you can't do that then you don't get the respect of others for yours.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
You should be allowed to make it, and the bookies should update their odds appropriately in response. Either they create accurate odds (which in turn creates accurate information for people to see), or they don't and you arbitrage them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
I’m unpersuaded by the typical religious argument that life is so sacred we cannot take it. We do take it, all the time, in war and executions.
How do people keep ignoring the actual argument? Killing good people is bad, killing bad people is good. This has been more or less the justification for war and executions from religious and non-religious people alike for thousands of years. And within the past 40 years the majority of people not only stopped believing it, but completely and utterly forgot that this is what other people believe. Just because some people believe in a constant function: "killing people is always bad", does not mean everyone who disagrees with them believes its pure negation: "killing people is always good." There's a ton of room for nuance.
Given that the vast majority of potential euthanasia recipients are "good people" according to most sane definitions, ie they are not mass murderers or foreign soldiers that represent an existential threat to the life and liberty of your nation, any belief system that believes "killing good people is bad" and doesn't make exceptions for the will of the person will think that killing them is bad. Sophistication is not hypocrisy.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
My Grandpa used to chew tobacco in secret. Officially, this was not okay behavior. He wanted to do it, Grandma disapproved, so he "wasn't allowed to". Partly because it was bad for his health, partly because it's gross. So, not wanting to cause trouble, he pretended to quit, and then went off and did it in secret.
Obviously, Grandpa knows that grandpa chews tobacco. Let's call this level 1 knowledge. Knowledge of the object level fact itself.
He thought he was being sneaky about it, but he wasn't all that sneaky. Grandma found enough evidence to figure it out, so she has level 1 knowledge about him chewing. But since he obviously knows he chews, Grandma knows that he knows, so she has level 2 knowledge: knowledge that Grandpa has level 1 knowledge.
But she doesn't confront Grandpa. Because if she does they might have a fight, or he might decide that now the cat's out of the bag he might as well do it openly in front of people, which is gross. So she says nothing. Everyone knows that Grandpa chews, it is shared knowledge. But it's not common knowledge, because Grandpa doesn't know that she knows.
The lack of common knowledge is meaningful because it allows people to credibly pretend and act like they don't know even when they do.
Now, this didn't happen in real life (I think), but suppose that Grandpa is snooping around and happens to see a text (or more likely overhear a conversation, they're old after all), where Grandma was telling someone about this situation. He's like, "oh crap, I've been discovered. But Grandma chose not to confront me because she doesn't approve but also doesn't want to start a fight. If I want to I could just address this openly, admit what I've been doing, and then either stop or else have the fight and force my way to doing it openly. But I'm reasonably happy the way things have been going, and also I don't want to admit that I've been snooping, so I'll just keep chewing in secret and pretend I don't know that they know." Grandpa now has level 3 knowledge. Everyone knows that Grandpa chews, everyone knows that everyone knows, it's a bit of an "open secret", but not everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows, because nobody knows about Grandpa's snooping, so everyone else thinks that Grandpa is still oblivious to their knowledge, when he's not. This is meaningfully different from the previous scenario, where Grandpa actually thought he was being sneaky about the chewing, and is meaningfully different from common knowledge where it's all out in the open and nobody thinks they know more than someone else.
You can continue this pattern any finite number of steps upward, maybe Grandma planned for Grandpa to overhear her, and maybe Grandpa then discovers that it was a ruse, and so on and so on, but it becomes increasingly convoluted to understand or explain, and also there's little practical difference between level 19 knowledge and level 24 knowledge other than who happens to be on top at the moment, but they still differ from common knowledge, in that any large but finite number of steps creates an open secret that everyone knows but doesn't talk about, while the infinite recursion of common knowledge makes it just not a secret at all and it's harder for people to pretend it's a secret when it's obviously not.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
We got some pretty good tomatoes last year, but the whole garden seems to be floundering this year (except cucumbers which are doing great) and I'm not sure why. It's in the exact same spot with approximately the same weather, though maybe we haven't paid as much attention to watering it on hot days as last year.
I've never heard that about black currants. I just googled it, and it looks like it used to be illegal but they lifted the ban in the early 2000s since better anti-fungal stuff has come out and they're less of a threat to trees now. But they're still really rare due to having been banned for so long. I didn't even know black currants existed until I started looking to buy berry bushes last year.
MathWizard
Good things are good
3mo ago
I'd guess that the single highest value per effort is probably in choosing the right plants. If you can find plants that thrive in your garden you'll get a much better result for less effort than any amount of techno-fixes being spent on the wrong plant.
How do I figure that out? Do I try to google a database for what plants grow optimally in my region? Or do I have to trial and error if soil quality and sunlight amounts vary enough such that my yard is somewhat unique?
It's more civil than war.
I'm serious, that's the baseline. That's the floor to which things can fall. The default method of conflict resolution is where team A and team B kill each other until one of them wins and then that side imposes its will and/or enslaves and/or genocides the other. Politics allows us to decide who gets their way without doing that. Modern politics is nowhere near as civil as it ought to be, and contains a lot more violence and death than it ought to, but it's not literally war. We're heading in that direction, but very slowly, and we're far enough away that there is time to course correct before we get there. Hopefully.
The takeaway from History so many people fail to learn is that things could be so much worse, and how easy it is to get there. We should participate in politics to avoid getting there any faster than we have to.
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