MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
Maybe it's just because lean right in my media consumption, but I've heard a lot of complaints about woke nonsense in videogames. Horizon Zero Dawn made the main character way less attractive, The Last of Us killed off the main guy from the first game in a disrespectful way. GTA 6 looks like a woke disaster. And of course I've seen quite a few games with the weird lefty art-style that indicate them as obviously woke that nobody ever plays or cares about because they aren't beloved franchises (though I don't think it's reasonable to complain about these. If woke people want to form their own IP and let people freely choose to play or not play, good for them, as long as they aren't co-opting non-woke franchises and destroying them)
I don't know that Sweet Baby Inc was involved in the games I mentioned. The Sweet Baby Inc Detected only has 16 reviews and those aren't any of them, so either they're not thorough, or something else is involved. But some sort of woke force has been going around corrupting games just like it has in comics and movies, and people have been complaining about it for the last decade. Not as much as they complain about in-game transactions, because it is less prevalent, but it's been there.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
It's been a while since I've seen it, but I think the main clue is the over-the-top propaganda commercials in it. The tone makes it clear that the director does not intend the audience to believe it or take it seriously.
Aside from that, the horrible meat-grinder of combat and disregard for the lives of the troops makes it clear that the human army is not a desirable place to be and the higher ups do not respect their troops. Also the literal child soldiers.
If it was a pro-fascist movie, the human government would be portrayed a lot more competently.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
My vote is on the similarity to concentration camps. People in general, especially people far away hearing news reports about events in other countries, are not utilitarians. 10000 civilians dead looks pretty similar to 100000 civilians dead, but the words "concentration camp" with some lurid descriptions gets people outraged. I suspect that the amount of international blowback from your plan would be more than the amount of international blowback they're getting now, even if the actual harms were much lesser.
But different traits scale disproportionally with respect to each other, so I think you can meaningfully translate quantitative differences into qualitative differences in practice via orders of magnitude difference in ability.
That is, if someone with an IQ of 120 can throw a football 2% more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then we'd say that football-throwing skill does not scale meaningfully with IQ even if there is technically a minor improvement. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve simple arithmetic problems 40% faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then this would reasonably be considered a quantitative difference. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve problems related to hierarchically nested hypothetical scenarios 50 times (5000%) faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, (which is realistic if the latter can barely handle them at all), then this would reasonably be described as a qualitative difference despite technically being quantitative in the details.
Clearly there isn't a well-defined bright line distinguishing the scenarios. But there are cases which fall unambiguously on one side or the other, such that it's meaningful to discuss.
edit: mixed up the words "quantitative" and "qualitative" in some places
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
An important distinction needs to be made between the film "Starship Troopers" and the novel "Starship Troopers" that it's inspired-by/parodying. Given that the director did not actually read the novel, absolute despised fascism, and set about parodying and mocking the original story, they are clearly distinct stories in a way that most adaptations are not.
I'm assuming /u/bearmarket is referring to the film, whose main character "John Rico" is white. But if so, this undercuts his actual point, since this is a parody attempting to demonstrate how this white imperialism is BAD, not celebrating it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
Indoor. It's cheaper/safer in terms of disease risk and thus the amount of vaccinations they require, it's comfier for them in general with respect to weather, and you get to actually encounter them and interact with them more, assuming you spend more time indoors versus outdoors.
Having an outdoor cat is like halfway between having a cat and just feeding a stray cat. Might as well actually commit to having a cat if you want to have a cat.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
if the woman lives in a castle doctrine state
Sounds like a big if. An lot of people don't live in castle doctrine states. And while on a societal level this could be fixed by adding this to more states, that's not super realistic for an individual person in this situation. An individual solution would be to move to a castle doctrine state, but that has some pretty high costs depending on how their social circles, family, and careers are structured.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
The wiseness of marrying her or not is going to depend on who she is now and in the future, the past is useful in-so-far as it informs those.
Having promiscuous sex is a sign that someone
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Does not treat sex as special or sacred or important, at least not to the extent that a chaste person does.
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Does not have a proactive loyalty or consideration towards their future partner. A chaste person who saves themselves shows respect and loyalty to the person who they will eventually end up with, before they've even met them. This means that once they do and that person fills that role they are irreplaceable.
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Does not think about long-term consequences of their actions, or highly value things like reputation and honorable behavior. A lot of people are going to find this behavior icky, which both severely narrows down the promiscuous person's future partners, and leaves a permanent regret in the heart of partners who decide to forgive their past but still have to know about it.
All of this together means such people are more likely to cheat, and more likely to divorce when they get bored and find someone new. Their current partner may be special, but they are unlikely to be the same level of special that a purely monogamous person would have. However, this is correlational, not guaranteed. And people can change. I don't know Alice, I don't know how much she's changed since then, how loyal she is, how devoted she is to Bob, how much she does or does not regret her past. All I know is that however many years ago she thought that sleeping with however many guys was an acceptable thing to inflict on Bob before she ever met him. But ultimately, the decision is up to Bob. He has to figure out whether he's willing to be guy #537 to Alice, whether he can accept that without it bothering him for the rest of his life. And decide how much he trusts her, whether he's actually truly special to her or just another notch in her belt. And he's allowed to choose to marry her. And it might even be the right decision, I don't know her, I don't know how much her past speaks to her current character, whether she's still the same kind of person or whether she's truly changed.
But when making an argument, it should be focused on Bob, his future, and what's right for him. Her past only matters in-so-far as it affects those.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
In a pure, mathematically perfect, game theory bilateral monopoly, any distribution is a Nash Equilibrium, making the actual distribution arbitrary and impossible to deduce logically. Any offer someone makes and commits to would be irrational to refuse, but any counter-offer is similarly irrational to refuse, although I suppose if you modify the game with some sort of negotiation system attached and maybe some semi-rational actors you could come up with some sort of converging equilibrium.
In the real world, nothing is a perfect bilateral monopoly isolated from other economics, in which case the asymmetry of the breaking of this monopoly is likely to have a very strong impact on the negotiation. Labor pretty much always has value, if nothing else than the fact that sitting around relaxing is typically more enjoyable than working (not literally always though), and there are plenty of other jobs someone could take. So if there's a resource A that is completely worthless without skill B, and person B has skill C that's useless without resource A, you still don't have a perfect bilateral monopoly because person B could go do something else even if it doesn't use that skill. This gives person B an advantage in negotiations. Or maybe person B can extract value from A with 99% efficiency and some random Joe off the street can extract value with 5% efficiency. That gives person A an advantage. Unless the bilateral monopoly is truly perfect, both the resource and the skill/labor are completely useless without each other, the imperfections in the monopoly are going to provide pressure on the negotiating price. Internal factors of the people such as their wealth and utility functions may also play a role, as you point out, but I think the asymmetries in the monopoly are going to be a bigger factor.
MathWizard
Good things are good
8mo ago
I think a distinction needs to be made between conspiracies where the mere knowledge of the conspiracies existence is secret, versus ones where specific details are secret. Everyone knows that Coca Cola and KFC exist, and have spice blends, and that those spice blends are secret. The existence of the spices have not been successfully hidden, and in fact many (most?) of the individual spices are known, but their exact combination and proportions are unknown, which means competitors can sort of imitate them, but not perfectly. We know the who, what, and why, just not the how.
Meanwhile, if you had a similar level of secrecy for something like political assassination, it would be over. If it leaked that X, Y, Z people were in a secret assassination club that killed people for political gain, but the exact details of who they had killed were secret, you could arrest and interrogate X,Y and Z, and then find out the details (and even if you never found out the details, you could still punish them for what you did know). Criminal conspiracies require not only that specific details remain secret, but that the existence of the conspiracy itself remains secret. Which is a lot harder to pull off.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
It can get especially bad on Reddit when you're in a back-and-forth conversation with someone that goes enough layers deep that probably nobody else is reading your comments except the responder, and you can see when they're downvoting each reply you make.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
Oooh this is good trolling. The "you did this to yourself" aspect is very strong here, despite it being obvious that the poster is creating this combination on purpose, which is precisely the balance that a good troll creates.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
donating money to cure liver cancer is infinitely more aligned to EA values than, well, basically anything I can think of.
If one dollar saved the same number of liver cancer lives as one dollar saved malaria lives, this might be true. It's not. As a reminder, the E in EA stands for "effective". That means do the math, shut up and multiply. One liver cancer death might be worse than one malaria death, but it's not worse than ten malaria deaths, so if you can save ten lives for the same money as one life, you save the ten.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
even though you've never believed in the validity of the accusation at all?
This is an incredibly rare scenario that almost never sees play anywhere, especially in the examples you give. Nobody in mainstream politics or culture thinks that being a racist or a pedophile is okay and therefore an invalid accusation that can simply be ignored. Dismissals are always founded on assumptions that the accusation is so obviously false that they don't even require rebuttals, that opponents are wolf-criers with no credibility, not that the accusations are true but ignorable because the they aren't bad.
Therefore, it is entirely consistent and not at all hypocritical to believe that opponents are unreliable wolf-criers who shouldn't be taken seriously when they make accusations, but then if you find actual evidence of them misbehaving to accuse them of the same crime, if you have actual evidence. Which of course, each side believes about themselves and not their opponents.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
Pressuring victims of anything to retract their claims gets my hackles up. There are forms of "obstruction of justice" that don't outrage me, where people resist arrest, or destroy evidence when they get caught doing something illegal. Like, you shouldn't do that, but I get it. But witness tampering, threats, corruption? That's unacceptable, regardless of what it's in service of.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
Yeah, we definitely need to move in a more libertarian direction than we are now. It's just that an awful lot of Libertarians claim things like "we need to remove literally all regulations", and I'm like "no, the anti-monopoly, anti-cartel ones are pretty good and we should keep those while we strip out the bad ones."
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
This is why I don't consider myself officially a Libertarian despite some fairly strong leanings in that direction. A handful of monopolistic megacorp/cartels using economic power to suppress competition isn't that much different from a handful of government bureaucrats doing that same with laws. Better to have some regulations even if they restrict the markets as first-order effects as long as they result in more free markets on the second and higher orders. And also to solve obvious game-theoretic issues like externalities and coordination problems.
But my ideal government would probably take a Libertarian minimalist government as a template and then patch the bugs until you end up 10-20% of the way towards what we currently have.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
That's a reasonable take. My gut response was "well if the terms are bad just don't sign it", but for working class people that's not really an option, especially if this becomes the norm and people get used to signing it. And this allows companies to have their noncompetes if it's important, but they have to pay for it so won't do it just because they can.
Well the possibility arises in all scenarios, but the outcome differs as a matter of weighing the two sides. Which causes more economic harm, the inefficiencies caused by fraud or the inefficiencies caused by behaviors in the absence of fraud? My understanding is that fraud is way worse than the work-arounds, so it should be banned.
Which causes more economic harm, the inefficiencies caused by non-competes, or the inefficiencies caused by the work-arounds? In genuinely don't know, I'm by no means an expert, so maybe it is the case that non-competes are worse than the work-arounds. But I don't think the magnitude of the inefficiencies caused by non-competes are anywhere near the inefficiences caused by fraud, so I don't think it tips the balance away from the default of legality.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
Outlaw Non-competes: Non-compete agreements distort labor markets and should be banned at the federal level.
I'm surprised to see this one in here alongside all the others. On the one hand, I agree that on the first-order a non-compete will distort labor markets, but on the other hand an absence of non-compete distorts incentives for training, trade secrets, and customer sharing. A company doesn't want to hire someone, spend time and resources teach them all the best techniques for doing a job effectively, and then have that person immediately leave and take all that training somewhere else or strike out on their own. Similarly, a company doesn't want to give someone a bunch of infrastructure and marketing and accumulate a bunch of clients and then spin off into a private business, carrying those clients with them.
Now, I don't think we have an obligation to do things just because they make companies happy, not at all. But the incentive structure means that if companies can't curtail these behaviors via non-competes they will curtail them in other ways. Companies will guard their secrets more carefully, will shuffle customers around so they can't get too attached to any one employee, and do other inefficient things that create economic friction.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
If you're sufficiently loose with your criteria for a scenario where reward is involved, such as a desired endgoal or outcome, then literally all rational behavior is driven by reward, because that's the definition of rationality. And not in the broad logical scale of rationalism, but in the colloquial someone acting with no goal is being purposeless and irrational. Why would you do anything at all if there wasn't some point? And then you can consider that point to be a "reward".
So unless you have a narrower definition of reward in mind, then regardless of whether learning is involved or not, the only case of behavior I can think of which is not tied to a reward is irrational behavior, and people with involuntary tics, and stuff like that.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9mo ago
They didn't ask for constitutional amendments which are good ideas, or which might receive grassroots bipartisan support, they asked for ones which stand a shot of actually getting passed.
1 seems plausible, if you could make each party think it was their own idea and defending against incursions of the other party.
2 seems very unlikely, all of the politicians are stuck in their ways and in the DC culture and are not going let through a Bill that limits themselves in this way.
3 has absolutely no chance, the Democrats are not going to do anything that discourages illegal immigration, especially if it can be spun as race-related, and having noncitizen children born in this country and then being deported to a country they've never been to is way too easy to stir up emotions about.
4 seems unlikely for similar reasons to 2. The politicians love DC, they're not going to do something that messes with the status quo unless it's strictly good for them.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
Just think about it, if conveying the impression, with little effort, that you agree with someone was against the rules, why on earth would we have upvote or downvote buttons?
I think the point is that if the only thing you're expressing is agreement then you should be upvoting instead of commenting in order to save pagespace and brainspace for substantial comments. Everyone who scrolls past can see the comment and is likely to waste time reading it before recognizing that it contributes nothing and moving on. Rather than having a popular post with 50 "I agree" comments and one actual reply mixed together, we could just have a 50 next to the upvote button and then the one actual reply stand on its own for people to read and possibly reply to.
To the extent that upvotes and "I agrees" aren't actually the same thing, as you can upvote people you disagree with but you feel make good posts, and you can fail to upvote people even if you agree with their point, I've suggested in the past that it could be useful to have two different vote bars, one for quality and one for agreement.
MathWizard
Good things are good
10mo ago
I like discords for some of the games I play that involve people theorycrafting and optimizing builds and stuff. Usually when I stop playing said game I stop hanging out in that discord though, so it's more of a category of server I like than a specific server.
I think part of the problem is simply a failure to optimize for quality. An absence of merit and meritocracy. It's not required for wokeness to be an objectively negative property in games as long as it distracts from quality. If you had a substantial fraction of people obsessed with blue flowers to the point that they start hiring people to work on their game on the basis that they are fellow blue-flower enthusiasts rather than their programming and game design skill, that alone would decrease the quality of games (or productivity in pretty much any industry). If you insert a bunch of fanservice characters whose main appeal is that they wear blue flowers, and fail to make them appealing in other ways because the blue-flower-wearing takes care of that in the minds of the developers, then you end up with lackluster characters from the perspective of anyone who doesn't care about blue flowers. If all mainstream games all start to share similar plotlines of evil villains trying to poison all the blue flowers, or worse, dye them red (the horror!), people will get tired of it. Nobody cares about blue flowers, tell some good stories!
Any overly ideological creator that gets too self-absorbed in their own niche obsession will struggle to make good content that appeals to anyone who doesn't share their obsession because they get too many false-positives from self-masturbatory appeals to their own niche and stop optimizing for more objective quality once something meets their own distorted subjective view.
This is why any overly preachy content is cringe and lame even when it contains a message that I agree with. The fact that wokeness in many instances happens to be toxic and destructive is just the cherry on top. The ideological obsession is the majority of the problem.
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