MathWizard's profile

MathWizard Good things are good 2d ago

Fine. It sounds like we don't disagree about any object level issues, just the meaning of certain words and phrases. I don't think what you said originally properly conveys the nuance of what you're saying now, but I understand you now and I don't disagree.

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MathWizard Good things are good 3d ago

Sure, but my example is basically a disproof by counterexample. In this example, prices don't match utility, therefore, the statement "prices always match utility" is logically false. It's really easy to disprove an "always" statement with a single example, even a hypothetical one, because an "always" statement is such a strong claim that it's almost never true. Utility value and market value are different things: sometimes they will be equal, sometimes they will not. I'm not saying they're never equal, I'm not saying they won't usually be close, especially in an efficient market. My point is that markets in the real world are not always efficient, therefore the two values are not always equal in the real world. This should not be controversial.

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MathWizard Good things are good 3d ago

In a perfectly efficient market, this would be the case. But it's easily disproven in practice by the fact that market prices can change by effects which have absolutely no impact on the utility value.

Ie, suppose we have a city with a bunch of plumbers, all of equal plumbing skill/ability, and a company that hires them and manages their distribution to clients, and pays between $80k and $120k depending on how skilled and aggressive the plumber is at negotiating (aggressive meaning they demonstrate an ability/willingness to quit and do a different job instead if they don't get the salary they want). We've assumed by axiom that they provide the same value, and yet get paid different amounts, let's assume the frequency is evenly distributed across this range, such that the average plumber is paid $100k. I suppose you could say that the "utility value" is the highest the company is willing to pay, $120k, and anyone being paid less is simply a bad negotiator, but I'm not sure if you'd say the "market value" is $120k given that most of the plumbers aren't earning that, and a new plumber entering the field is unlikely to get an offer that high.

Suppose then that the plumbers unionize and negotiate that all of them will receive the same pay of $110k. That's now the market value, unambiguously, that's what the market, as created by this single local monopolistic company (which is the only company offering reliable and consistent pay for plumbers in this city) and this one union (which all employees of the company must join) will pay. And yet the utility value of plumbing has not changed, because the union doesn't impact plumbing skill/ability in any way.

Suppose that the company actually takes in revenue of $140k for each plumbing employee it has, and keeps the difference as overhead/profit. There's a sense in which the utility value of a plumber is actually $140k since that's what clients are willing to pay, although if the overhead is necessary then I suppose the utility of the plumber themself is lessened by that. However if a plumbing emergency happens and the company gets a lot more business, earning $150k per employee one year, but takes the extra as profit and changes no salaries, then the utility value of plumbers goes up that year, the market price (from the client and owner's side) goes up, but the market price (from the employees side) remains unchanged.

And suppose that the employer uses local regulations, an army of lawyers, and relationships with local politicians to crush any new plumbers that try to form their own company or go independent in this area. It is not a free market, it is effectively a local monopoly. If you want to be a plumber, you negotiate here, or you leave the city and pay whatever transition costs it takes to uproot your life and your family and be a plumber somewhere else. The fact that this changes market prices but doesn't change the utility value of plumbers should clearly demonstrate that market prices are distinct from utility prices, even if an ideal perfectly efficient and free market would cause them to be equal. In practice, no market is perfectly free, therefore we should expect deviations in precisely the areas where these imperfections drive them apart.

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MathWizard Good things are good 4d ago

I don't think I agree. If I saw a similar-looking meme from the right when Biden had taken office I would have cringed. There's a joke there, it's a tiny bit funnier than one of those braindead and overly-labeled political comics you'd see in a newspaper, but barely. It's a step in the right direction, but it's lacking....heart? authenticity?

Truth. It's lacking the "it's-funny-because-it's-true" bit. And I suppose 50% of that is simply me not agreeing with the substance, but 50% of that is just pure made up. Like, even for a left-winger who does believe Trump is authoritarian and is sympathetic to the other dictators, I don't think any of them genuinely believe he is going to join them and have the U.S. declare war on Ukraine. And also South Korea, and Taiwan for some reason. Who thinks Trump is pro-China???

Again, if the right had made a meme about the U.S. bombing Taiwan in 2020 because of the Biden-China connections, I would have cringed. This is not a good meme.

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MathWizard Good things are good 8d ago

I am absolutely not blue tribe, and never have been, this does not describe me. I grew up with Christian Republican parents, got a hunting license at 12 years old, I hate cities, am highly skeptical of big government and redistributive policies, and think the majority of social problems are best solved by self control and personal responsibility, or failing that, ruthless law enforcement. My grandparents on both sides are rednecks and they are wonderful and kind people who I adore. But I personally would rather spend my day on my computer than outdoors on a pickup truck, and I think the Republicans are equally braindead as the Democrats, just less trigger-happy about their stupid plans. I suppose you could define me as "a particular disaffected part of the red tribe", but then you have to explain why I have more in common with the other blue-grey people than I do with the pure red people. I think lots of the right-leaning Mottizens have similar cultural leanings. Some of them are disaffected blue tribe, but others came from Red. But most of us don't fit in nicely with either.

Even if you don't think "gray tribe" is the best way to describe it, there's clearly some real thing that the term is pointing to, something that bridges the gap between Red and Blue.

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MathWizard Good things are good 9d ago

They are increasing functions with respect to each other, but the effect is nonlinear. That is, if you make twice as many pizzas, people will generally be more happy, but less than twice as happy. You can only physically eat so much pizza, you only like pizza so much, and there are a bunch of things you care about that aren't food.

So first, let's construct scenarios where material productivity increases but utility decreases utility, starting with unambiguous but somewhat contrived and trivial ways that form a proof by example, and gradually transition into more sophisticated but debatable examples

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to customers, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and shunts them off to a warehouse to rot. (Utility is derived via consumption, not production)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day and serves them to hungry poor people, VS a bakery that produces 100 pizzas per day and sends them all to the penthouse suite of a single really fat rich person who eats them all himself. (Utility per pizza is higher the fewer you already have)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 11 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Total output has gone up, but the cost has gone up more, so efficiency is lower)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, who then goes home to his family and kids afterwards, VS a bakery that produces 80 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 16 hours every single day, who goes home exhausted with most of his day gone. (Pizza:labor efficiency is equal, but TIME also has nonlinear utility, so the quality of life for the worker has decreased even if he gets paid 8 times as much)

-A bakery that produces 10 pizzas per day using the labor of 1 person working for 2 hours, VS A bakery that produces pizzas with literally no labor or ingredient cost, but the pizzas somehow mess with their consumer's brains such that they to lose the ability to experience happiness ever again. (Obviously the most contrived example, but hopefully clearly pointing out the distinction).

The point being, that although all else being equal, more material production on its own is strictly superior to less material production for the same costs, all else is rarely equal. Therefore, increases in material production should be correlated with but distinct from actual utility. The biggest counterexample is the industrial revolution. Material production has, in reality, increased 100x. The wellbeing and happiness and prosperity of people has not increased 100x. It's gone up, for sure. But some things have gotten worse to compensate, and most things just have improved by less than a factor of 100x. The amount of joy you get from looking at art is less than a hundred times better than it was in the past. The enjoyability of food is less than a hundred times better. The amount of value you get from socialization is less than a hundred times more. Oh sure, you have access to a hundred times as much art, or food, or social connections via the internet, but you can't actually convert that into internal value, utility, at anywhere near perfect efficiency because you have bottlenecks based on time and biology and psychology. This is why Bill Gates isn't running around being thousands of times happier than everyone else: it doesn't work that way.

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MathWizard Good things are good 9d ago

and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.

I'm going to nitpick just the word choice here. Material goods are NOT utility. Utility is actual internal value: happiness/wellbeing/fulfillment/life-satisfaction etc. The endgoal of desirability/morality. By definition, a 100x increase in utility results in a world that is 100x better for everyone. However utility suffers from massive diminishing returns as a function of material goods, as Yudkowsky shows. A 100x increase in material productivity does not result in a 100x increase in utility.

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MathWizard Good things are good 11d ago

I actually think the no special resources is a point in Nauvis' favor for the main ground base, because it means the core miners give an even distribution of resources instead of overloading you with one thing for export (which is what I want my mining outposts to do, not the main base). But the gravity and biters are points against it. I chose it anyway and tolerated the downsides partly for sentimental reasons, since all my pre-space stuff was already there, but mostly for the respawn. If I make spare space suits for each planet then I can return home by stripping all my stuff, sticking it in a warehouse, and then suiciding and respawning on Nauvis. Makes it way easier to go exploring and building outposts if I don't have to budget for a return trip. I could be mistaken, but I don't think you can do that effectively with other planets, since if I recall correctly, the respawn options are something like (Nauvis, nearest space station, nearest occupied planet) or something like that, which will only work reliably if your chosen base is near (or you have shuttles from Nauvis to the new base I guess).

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MathWizard Good things are good 12d ago

SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains. (technically you can do this with rocket fueled shuttles, but then you have to worry about producing and refueling and having enough fuel capacity to get there and back). But that's late enough to unlock that you've already spent a few hundred hours dealing with the more complicated and expensive. methods.

I actually haven't played SA yet because I'm still in the middle of Pyanodon and am not allowing Factorio to update and break my mods. But I am very excited for what happens when some of the mod people take the new infrastructure and ideas in SA and then combine them with their crazy mod expansions.

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MathWizard Good things are good 12d ago

I think framing the objection as "this law is technically worded in a way that allows parents to get away with making porn of their own children if they exploit this loophole, we should make it stricter to fix that loophole" would not get someone chastised as being pro-pedo. You're generally allowed to make things more strict. Even if it's obvious that in practice a jury would just handwave the discrepancy and convict them anyway.

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MathWizard Good things are good 12d ago

That last link on Maryland's laws is confusing me. In particular, section (c) is almost redundant. It's basically trying to say "parents with photos of their kids who happen to be nude aren't in violation unless it's like actually porn" to prevent overapplication of the law where it's not intended, so that when your four year old goes streaking across an otherwise wholesome family video you don't go to jail as a sex offender.

But the specific wording in section (c) is different from the wording in section (a), which draws attention to the differences. In section (a), it says you can't have media where the minor is

(1) engaged as a subject of sadomasochistic abuse; (2) engaged in sexual conduct; or (3) in a state of sexual excitement.

In section (c) it says parents may not have media of their own children where the minor is engaged

(1) as a subject of sadomasochistic abuse; or (2) in sexual conduct and in a state of sexual excitement.

Which means that parents specifically ARE allowed to have content where their child is engaged in sexual conduct XOR in a state of sexual excitement, as long as it's not both simultaneously???

Is this reading correct? Maybe they're trying to ward off the case where a two year old is having their diaper changed and pops a boner randomly? I'm not sure why you'd be filming that in the first place, but I suppose it makes sense not to prosecute it on the same level as actual CP.

However this opens a logical loophole where it appears that the law as written would allow pornographic videos involving your own children (with unambiguously sexual conduct), as long as it's not sadomasochistic in nature, and the child themself is not sexually excited by it (so them pleasuring an adult would be fine), since such an act wouldn't meet the criteria for c1 or c2. What am I missing here?

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MathWizard Good things are good 12d ago

Not quite. There's still the broader bathroom that itself contains the stalls. Men and women both are going to feel less comfortable pooping in a stall next to someone of the opposite sex, and coming out and washing their hands, or doing makeup, or whatever. Not that it's super comfortable to do that among people of the same sex, but its worse if they're opposite. All of the unisex bathrooms I've encountered are real life are defined that way because it's like a normal house bathroom: one room with one toilet, one sink, and a lock on the door. From that perspective then, the benefit of sex-segregated toilets is the economy of scale because you can build 5 stalls in a large room much more cheaply than you can build 5 separate rooms.

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MathWizard Good things are good 13d ago

The most plausible way I can see Democrats shifting on trans issues is to shift focus to encouraging and/or mandating individualized unisex bathrooms. It resolves the most salient of the objections (biological men creeping on women), while still enabling trans people and their preferences (not have to be treated as someone of their birth sex), and more importantly appears like they're supporting trans people, while offloading all of the burden onto private enterprises who now have to pay for enough individualized bathrooms to accommodate everyone. They can even spin this as "all inclusive", because only having women's and men's bathrooms still buys into the gender binary, while unisex bathrooms support everyone of all genders and fluidities and whatever.

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MathWizard Good things are good 13d ago

I actually think that supporting Ukraine and making no concessions to Russia unless they give back every square inch of occupied territory strengthens our position against China, because it makes them expect the same treatment if they try something on Taiwan. The absolute best outcome with regards to China is to never have to go to war in the first place because they expect the costs to outweigh the gains. I see Ukraine as an opportunity to make an example out of Russia. They don't need to be completely obliterated, it just has to hurt enough to disincentivize similar actions from them and others in the future.

If instead Trump just gives them what they want as soon as he's in power, then China can reasonably expect to get the same thing (as long as they wait for the next Democrat President).

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MathWizard Good things are good 14d ago

Even more sympathetically, it's not clear to me how much he was really in control of the presidency.

I am not sympathetic to this at all. If you are old and senile, you don't belong in a leadership position at... pretty much anything. The responsible thing to do is to retire and enjoy what remains of your health, and let younger people take charge. He knew his own mental state much sooner than anyone else did, and everyone knew approximately how much control he'd be in charge of his presidency when he was running for office in the first place. He should not have run, and by running he knowably made himself a figurehead and put his advisors in charge of the country in his stead. He shouldn't have done that, and the voters should not have voted for him knowing he would do that, but they did anyway, and that's largely his fault for enabling it.

He shouldn't have run, he did anyway, he deserves the blame for all the consequences of that.

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MathWizard Good things are good 22d ago

That's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered before. But if you dig into that it's kind of like inflicting psychological punishment on someone for their own good. Like if a kid is picking on their siblings, and they don't really understand the long-term adult consequences of being a jerk (nobody will like you and you will have no friends and be lonely), so you spank them so that they learn to associate the bad behavior with pain. You are inflicting pain that previously didn't exist, and could be avoided on the first order simply by not punishing them, because you expect that in the long term it will improve their behavior and make them better off due to second order effects.

Except in this case instead of a parent it's all of society inflicting the punishment, and it's inducing psychological trauma into them instead of physically spanking them, and they're adults instead of children. But it is still supposed to be for their own good. I'm not sure how I feel about that. And as a side effect you also end up inducing trauma into the subset that genuinely tried to avoid being raped, will try to avoid it in the future, but happen to be tough enough not to be traumatized by the experience unless society induces it into them. And those people may be more common than the sort who irresponsibly set themselves up to get raped semi-on purpose.

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MathWizard Good things are good 22d ago

This is a good argument. I'm certainly not trying to argue that rape is okay if the person enjoyed it. But in this case that would still imply that the appropriate social/therapeutic response to such a victim is entirely different than the response to a more typical rape victim, right? A thing happened to them and instead of traumatizing them due to something horrible that they hated happened, a thing happened to them and it wasn't immediately horrible but instead messed with their preferences and self-perception. Or simply brought to light that their preferences were already messed up. And it doesn't seem like the way to help them heal, the way that society is structured to try to help rape victims heal, would be the same.

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MathWizard Good things are good 22d ago

The instance I'm imagining for the inverse is more latent. A woman who doesn't consciously realize she has a rape fetish, or enjoys porn of that sort but doesn't think she wants it in real life, or has it but thinks that's bad and feels shame and tries to suppress it. Therefore isn't sending off signals to get it, and if someone tried to rape her she would try to stop them. But then when it happens she realizes that it actually is fulfilling and enjoyable and she retroactively changes her mind.

This would be quite rare, and there's probably less contrived scenarios, but this would definitely count as rape because whatever implicit consent would only apply retroactively.

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MathWizard Good things are good 22d ago

I think there is a substantial conscious and voluntary component to the thing we mean by consent, and for legal and social purposes that's the only part we as third parties can/should use as inputs into decision making processes. A law saying "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you get 20 years of jailtime, but if they shrug it off then you go free" is a terrible law because people choosing to have sex with someone else can't entirely control the other person's reactions. So legally rape should absolutely be defined by visible and mostly unambiguous signals. Similarly, a social convention of "If you have sex with someone and they are traumatized afterwards then you are a bad person and everyone should shun you, but if they shrug it off then you're fine." is... more reasonable, but still dubious, because if you're so bad at a sex you traumatized someone then clearly something is wrong with you. But again, if you force sex on someone and they shrug it off you're still a horrible person because that is an action with very negative expected outcome. If you shoot at someone with a gun, maybe you don't actually hit them and wound them, and maybe you don't get convicted of murder, but you still get convicted of assault, because you easily could have hurt them.

So there's the legal definition, and the social definition, and the moral definition. And the moral version of consent involves internal thoughts and feelings, the legal one does not and should not, while the social one is probably somewhere in between. And all of them are meaningful and useful, and mostly referring to the same thing even if having different words for them might make it easier to communicate the distinctions.

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