SnapDragon
1yr ago
Well, you only need a "trial" when the outcome is important, like which prison to send an inmate to. And we already have a trial system for that; seems like the judge is in the best position to determine which prison would be appropriate, alongside all the other aspects of sentencing.
But in normal life, if we just acknowledge that it's not Literal Genocide to occasionally use the wrong pronouns, no trial is needed. Sure, if you're one of the rare edge cases where people genuinely mistake what gender you prefer, then you might have to keep announcing it and correcting people. It sucks a little, but not a lot.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
This show is absolutely one of the greatest things the BBC ever created. But it's 40 years old, and I often wonder where the next generation's Yes, Minister is. I don't watch a lot of TV (I've seen some of The West Wing, none of Veep or House of Cards), but as far as I know no modern show is worthy of claiming its mantle. Why? Is this the sort of show that can only come from a no-longer-existent world of low BBC budgets, niche high-brow appeal, and writers' willingness to skewer everyone's sacred cow rather than push a one-sided agenda?
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Or maybe at Mr. Burns' birthday party...
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Well, yes? An NFL player would be enough by itself, but it looks like he also started a charity foundation. He undoubtedly has strong sponsorship and college connections. Clearly the definition of "elite" is going to be subjective, but do you think a former NFL player is going to be turned away from a schmoozy high-status party?
Some people on The Motte seem to have really REALLY high standards. Maybe you're Silicon Valley CEOs slumming it with the rest of us. :)
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Uh, you might be confusing income with personal wealth, or you have very strange standards. Having $1.6M doesn't make you particularly rich. Earning $1.6M per year definitely does. Unless you just think that schmoes like George W. Bush (net worth of ~$40M) aren't "rich or elite in a meaningful way".
SnapDragon
1yr ago
In fact, one line of argument for theism is that math is unreasonably useful here.
Um, what? It really is "heads I win, tails you lose" with theism, isn't it? I guarantee no ancient theologian was saying "I sure hope that all of Creation, including our own biology and brains, turns out to be describable by simple mathematical rules; that would REALLY cement my belief in God, unlike all this ineffability nonsense."
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I'm not putting limits on anything. The problem with the "ascension" idea isn't that it's impossible - we can't rule it out - but it's that every single member of the ascending civilization, unanimously, would have to stop caring about (or affecting, even by accident) the physical galaxy and the rest of the civilizations in it. Despite a lot of fun sci-fi tropes, ascension isn't some macguffin you build and then everybody disappears. Our modern civilization didn't stop affecting the savannah just because most of us "ascended" out of there. I consider the explanation "everybody's super powerful but also invisible, coincidentally leaving the galaxy looking indistinguishable from an uncivilized one" to be very unlikely. (Not impossible, though.)
SnapDragon
1yr ago
What do you think our long-term future in the galaxy looks like? Is it really likely that our technological civilization will just poof out with no real impact? (Even the AI doom scenario involves a superintelligence that will start gobbling up the reachable Universe.) This is the argument underlying the Fermi Paradox: we have only one example of an intelligent civilization, and there seems to be little standing in the way of us spreading through and changing the galaxy in an unmissable way. Interstellar travel is quite hard, but not impossibly so. The time scale for this would be measured in millions of years, which is barely a hiccup in cosmological terms. So why didn't someone else do it first?
On a similar note, I'm very confident I'm not standing next to a nuclear explosion (probability well below 0.001%). Am I overconfident? Ok, yes, I'm being a bit cheeky - the effects of a nuclear explosion are well understood, after all. The chance that there's a "great filter" in our future that would stop us and all similar civilizations from spreading exponentially is a lot larger than 0.001%.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
My username is a generic ratsphere pun that I don't use anywhere else.
Off topic, but I have to say it's a brilliant pun and makes me smile whenever I see it.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I can confirm that this was not how Google-circa-2010 thought. A user having to redo a search was correctly treated as a negative signal. There was a joke along the lines of "we're the only site on the Internet that tries to get users off of it as fast as possible". I think even modern Google (which, IMO, has completely lost its moral compass and belief in free speech) wouldn't make an entry-level mistake like that. They're the leaders in the search market for a reason.
You're right about the constant A/B testing, though. And sometimes it's sliced by user, so you can't just try again in a new tab. Unless it's Incognito, and even that might not be enough - let me tell you about today's sponsor, NordVPN...
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Part of the problem is that the American age of consent is a bit ludicrous - by the time you're 18 you've already spent a third of your life sexually aware, and most people lose their virginity long before then. So it's very important to clarify whether one is talking about a) actual rape of prepubescent children, or b) mutually consensual sexual encounters that are biologically normal, legal in most of the world, and just happen to be called "statutory rape" in America.
I find it particularly concerning that progressives hold the position that teens are capable of deciding they're trans (complete with devastatingly life-altering physical interventions) when they're young but not capable of deciding they want sex (which is a hell of a lot safer, done responsibly). This just seems incoherent.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Absolutely. And I'm totally being a pedant about a policy I'm in complete agreement with. But this nitpicking is still valuable - if we as a society understand that we're banning torture for very good ideological reasons, then we won't be so tempted to backslide the next time a crisis (like 9/11) arises and people start noticing that (arguably) torture might help us track down more terrorists. Like how some people forget that free speech ideals are important beyond simply making sure that we don't violate the 1st amendment.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
So, I admit this is a well-written, convincing argument. It's appreciated! But I still find it contrasts with common sense (and my own lying eyes). I can, say, imagine authorities arresting me and demanding to know my email password. I would not cooperate, and I would expect to be able to get access to a lawyer before long. In reality there's only one way they'd get the password: torturing me. And in that case, they'd get the password immediately. It would be fast and effective. I'm still going to trust the knowledge that torture would work perfectly on me over a sociological essay, no matter how eloquent.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Well yeah, I don't disagree with any of it either so I don't really see what your point is?
But ... if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.
Why should they notice? Institutions do immoral and ineffective things literally all the time for centuries on end. And we're talking about the CIA, the kings of spending money on absolute bullshit that just sounds cool to some dudes in a room, and that's not saying nothing given the competition for that title in USG.
A fair point! I'm never going to argue with "government is incompetent" being an answer. :) But still, agencies using it is evidence that points in the direction of torture being useful - incompetence is just a (very plausible) explanation for why that evidence isn't conclusive.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I'm glad that, at the start, you (correctly) emphasized that we're talking about intelligence gathering. So please don't fall back to the motte of "I only meant that confessions couldn't be trusted", which you're threatening to do by bringing up the judicial system and "people admitting to things". Some posters did that in the last argument, too. I don't know how many times I can repeat that, duh, torture-extracted confessions aren't legitimate. But confessions and intelligence gathering are completely different things.
Torture being immoral is a fully sufficient explanation for it being purged from our systems. So your argument is worse than useless when it comes to effectiveness - because it actually raises the question of why Western intelligence agencies were still waterboarding people in the 2000s. Why would they keep doing something that's both immoral and ineffective? Shouldn't they have noticed?
When you have a prisoner who knows something important, there are lots of ways of applying pressure. Sometimes you can get by with compassion, negotiation, and so on, which is great. But the horrible fact is that pain has always been the most effective way to get someone to do what you want. There will be some people who will never take a deal, who will never repent, but will still break under torture and give you the information you want. Yes, if you have the wrong person they'll make something up. Even if you have the right person but they're holding out, they might feed you false information (which they might do in all other scenarios, too). Torture is a tool in your arsenal that may be the only way to produce that one address or name or password that you never would have gotten otherwise, but you'll still have to apply the other tools at your disposal too.
Sigh. The above paragraph is obvious and not insightful, and I feel silly having to spell it out. But hey, in some sense it's a good thing that there are people so sheltered that they can pretend pain doesn't work to get evil people what they want. It points to how nice a civilization we've built for ourselves, how absent cruelty ("barbarism", as you put it) is from most people's day-to-day existence.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I had an argument about torture here just a few weeks ago.
Bluntly, I absolutely do not buy that torture is "inherently useless". It's an extremely counterintuitive claim. I'm inherently suspicious whenever somebody claims that their political belief also comes with no tradeoffs. And the "torture doesn't work" argument fits the mold of a contrarian position where intellectuals can present cute, clever arguments that "overturn" common sense (and will fortunately never be tested in the real world). It's basically the midwit meme where people get to just the right level of cleverness to be wrong.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
...she didn't intend to expose confidential or classified information and most of the email saga came down to a mixture of negligence and pride...
...It was the pride of "owning" them...
Um, your justification seems to apply equally to both Hillary and Trump, even by your own words. So far as I know, nobody is accusing Trump of actually intending to expose the information.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Well, no... "costs" and "what consumers are willing to pay" are both important factors that go into the price. If the manufacturer's costs go up, then the equilibrium price at which profits are maximized goes up too (although the manufacturer would make less absolute profit overall). That's the real misconception that I think you're pointing at: many people, including the OP, think that prices are completely determined by the seller. In reality, sellers are already maximally greedy, so they want to find this equilibrium price point that maximizes profits. This makes price a signal that they're measuring, not something that they directly control.
Minimum wage debates tend to sadden me, because there's always somebody saying "McDonald's can just compensate by charging $1 more for a burger", making this silly mistake. As if McDonald's is just leaving all that extra money on the table, until it's forced to collect it to pay wages...
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I'd be ambivalent if it was just a few instances, but it really feels like he's exploiting the system. I wouldn't come to themotte if every other top-level post was one person soapboxing about da joos. HBD was similar: Yes, this is (intended to be) one of the few places on the Internet you can freely debate it, but it shouldn't be the only topic of discussion...
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I know very little about the topic, but isn't there a fourth possibility: that getting a good absolute ranking in the race is what motivates people to try really hard? A woman in the race you described could kill herself training and still not crack the top 50, which might be a disincentive. If this is true, then having separate events for men and women (or, at least, separate rankings) might result in more serious female competitors.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
The law of non contradiction: "Not both A and not A" or "¬(p ∧ ¬p)". Is another first principle.
That one's pretty uncontroversial, but the more interesting one is the law of excluded middle: "either A or not A". We all learn it, but there's a school of thought (intuitionism) that this shouldn't be a basic law. And indeed there are some weeeeeeeird results in math that go away (or become less weird) if you don't allow proof by contradiction.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Yeah, I think Miles Morales was definitely an early example of wokewashing, although not quite as blatant as in recent years. But when we're talking about movies there is one, rather important, distinction: Into The Spider-Verse was really, really, really, REALLY, REALLY good. (I haven't seen Across yet, but I have high hopes.) Frankly, if all these woke race swaps and girlboss Mary Sues and deconstructions of white male privilege were accompanied by movies that were even close to the quality of Into The Spider-Verse, I don't think I'd have such a problem with them!
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Ah, perfect, thanks for the link. That looks like exactly the same thing; I completely missed it because I didn't care about Woman King in the slightest. 99% is as hilariously unbelievable as El Presidente winning an election with 105% of the votes. So, it really does look like RT is willing to just blatantly lie about certain - ahem - "culturally relevant" movies, and that casts doubt even on other scores that aren't obviously fake. Maybe I can keep clicking through to the "all audiences" score, but who knows how long they'll allow that? Looks like it's time to drop RT for good and go to Metacritic ... which also uses an opaque aggregation algorithm, but at least I haven't caught them in an obvious lie yet!
SnapDragon
1yr ago
It's more of a variation of your first possibility, but RT could also be acting out of principal-agent problems, not at the behest of Hollywood executives. The explanations probably overlap. There's also the possibility that they care about their credibility every bit as much as they did in the past, but it's their credibility among tastemakers that's important, not the rabble.
Yeah, I'd be surprised if RT's review aggregation takes "marching orders" from any executives. In fact, I think RT is owned indirectly by Warner Bros., so if anything you'd expect they'd be "adjusting" Disney movies unfavorably. I like your explanation that RT's just sincerely trying to appease the Hollywood elite, rather than provide a useful signal to the masses. It fits.
I'm not sure why you'd put a low prior on the first, though. Particularly for high visibility productions, "everyone" knows to take politics into account when reading reviews. Positively weighting aligned reviews doesn't seem like an incredible step beyond that.
I knew to take that into account with the critics score, which I would usually ignore for the "woke" crap. But in the past I've generally found the audience score trustworthy. Maybe I was just naive, and it took a ridiculous outlier for me to finally notice that they have their fingers on every scale.
Well, they can demand it, but it's society's support that allows that demand to have teeth. Like @Walterodim says, we need to get back to the point where you had no moral/legal obligation to comply when somebody else tries to control you.
You're right about the rest of the trans issues. I realize I was being a bit naive - bathroom/changing room access, for instance, is both important and far too common to litigate. Ending cancel culture isn't going to help us find a compromise between the two sides of that debate...
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