erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
1d ago
From Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein:
That night I tried to figure out how such things could be kept from happening. Of course, they hardly ever do nowadays - but even once is 'way too many. I never did reach an answer that satisfied me. This Dillinger - he looked like anybody else, and his behavior and record couldn't have been too odd or he would never have reached Camp Currie in the first place. I suppose he was one of those pathological personalities you read about - no way to spot them.
Well, if there was no way to keep it from happening once, there was only one sure way to keep it from happening twice. Which we had used.
If Dillinger had understood what he was doing (which seemed incredible) then he got what was coming to him . . . except that it seemed a shame that he hadn't suffered as much as had little Barbara Anne - he practically hadn't suffered at all.
But suppose, as seemed more likely, that he was so crazy that he had never been aware that he was doing anything wrong? What then?
Well, we shoot mad dogs, don't we?
Yes, but being crazy that way is a sickness -
I couldn't see but two possibilities. Either he couldn't be made well - in which case he was better dead for his own sake and for the safety of others - or he could be treated and made sane. In which case (it seemed to me) if he ever became sane enough for civilized society . . . and thought over what he had done while he was "sick" - what could be left for him but suicide? How could he live with himself?
And suppose he escaped before he was cured and did the same thing again? And maybe again? How do you explain that to bereaved parents? In view of his record?
I couldn't see but one answer.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Like I’m the white nationalist who only has friends of other colors.
I spend half my time in Miami and half in Argentina. The blacks I interact with in Miami and most of the Latinos. But it’s highly selective for. If Cali and Ny sounded like they had functional policy maybe I’d be game.
I just know what I dealt with in Chicago and random shootings….ummm I don’t like that.
Well, there are immigrants and then there are immigrants. Europe, which was almost completely white, and whose third-world immigration consists mostly of African and Middle Eastern Muslims, has seen its quality of life degrade significantly. America, which already had a ridiculously criminal ethnic underclass, and whose third-world immigration has consisted mostly of comparatively well-behaved Latinos, less so.
Never forget that white flight to the suburbs was the result of desegregation of the native black underclass, not Hispanic immigration from Latin America. If anything, Latinos help keep blacks in check, because we do not have an ounce of white guilt (see George Zimmerman).
I live in Miami, and I still remember how surreal it was when blacks attacked the Bayside Marketplace during the George Floyd riots. Some of my earliest memories of America are of shopping there with my father and sister.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
At this point in my life, rational fiction and hard science fiction are pretty much the only things that do it for me. Basically everything Eliezer covers in his Abridged Guide to Intelligent Characters as well as his laws of fanfiction and philosophy of fanfiction. On that note, I strongly prefer fanfiction over original fiction, because it means I don't have to waste time learning the characters.
Things I particularly enjoy: Brain uploads, post-apocalyptic scenarios, tech uplift. Things I don't usually enjoy: LitRPG, polyamory, metafiction.
The optimal starter is Bulbasaur because he counters the first two gym leaders (Brock and Misty). I think the models are smart enough to know that.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
erwgv3g34
1d ago
((I'd also argue that Pokemon is intended more for the 10-16 range, but the general problem remains for them, too.))
Red is 11. It makes no logical sense for a kid that age to leave home, defeat every adult he encounters, destroy a criminal organization, and become world champion. Only reason to do that is because your target audience is 11-year-olds.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
In theory, what's in it for you is that each immigrant that can support himself is producing at least as much as he takes, and therefore making you richer.
In practice, when a country gets dysfunctional enough (making it illegal to build new housing means that all productivity gains end up being stolen by landlords, lack of law and orders means the negative externalities of criminal immigrants can easily overwhelm the positive good created by law-abiding immigrants, the welfare state means that immigrants don't actually need to produce more than they take in order to support themselves, etc.) this doesn't hold.
I quit during the time compression chamber arc, when Joon learned about
Fenn's child and was nothing but enthused at the opportunity to be the dad who stepped up. Fenn was my least-preferred pairing for our hero, and this was the nail in the coffin for me. I wound up reading the last few chapters to see how it ended and had to put it down in disgust by the end.
Okay, fair.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
Given that we're not going to fix alignment in 6-12 months, China is not going to pause, and US labs are at best 6-12 months ahead, I think the safest outcome is to have an ecosystem of competing agents. The last thing I want is someone like Dario or Sam being made God-Emperor.
Nobody is going to be God-Emperor, and that stupid meme needs to die; it's arguing about which monkey gets the poisoned banana, as Eliezer put it. If AIs reach the point of recursive self-improvement leading to artificial superintelligence, we all dead; period.
Look at the weird, alien civilizations that AIs are forming. Can you imagine them caring about humans as their power grows without bounds? I can't. We'll be swept aside by them boiling the oceans to cool servers and building Dyson spheres out of Earth matter with no more thought than we give to paving an anthill to build a road.
I'm going to travel back to South America soon because I want to see my extended family before the world ends.
Luthor's characterization here was excellent, and Superman's good, but my only concern with the story is that I think Lois feels like more of a stretch vs her canon characterizations.
The thing I remember most about Lois in the fic is that her thottery pisses off Superman, which is sadly in-character.
Well, what part of planecrash would you cut, exactly? The decision theory lectures? The polyamorous BDSM orgies? Those are not filler; they are the core of the story!
erwgv3g34
5d ago
Limited series like Shogun and North and South are almost always better than regular TV shows which have 22 episodes per season and an explicit goal of staying on the air as long as possible.
Something interesting happened to anime. In the 1990s, most animes were double cours, 24-26 episodes. These days the standard is a single cour, 12-13 episodes, then maybe a second cour a few years later if your are lucky. On the one hand, this means a lot of stories are never fully adapted and the anime ends up being an advertisement for the manga or light novels. On the other hand, when an anime does manage to adapt a whole story into a single cour, the results are great; all the filler is stripped away and the story consists of only the essentials.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
Okay, yeah, if you want brevity, then webfic is probably the wrong medium for you.
On the other hand, I feel like a lot of the complains about how long web novels are comes from a category error?
They are absurdly long compared to individual books, but they aren't unusual by the standards of sagas like Harry Potter or Narnia. Some of them are even internally divided into books (Worth the Candle, Mother of Learning, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, etc.).
But people are still treating them like someone dropped a one-million word book on their shelf, instead of a series.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
I fucking wish, but no. With the passage of the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, American copyright extends to 95 years from the date of publication. As for other public domains, the US uses trade deals to continually force countries to expand their copyright terms, such that life of the author + 70 years is now the standard.
I didn't like Mother of Learning. It's literally just Time Braid*, but worse†.
If you want the best the web novel medium has to offer, I'd recommend Worth the Candle by Alexander Wales‡.
* Zorian is Sakura, Zach is Naruto, Red Robe is Sasuke, QI is Orochiramu, they are all trapped in a one-month time loop that ends with an invasion, etc.; it's obvious once you know Domagoj Kurmaic listed Time Braid as one of his favorite stories on FanFiction.Net.
† Mother of Learning is slower, the fights are less exciting, the characters are flatter, and there is less fanservice.
‡ Unless glowfic counts, in which case I'd recommend Project Lawful by Eliezer Yudkowsky (LessWrong) and Kelsey Piper (The Unit of Caring).
erwgv3g34
5d ago
Just use dead authors. Roughly anything from 1900 to 1960 is modern enough to be readable but old enough that the writer is gone.
Godzilla Minus One was SO ridiculous. The movie sacrificed one emotional death (
I means, tons of movies have sequel hooks, but they are usually schlock; Godzilla Minus One hurts because it was so good. It's like if Titanic had ended with an elderly Rose suddenly opening her eyes, startled, then the camera zooms into her window for a menacing shot of the same iceberg that sank the ship all those years ago!
There are tons of children's movies that deal with the permanent death of a beloved character as a major part of the story: Bambi (1942), Old Yeller (1957), Charlotte's Web (1973), The Hobbit (1977), The Land Before Time (1988), The Lion King (1994), Antz (1998), The Princess and the Frog (2009), Summer Wars (2009), etc. They still have happy endings, but the fundamental message is that death is a natural part of life and we need to accept it and learn to move forward despite our losses. Why not show her one of those?
Yes, they are a little old, but that doesn't mean they are bad. The great thing about little kids is that YOU control what they watch, not them. If you think the media of your past is what made you who you are today, why not restrict her to that media? What is your daughter going to do, take out a Disney+ subscription on her credit card?
From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:
First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.
Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.
And from "Culture Is Not About Esthetics" by Gwern Branwen:
Or consider another medium: movies. Have you seen the IMDB’s Top 250 movies? There are excellent movies in there. Some are profound, others moving, and not a few profoundly moving. Why are you going to watch Transformers 2 or Ice Age 3? For entertainment value? But there are movies in that list which are far more entertaining, I assure you.
Even if you’ve seen the top 50, there’s another 200 to choose from. If you think the IMDB is too faddish and Internet-centric, there’s no shortage of other lists - the New York Times would be happy to tell you all about “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made” (6 years at 3 movies a week). And what about television? If we ask IMDB about movies by year or all the movies and TV episodes it knows about, it’s happy to tell us: 1,111,244 episodes; 263,524 movies; and 1,920,757 works in total (as of 2011-06-28). We can also look at movie production over time, where we find that as early as 1917 (109 ya) there were 5,490 movies made. (A current estimate for the EU is “1100 features and 1400 shorts per year”.) So even if we got in at the beginning, we never had a chance at watching so much as a small fraction.
Here’s a thought problem: suppose an intensive study revealed, authoritatively, that removing all subsidies and ‘intellectual property rights’ would cause movie production to fall by 95%. Would you regard that as a disaster, something to be decried and abhorred and legislated against? I suspect so. Suppose the study found that, specifically, this 95% fall was composed partially of movies never getting made, but also partially of movies getting made and then lost or never distributed or never shown at all (perhaps because in the absence of copyright, pirates would undercut them and take all profits); would this change your opinion much? Probably not for the better - if anything, it’s even more horrifying, in the same way almost winning the lottery but missing by 1 number is more saddening than missing it by 2 numbers.
But the interesting thing is that this is already happening: less than 5% of movies are available to the public[23], and only around 10% of silent films survive in any sense anywhere[24]. So that 95% fall has already happened; civilization seems to have survived[25]. (A reflection on the ‘movie canon’: if you believe the canon is aesthetically invalid and has not successfully picked out the best movies made, then that implies anywhere up to 90% of the best movies ever made are lost forever to you.)
[23] “…But tragically, some of the world’s strangest movies will never be available on DVD at all. The TCM database estimates that only 4.8% of all films ever made are currently available to the public. Though the Internet has been invaluable in finding strange and forgotten relics, some films, whether through accident, disaster or perceived disinterest, have been lost or temporarily displaced.” –io9, “Weird and Wonderful Movies That You’ll Never Get to See”
[24] “Pandora’s digital box: Pix and pixels”, quoting Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film and Television Archive.
[25] Of course, one could argue that there is something uniquely optimal and special about the current existing level of movie production, such that this invisible 95% fall is acceptable but another 95% fall would be cataclysmic. I hope the reader understands that this is a deeply untrustworthy position to take (and they should read the Bostrom link on the ‘status quo bias’) - I’d parody this argument as “oh, that 95% fall is OK because it still leaves us a number of movies which is bigger than some-number-I-made-up-just-now-based-on-the-information-you’ve-provided-me; but another 95% fall, well, that’d just be madness!”
erwgv3g34
7d ago
I mean, yes, obviously? What's next, are you going to point out that the survey is (4682+121)/(4682+121+610+21) = 88% men? Come on.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
Ravenclaw, obviously (unless muggle realism damns me to Slytherin). I suspect most of us would go there, this being a rationalist site and all.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
Watched Destination Moon (1950) by George Pal.
Astounding! I had doubts that this film could measure up to Pal's later When Worlds Collide (1951), since the stakes are much lower (winning the space race versus the end of the world), but the movie made up for it with its incredible scientific realism.
The astronauts endure take-off in acceleration couches to withstand the increased gravity during boosting, but spend most of the trip weightless, held to the surfaces of the ship by magnetic boots, then turn around and deaccelerate for the moon landing.
Reaction mass is always correctly referred to as such, not as fuel (which they presumably have a virtually unlimited supply of, this being an atomic motor). I chuckled when it was explained that the reaction mass is water, and that the rocket works by heating it up and expelling the resulting steam; in other words, it's boiling water again.
They even included the speed-of-light delay for communications with Earth! This is why it pays to hire a hard science-fiction author when you are writing your screenplay (Robert Heinlein worked on the script).
The highlight of the film for me was the Woody Woodpecker scene, "one of Hollywood's best known actors", which our heroes play during their pitch to explain the physics behind the journey. I'm a huge animation fan, and that bit was completely unexpected. Again, completely scientifically accurate.
I was amused by the fact that bureaucracy and regulation was a problem even in the 50s! "I will be [out of my mind] if we run into any more red tape. Now look... There's no law against taking off a spaceship. It's never been done, so it's not been prohibited. If we ask for permission, they'll find a way to block us. So we go now!" Of course, the problem is much worse now.
The special effects mostly hold up well, using practical tricks like dressing up a floor to look like a wall and rotating the angle to let the astronauts walk on walls with their magnetic boots. The only exception is the floating pill, which looks ridiculous; they should have just mimed it.
One of the greatest science fiction movies ever made. Highly recommended.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
OsmAnd, which uses OpenStreetMap data, is the main alternative. The free version only lets you download or update maps 7 times (you are supposed to have at least one map and update it monthly) before you have to upgrade to the paid version, but if you download F-Droid (a third-party app store for Android) then you can install the paid version for free.
When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
You don't need to make firms hire men whenever possible. You just need to stop punishing firms for not hiring women and let the market solve things. Or do you think companies want to hire people who are prone to maternity leave and sexual harassment lawsuits?
Second funniest comparison between Epstein and Clancy I have seen.
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