faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
My life is interesting, but not so much that I'd be part of the initial cadre in-the-know if the numbers of adolescents were still so low.
Depending on what particular social circles you ran in in 2008, it is entirely possible that your life is sufficiently interesting for you to be in the top 0.1% of people in terms of likelihood to run into this in your social circles (e.g. if you lived in a coastal state and knew this person from a state-level robotics or performing arts event).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
According to stats I’ve found, something like 1390 adolescents went on puberty blockers in the US in 2021, out of a population of about 42 million total teenagers. 282 teenagers got a mastectomy. In comparison, 2,590 kids died from a gunshot in that same year.
Do you happen to also have stats on HRT? My impression is that that's more common than either puberty blockers or surgery, but I have no particular knowledge of whether "more common" is "2x" or "200x".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
My answer would be something along the lines of "keep civilian casualties low enough that France does not regret choosing to ally with you" (or slightly more precisely, "don't have policies that impose costs on your allies that are high enough that they would not have allied with you if they knew what your policy was").
I don't have a solid answer for what that number would be, that would depend on the scope of the operation and the expected costs and benefits of doing that operation over the expected costs and benefits of doing the next-best thing. But I would imagine that number is pretty high.
Grammar transmits information, but that information frequently (not always, but frequently) serves as an error-correcting code rather than a channel for additional information. Consider the following:
- I bought some apples from Jenny, but they were rotten
- They some from Jenny apples bought I rotten but were
- Me buy some apple from Jenny, but them is rot
Even with pretty extreme destruction of information in the original sentence (e.g. randomly shuffling word order, or ignoring most grammatical rules while maintaining word order), you can still puzzle out what the sentence means. Minor errors on the level of using "then" instead of "than" every few sentences should have a pretty minimal effect on the reader's ability to determine what the author was trying to say.
I have an alternative hypothesis for why grammatical errors are aversive: flawless grammar demonstrates that either the author was smart and diligent enough to write the document correctly on the first try, or someone cared enough to edit the document. Either way, it serves as a costly signal of quality. Grammatical flaws demonstrate a conspicuous lack of that costly signal, and so readers develop a flinch response of "why am I even reading this, this is probably low value" whenever they hit a grammatical flaw.
Edit: Grugg had too much passion, use too many big word. Grug mean to say this. People tell Grugg "wrong words make hard understand". Grugg not believe people. Grugg think people see correlation, say causation.
Also you say is no prescriptivist linguist. Grugg agree now, but Grugg say that because prescriptivist tribe fight war but lose. Grugg point at Strunk and White.
Grugg only make some linguist cry, not all linguist. Grugg say language like river. When river flows, take shape of land it flows through, change shape of land in turn. Prescriptivist tribe try to write shape of river on stone tablet, but tablet stay same even when land change and river change. Grugg think prescriptivist cry because know in heart of heart he try to do thing no can be done.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Grugg admit, Grugg concise to point of parody, parody obscure point Grugg try to make. Grugg try again in normal English.
When you say it takes more time to read something concise but flawed than something wordy but grammatically correct, are you counting that time per word, or per idea successfully communicated, or by some other metric? There is a pattern of people writing thousands of words to communicate something that could have been expressed equally well in dozens of words. This pattern has been noted many times in the past (e.g. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."), but is particularly pronounced here on the Motte. Even if you have to spend 3 times as long per word to parse something with grammatical issues, you still may end up spending less time than you would have spent reading something that is grammatically flawless but ten times longer than it needs to be.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Possible. My guess would be that if you took each user's comments over the past year, you would see minimal change in the decouplishness of that user's comments over the year, but if you looked at comment volume by decouplishness the fraction of comments by low-decouplers has increased substantially over that same year. Though I have not actually run such an analysis -- if anyone does, I'd be super interested in the results.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Valid. Still, most communication is not on the Pareto frontier of efficiency and precision. In my experience, grammatical issues are a thing that causes communication to move away from that frontier, but not the main thing (or even that substantial compared to muddled thinking on both ends of the communication, or anti-inductive dynamics).
Or as Grugg might say, "Few word move idea only ok, but many word for sake of many word still move idea only ok. Many word done badly, less ok than few word".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Grugg ask, read few wrong word take more time per idea, or per word? Grugg say look at Motte before answer.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Use words is for take my idea, put in your head. If idea in your head, success. Why use many "proper" word when few "wrong" word do trick?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
It is farcial to expect that all taboos are philosophically well-grounded, so if your morality is based on your instincts and the norms of the society you live in, the high decouplers are missing the point. And that does look like "something has gone wrong with the intellectuals, they're condemning normal people while allowing taboo things" from the perspective of the low-decouplers.
I do think self_made_human is correct that the ratio of low to high decouplers here has increased recently.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
An economic zone that cannot or will not pay its soldiers sufficiently well that they are willing to fight because the pay is worth it considering the risk does not deserve the name of "economic zone". It's legitimate for economic zones to exist, and there are benefits of being an economic zone rather than a nation, but if a geopolitical body goes that route they should not expect to reap the benefits of being an economic zone while getting culturally-unified-nation levels of devotion in their armed forces.
Thanks for the detailed response. And yeah I could see blowing through $500 / person / day on activities if you like scuba diving or anything involving flight. Still, even $500 / person / day for a family of 4 is only $28k over a 2 week period. So I think the question stands: what does Soneva Fushi (best price I can find is $2700 / night for a basic room) have that makes it better than e.g. Kihaa Maldives (a different 5 star resort in the maldives where even an instagrammable overwater bungalow with its own private infinity pool runs $500 / night, and a more normal room runs $275/night which includes breakfast and dinner).
Like don't get me wrong, Soneva Fushi looks nice but as far as I can tell it doesn't actually look substantially nicer than other nearby options.
I've never actually stayed at a $1000+ / night hotel - there has to be something better, or people wouldn't pay the extra amount. Unless it's just one of those things where once you're pulling in mid 7 figures a year you don't really care if you're spending $20k or $200k during your two week vacation because you run out of free time for vacations faster than you run out of discretionary money, so it's worth spending 10x as much for a 10% better experience.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Thanks, that's pretty helpful, and much more concrete than my vague "I suspect this isn't entirely healthy but I can't currwntly back that suspicion up with rigorous evidence".
So yeah, the birth control : sterilization :: puberty blockers : hormone replacement therapy analogy does not hold very well.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Tuskagee was a spit in the bucket compared to what's happening, not to mention George Floyd, or MeToo. If you can link to making that s sort of argument about these cases, I'll believe that you actually made this argument in good faith.
Huh, apparently reddit is more of a tire fire than I thought, because I definitely made the "what exactly do you hope to accomplish, how does what's currently going on accomplish that, and are there any downsides to normalizing looting unrelated businesses and homes in response to injustice" point during the 2020 riots. But apparently it's been memory-holed. IIRC it was my second most downvoted comment ever.
I've got quite a lot of "measures to contain covid have costs as well as benefits, and I've seen no evidence that the benefits exceed the costs and quite a bit of evidence of the reverse" of you're interested in that.
Honestly though, you will probably not have much success modeling me as "on your side" or "against your side" - I would like to grill, and I object to moral busibodies who get between me and my grill with their schemes to make society better. And I especially object when those schemes aim to solve tiny problems that affect a few thousand people in a country of hundreds of millions, or when those schemes obviously won't help with the problem they're supposedly trying to solve, or when the cure is clearly worse than the disease.
The patients in question are minors, respectfully, they don't know what the hell they want.
And then when they turn 18 they become legal adults, famous for making good decisions that align with their long-term interests.
Some guardians approve it, but many have their arm twisted into it by dishonest statistics about risk of suicide. Doctors also mostly wash their hands of the responsibility...
Yeah this is pretty terrible, and the "the statistics on how things actually tend to go in practice are shit to begin with and then further obscured by biased parties on all sides" bit means that it's very hard to make a well-informed decision here. Such is life in an environment of imperfect and sometimes hostile information, but it still sucks.
Why is it beyond the pale to regulate an industry that functions this way?
I don't think it's beyond the pale, I just expect that the costs of regulation here, as it is likely to be implemented in practice, exceed the benefits. I don't actually think it's a good thing that a bunch of teenagers feel like they're trapped in the wrong body and that their best shot at happiness is major medical interventions, I just expect that any attempts by our current regulatory apparatus to curb the problem will cause horrible "unanticipated" problems.
If you have some statistics that show that, actually, regulation here is likely to prevent X0,000 unnecessary surgeries per year, which in turn will prevent Y,000 specific negative aftereffects, I might change my mind on that. But my impression as of now is that this is a small enough problem, and regulation a large and inexact enough hammer, that it's not worth it.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Elective sterilization.
Fair point. I note that birth control is allowed for minors, and has the same effect while taken as the permanent intervention has permanently. If there were something equivalent for transitioning, I would support allowing only that equivalent prior to the age of majority (if it were actually equivalent, and assuming that the way that regulation was implemented was sane and not batshit-crazy-like-the-rest-of-the-US-medical-system). I think puberty blockers are supposedly this -- I have my uninformed doubts as to their safety/efficacy but I have not actually done any research on this.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
What's wrong with "ban until they're 18"?
The canonical answer is "it works worse with age". I don't know how accurate that is, though it certainly seems plausible to me that delays will result in worse patient outcomes among those who do transition.
What precedent is it setting?
I'm not aware of any medical interventions that are banned even when the patient wants them, and their guardian approves it, and a doctor recommends it, but which are allowed once the patient reaches the age of majority.
It's not like we're living in an ancap utopia, the establishment even cracked down on the use of prescribed ivermectin.
Yes, and that was bad. I would prefer fewer things like that, not more things like that.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors
If you think that minors are basically small people, and that people should largely be allowed to do things that they personally expect will make them fulfilled, it's pretty easy to keep a neutral view. Something like "I have no desire to do this to myself, but neither to I have a moral claim to prevent them from doing it to themselves". To be honest, this is pretty much where I fall on the issue. I am somewhat uncomfortable with the speed with which this went from rare to common, as it leaves people without solid information on how well it's likely to go in the marginal case rather than the average-as-of-decades ago. Still, I can't think of any interventions where the benefit of that intervention is worth the costs and the precedents it sets.
How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
Empirically, people do not learn from history, only from things that they personally have seen, and so every group in every generation has to learn that lesson for themselves.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Your scores:
Care 58%
Loyalty 47%
Fairness 64%
Authority 47%
Purity 25%
Liberty 64%You have no one strongest moral foundation.
Your morality is closest to that of a Libertarian.
Answered the questions mostly based on vibes, especially when they were ambiguous.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
You can spend $100k on a nice 2 week vacation now
How?? Or rather, what do you get out of a $100k 2 week vacation that you wouldn't get out of a $7k 2 week vacation (which still gives you $500 / day to play with, which in my experience is the level where I run out of waking hours to experience things faster than I run out of money with which to pay for those experiences). The only people I know who blow through high-5-figure amounts on a short vacation are people with major gambling problems.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room
New startup idea: uber for staying in hotel rooms, where hotels pay background-checked people to stay in hotel rooms to prevent them from being vacant.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
Your reply makes me really want to know what OP said.
But (I think) there's no adblock in the world that could get past slatestarcodex's jpegs on the side of the page, which are fixed and just there like another part of the content.
With multimodal LLMs it should be possible to detect advertisements based on their content rather than their location on the page, even in cases where the advertisement is an image.
I'm thinking of a system along the lines of the one described here, but for blocking ads rather than distractions.
Of course, one issue with thesystem I'm envisioning is that, to quote the linked page, "this might be a problem for pages with sensitive content."
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1yr ago
54/57/30/5/95.
5th percentile conscientiousness sounds about right.
Chuck Bednarik was number 60 for the Philadelphia Eagles, who won the super bowl in 1960. By convention, that means that the decade beginning in 1960 belongs to him, and is thus 60's.
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