magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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15hr ago
This is the best review I've seen of Adolescence.
"reign in" got past The Spectator's proofreaders? I'd say they cut out the humans too soon, but I'm pretty sure even current AIs would spot that one.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
Jury nullification is one-way only. If a jury convicts and the judge thinks it's bananas, the judge can generally set it aside. But the judge can't set aside a jury acquittal because that would violate the right to trial by jury.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?
There's this point I've made before: given a constant source of dangerous people who commit loadsacrime which sometimes results in fatalities, and a lack of effective official countermeasures, the death rate is static regardless of how lethal each incident is (at least for a given ratio of deaths between perpetrator and victim; see below). This is because the dangerous people will keep committing crimes until killed by one of them going wrong, so raising the death rate per incident by a given ratio lowers the equilibrium number of these people in circulation and thus lowers the rate of incidents by the same ratio. So as a third-best solution (the first-best being removing the source of these people, in this case largely "meth", and the second-best being fixing your justice system so there are other ways of removing these people from circulation), you want to:
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make the deaths hit the perpetrators as much as possible (in particular, make sure that the most lethal easily-constructed weapons are legal, because the dangerous people will probably have them anyway but law-abiding citizens won't if they're illegal), as this lowers the death rate via lowering the number of kills each dangerous person gets before dying;
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jack up the death rate per incident as high as possible, because this won't affect the death rate per unit time but will lower the rate of incidents (and nonlethal crime still sucks).
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Burning down pharmaceuticals means that a bunch of currently-negligible bacterial infections become big threats again, and illnesses mostly-eliminated by vaccination start to come back. The worst-case scenario is probably another plague epidemic with non-modern fatality rates (there is plague in the USA; it's just very treatable with antibiotics), although modern garbage disposal might be enough to keep that at bay (pneumonic plague does spread human -> human, though).
Do not underestimate their value just because you don't have to use them all that often; IRL, maintaining a good state can be really, really cheap compared to the bad state (see: iron lung argument).
And you do still need university-equivalents to train the chemists, although this is admittedly far less urgent.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
There is, indeed, a reason I said "some of those institutions".
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Yeah, obviously Vance has read SSC and Moldbug. Are there any references that are Motte-specific, though? Or indications that any of them are active members of the Ratsphere rather than lurkers?
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
There are certain institutions which, if removed for an extended period, will result in a modern society rapidly depopulating due to the heavy optimisation required to sustain modern population densities. Military, police, public utilities, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, plus the tax collection apparatus to fund some of these, and a pipeline to train people to do these things. I'm not saying you have to preserve the specific institutions that currently do these things, but "torch them all now and then start figuring out how to replace them" won't cut it. You cannot take them all offline for months without a mountain of skulls; it'd be the Great Leap Forward all over again.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
Personally, despite differing with conservatives on many things, I espouse a lot of heterodoxy that's anathema to progressives and would happily warm my hands on the embers of the torched institutions.
I'll just point out here that if you don't want to build a mountain of skulls, some of those institutions will need a replacement at least moderately close to ready before you torch them.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Yes, I know, but that's just a "this reduces your study's power" issue; this is trivially fixable assuming you have enough funding (and you should).
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
That was narrator voice, not the Valar.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Funny enough if you look at the totality of middle earth stories even if Sauron won it wouldn’t be lights out. Morgoth won at one point and the valar intervened.
I mean, yes, but it was a Pyrrhic victory; Beleriand, where all the elven kingdoms had been, sank into the ocean permanently with the exception of Lindon. Sauron might not have won, but the Free Peoples would have lost.
Also, there's that line from the Downfall of Numenôr: "Men could not a second time be saved by any such embassy".
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
That's what he said; he was listing it as an exception.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
When you say you don't "find" this to be true, are you saying you're involved with this personally in some fashion?
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
That's not necessarily true: suppose transition, even with transition-with-extra-annoyance, always leads to strictly better outcomes. The control group will then have better outcomes if the defiant transitioners are counted than if they aren't, possibly on par with transitioners within margins of error depending on how many there are and how much the extra annoyance impacts outcomes.
By "biases in favour of transition" I mean "makes it more likely to put transition ahead". This cannot flip the study from "transition good" to "transition bad", but it can flip it from "transition bad" to "transition good".
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Oh, it's easy enough to tell if somebody's been taking hormones against your instructions. That just doesn't solve the problem.
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If you count defiant transitioners as part of your control group, it biases your study in favour of transition, because defiant transitioners amount to "transition with a bunch of extra annoyance" and as such are near-guaranteed to do worse than the transition group regardless of how good or bad transition is.
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If you kick defiant transitioners out of the control group, it biases your study against transition, because desisters will stop trying to defy you at some point, and as such success stories will make up a larger chunk of your control group than they would have if you'd successfully prevented the defiant transitioners from transitioning.
If the trans activists manage to subvert enough of your control group (which is pretty likely without the extreme measures I mentioned), these two effects will destroy the study's value; it will give the "do transitions!" answer with one set of rules and the "don't do transitions!" answer with the other. Whoops, looks like the clear liquid you poured on that fire was petrol instead of water.
Oh, and this is assuming that you picked outcome measures that don't allow for easy lying; it's not like people can't go on Twitter and yell "hey everybody, put down that you're ecstatic if you were in the transition group and suicidal if in the control group; it's for the sake of all the other transfolk". As Scott said, "sometimes people might just be actively working to corrupt your data".
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
The "there we go" is in regard to the "dozen", not the buried reviews?
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
I would have to agree with this, although some more explanation would be nice.
@Skibboleth: I don't have personal experience* (yet; I suspect this'll show up when I do my MEd) but I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down (when you aren't thrown out), which literally makes it harder to become legibly "a historian" or "an architect" as a conservative than as a progressive. If you want to see the prior ratio, you need to either enforce political neutrality in the current universities' assessments, or enforce that degrees from those universities be held to be of negligible credential value (as in, "I hired this architect because he got a Harvard degree in architecture" becomes identical in legal ramifications to "I hired this architect because he's white").
I suspect that that ratio does favour progressives, but not remotely to the current extent.
*Well, I do have personal experience that there are opportunities open to progressives and not conservatives in university, just not in the academic side - specifically, I wasn't able to become an RA in my dorm because "spread SJ propaganda" was part of the job description. Would have been nice to not have to pay rent, particularly since I was doing much of the rest of the job anyway!
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Has the buried systemic review from your second link been unearthed?
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Honestly, this is one of the situations where I say "fuck it"; the amount of trans surgeries from doing the RCT, assuming it finds that they're bad, will be lower than the amount from not doing it (in contrast to the usual case), so I'm not seeing the "do no harm" issue.
The bigger issue is that trans activists will attempt to defy you and transition the control group anyway. I don't see a way to get around that that isn't either "deploy the counterterrorism apparatus in full to prevent such attempts" or "ban transition as a whole in order to saturate the trans movement's covert-ops resources and draw them away from the trial". These are both pretty drastic actions, with significant PR costs even if you personally aren't bothered by using that level of force.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Who is "you"?
SJ is very trigger-happy and has weak leadership; there is for the most part no "you" that actually has the security in power to take the locally-disincentivised action and actually make the mob follow along (rather than simply being replaced).
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
I can only imagine how much more fucked up prohibition would have been if the prohibition side began mass importing Muslims who don't drink, and the anti-prohibition side scoured the globe for alcoholics. And it's hard to imagine either approach making America better off long term, even if the short term culture war issue gets "settled".
You don't need to imagine. I can identify one very obvious example of this in US history i.e. Bleeding Kansas.
magic9mushroom
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8d ago
I was already breaking it down into smaller problems; the part I was missing was memoisation to let me do all of those smaller problems only once instead of >9000 times. The algorithm we built would still run in exponential time if I took out the "@cache" on the key function, and if you'd told me memoisation was a thing I'd have probably managed it from there. Necessary and sufficient.
Also, uh, in case you weren't aware, I am Australian, so yes, I do use Commonwealth spelling.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Update on this:
@lagrangian and I discussed this over PM, and he introduced me to the wonderful concept of memoisation, which took the difficulty from exponential to quadratic. So, stuff that would have taken weeks (or millennia) now takes minutes, and I turned this into this in a couple of weeks (most of that being me moving data around and doing formatting).
I will say, making it a classmate and not a teacher or politician getting murdered was a clever move. Either of the latter two would risk a Torment Nexus/"this, but unironically" response.
(Disclaimer: I happen to agree with the opinion I'm imputing to the writers - that students murdering teachers and politicians en-masse would, in fact, be bad.)
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