mdurak
1mo ago
Democracy in America is already dead and dying then, because it seems to me there’s simply no practical way to convince one side of losers because they’ll nitpick any evidence to the contrary to death. Maybe this is to be expected, as a symptom of the larger decline of democracy across the world in recent years.
mdurak
1mo ago
For an example of such views online
Sure, those views are there. But where’s the actual proof from unbiased third party sources? Last time I participated in such a discussion on TheMotte, the answer was that it does not and cannot exist because there are no unbiased sources, which I suppose is a valid viewpoint to hold, but means that any further discussion is moot.
mdurak
1mo ago
So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says?
Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.
I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.
Ditto. At least we can agree on that.
mdurak
1mo ago
That does not imply a peer review process that can’t outperform laymen, because laypeople are only acting on the outputs of the peer review process. Moreover, a prediction performance of 67% may be much higher than chance, but there’s clearly a lot of signal still that laypeople cannot discern. You’d expect something different if they’re not trying at all.
mdurak
1mo ago
I haven’t read up on this case as much, but if it’s anything like the employment stats revision, are you implying that official stats shouldn’t be revised in the face of new information?
mdurak
1mo ago
He says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they hsve basically no basis to reality. The numbers they report just reflect the process of the people creating them, which is bureaucratic and dull.
Isn’t boring and dull bureaucratic number crunching the opposite of “made up”? I wouldn’t want these numbers influenced by someone putting their finger on the scale because they know better than the data. I’m sure it happens anyways, but I don’t see how your argument justifies what you’re claiming.
mdurak
1mo ago
Right, but that doesn’t mean the pollsters aren’t trying to correct for it all the same.
mdurak
1mo ago
According to some polling at least, Israel/Palestine ranks rather low on voter priorities: https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/eba2f5ad-57c0-4c7b-b546-296a1e273e06_1456x1241.png
If the point was just to see who might win, why publish the results?
Depending on the motivations of the pollster, I can imagine various reasons why they’d publicize accurate results (eg to advertise their polling outfit in case you want to hire them to poll on other issues of note). But I haven’t actually been able to find much about how public polls are funded and why. You?
mdurak
1mo ago
How do you explain the pollster debate over polling methodologies if they’re not trying to correct for biases? Perhaps sometimes the biases are hard to correct for https://archive.is/6tjvT
mdurak
1mo ago
How did CU allow for increased federal spending on elections? I thought it only barred the government from restricting private organizations from exercising free speech.
mdurak
1mo ago
This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
What do you mean by this? What camels did it swallow?
mdurak
1mo ago
You make it sound as if pollster bias is just a simple matter of them deciding not to correct for them, rather than them trying repeatedly to correct for it but reality being surprising in various ways.
mdurak
1mo ago
Why do we need more people? We’re probably already beyond carrying capacity as it is.
mdurak
1mo ago
We put a whole generation of women on pills that accidentally change that characteristics of which men they're attracted to.
Haven’t heard of this one. What pill was it, and what men did those women get attracted to instead?
The first day of the monsoon, petting a puppy, making faces at a toddler
And what if a post-human species is just as capable of experiencing such emotions? Would you still privilege humans? (As a hypothetical, since you don’t believe non-humans to be capable of such emotions.)
mdurak
1mo ago
Do you really want people who don’t care about the future of humanity (as you claim) reproducing and passing their values on to the next generation?
mdurak
1mo ago
Good points. So why are the eco extremists risking jail time for mere clownery rather than bona fide terrorism on the level of the Houthis?
mdurak
1mo ago
The fact that there is a strong taboo against nuclear weapons today is for the most part the result of a deliberate conspiracy of scientists to make nuclear weapons special
From my reading of Nina Tannenwald’s The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, it appears that while the scientists were generally opposed to widespread use of nukes, and while they did play a large part in raising public consciousness around the dangerous health effects of radiation, they ultimately had minimal influence on the development of the international nuclear taboo compared to domestic policy makers, Soviet propaganda efforts, and third world politics.
I see a lot of doomer advocacy as an attempt to manifest AI's own Operation Candor.
According to that book at least, far from trying to stigmatize nukes, the Eisenhower administration was very much trying to counter their stigmatization and present them as just another part of conventional warfare, due to the huge cost savings involved. Seen in this light, Operation Candor was more of a public relations campaign around justifying the administration’s spending on nukes rather than a way to stop nuclear proliferation.
So if history is any indication, the scientists can make all the noise they want, but it’s not going to matter unless it aligns with the self-interests of major institutional stakeholders.
mdurak
1mo ago
I’m coming to this discussion late, but this assumes that discarding bourgeois morality will be better at achieving your goals, when we see from BLM and Extinction Rebellion that domestic terrorism can have its own counterproductive backlash. How do we know they aren’t entirely willing to give up bourgeois morality, they just don’t see it as conducive to their cause?
mdurak
1mo ago
Then aren’t we all going to simply choose to believe what we’re going to believe?
mdurak
1mo ago
Ah, given your repeated emphasis on how democrats need to apologize, I interpreted you as meaning they stole that one too
mdurak
1mo ago
I see. Thank you for the informative discussion! I have much to research now
mdurak
2mo ago
You mean this case where the investigation found no wrongdoing? Or do you think the FBI are in on it too?
That’s not evidence of fraud happening. It could well be evidence that Florida cleaned up their act enough that irregularities from regular organizational incompetence no longer occur. But I suppose that depends a lot on your priors here.
That being said, I do strongly agree with enforcing electoral security the way that you say Florida has done. If the main point was a pre-emptive “Improve election security or else we’re not going to trust the results of this next election,” I would be on board with that. But instead, it sounds a lot more like a post-hoc “Nuh uh, we didn’t lose even though we have no hard evidence!”
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