octopus_eats_platypus
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User ID: 334
octopus_eats_platypus
1mo ago
Absurd. Insane. Spectacular.
I didn't expect them to catch the booster at all on this attempt, but I'm so glad to be wrong.
octopus_eats_platypus
1mo ago
I appreciate you writing this. My grandfather is rotting away due to Alzheimers - the last time I saw him was three years ago, after which his health rarely allowed visitors and flying down to see him was nearly impossible plan due to personal health issues. When I was a little boy, he was the strongest man I knew. I love my grandmother as well, but going down to see him was a special joy.
I never knew my father, but my grandfather would toss me up in his arms and get me to feel his sweat 'any sweat?' and then whiskers 'any whiskers?'. He'd always be in from a hard day's work (after retiring he renovated houses and repaired cars until his health no longer allowed it, after which he went from a joyful strong man to perpetually grouchy and frustrated) and there'd always be sweat on his brow. Whiskers sometimes. He'd laugh and he'd put me down and make me lemon cordial with milk, a combination I've never seen anyone else like. You had to drink it quick to stop it curdling, and I'd always have my own milk whiskers afterwards.
All throughout my life he was taciturn and showed his love physically or by building or fixing something. He fixed cars of mine a few times when I couldn't afford a mechanic, and loaned me his ute when my car broke down and I couldn't afford a new one for some months. But he had a biting sense of wit as well, and loved to tease. I once found a giant novelty wooden spoon at a car boot sale, and painstakingly carved the words 'biggest shit-stirrer' into it for a Christmas present. He laughed at the time - but later I found out he hated it and felt put on the spot, only keeping it because he appreciated a gift from his grandson more than his own pride.
Now the only thing he can remember about me is that I owe him fifty dollars. It makes him apoplectic with rage that I haven't paid him back for the money, and if I were to go visit him in hospice all I could bring what remains of him is grief and rage. I'm his favorite grandson (I was given his name which I think gave me an unfair head start) and now all I do is ring my grandmother once a week and hear about how he's degrading, how another little piece of him is being taken away. How his legs and fingers are rotting and he only recognises my grandmother sometimes.
Nobody in my family has ever died since I was four years old and too young to remember it, but every time I think of him I hope it comes soon.
I tried to sit down with him and record something when I last saw him, but he hated the notion of his life being recorded, as his own father was an undisputed monster and I think he wants the man to go unlamented and unremembered. I thought foolishly I had time to convince him, time to sit down and talk and record and write so I'd get some record of his life and the man he was.
I didn't, and there's not enough of him left to piece it together.
Thank you for writing this. I'm going to find a time later this year, take a week off work, sit down with my grandmother and record whatever she'll give me.
octopus_eats_platypus
4mo ago
Autism is ~4x more prevalent in boys than in girls. This is true for a lot of genetic diseases due to the relative size of the X chromosome meaning girls can have one copy of a allele that causes issues and have it 'error-checked' so to speak by the other.
octopus_eats_platypus
4mo ago
I appreciate this greatly - I'm going off to do some more reading and we're going through the SRS together to try and figure out where we might sit and what that heritability might look like. Given the chances at play, $20-30k for a few rounds of IVF for gender selection doesn't seem very unreasonable at all, but I'll start drilling down into the numbers a little more.
As an aside - ultimately my concerns are more about nonverbal children requiring constant care. We make the sort of money that a child being mostly homebound or unable to work but mostly functional is within the risk we're willing to take, but we won't make that kind of money if we're suddenly in full-time caring roles.
octopus_eats_platypus
4mo ago
My wife and I are looking to start having children shortly. As you might imagine being dual-income professionals, we left it to somewhat later in life (32 for me, 30 for her). I was diagnosed as a child with Asperger's Syndrome (now high-functioning or Level 3 autism, I believe), and her brother is severely disabled with low-functioning autism (she also has a lot of the classical traits, but was never diagnosed).
I've been scouring the internet for the last few hours but haven't found anything useful in terms of research - is there anything out there talking about the chance of having low-functioning autistic kids if you're high-functioning yourself?
We're tossing up going down the IVF route, maybe taking a trip to Greece and getting female embryos implanted to avoid the worse outcome, but it's difficult to make that call without knowing the odds.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
This is a category where the conventional wisdom fits really well in that opposite spending styles cause a lot of marriage woes.
My experience with this across quite a few friends and their partners is that with this sort of coupling is that it invariably ends in one of roughly three (I'll outline four but two are variations on a theme) stable ways.
The first is the end of the relationship - there's not too much to be said here. I don't think this is a huge risk for you personally, as this is a more lower-income sort of end. If she's not outspending your actual income then the chances are much-reduced.
The second is that she gets what she wants, which is license to spend what she wants. For some spenders this has an inherent limit and will be satisfied, at which point this largely resolves itself. If her spending is more social - lunch with the girls, keeping with fashions with her friends, etc, etc, this isn't too uncommon. Lots of people feel the urge to spend more to keep up with the Joneses, but many simply want to keep up and don't feel the need to spend incessantly. Lunch, dinners, hairdos, makeup - a lot of women just need these things covered for social reasons which to me is very fair. If she has a compulsion to spend her money no matter how much she has... well, GOTO 1 or 4.
The next two are very similar and differ mainly by degrees but because they play out so differently psychologically I've listed them separately.
The third is when you have auto-payments deducted out of your accounts into non-spending accounts that are hard to access. Savings accounts with no cards attached, 401ks, etc. These automatic debits come out on payday. Once that's done, what remains is spending money. Usually this means the two of you separate out, say, grocery money (a buddy of mine used store gift cards to manage his grocery budget with his girlfriend which meant any further spending had to happen from her spending money) and such, and potentially have a third account for other automated spending like bills and such. In short, making as much of the process as automatic as possible so any spending blowouts are constrained.
The fourth is very similar - money goes into a central bank account under the control of the 'saver' spouse and the 'spender' is given their allowance automatically once a month/fortnight/week. They can still log into it and transfer money, but there's an understanding nobody is going to do that. This is more extreme than 3 and is more when someone has a spending problem, can't control it and needs just to have a card with limits. I have seen this work well with my grandparents - my grandfather always spent money like it was going out of style so my grandmother would always give him a cash allowance for the week to spend and managed the household herself with the rest.
The theoretical fifth is that she just starts budgeting well by herself, falls in line with your spending philosophy and all is well. I have never seen this happen but have included for completeness' sake.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Aggravated burglary specifically was something like 40 times in 2017, though this admittedly had a lot to do with a small population and a gang going hard on organised crime, meaning it's very easy to get outsized figures in a way that doesn't represent a necessarily 'real' base rate. The ~7 times figure below is more accurate overall, though making allowances for a much younger population I'd say the real base rate is intuitively somewhere in the 4-5 times more likely zone.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Their training reward functions were utilitarian, maybe, but it would be pretty easy to create reward functions that align more with virtue ethics.
I am absolutely keen to hear more about this, because everything I know tells me this is a close-to-impossible problem. The notion of 'pretty easy' seems intuitively wrong to me, but if you have any reading to offer on the subject I'd love to go through it.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I don't quite understand how we'd even begin to program a deontological or virtue ethicist AI. We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'. Whatever the flaws or virtues of utilitarianism, it does have the singular advantage of being computable. Compare to a virtue ethicist AI - how on earth do we begin building such a thing?
Even if it would be better, it seems like we're much closer to getting 'AI with a function it seeks to maximise' than we are getting 'AI who desires to fulfill virtues such as honour and charity'.
I agree that having an AI that believed in being virtuous according to human standards would be far, far better than one with a complicated mathematical function we try and map onto human utility and hope it doesn't kill us, but I've seen no reason to think the first is even possible.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
But that hasn't been my experience. The contentious trivial topics I've tried to talk about gather a lot of feedback, they are not ignored at all: they are lambasted.
Out of curiosity, what are your explanations (I presume you've thought about more than one) for the reception you tend to get in your posts?
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
If someone wanted to discuss the inns and outs of basic high-school algebra here I imagine they wouldn't get a great deal of buy-in. There are certain topics (usually around formal logic, math and computer science) that the Motte is drastically overrepresented in demographically. You can probably discuss a lot of very low-level things on a number of different issues that aren't well-known and get more interest.
Essentially quality posts on non-contentious trivial topics are going to be ignored by the community, the same posts on contentious trivial ones (trivial in the sense the majority of people believe they have an answer, largely culture war issues) will be feted, and quality posts on non-contentious topics that the community doesn't understand but has explained to them will likely be considered a standard for a quality contribution.
The world's best explanation on logical equivalencies and truth tables would be almost entirely ignored here, for example. It's a useful topic to understand but the number of people here who don't grok basic formal logic is probably very small.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Please take five minutes out of your day and google "Duane Gish".
I wrote one paragraph, I genuinely didn't think reading the entire thing was that big an ask, especially in this community.
To be more succinct: Gish gallop bad, should be unconvincing. Central question powerful and important - but not answered! Why mottizens fall for gallop but ignore important central question in argument between two people? Not good!
Alternatively: Meta-argument commentary on argument is in fact a valid part of the community, as evidenced by what you are literally doing right now. This tiresome sort of hypocrisy really deserves 'no one cares about your opinion, bring arguments' as a snide response but instead I think I made my point fairly succinctly and reasonably to begin with in the context of the original argument.
Unless your argument is 'community norms are not worth consideration to begin with', talking about them has as much value as our recent debate on the Holocaust.
Moreover, I'm not just talking about skepticism or opinions, I'm talking about voting habits. The 'this is a big wall of text, reflective upvote' culture doesn't necessarily cause all the cream to reach the top to be skimmed off. It makes me wonder to what degree mottizens see argument as won by walls of text over actual correctness, for instance.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I think you're being somewhat deceitful, I'm sorry. It's quite clear the revisionist poster is arguing their case more successfully because of Motte norms, not because of some inherent virtue in their argument. The line in question was asked several times and notably never answered, and yes, the other side eventually acted offended and signalled disbelief - this is the point of a Gish Gallop, to induce a failure state on the other side. The goal is never to prove anything, merely to clog the argument with so many extraneous facts (or simply introducing doubt into facts somewhat removed from the central point) that they cannot be all effectively refuted, leaving you the 'winner' in the debate.
If the original poster asking the question ended up being downvoted, why do you think I would fare any better?
The voting on the Holocaust threads has me substantially downgrade my opinion of the voting habits of the average mottizen, I have to say. The bizarre nitpicking arguments followed by the complete failure to answer the simple question of 'well, where did all the Jews go?' makes me suspect our 'simply upvote long tracts of text' culture would see us upvote creationism in fairly short order if faced down by Duane Gish.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
There wasn't an all volunteer army on any side of WW1
Notably, this is not true for the Australian Imperial Force, which was entirely volunteer - the split over conscription (a referendum which narrowly failed) ended up splitting the Australian Labor Party and ultimately shaped the modern Liberal and Labor Parties.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Entertainingly I did the opposite. Got 10/20, 7 out of the first 10 correct and then 3 out of the last 10.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
14/20 the first time and 10/20 the second
It really does look like random chance.
Also because I'm Australian, anyone wearing green immediately strikes me as, well, a Green.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
14/20. Mildly better than chance, went solely off intuition and zero thought. Literally 'left or right? click!'.
I think I would've done worse if I'd thought about it.
Your assertion that Ligma Johnson was a genius 5D chess maneuver designed to undermine the authority of modern journalism as opposed to, y'know, a joke isn't compelling so much as it stretches the principle of charity to believe you believe it.
Your patterns aren't just non-obvious, they're non-existent and clearly contrived - badly contrived to support a single political side. You have a pattern of posting half-developed essays that meander for a long time and take a sharp left turn at the end into a conclusion completely unsupported by the argument.
Your thesis is "rationalists are too easily duped". Your supporting points are a hypothetical thought experiment from Nassim Taleb, a tweet including the eggplant emoji from Elon Musk and Krugman taking a Scott Adams tweet seriously to make his own point (this isn't duping and I have no idea why you think it is).
Notably, none of these events even involve scams, let alone rationalists. They involve 'deception' in the sense that Krugman doesn't really care if Adams votes for Trump or not, he was using Adams' tweet to make his own point. If you say 'I am a communist and I want higher taxes' in a discussion and I use that as a springboard to argue against higher taxes, you haven't fooled me if you're really a fascist and are just pretending to be a communist. I've said the piece I wanted to say, why do I care that you lied?
As for the end of your essay if you're genuinely in possession of a secret 'black pill' of deception and persuasion, why are you personally not convincing?
The answer lies in some fairly traditional elements. Pathos, ethos, and logos.
There's not much pathos to speak of here, so I won't.
Ethos matters. If your essay is 'wow, look at all these points from people who also hate the woke like I do', you lose a substantial amount of ethos from the get go. You've clearly picked a side and have an investment in it winning, or at least looking good. You seem untrustworthy - why would I believe you're genuine and honest about arguing this? This doesn't sink your essay, but it intrinsically loses you the trust you might need to stretch an argument further than it might ordinarily go.
Logos.
I maintain than in our modern era rationalists are not nearly as skeptical as they should be. Even people who call themselves skeptics lack skepticism.
Why are none of your examples about real skeptics or rationalists failing to be skeptical? This is a complete failure of logos. You should bring a series of logical reasons I would believe in your stated argument, but you don't. You bring weirdly irrelevant culture-war bits - which ties back into ethos again. If your supporting evidence is both irrelevant and biased, your failure in logos simply increases the failure in ethos.
Hopefully that clarifies things.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
This feels all over the place. Your title doesn't seem to be related with most of what you wrote, and your conclusion comes out of left field 'here's a bunch of examples about some jokes, this is why rationalists get scammed' seems more like nonsense than a coherent argument.
You also pattern-match badly here - Trump, Adams, Taleb and Musk are the kind of examples that intimate you aren't seriously thinking about this but simply want to dunk on the opposition.
Maybe take this one back to the writing board, and look for more salient examples that support the point you're trying to make.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
You wrote all of this on an election thread to say someone else is wrong?
This is a discussion forum. Writing something large and detailed to disagree with someone else is our bread and butter.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Out of curiosity, do you mean sparse urbanization in that our cities are low-density, or sparse urbanization in that we have a large rural population? The former is true, but the latter definitely isn't
I was thinking about edutainment from when I was a kid. We had Treasure Mountain to help learn words, JumpStart for a whole bunch of interesting stuff each year, and so on. From age 5-12 it felt like there was a massive array of edutainment products, which disappeared as I hit high school. I remember trying to convince my teacher at age 9 that Escape Velocity was educational as it taught you to buy low and sell high.
So as a teenager, nothing. Makes sense - teenagers are less pliable and enjoy this stuff less and want to go off and do their own thing.
But I am genuinely surprised edutainment never really took off, or doesn't seem to have surpassed its 90s-early 00s peak. I would've assumed there was a lot of demand for this sort of product for adults, but instead we just reverted to video games sans education.
Am I wrong about this? Are there a bunch of super popular products I'm just not aware of? Or if not, why did it never take off? Entertaining yourself while learning is a big market, but maybe it's not entertaining enough so unless you're choosing it for someone else (like a child) you don't? I'm not sure, but feel free to chime in with thoughts or the like.
Being taller is one of those things I'd basically take 100% of the time up to probably 6'4-5 or so. It's not a cure-all, but it's like being richer in the sense that it's virtually all upside. That's not to say you can't or don't have other downsides that vastly outweigh it; I wouldn't take being incredibly rich if I were also a paraplegic. Nor would I be made incredibly handsome if I gained agoraphobia as a result.
But if I could get a height boost, a handsomeness boost, or a big pile of money for free I'd take it without reservation.
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