roystgnr
1d ago
Thanks! If you haven't already read Flatland, you might enjoy it. It lacks some of the mathematical sophistication (when it was written, general curved manifolds were still a cutting-edge idea) and brevity (though it is only 100 pages, and a fast read) of my ripoff here, but it does retain some attributes I had to drop like "social satire" and "literary quality".
roystgnr
2d ago
I don't think I understood any of this.
My apologies. I'll back up, if you're still curious.
Think of the function sin(x).
We can take a number, like x=π/3, and plug it into the function, and we get another number, in this case sin(π/3)=√3/2. (here π/3 is in radians, which when we start doing calculus turns out to be more natural than 60°) We can imagine doing that with every real number, and plotting every (x,y) on a plane, and we get a "sine wave" picture like this. That "plane" gets called ℝ×ℝ, or ℝ², because it's defined with 2 real number (ℝ) lines that form a cross intersecting at one point. It's a great picture! I can think about the function inputs as being the length of lines in one direction, outputs as the lengths of lines in another, derivatives as slopes of angled lines, etc.
But ... how about sin(i), where i=√-1? On the one hand, who cares, because it seems like √-1 shouldn't exist: there's no real number whose square is negative, and even when we found such numbers to be useful intermediate results in algebra problems we still decided to call them "imaginary" as opposed to the newly-named "real" numbers; you'd still expect to have a real number in the end. On the other hand, we soon found "complex numbers" (ℂ, all the numbers x+yi you can make by adding a real number x to an imaginary number yi) to also be useful in engineering problems (they represent oscillation a way similar to how positive numbers can represent growth and negative ones decay), and then we found them to be useful in physics problems (where a "quantum wave function" takes complex values), and at some point it's hard to ignore something as not "real" when it's at the foundation of our understanding of reality.
We can plot a collection of complex numbers on the "complex plane": for every complex number z=x+yi you just plot it as (x,y). One complex number can be described with two reals.
But how do we plot a function that takes complex number inputs and gives complex number outputs? We would need to plot it in ℂ×ℂ, two complex planes that form a cross intersecting at one point. "But two planes meet in a line, not a point", you might object, and that's true, in 3D. ℂ×ℂ only fits in 4D. If I wanted to clearly plot part of a real function y=f(x), I can plot each point as (x,y) in a square, but if I want to clearly plot part of a complex function f(x+yi)=u+vi, I need to be able to plot each point as (x,y,u,v) in a hypercube. I don't have any hypercubes lying around! I can't even visualize a hypercube.
So, we plot garbage like this instead. The xy plane there is the complex plane of inputs x+yi, and for each output u+vi=sin(x+yi), the height z of the red surface is u and the height z of the green surface is v. We plot (x,y,u) and (x,y,w) in the same cube and try to picture the true (x,y,u,w) from the result. Those two 2D surfaces twisting through 3D space are really two aspects of a single 2D surface twisting through 4D space. They're easier to understand if you use that web page to rotate them back and forth and turn them translucent, but still I can't picture the single surface in 4D that they represent. If I could actually visualize 4D then the plot of that single surface would fit in my head as naturally as that first "sine wave" plot did.
If you magically found yourself in a 4D space you might be best off acting a bit like a slime by closing your eyes and feeling your way around. Your eyes will lie, your touch won't.
I think here it depends on what you mean by "in a 4D space".
If my movements were naturally restricted to a 3D manifold (a "surface" is just a 2D manifold) curving through 4D space then you're probably exactly right. Let's back up to 2D. Imagine as an analog a 2D version of me, living on the surface of a globe. Open my eyes, and if light also follows the globe surface then in any unobstructed direction I look I see the back of my own head one globe-circumference away, but if I'm small enough compared to the globe then it feels almost like I'm in good old flat 2D space. Even if the globe is made of taffy and some 3D monster stretches spikes out of it, mushes parts of it together elsewhere to make a torus or worse, whatever. I can still move around any weird surface I'm stuck to so long as it's smooth enough, to any part of it I want to go to so long as it's it's connected. When I'm on the globe, or on any points of "positive curvature" on a more complicated surface, I might feel a little weird (there's more "room" inside a shape than you would expect from its boundary, so it might be like my skin is getting compressed or my innards stretched). Or, on points of "negative curvature" on a more complicated shape, I might feel like my skin was getting stretched or my innards compressed. But either way, if I was small enough compared to the curvature then I'd still be just a slightly squished-around version of me.
Your "bag of holding" example actually is a 3D manifold - locally I can move parts of my body in no more or fewer than the usual 3 dimensions: up/down, left/right, or forward/backward. But those things are only consistent locally - if I stick my arm 10 inches forward into the bag and then reach 10 inches up, it won't be in the same place as if I reach my other arm 10 inches up (outside the bag) and then 10 inches forward. This 3D manifold has geometry that can't exist in 3D space, but only embedded in a space with at least one more dimension.
But with the same one extra dimension, if my movements were unrestricted? Local senses like touch would get weird too. Imagine that 2D me, previously stuck to the globe like a flat sticker (though free to move parallel to the globe surface), suddenly peeled away into the air. I can still wiggle around in my accustomed two directions, but my orientation with respect to that third direction is at the whim of the breeze. On a globe I might be able to look or propel myself north/south vs east/west, but 2D me has no muscles that can turn his limbs up/down. Even if someone took pity and stuck me back on the globe so I could move around its surface again, if they stuck me on backwards then I'd be backwards for the rest of time; clockwise would seem to be counter-clockwise and vice-versa. 3D me in a true 4D space would be in the same boat; my arm has no way to reach hyperup/hyperdown.
roystgnr
2d ago
Inability to perceive 4D spaces just kills me. It turns out that "imaginary" numbers are actually at the root of reality, and most functions we're interested in are rooted in analytic multivalued functions, visualizable in ℂ×ℂ. That's a 2-complex-dimension space, so it's 4-(real)-dimensional, so we're screwed. Best you can usually do is to switch back and forth between plots of output magnitude and phase (or between real and imaginary components of output), or plot magnitude as height along with phase as color. Fortunately we don't have to be able to visualize something to describe and compute with it, but I feel like it could have helped a lot.
The "bag of holding" trick is clever, it gets you the topology of a 3D manifold that can't be embedded in less than ℝ⁴, but to me it "feels" like a very fixed geometry - two parallel 3D spaces, with the "hole" of the bag's opening connecting them.
TVTropes is shockingly empty of 5-D spaces in fiction. There's a Greg Egan book that takes that seriously, there's a Douglas Adams joke, there's a corny Superman villain, and it's sparse and downhill from there.
roystgnr
6d ago
If someone said "the reason why my pants are 36 waist is that I've put on a little weight since college" I wouldn't say "This incorrect. Pant waist size means the number that a hypothetical tape measure would read when measuring around the waistband." Causal graphs are not just sets of ordered pairs, and when one effect has multiple causes sometimes the most proximal cause is not the only or even the most important cause.
But, to abandon brevity for clarity: the reason why the property was worth $2.9M instead of $3.5M is that that is the price that a hypothetical buyer would have paid to buy the properties, and the reason why that price was the former rather than the latter was because:
buying the properties does not include canceling the grocery store's lease early.
If they could have cancelled the lease early, or even if a cancellation after purchase could have been done without penalty, then I would have been incorrect; the existence of the lease would not have notably reduced the price.
The grocery-store company terminated its lease voluntarily in 1999, so nothing is being taken from it in this condemnation action.
Yes; this is what I phrased as "The interest is gone in 2018, sure". I'm just curious about the legal and ethical implications. "Compensation needs to be based on what it would have been in 1994" seems to the intent of the law here; so does that mean that the grocery store would have also been stiffed if the taking had gone through in 1994? If I move to a smaller house and give one of my kids a 30 year rent-free lease on my current house, the market value of my current house afterward might be negative (who else wants to pay property taxes for decades on a house they can't use themselves?); would that mean that if it's eminent domained then my kid is out of luck and I need to pay the taker for the privilege?
but the original 2018 condemnation complaint indicates that the municipal government made an offer of just 0.92 M$, on the basis of an appraisal.
Thanks for this!
roystgnr
6d ago
Was there any suggestion of compensating the grocery store owner? This feels like a "heads we win, tails you lose" scenario - if the reason why the property is worth $2.9M instead of $3.5M (deduced from (4.8M-2.9M)*(4.0-2.0)/(8.5-2.0)+2.9M) is that the grocery store owner has an interest in the property too, isn't that interest worth $600K and in need of compensation? The interest is gone in 2018, sure, but if the rule is "evaluate as if it was 1994" then what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
This reminds me a bit of one of the loopholes for evading the Supreme Court ruling that governments can't keep the excess auction proceeds from property they seize for tax non-payment: the left hand of the government just sells to the right hand for whatever pittance covers the debt and lets the right hand take the auction profits.
On a side note,
The couple argues that the proper valuation date is year 1994
Wow - how bad were their property values in 2018? If it was already "blighted", "old", "in below average condition" in 1994, how much worse did it have to get for the decline to outpace 72% total inflation in the interim?!
roystgnr
7d ago
Was it 50/50 of the Blue Tribe, or 50/50 of the fraction of the Blue Tribe that got promoted to your attention by social media?
In recent polls, 56% of "very liberal" and 73% of liberal respondents say it is "always or usually unacceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose; 55% and 68% say that "violence is never justified" "in order to achieve political goals". Obama's initial response was to say that "this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy", with 1.1 million likes that probably aren't all from Red Tribe Obama fans, and he didn't soften on that, though he went "both sides" on calling out the Minnesota shootings and right-wing rhetoric too. Bernie Sanders also tried to call out more examples but foremost condemned Kirk's killing in particular as "political cowardice" which "must be condemned".
roystgnr
7d ago
For uncertainty problems where there's a lower bound at zero and the uncertainty is over a large range of proportions, usually the geometric mean is more appropriate then the arithmetic mean; 14/15 year old you had good mathematical instincts.
I really wish I had anything at all useful to say about his or your actual problems; sorry.
roystgnr
8d ago
It's one thing to say she had a problem making racists and sexists happy; it's quite another to say that she foresaw a problem making homophobes happy and so she solved it.
roystgnr
8d ago
That was probably a fig leaf to HBO, but I think to Chris Rock it was just another instance of trying to wrap comedy around a kernel of truth!
When he was doing "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" with Seinfeld and their Lamborghini got pulled over (with Seinfeld speeding), Rock ad-libbed "It’d be such a better episode if he pulled me to the side and beat the shit out of me, don’t you think?" and "Now here’s the crazy thing: If you weren’t here, I’d be scared. ... I’m famous, still black. ... Right now, I’m looking for my license right now." pretty readily. Seinfeld is fucking around a bit with his answers to the cop's questions, and Rock is giving pure strait-laced advice. He's laughing, but it's a nervous laugh, and when he laughs later after "I was worried the whole time. I'm still worried." I think he's laughing as much at how the line made Seinfeld crack up as he is at his exaggeration. I don't think he believes cops are all overly eager to harass black people any more than he believes that everyone who gets beaten by the cops had it coming, but I think he's serious in suggesting that both situations can and do occur sometimes.
Personally, I (white guy) have only had respectful interactions with the police, but I'm not the one they'd be profiling the hardest, right? I do think it might not be a coincidence that I've gotten one speeding ticket in my life, while driving alone, and two "pulled over for speeding and let off with a warning" incidents while my wife or I were driving with our kids in the back.
roystgnr
9d ago
Which makes it not exactly baffling that this happens, though it is baffling that nobody seems to be trying to fix it on the cultural level. There are lots of attempts to blame the police and reduce their aggression towards minorities, but I don't see the same level of impetus towards teaching minorities "Don't fight the police!"
Chris Rock: "How Not to Get Your Ass Kicked by the Police"
Of course it's a comedy, and some of the advice either blames the police and/or suggests mutual blame in some cases, but it's mostly comedy built around a kernel of just what you're suggesting.
But if you're trying to reduce your bafflement: note that the genre and source and date of that video are probably not a coincidence. It's long enough after the Rodney King incident that it wasn't going to start another riot, long enough before cancel culture that it was relatively safe there, it's from a comedian, and the comedian is African-American. Rock wouldn't have come up with the routine in the first place unless he was capable of intelligent nuanced thought, sure, but if he wasn't also relatively immune to racism and victim-blaming allegations then I don't think he would have gotten HBO to okay it.
Fun fact: showing this video during police training was considered by an appellate court to be evidence of that police department's "city’s custom surrounding use of force" in an excessive-force lawsuit, leading to a half-million-dollar settlement.
roystgnr
9d ago
It had to be hard-coupled with autism because RFK Jr. positioned himself as the "I'm going to solve the autism epidemic" guy, was getting raked for basically falling for Wakefield's frauds, and had to either double down and/or find something else he could point to instead.
There are still a couple pain-relief use cases for acetaminophen, though, even if it should be obsolete in general.
First: it doesn't interact with other pain relievers, so you can "double up" in cases of extremely strong pain, alternating doses of acetaminophen with a NSAID, taking both at full strength. My son had to do that recently for a broken arm; for the first few days of healing his only other sufficiently-effective option was a prescription for codeine (pre-combined with acetaminophen; not sure how much of that is "synergy" and how much is "we can deter opioid addicts by holding their livers hostage"), which he saved for when he needed to sleep.
Second, and more significantly in this context: it has been basically the only pain relief option that (assuming you're not allergic and don't overdose) is still thought to be safe during pregnancy! Even if you banned it for any other use case, there'd still be a strong argument to make it available for pregnant mothers, where the liver risks are the same but the next best alternative is "no pain relief" rather than "ibuprofen". NSAIDs increase risks of miscarriage when taken early in pregnancy, and risks of premature birth and birth defects when taken late. I've never dug into the research to see how much they increase risks, and of course typical lists of side effects never include probabilities, but these are the sort of qualitative risks that steer mothers and ob-gyns away from a drug regardless of the numbers.
So, I agree with some other posters that this is "your brain on memetic reasoning ... and probably ChatGPT."
Yeah, and it's not like we've all got formidable cognitive defenses to begin with.
Consider how "typical lists of side effects never include probabilities" gets treated as a normal, reasonable state of affairs - how can humanity be so innumerate that even teams of MDs can default to functional innumeracy without noticing? I like Mark Liberman's use of the Pirahã language (which has no words for numbers more specific than "some" or "many") as a metaphor, seeing their hand-wavy attitude toward numbers as a reflection of ours towards probability distributions ... but, damn it, the median first-world citizen educated enough to read his medication's fine print still isn't expected to be past the point of being hand-wavy about numbers! When it comes to questions like "how likely is it that the medicine you're about to swallow will make you sicker", we're not just simplifying "the Bayesian posterior looks like a lognormal with mean 1e-4 and standard deviation 1e-5" to "1 in ten thousand", we're effectively simplifying "1 in ten thousand" to "some"! We could translate it to Pirahã and back just fine!
roystgnr
9d ago
The increase in autism doesn't include self-diagnoses, but does include diagnoses based on criteria that have greatly loosened over the years, in tests that are administered far more often to a more autism-aware populace. Yesterday's kid who likes model trains a lot is today's autism diagnosis with Individual Education Plan.
I'd assume there's also some actual increase that isn't just a measurement artifact, because autism has a bunch of plausibly-causative correlations with things that have increased over generations, like higher parental age and assortative mating of highly-educated parents. But IIRC, when people control for measurement artifacts, "has autism increased" is still an open question; "why has autism increased" investigators are getting ahead of themselves.
roystgnr
9d ago
Politics is about group interest, not ideas.
Ironically, the idea that we can benefit our own interests by engaging in political activity out of group interest is, itself ... (pause for drama ruined by the spoiler at the start of the sentence) ... an incredibly idealistic idea.
If you're lucky enough to be registered in a swing state, the odds that your state carries the crucial electoral votes multipled by the odds that your vote will break a tie in the state is only as high as 1/10,000,000. Most of us are closer to the 1/1,000,000,000 range.
It sounds irrational to fight for an idea even at short-term cost to your group, but anybody who expends time and effort on politics without being paid for it has already self-selected to be the sort of person who will fight for at least one romantic abstract idea, the idea that they can and should try to sway the course of the whole nation even at the expense of their own self-interest. The other abstract ideas we try to make win, like "free speech is good even if I disagree" or "deaths are bad even among people I have no connection to", aren't nearly as irrational as anteing up to play the game in the first place.
Acetaminophen overdoses cause something like 50,000 ER visits and 500 deaths a year in the US. It's got a therapeutic index (the ratio of LD50 to ED50, i.e. how much a dose that delivers desired effects for for half of users has to be increased to be lethal for half of users) of only 10x, roughly as unsafe by that metric as ethanol and somewhat less safe than cocaine. Oh, and speaking of ethanol, you do not want to consume anything else that will tax your liver at the same time as you're taking the acetaminophen, because if you do the LD50 tanks.
It's supposedly even a bad way to kill yourself on purpose - suicidal people imagine popping a jar of pills and passing out to die right away, but instead just their livers die right away and they spend the next few days in agony while they inexorably drown in their bodies' own chemical wastes. No hyperlink for that one; I might be completely misremembering, but I don't want to read up on the details again.
So it's not impossible that scaring people away from Tylenol will do some net good.
But, as far as I know the negative effects of acetaminophen are purely via liver damage, and associations with autism exist but aren't causal - if you take a ton of Tylenol while pregnant then your kid might be up to 100% more likely to develop autism, but so will any kids who you were pregnant with without taking a ton of Tylenol; there's just some hidden cultural/genetic [edit: and/or medical - thanks to @MadMonzer for not missing the obvious] factors that correlate.
roystgnr
10d ago
Killing Hitler, I think, is much more defensible. He really was the driving force behind much of the Nazi's objectionable behavior.
With the right deontology and with hindsight, then sure it's defensible; there's a point at which one loses the right to life, probably even before they reach "faking casus belli to start wars of conquest" and "genocide".
But from a utilitarian perspective this a frightening coin flip. There was a wide wave of pent-up rage in inter-war Germany, and whoever replaced Hitler would still have to surf most of that wave, every part that Hitler wasn't solely responsible for instigating. If the replacement was far less evil maybe that would lead to toning down the rhetoric, wars, and genocide; if the replacement was just a little more competent maybe that would lead to to an indefinitely Nazi-controlled Europe that chose to consolidate its defenses while it was ahead instead of launching Barbarossa.
roystgnr
13d ago
Their ER Small Lasers are better than Inner Sphere Medium Lasers in every facet. More damage, better range, less head, half the weight.
In the tabletop game it's equal damage, 2/3 the range, better heat, half the weight. Does the video game mess with game balance that strongly? Skimming forums it sounds like the answer may be "yes", because smaller lasers fire more frequently and all beam weapons hit the same target at the same time and the AI tries to close range rapidly regardless of loadout so you just want to spam builds with as many little lasers as possible ... but if it's the greatest Mechwarrior game ever (I haven't played since 3 but I loved 2) maybe they're exaggerating the severity?
roystgnr
14d ago
simple edgy comedy like Maher saying the 9/11 hijackers were the brave ones
That part of his statement wasn't comedy, though; he was being serious. And that half of his serious-and-cancellable statements was actually correct!
The 9/11 hijackers were brave¹. Dying is scary. Flying a plane into a building is obviously going to cause immediate death. Overcoming a fear is bravery. Q.E.D. But we'd just watched them murder thousands of people, and our President (whose approval rating had just jumped from 50% to 90%; clearly logic was not the order of the day) said they were cowardly, so at that point the invalid syllogism "murder is bad, cowardice is bad, therefore murder is cowardice" wasn't a Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle to be avoided, it was practically mandated.
It probably really didn't help that Maher preceded his technically-correct statements with some much harder-to-justify ones. "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." also wasn't edgy comedy, it was just a weirdly illogical insult. Overcoming fear of death is brave, but avoiding death when that's a good option isn't cowardly, it's just sensible.
It's also arguable to what extent either of these remarks were what got Maher cancelled. Some affiliates pulled him from the air for a week or two, but the show didn't finally get cancelled for good until half a year later, and ABC claimed it was due to declining ratings rather than the controversy. I'd guess most of the ratings decline was because of the controversy, but at this point the only evidence would be buried in some Nielsen database.
¹ Well, the pilots were brave, at least. The "muscle" hijackers were kept in the dark until just before they boarded the planes, and it's not impossible that up until the very end some were still expecting an old-fashioned "fly to Cuba, laugh at America, go home" hijacking. It's amusing (albeit probably just wishful thinking) to imagine box-cutter-waving psychopaths spending their last moments going "Hey, Marwan, we're flying kind of low now, shouldn't we pull up? Why's one of those skyscrapers smoking, Marwan? Marwan???"
roystgnr
14d ago
Wow, are they serious?
"Rittenhouse ran away from protesters after prosecutors say he had already shot and killed someone."
Yeah, and he also ran away from the someone he shot and killed, while the guy was chasing him and grabbing for his weapon and Rittenhouse was shouting "Friendly! Friendly! Friendly!", only turning to fire after he heard a gunshot behind him and spun around to find the guy still close behind and charging him.
I'm getting the impression that these guys might not actually have a principled interest in preventing the misleading omission of relevant facts.
roystgnr
15d ago
the place where Conservative presence is the strongest tends to be the math, physics, and engineering departments, WHERE BEING CORRECT IN THE REAL WORLD continues to matter the most.
Well, the place where the Republican-vs-Democrat ratio is highest is in Economics, but that's not so much because there's especially extensive high-stakes testing that Applied Economics gets. It's probably because our best theories, starting in literally the first Microecon 101 classes, have good, simple explanations for why many populist (and historically leftist-aligned) economic ideas end up worsening the very problems they were trying to solve. You can still say those explanations are too simple, and make an economics research career out of trying to justify that, but having to add and defend precisely the necessary epicycles can't be entirely comfortable.
I'd also point out that it's common for a math professor to take pride in how disconnected their research is from real-world applications. Maybe in the back of their mind they expect some applied math guys to snatch up their work and use it eventually, but the more decades that takes, the more ahead-of-its-time their work must have been! There may also be some counter-signalling, where the shakier your reputation is, the more your grant applications have to look like "this could advance cancer research, somehow, because graph theory I guess" rather than "this builds on my work that finally proved the long-open Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture"? The trick with trying to subvert math is that even if it's not empirical, it's still objective. Other mathematicians may disagree over how important the Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture is, but even if some of them dislike you that doesn't make it any easier for them to find flaws in your proof.
roystgnr
15d ago
Long ago; I loved it! It really was the epitome of "Modern" Anglish, where words with no non-Romance-descended English equivalents get rederived from old Germanic-English roots, as opposed to texts which merely use existing but antiquated non-Romance English words.
To be clear, though, I love this stuff in a for-entertainment-purposes-only way; one of the best things about English is how, after it "has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary", we've ended up in a state where every concept has three times as many ways to express it, each subtly different in meanings, connotations, formality, rhythm and rhyme, etc. Adding new Anglish formations to English would be fun (though if I was the Emperor of English I'd prioritize it way below things like universally-phonetic spelling), but actually replacing and removing non-Anglish words would be silly.
For that matter, I'm happy to have new Anglish formations remain reminiscent of but not actually part of English. I bookmarked that Anglish dictionary for use as an RPG game master, to draw words from when players roll a Linguistics check that's almost but not quite successful at translating a dead language their characters only partially understand.
roystgnr
16d ago
Wiki says Eilat handled 2.6M tons a year; that would make it a little under 5% of their shipping, right? Is there a plan to extend that to the other 95%?
Our unmight has beteemed Norman sway over the English tongue for scores of years, but this is forestalled at last! Do not let "lawmaker" afear you! It betokens our folkright eft wending to the better, and the begetting of the Anglish uprising!
(yeah, I've got no idea ken either; I just find it amusing mirthful that "lawmaker" is the word for "legislator" in the Anglish dictionary wordbook)
roystgnr
17d ago
Yeah, but even at that point (and definitely since 2016) the win state has been just another toy to play with. The area with the end boss is literally called "The End", but after the final victory text the game doesn't actually end, or even restart from scratch in a "New Game +" sort of mode; all persistent world and character changes remain. As of 2016, "winning" spawns a portal that makes it easier to reach new areas that are practically inaccessible otherwise, with monsters and treasures that don't exist elsewhere in the game. To make it easier to reach more of those new areas it's recommended that you re-summon the end boss and defeat it again to spawn more portals; wiki says you can get up to 20 of them.
roystgnr
18d ago
This guy needs to be banned.
Only took another hour, albeit for a short ban.
He states views that are basically unfalsifiable.
The failure at "making beliefs pay rent" is ironic when juxtaposed against moaning that "This place used to be LessWrong and SSC", but epistemology is hard and sometimes you can come up with an idea that's falsifiable in principle even if you have trouble figuring out how it might be falsified in practice. I think the point where he really went off the deep end was the thread where one of his claims actually got falsified and instead of taking the opportunity to literally become less wrong he started misinforming everyone about the response and insulting the respondent and calling correctness "pedantry". I've seen people speed-run the decay that LessWrong described as "pass from lying about specific facts ... to lying about the rules of reasoning" before, but I've never seen someone doing it while approvingly citing LessWrong!
who the fuck would say that if Kirk was more “gracious,” the shooter wouldn’t shot unless they were tacitly explaining away the murder?
But, to be fair, this is exactly the sort of distinction between causality and blame that autism-adjacent LessWrong-type folks have no trouble making correctly. There is no logical incompatibility between positive claims like [if you hand over your wallet a mugger is less likely to shoot you] or "if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all" and normative claims like [the mugger is completely at fault and the victim not at all at fault for the negative consequences of the mugging] or "I'm not contending any of this was remotely justified", even if the positive claims feel like victim blaming.
In the most general technical sense, sure, the Halting Problem is unsolvable: no matter how long you let some arbitrary algorithm run you can't always be sure of whether it's going to keep going forever or whether it's actually just about to finish.
In slightly less general technical sense, here, you don't need some arbitrary algorithm just to do a better version of an ordered search, so you can restrict your users to a non-Turing-Complete language on which the Halting Problem is solvable.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
This, on the other hand, has been solved even in the technical sense. Even if you're going Turing-Complete you don't have to let your users specify a program in C or binary or something, or run it unsandboxed in the same address space or with the same kernel privileges. Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
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