roystgnr
15hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
6d 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
7d 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
7d 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
8d 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
8d 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
9d 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
10d 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
11d 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.
roystgnr
13d ago
We have magically bloodless revolutions roughly every 4 years in the USA. People who don't even consider bloodless revolutions to be worthwhile aren't actually devoted to revolution at the price of blood, they're devoted to blood via the excuse of revolution.
roystgnr
14d ago
Also a complete normie, and this is why I make cold brew. Better than instant or any kind of preserved hot-brew coffee, you can still use fresh-ground beans and everything, but you can do all the work in the afternoon or evening and then the result is quicker and easier to put together in the morning than fresh hot-brew coffee.
Zero "pleasant aroma filling my home" is a downside, though.
If I was more of a coffee person I might switch to one of those coffee makers with a "set it up the night before to turn on right before you get up in the morning" electronic timer, but I'd assume that gets noticeably more expensive - not because of the electronics, but because it's got to have some way (pods? a perfectly sealed grounds compartment? a built-in grinder?) to prevent the grounds from going stale as they sit there overnight.
roystgnr
15d ago
Maximal precision in string literals is referring to a different type of precision. To a software engineer, this sentence is incorrect:
The phrase "my quotation" is the same as "my quotation."
because a period is either part or not part of a string and those two options aren't the same string.
But this sentence is fine:
The quotation "I'm making the point that [X] via a careful logical application of [point Y], and [point Z]" can be summarized as "Y and Z imply X".
because quotation marks are how you indicate that something is a single string variable (a noun phrase, essentially) whose internals have no syntactic impact externally. IMHO it's actually pretty annoying that there's no clean universal English-language way to do this. Often you can get away with punctuation to delimit a phrase if you reword the sentence a little, or you can use a hyphenated-compound-word if it's short enough and if it's needed as disambiguation (which it isn't in this sentence; the rule is so non-universal that I'm already breaking it here), but there's nothing as clean as the programming rule: wrap it in these delimiters and you're done. (Isn't that colon so much more annoying than quotation marks would have been there?)
To an American journalist (and to most non-journalist normies, honestly), the first sentence is fine (it's just using the "typesetters' quotation" rule, common in America, for how commas and periods interact with quotation marks) and the second is wrong (because quotation marks around text are "to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name"), not just a mere paraphrase, unless the paraphrase is also marked via brackets. It's not that journalism is supposed to be less precise, it's just that it's supposed to be following a different set of rules.
I've spent most of my life writing software for fun and for school and for a living, and I frequently have to fix it when I catch myself slipping up (or get caught by others while slipping up) in just this way when writing English, and although I probably fail to catch myself even more often I'm at least trying. I feel that someone who went into the humanities in school and writes English for a living and doesn't have a half dozen incompatible computer languages twisting their brain and does have an editor trying to catch their slip-ups can be fairly held to the same standard.
Moreover, in these cases we're not even talking about misquotations where the rules disagree! Omitting a phrase like "of Alberta" would be incorrect by both journalistic and programmers' rules - the use of quotation marks is fine by programmer's rules, but the semantic meaning of the sentence including it is false! That's even worse! Errors which fail to compile are much better than errors that compile but then give you the wrong results!
I'm still happy (by which I mean persuaded and unhappy) with my theory that technological/economic devastation of newsroom employment means we're now stuck getting our news from people who make bad life choices.
roystgnr
16d ago
American food is great.
It is if you look hard enough, it is, and you don't have to look too hard, but you have to admit that walking into a restaurant aimed at an American audience (so, including Asian and other ethnic cuisines) is a crapshoot in at least the "incorporating vegetables into their dishes" category. These days "bland, boiled mush" is rare, but "steamed, with butter and salt" might be the median and "your meat and starch comes with so few veggies they're practically just a garnish" is way more common than it should be.
H-E-B is the best grocery store I have ever been in, anywhere in the world,
Have you been to Central Market? That upscale subsidiary is the H-E-B of H-E-Bs (except that ordinary H-E-B stores somehow accomplish high quality without high prices, while Central Market ... does not). When their grandmother last visited and wanted to spoil my kids, my son lobbied for (and got) a grocery shopping trip there, I guess on the theory that he had enough entertainment to last until Christmas but who knows when he'd next get let loose in an aisle with four or five hundred (not hyperbole) different kinds of gourmet cheese.
and their produce is fantastic.
You do still want to get there early and shop in person for the best selection. I usually order online for pickup, and that's still great for most fruits and veggies, but there are a few (fresh okra!) that are a crapshoot unless you pick your own.
H-E-B is also decent with charity and famous for disaster relief efforts. "Better than the government of Texas" isn't as high a bar as it should be in that case, admittedly, but it's still impressive that they clear it.
roystgnr
17d ago
I think you can technically do it with ChatGPT/Grok by abusing the Share function and just using that linked conversation as a separate branch
ChatGPT just added a "branch in new chat" option last week.
I'm a little embarrassed to say that I haven't really tried Grok before, despite starting to use (paid) ChatGPT for work, and regularly testing new (free) ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini versions on my own personal benchmark math questions. I should rectify that. On my first try, the free version took nearly 5 minutes thinking, which I was hoping was a good sign - paid ChatGPT will take 3 minutes to answer something that free ChatGPT answers instantly, but the paid answer will be correct and well-sourced or at worst "I don't know" where the free answer will be nonsense that it proceeds to try to gaslight me about if I question it. But the Grok answer after 5 minutes made a sign error of the sort that the other free LLMs stopped falling for several months ago, and when notified it started in on the gaslighting.
roystgnr
17d ago
in Star Wars: A New Hope as of 1977, Darth Vader is a low level mook
He's referred to as "Lord Vader", and recognized immediately by an imperial senator.
Later, he's on board the singular imperial superweapon in a top-level strategy meeting with less than a dozen participants. He does obey a command from one of the other participants, but the command is "stop choking that high-level general", everybody watches for a while first before anyone dares give the command, and Vader still faces no consequences for the incident; Tarkin even goes back to addressing him as "Lord Vader" immediately afterward. Out of context, the impression the movie gives is that Vader is basically the third in command of the Empire after Tarkin. With "it was only 30 years after WWII" context, Vader seems to be the head of the sort of personally-loyal private forces that fascist dictators develop alongside existing traditional armies, with perhaps less nominal power but with more real power.
and the republic collapsed in distant history
This was probably technically a retcon - there's some bit of dialogue in the novelization about multiple Emperors and their increasing corruption over time - but the bits needing to be retconned never made it into the movie.
In the movie, the Emperor dissolves the senate in the middle of the plot. Not long prior, Leia is invoking the Senate as a moral authority and the villains are taking it seriously enough as a practical authority that Vader decides it'll be easier to pretend Leia died than to admit she's imprisoned. This is perhaps compatible with the Senate being just an old Imperial-Rome-style facade that hasn't had real power in centuries, but from the film alone the retcon is the most parsimonious interpretation - they spell out right in dialogue that everyone still takes the senate seriously, and that the imperials get rid of it as soon as they think they've got the centralized military power to ignore any backlash.
Vice-President of the Empire
The phrase in the final draft of the script was "right hand of the Emperor". To be fair, this never made it into the movie, and could have ended up in the same wastebin as "Journal of the Whills" without too much hassle.
Those retcons were made for the artistic convenience of later films.
Star Wars, even if you only consider the first movie vs later films (and not the others or the shows or the entirely waste-binned Expanded Universe), has some seriously retconned ideas! These just aren't the best examples.
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".
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