roystgnr
1mo ago
"LGBT for Hillary", Barbara Streisand performing, $1,200 per "Friend"-level ticket for the cheapest seats, so definitely not for a wide or unfriendly audience. But it was still the keynote speech at a gala widely reported a month in advance, not an off-the-cuff unprepared remark among a select group of actual friends. I vaguely recall learning that early 19th century Presidential candidates would make one set of promises to crowds in Northern states and another set to crowds in Southern ones, but that kind of thing shouldn't have survived for very long after the telegraph, much less after the private-recording-device-in-everyone's-pocket.
roystgnr
1mo ago
This was a big part of what tore through Yellowstone a couple years ago; up to 5 inches of rain brought down up to another 5 inches of meltwater, before all that got channeled into the Gardner River. This can't be much of an issue for Tennessee, though. 5 or 10 inches of snow a year there, that would turn into less than an inch of meltwater even in the worst case.
roystgnr
1mo ago
HRC would never have gotten "deplorables" past a focus group, even if they'd missed all the other hints in her speeches that pointed in the same direction.
She had more than enough intelligence that she could have done a competent job without anyone double-checking her every word; her problem was that she was aware of her intelligence and she let that awareness fester into contempt rather than compassion for those not so endowed. That is a failure of character which she should have worked on, but of all the people in the world she was probably the most painfully aware that it's possible to be a great politician and a decent president without bothering to work on your failures of character. She just didn't realize that voters who will forgive failings like "contempt for your spouse" still won't forgive failings like "contempt for us". I think it was someone on TheMotte who pointed out that true meritocracy can be actually much worse than ending up with an incompetent candidate, if a competent person picked on merit would be using their competence in opposition to your values rather than in support of them.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Exactly.
The expected value theory here is symmetric. If you're close to 50/50 odds then your vote has a relatively high chance of making a huge impact, and you should make absolutely sure to cast it. If you're at 90/10 or 10/90, then whatever; why bother making your margin of victory a tiny bit larger or your margin of defeat a tiny bit smaller?
The psychological theory here is what's asymmetric. Social Desirability Bias tells you that if you agree with the majority and high-status leaders of Our Tribe then you are in sync with the community and safe and loved, whereas if you agree with the outnumbered and low-status dissenters from Our Tribe then you are a traitor and a risk and what are you even still doing here anyways? Best to hop on the bandwagon.
It's weird to see people blowing money on prediction markets to that end, though. They used to be such a niche nerd idea, mostly talked about among small groups who saw expected utility maximization as a goal and biases as obstacles inherited from our less-evolved ancestors, but I guess they're now just as fertile a target for hoary advertising tricks as "people who didn't even get up to stretch during the commercial breaks" used to be.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Start with a standard Manhattan recipe, but not only do you make sure not to forget the Maraschino cherry, you also add a dash of Maraschino liqueur and a dash of Cherry Heering.
Weeski: 1 1/2 oz Irish whiskey, 1/2 oz Cointreau, 1 dash orange bitters, 1 oz Lillet Blanc, orange peel (candied since I'm lazy) garnish.
Mint julep, but always with granulated sugar instead of syrup (to muddle the mint leaves better), and about twice as many leaves as the standard recipe calls for.
roystgnr
1mo ago
The orange peel garnish actually seems to make a difference to an Old Fashioned for me, but I'm too lazy to keep fresh oranges on hand and carve peels for cocktails, so I've recently got a jar of candied orange peels for the purpose, and that seems to add 50% of the value for 5% of the work.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I love Starship Troopers, and The Forever War was written partly as a rebuttal to how Troopers "glorifies war", so you'd think I should hate it, as an Ur-example of leftists hijacking something so they can update it with The Message, for Modern Audiences. But it's so much better as a rebuttal than most modern reboots of that type. It treats the theme as a necessary part of a good story but not a sufficient part, so it puts just as much effort into characterization and plot. It feels like (and AFAIK was) well-informed self-criticism by an insider of the culture being criticized, not ignorant cheap shots from an outsider. It treats its genre as a promise with conventions that it lives up to, not just an arbitrary color palette slapped onto a generic story. And even considered as a rebuttal to previous fiction or as a commentary on non-fiction events, it manages to avoid the typical minor failure of "so tenuous an allegory that it doesn't really contribute to the debate" and the typical major failure of "so heavy an allegory that it doesn't really stand on it's own", threading the needle perfectly. I personally prefer Troopers, but I'd still call Forever War the more proficient of the two.
I wish I could praise any more of Haldeman's work as much. I remember kind of liking Camoflague, and I think Forever Peace, but not enough to reread them, whereas Troopers wasn't even Heinlein's best Middle-Grade/Young-Adult book.
roystgnr
1mo ago
It might be worth trying just to see how hard it is. I quit alcohol for a month one year and it didn't bother me. I quit my daily coke for a month the next year, and the whole time I felt like a junkie deprived of his fix. Discovering that led me to cut my consumption in half even after the month was up ... which probably delayed the kidney stone that talked me down to my current one can per week. (fine, some weeks it's two, and it's never zero - "junkie deprived of his fix", remember)
roystgnr
1mo ago
There's lots of high-end options out there these days. We tried delivery and curbside pickup in 2020, and the former wasn't worth the price but the latter is still how we do our regular grocery shopping. A few bucks extra, and we can't pick produce ourselves, but saving 40 minutes per trip is usually more than worth it.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I saw reports of bannings on Github as well ... which is kind of a grey area? AFAIK a blocked user can still download your code, but they can't interact with you there in just about any other way. So if you're happy using the engine as-is or with forking it, then yay Open Source Software, but if you have a bug report or a feature request or a patch then it's time to get happy with forking it (or hope someone else's fork takes off).
roystgnr
1mo ago
it has trouble with basic logic unless it uses 'chain of thought'
So do I, but they gave me the PhD anyway. Applied math, so there were a lot of computers rather than just the traditional coffee maker and a chalkboard, but you'd be surprised at how heavily even the more-respectable pure mathematicians rely on that chalkboard (or whiteboard, these days) to keep track of a chain of thought.
And on that subject, math is one field where you can add new perfect-quality synthetic data with no obvious bound. Generating a proof may be NP-complete, but verifying a rigorous proof can be done by non-AI computer programs. Both OpenAI and Meta have started using Lean to train models to generate new proofs. It's not quite as good a target as Go self-play, since "play against yourself" is a naturally good difficulty-level for self-improvement, whereas some theorems are deceptively complex to state and easy to prove or vice-versa, but it's not a slow-growing data set in the same way as "mimic our recorded human language" is, and yet it's natural to translate back and forth between the formal proof language and the basic-logic-plus-much-more subset of human languages.
I'd still say it's possible that there's some other "spark" of out-of-sample creativity that humans have and models trained under current techniques just can't acquire, but if that's what you're shooting for, at least lead your target. Even if current progress does stall out, we may end up going from "has trouble with basic logic" to "(dis?)proved the Riemann hypothesis" before things plateau again.
roystgnr
1mo ago
You are paying indirectly for other people stealing, but not because they raised prices, just because they couldn't lower prices as much as they'd otherwise be able to after reducing cashier hours.
If the money they have to spend to offset increased theft was less than the money they'd have to keep spending on non-self-checkout cashiers then they'd happily keep the extra cashiers and the extra profit.
That assumes we all just care about store prices, though. If self-checkout raises shrinkage from 1.5% to 2.5% of revenues and reduces labor costs from 15% to 13% of revenues (all numbers here are 10% from Google and 90% pulled out of my hat) then price conscious shoppers are going to push for self-checkout, but there may be shoppers who hate the extra work, or like or hate the reduced contact, or have opinions on changes in line lengths ... or, while we're on the subject, I suppose there may be a few shoppers who would rather pay 2% more to employ more cashiers instead of 1% more to enrich more thieves.
roystgnr
1mo ago
I'd consider my credit+debit+cash to be urgent and my driver's license to be replaceable ... but in effect that means I'd definitely have ID, since it's all in the same wallet.
I feel like the "I don't know anybody voting for Nixon" lady, but I don't think I know any adult who doesn't carry ID habitually. I guess my wife sometimes leaves her ID and cards at home when I'm driving, but even then it's less often than not.
Things are probably different in cities with good mass transit, but does that describe any of the ones flooding?
roystgnr
1mo ago
Thanks for these. I don't see much to argue about with them, though I'm suspicious about that since the hook-shaped curve flatters my priors from other vaguely-recalled studies. The zeitgeist of "I shouldn't have kids while I'm still struggling with the rat race" favors the people who've won (their idea of) the rat race, but not as much as it favors the people who just decide not to run.
roystgnr
1mo ago
That is the bias you would see in a graph of TFR, but your graph is not of TFR.
roystgnr
1mo ago
The hardcore Yuddites are not on the Trust & Safety teams at big LLM companies.
The hardcore Yuddites were pissed at those teams using the word "Safety" for a category that included sometimes-reading-naughty-words risk as a central problem and existential risk as an afterthought at most. Some were pissed enough to rename their own philosophy from "AI Safety" to "AI Notkilleveryoneism" just because being stuck with a stupid-sounding neologism is a cheap price to pay to have a word that can't be so completely hijacked again.
roystgnr
1mo ago
selection pressures in that have returned to favoring fertility rates in people with high educational attainment
You say fertility rates, but am I reading correctly that in your link the graph is of a raw birthrate in the age 15-50 bracket without controlling for age? How much of that result is just reflecting the fact that a lot more people are going to higher education than they used to? In Census data I'm seeing the ""College 4 years or more" column rise from e.g. 23% of the total "25 to 34 years, Female" section in 1992 to 45% of the total in 2022 (passing through 32.5% in 2002 and 37.5% in 2012). Unless I'm misreading something, women in their childbearing years are much more likely to be well educated than women a decade or three older, so we'd expect birth rates to skew much more strongly toward educated mothers than total fertility rates do.
roystgnr
1mo ago
You can be a total sellout and still be a good actor, though; doing this just means that the onus still falls back on your potential audience to look for other indicators of quality (reviews, non-sellout costars/directors/writers) rather than just trusting that you wouldn't be in anything that wasn't good. "The Rock" has been in a bunch of uninspiring stuff but that doesn't mean (assuming you have kids) you should run from Moana.
Consider Michael Caine for a better example. Two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, four nominations for Best Actor, cast member in several fantastic movies, and yet perhaps his best line was the one he ad-libbed to a question about his appearance in Jaws: The Revenge (IMDB 3.0/10):
"I haven’t seen the completed film, although from all accounts it’s terrible. I have seen the house it paid for, though, and that is terrific."
roystgnr
2mo ago
It would be even more true of a workers' coop when considering the market for the provision of goods. The place workers' coops fails is, ironically, when considering the market for the provision of workers' compensation. Putting your investments in a single business instead of diversifying is in general a bad idea; making that business be the same business you rely on for a salary makes it an even worse idea. Maybe not for the customers, because from their perspective the workers' incentives are now just about as well-aligned as they possibly could be, but when considering the workers or even just considering both together it's hard to beat keeping most wealth in index funds rather than a "pray to God this one company doesn't go under" fund.
roystgnr
2mo ago
I'd also like to know the answer to that question.
IIRC the likely-better short-term alternative to sulfate aerosol is calcite aerosol (so the main side effect is to reduce rather than increase ozone depletion), and the likely-better long-term alternative is enhanced rock weathering (to actually get excess CO2 out of the atmosphere rather than just papering over a few of the problems it causes), but IIRC they're even further back in the theoretical/experimental stages.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Is it possible to be weighing engagement vs breaking up at the same time ?
It's quite sensible; when you know your SO well enough to decide whether you want to spend your life with them, the best answers are "yes" or "no", not "no but I'll waste both our time dragging things out anyway".
Sometimes I appreciate her steady self confidence. Other times, I am frustrated by her lack of brutal drive to self improvement.
Pros: she's confident
"Cons": she's not brutally driven
her intelligence is not up for question, but other times Im dissastisfied with the lack of sharp off the cuff retorts
Pros: she's intelligent
"Cons": she's not sharp-tongued
the brain wants what it wants.
It is definitely possible that you're not the kind of person who can be happy forever with her, and I certainly don't know you or her well enough to say you are ... but it says something that you were trying to lay down criticisms and your top three were one triviality plus two humblebrags.
The relationship feels like coasting. And some part of my brain wants jazz.
Jazz gets a lot of value out of tension and dissonance, but like any music the trick is the balance between tension's creation and its release. If you've got a partner who consistently relieves tension, then finding tension elsewhere (e.g. from your own hopefully-not-quite-brutal drive to self-improvement) is going to be much easier and more productive than the alternative of demanding/creating tension in your closest relationship.
(not to be mistaken for the alternative of creating tension via your closest relationship - I wonder if humans are ill-adapted to handle a "feels like coasting" malaise phase because historically we'd have all the tension we could want from the "when will baby start sleeping through the night and my brain fog go away" phase sooner)
roystgnr
2mo ago
Nuke availability was nowhere near the point where you could just throw them out of spite
Within a year we had seven more nukes, despite massive demobilization of the Manhattan Project after Japan's surrender. The original plan was to shoot for seven bombs per month by then, a rate which we passed in 1948 despite the peace-time.
Even if for some reason plutonium production during an active nuclear war was still limited to only 7 bombs per year, a target turning into a mushroom cloud every couple months with no end in sight is shocking enough that you'd expect spite to be the resource in too-limited supply first.
long enough for the German atomic bomb programme to catch up
"The point in 1942 when the army relinquished control of the project was its zenith in terms of the number of personnel devoted to the effort, and this was no more than about seventy scientists, with about forty devoting more than half their time to nuclear fission research. After this the number diminished dramatically"
A tenth of a Manhattan Project (at most? I'd bet the ratio of engineers was even worse), under active attack, and ideologically determined to disparage that idiot Einstein's "Jewish physics", is not going to be producing counter-nukes by 1946.
roystgnr
2mo ago
IMHO this doesn't scale well.
A few thousand targets, who are trying to stay in hiding, who you know you'll be hitting within months, who are already at war with you, and who are soldiers in that war? Sure, slip some explosives into their pagers. What are they going to say if they catch you, "Gosh, we only launched seven or eight thousand rockets at your towns this year, but now the gloves are off!"
A hundred million targets, a million of whom take their cell phones through airport explosive detectors each day, another 20,000 of whom have their cell phones dismantled for repairs each day, who are a mix of 99% civilians not at war with you and 1% soldiers who are also not at war with you but who still have a few thousand nuclear warheads ready just in case? You would have to be completely insane to start loading their phones with explosives.
China could realistically be at war with us within a decade, but it'll be a "gosh, Taipei really wanted to reunify with us and we just had to very suddenly send over a bunch of troops to what's really also our own territory to deal with the criminal terrorists who wanted to oppose the will of the people" sort of war, not a "the trouble with Pearl Harbor was it didn't piss off the US enough" sort of war. I wouldn't be surprised if every chip they manufacture for us is compromised with a you-can-find-it-under-an-electron-microscope plausibly-deniable-backdoor for SigInt or DDOS purposes, but I would be astonished if they tried to pull off a you-can-find-it-with-a-screwdriver obvious-killing-Americans-preparation for unclear purposes. Your phone may stop working when WW3 starts, or it may start transmitting every word spoken around you to Chinese AIs to sieve through for intelligence, but it's not going to explode.
Polarization these days is strong enough that I wouldn't expect that bias to make a huge difference, it's true, only a difference on the margins. But we're on the margins again with this election, aren't we? +3% Harris nationally, but Trump's leading in a couple swing states he lost last time, probably within one swing state's electoral votes of winning. I could easily imagine a decent number of undecided voters being swayed (or just persuaded not to stay home) by the belief that one candidate or the other is socially acceptable or at least not too socially unacceptable.
More options
Context Copy link