ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
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User ID: 1098
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2d ago
Yes, the law applying to this case seems misguided.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2d ago
It makes sense to prevent sexual relationships between a teacher and their students. The 90 day limit should be even longer for such cases, at least a year. It's way too big a conflict of interest to allow that for teachers. It's also a breach of trust of the teacher's position. However, the fact that this law applies to any teacher and student regardless of whether the teacher ever taught the student seems misguided.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6d ago
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8d ago
One difference is that people can act on predictions of real-world events like elections. The information that the prediction market reveals has value. There's not really anything you can do with knowing which football team will win the Super Bowl.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
The whole point of prediction markets as a concept is to aggregate information for the benefit of non-participants. All the participants are playing by the same rules (which don't prohibit insider trading) so I have no sympathy for anyone on the losing end of those bets.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
I didn't specify, because almost any deliberate purpose is better than the hedonistic pursuit of subjective experience. I'll give some examples:
- Living a life of virtue
- Discovering or creating something of lasting importance to humanity
- Living a life devoted to God
- Giving life to your children and descendants
- Planting lupines in your neighborhood
In some sense pursuing a life of purpose is just subjective experience. But I don't think this is what people mean when they talk about 'subjective life' as in the essay. One quote that rubbed me the wrong way was
Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
This suggests that the feeling of boredom is bad in itself. But that's not right. Boredom is a useful feeling, in the same way that hunger or anger are useful for motivating useful behavior (not starving, and protecting one's place in the social hierarchy, respectively). Boredom is useful to motivate one to learn new things. But these feelings are only useful on average; there are circumstances where indulging one's boredom or hunger or anger would be counterproductive. Treating the feeling as bad or good in itself, and the cessation or increase in the feeling as one's goal, in the extreme means a life of hedonism. It doesn't matter whether one is focused on one's children or oneself; the hedonism is what's mistaken.
I'm not saying anything new here that philosophers haven't been talking about for hundreds of years, but this is bound to be a common objection to the essay.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
Not at all.
This is a beautiful essay. But ultimately consciousness and subjective experience don't matter. Outcomes matter. If your life was pure suffering but you achieved a great purpose, then that's a better life than one full of subjective joy. Giving children a great childhood can be good, but only insofar as it causes them to live a purposeful life.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
1mo ago
An engineering organization doesn't have to accept the default compiler behavior for a language. They can use linters and other tools to restrict (or expand!) the kind of code that's acceptable. And they can have a culture that values thoroughness or that values moving fast and breaking things.
I think the best argument for something like Rust is that it makes it easier to guarantee quality where it matters to the organization. If quality doesn't matter to the organization, whether explicitly through tooling and coding standards or implicitly through seeing what gets people promoted or fired, then people will circumvent safeguards whatever language it is.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
This is a really interesting point. I really like the proposal to require showing after-tax prices. But this means that businesses have to know what the after-tax price actually is for each customer before purchasing, which is much harder and more ambiguous than doing it after purchase. For example, if customers who live in a certain city have to pay an extra tax, how would the business learn this about customers it's showing ads to? Not to mention the much larger number of ad targets than actual customers.
I think one thing that would happen is businesses would show some price based on predicted taxes, and just eat the tax difference if they predicted wrong. Or an even richer industry of fine print would spring up around price displays.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
I would appreciate an in-depth defense of this claim. I'm a big proponent of following the law as it is, but working to change bad laws. If changing the law requires violating it then I would have to rethink my stance.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
Freedom of speech is a mistake theory idea. You won't get conflict theorists to accept it, because it doesn't' advance their goals. The only way to convert people to mistake theorists and get them to adopt freedom of speech as a shared principle with you is to get together with them on the same team against a larger common enemy. As long as they consider you a rival/threat/enemy, they'll treat your words as enemy soldiers.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
4mo ago
I don't think you can separate the things that were grandfathered in from the current good state we find ourselves in. Alcohol is useful for proving trustworthiness within a group. We might never have gotten out of small-scale tribalism without its influence. Guns were a necessary tool for breaking the old social order of kings and nobility. The countries where guns are rare have at least a vibe that no one could ever upset the established order. In America there are times when states, and even smaller groups, defy the federal government using force. The threat of such defiance limits the extent to which the establishment boot can stomp on human faces before it is stopped by force.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
5mo ago
In the US it's a current event: T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree. One might be able to opt out.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6mo ago
I'm very skeptical, on Hansonian grounds.
MBTI (or you could say more generally, "Jungian typology") is a language for talking about internal phenomenological experience; it's not a tool for making behavioral predictions
I'm skeptical that there's a rigorous way to show a difference between really experiencing something vs. claiming to experience it for the evolutionary advantage.
MBTI makes additional predictions about Fe and Fi being correlated with other (rather specific) psychological and personality traits, instead of simply treating it as an isolated and free-floating random variable.
What are those predictions? And how are they validated or falsified? If not by behavior, then what? I would expect that any correlation with other psychological and personality traits would fall out of the analysis that produced OCEAN.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
6mo ago
Why use MBTI when OCEAN is available and makes better predictions? And how is the Fi/Fe dichotomy different from just Agreeableness?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
Not OP but his reputation was destroyed, and for someone like him what does he have left?
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
7mo ago
The "can't remember the name of their medication" test is a frustratingly close mirror to the Obama administration's 'fiduciary' test, which was quite broadly applied to people whose sole sin was having difficultly dealing with a checkbook.
Could you give some more context on what this is, for those unfamiliar? All I can find is a rule about financial professionals having to act in their clients' best interests.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
- Yes
- Yes
- No, mainly because speed limits are inappropriately low in most cases.
- Left lane is for passing only, but cutting drivers off and tailgating are wrong too.
- No, it's not okay to break the law. However, see 7.
- No, everyone follows the same rules.
- There should be a new law on merging: if another vehicle ahead is signaling to change into your lane, you must slow down to let them in. This would encourage drivers to use the whole roadway instead of lining up a mile back to get into a specific lane. In most cases this would lead to more efficient use of road space, and it would make driving a lot less stressful for people who are not assertive. It's painful to ride with a driver who has no guts and can't assertively merge.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
Cars should abide by the "Gentleman's Agreement" to stick around 300hp, and anything larger than that should be heavily taxed. 300hp is plenty to have a quick mid size sedan, a very fast small car, or a reasonably drivable large SUV/pickup truck. Capping horsepower on most cars would encourage people who want to drive fast sporty cars to buy small cars, and discourage people from driving giant SUVs and pickup trucks they can't handle too fast.
This is a great idea. Another idea along these lines is to have a momentum limit so that any individual vehicle is limited in how much damage it can do to another. Lighter vehicles could go faster and heavier vehicles would be limited to a lower speed. Speed limits could be raised in many cases if there was a momentum limit.
Scaling liability with momentum would help too, by increasing insurance premiums for large dangerous vehicles.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
AP is reporting on it now: Israel attacks Iran’s capital with explosions booming across Tehran
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
Those things are all bad in the same way that prostitution is, just less so. I'd add to the list: giving resources without even getting sex (simping), consumption of pornography, and divorce are all degenerate forms of relationships that in the ideal would be marriage.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
It seems like you don't like cycling.
there's no need for this medium speed, low-safety, exhausting means of transport
How about
- Getting some default amount of exercise every day just from running errands and commuting. This is mainly a benefit to the cyclist, but in countries with more socialized medicine, it's a public good too.
- Saving money. For people who live in denser areas, much of the cost of a car is the capital expense and fixed maintenance.
- Saving time. For short trips in dense areas where it's hard to park, a bike beats driving.
- Combining all three. Even if cycling takes longer and doesn't save much money, the fact that it's combining exercise, travel, relaxation, and thrift makes it pretty good use of time for a lot of people.
- Reducing traffic. Where I live, due to traffic it takes about as long to commute 20 miles by bike as by car. Believe it or not most of the time a cyclist is on the road they are not in conflict with any cars; they're using shoulders or bike paths. A car on the freeway is taking up that much extra space the whole time.
This is all completely orthogonal to whether cyclists obey traffic laws. I'm all for ticketing cyclists and making their movements more legible to the law. I think this would go a long way towards cycling becoming more normalized so that people can have discussions based on tradeoffs rather than emotions.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
8mo ago
I knew what video this was before I clicked on it. It's a classic.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
10mo ago
I'll miss your commentary but I support this choice. Good luck with your project, and please succeed or fail quickly so you can get back here sooner.
That is important context and completely changes my view. If it's true, then the charges, with potential for a 20-year sentence, are completely appropriate.
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