MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
In my case, the goal is the end product. I want a videogame with every single feature I want in a game and none of the features I don't want, and whenever I run out of content I can make more content. The software project is "for fun", in that the game is for fun and tailored to me specifically, I don't think it will ever be commercially viable, but 70% of the fun is (or would be if I ever get anywhere) the game itself, 25% is being able to think about game design features and add and tweak things, 5% is the actual coding line by line. If I could tell an AI what features I want and have it keep adding them cohesively and coherently on a global level without hallucinating or forgetting details from months ago, I would easily drop the 5% line by line coding part.
Instead I keep getting bored and losing motivation because I get too ambitious and it takes too long to do what I want to do before I get to enjoy it in a playable state.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
By redistributing the proceeds/profits as a "citizens dividend" which is just UBI except the value is determined based on LVT revenue rather than cost of living. Although not the most economically efficient, the most philosophically/morally sound version of it is that you tax land based on its market rent value as measured via supply and demand, divide it equally into N pieces where N is the number of eligible recipients (which might be all citizens above 18, or all citizens including children, or all permanent residents, the specifics don't matter a ton here) then give each person that money.
It is their birthright as human beings and as citizens of the nation to an equal share of the land. Anyone who owns an average amount of land (not merely surface area, but weighted based on desirability) is net zero. Their LVT and their citizens dividend perfectly cancel out. They are morally entitled to live on or otherwise use a fair and equal portion of the land, same as everyone else. Anyone who owns an above average amount of land (or corporations which by themselves don't receive LVT) has a higher LVT burden to pay for the privilege of hogging up more space than their birthright. Anyone who owns a below average amount of land profits from getting more dividend than their tax burden. Essentially, everyone "owns" an equal share of the land, but some of them are leasing their land to others (or corporations) for money.
Even if efficiency gets really high, and therefore land values, and therefore tax burdens rise, anyone who doesn't want to participate in a Malthusian race for endless efficiency can simply satisfy themselves with an average sized home in an average valued location and pay net zero. This does provide economic pressure to reduce to below average, but the compensation rises accordingly. This is good. This means people can voluntarily downsize and live in a below average area (or out in a rural area that is in low demand) in order to free up valuable land for the high efficiency people and corporations to use, and those people and corporations then compensate the downsizers for the privilege of using their land. This is both just and economically efficient. The people who give up their land are the ones who choose to based on the economic incentive.
There is a potential downside where someone who has lived in the same home for decades might get kicked out if the value of the land around them rises faster than their own income. This is a serious issue, and most Georgists seem kind of cavalier about it. But there are potential solutions such adjusting tax rates slowly in response to rapidly changing prices, essentially grandfathering people in.
It gets slightly more complicated if you're replacing existing taxes with LVT and so not all of it can be redistributed via a dividend. But if you fix the amount of government spending, then in the limit as efficiency and thus LVT increases the excess can still be redistributed via a dividend and simplify to the above dynamics on the margin.
MathWizard
Good things are good
7d ago
Seems to me like a hack step gesturing towards Georgism without getting all the way there and losing out on some of its better features. Primarily the economic efficiency, but through it also some of the justification. The country is a meta-market, paying an army to create a safe environment (land) where businesses and marketplaces can exist safely, without fear of disruption by foreign armies. This creates a finite amount of safe land to use. People should pay in proportion to the amount (and desirability) of the land that they use. If someone makes a business that is twice as efficient and earns twice as much money on the same plot of land, then they shouldn't owe twice as much tax. The army doesn't cost twice as much in response to their efficiency, the other people around them aren't being burdened twice as much by their efficiency. They earned extra money by their own cleverness and good business sense, they owe tax only in proportion to what they used from the commons (land, and similar limited resources that are economically defined as "land"). Contrarily, if someone snatches up huge swathes of land and then squats on them, generating basically value but still requiring the same amount of military defense and taking up space that someone else could have used, this "fair tax" wouldn't have them pay any more than a homeless man, while a land value tax would.
MathWizard
Good things are good
14d ago
At the very least the longevity would be nice. Living 80 years as a human and then putting your brain into a robot body, or ship of theseusing your parts as they fail, seems strictly better than living 80 years as a human and then dying, provided the robot body is good enough to not be literal torture.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
A good reason for this not to be a place to read AI slop is that place already exists: https://chatgpt.com/. People who want to can just generate it themselves. Unless you are privy to some super advanced proprietary AI that isn't yet available to the public and blows all of the public ones out of the water, each and every one of us can go ask ChatGPT any questions about any topics we care about and get generic AI responses to them. Or better yet, stuff more tailored to our own interests and in our own styles, and can ask followup questions. Same reason I don't need to see your AI generated pictures or hear your AI generated music, but am enjoying generating my own.
AI land already exists. I'd like this place to exist too and be distinct from it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
16d ago
Do you need to care about the environment to get an electric car? My brother is big into EVs because he's... I'm not even sure what to call it, mechanical tech nerd? Like he's obsessed with electric cars, electric unicycles, fancy powerful flashlights, and stuff like that, rather than computers and programming.
You don't have to pay for gas, you can use regenerative braking and stuff, it runs really smooth and quiet. The only reason to buy a gas car is because they're cheaper up front. For now. If Teslas can continue to improve technologically and get cheaper then they have a real future among normal people buying them for practical reasons, completely divorced from ideology.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
Example 4 shows that to be an "oppressed minority" it matters that the overall sentiment of society is against you, rather than just anyone. Thought I also argue this above, example 5 shows us that in order to measure the disadvantage you hold in society, you have to multiply the amount of people who are against you by the extent to which they're against you. You should also multiply this by how powerful they are (if those against you are 10 times more powerful, they count for 10 times more). Now, simply find out if the sum of the sentiments in your favor minus the sum of sentiments against you, is bigger or smaller than 0. On the makro scale, this decides if you're oppressed or not, and the average sentiment is necessarily going to be the opposite of what it claims unless it's exactly 0 (If society as a whole arrives at the conclusion that society as a whole is against you, we arrive at a contradiction).
If you define this too strictly then it becomes tautologically true but meaningless. One could never know whether one is an "oppressed minority" unless one first painstakingly computes this sum, find it less than zero and then, having done so, can generalize it no further than saying that the sum is less than zero.
This only matters if it affects things we care about. So heuristically I mostly agree with the general mathematical framing, provided we are careful to measure the "extent to which they're against you" by actions more than words. Words probably count a little bit since they affect social outcomes and psychological well-being, but things like violence or job opportunities matter much more. Here then is I think where the apparent "paradox unravels", in that the internal sentiment of people materializes at different rates in the realm of socially expressed sentiment and actual material outcomes. In a phrase: "talk is cheap". Zooming in on Example 3, we have a world where 90% of people say they support C, they get angry when B do terrible things to C. If they witness a discriminatory event in person they probably get upset at the B who did it, yell at them a bit, and then go make a social media post about how awful B are. The apparent social sentiment is overwhelming in favor of C, and thinks B are horrible ignorant scum. But if they don't actually do anything about it, then it's all just surface level talk and C continue to get discriminated against while B are fine as long as they make do a little bit of op-sec so they don't get witnessed discriminating too publicly.
If your model defines "oppressed minority" using apparent public sentiment in the equation, it will classify C here as "not oppressed", and fail to recognize a scenario which, while not a central example, shares a lot of the bad features associated with being an oppressed minority. At the very least, some new term needs to be used to describe this and a problem needs to be solved, rather than ignored because it's "not real oppression".
If instead your model defines "oppressed minority" using actual behaviors in the equation then you have a major legibility issue in that it's really really hard to measure. You can easily have a society in which apparent public sentiment is overwhelming in favor of one side but they're still an "oppressed minority" because the behaviors skew the other way.
In either case, the map is not the territory. Whatever word you use for it, it's entirely possible to have a society in which the majority of public sentiment skews one way and the majority of actionable offensive and defensive behaviors skew the other. It's rare, because public sentiment and behaviors are correlated, and I don't think it's the world we live in (in the U.S.) but it's logically possible.
If you can convince everyone that you're an oppressed minority, you're not. That you can get the majority on your side proves that you are not discriminated against or in a vulnerable position, as being in a vulnerable and oppressed position is defined by having the majority against you.
I don't think this tracks. I'm going to use hypothetical thought experiments, because the counterexamples are somewhat contrived and thus rare in real life, but still logically possible.
Example 1: We have groups A (51%) B(48%) C(1%). A treats everyone equally regardless of their type. B hates C with a passion and will harass, threaten, ostracize, refuse service etc to any members of C (Let's suppose there are no explicit anti-discrimination laws, so refusing service is allowed. Violence is not allowed, but occurs anyway when they can get away with it). A thinks this is wrong, and will believe members of C, be on their side, and think poorly of members of B who they witness doing it, but offers no material support in favor of C to help against it other than treating them fairly the same as they treat anyone else. If the hatred and harassment that B inflicts on C is severe enough, I think C counts as an oppressed minority despite having "support" from the majority.
Example 2: As above, except A is (48%) and B is (51%). Now C is technically oppressed by the majority, and has minority support. Politically this distinction is likely to be important, since now explicitly Anti-C politicians are more likely to be elected and Anti-C policies are more likely to pass legislatively. But for day to day life not much changes between this and example 1. About half of the people a C person meets will harass them and half will not. Hopefully this demonstrates that the "majority" distinction isn't especially important.
Example 3: As above except A is (89%) and B is (10%). So now B is a meaningful minority, though not as minor as C. And yet 10% of businesses are owned by B, 10% of police officers are B, 10% of strangers you pass by on the sidewalk at night are B, and they all hate C and continue to oppress them as best they can despite only being 10% of the population. I'm not entirely confident that C counts as an "oppressed minority" here, because they have overwhelming majority support. But I'm not sure that they don't. Conditional on the harassment being bad enough and A doing nothing to stop B from doing it, this still seems remarkably unpleasant to be a C.
Example 4: As above except A is (98%) and B is (1%). Now B and C are equal in numbers. I assume that if A is fairly apathetic to both sides, then B and C end up in a race war where both fight each other constantly, and they should have equal power and ability to do this. So in this case I think C is unambiguously not an "oppressed minority", although it still seems unpleasant.
Example 5: As in 4, B and C are both (1%), but B is disproportionately wealthy and influential in certain spheres. Maybe 95% of bankers are B and they all refuse service to C. Maybe every single grocery store is owned by a B and so C have to grow their own produce or buy overpriced food from gas stations. Maybe 90% of people who work at power plants are B and they keep sneakily cutting off power to houses owned by C and getting away with it. I'm still not sure if this counts as C being an "oppressed minority" because they're being harassed by a group of the same size, but there's still something going on here that "having majority support" doesn't solve.
I should clarify that I don't think we live in any of these worlds, but my impression is that most leftists think we live somewhere in Examples 1-2. Hopefully it's clear that this is a world that could exist in theory. Therefore, opposition to it should be based on empirical grounds (this is not the world we live in, and haven't for decades) rather than logical grounds.
MathWizard
Good things are good
26d ago
In some sense this proves the point though. You stopped playing. It's not that social validation is the only thing these games could provide in theory, but that due to selection effects people who like the social validation and the joy of destroying someone who was just trash talking you are the people who play obsessively play these games, while people who find it toxic and unenjoyable stop.
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
Yeah. "If you refuse to show up everyone else just votes without you" seems like a way better principle than "if you refuse to show up you deadlock the system", conditional on the not showing up being voluntary rather than some scheme where a surprise meeting was called.
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
Is the placebo effect real or just response bias? Ie, you give someone a sugar pill, tell them it will relieve their pain, and absolutely nothing physiological changes but when responding they're more likely to feel socially compelled to say there was some small reduction even if there wasn't, or they're more likely to pay attention and notice small improvements that happen randomly. Or is there an actual physiological change that happens (presumably downstream of their mental state expecting such a change and then the brain altering something to reduce pain response).
My understanding is that an awful lot of studies are hopelessly confounded by response bias and just kind of shrug because there's not much they can do about it. Are there any good papers that directly try to measure physiological effects of placebo and/or disentangle response bias from real improvements?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Absolutely. I'm not really sure how it should worded though. Because you definitely want to avoid the ability to pardon people the President himself encouraged or enabled to avoid the ability to wilfully break the law on his behalf. But you can't entirely say "no political crimes" in a broad enough sense without preventing good pardons. Like the go-to example I keep thinking of is Julian Assange, who should be/should have been pardoned, so any rule needs to make sure that people like that still can be.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Almost certainly not what you're looking for, but I have been having a lot of fun using a combination of ChatGPT and SunoAI to write song lyrics that are hyper-specific to me and people I know and inside jokes between us. My brother had a negative encounter with some random guy in a monster truck who hates electric vehicles and had to make it known, so I made a song about him, and one of the parts the AI generatred was
His dog ran off, his ex did too,
Guess they got tired of his dumb tattoo.
("Diesel Forever" misspelled on his arm...)
Which made me laugh way too much and is now one of my favorite lines in a song.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
What's so good about the camouflage?
I'm not entirely sure, I'm mostly making this claim on the basis of observation. A lot of people are convinced by it, therefore by definition it is very convincing. I don't think I fully understand it, but I think a large part of it is a mastery of Motte and Bailey tactics. There's a subset of aggressive lunatics who use fully woke ideas to cancel people and commit violence, a subset of humanities academics and mainstream media who are really good at manipulating language and public consensus who launder woke ideas as liberal ideas, a large subset of moderates who think mostly reasonable liberal thoughts but don't think very hard and believe the laundered ideas. And there's also a complementary set of classical racists and sexists who get outraged at all of the woke ideas but voice their outrage in very awful ways so the media have a scapegoat to point at. Whenever the woke do something outrageous the more principled liberals and the racists both get upset, and the media can just point at the latter as examples of people being upset at wokeism.
I'm not entirely sure why wokeism in particular is so good at this as opposed to any other movement in the present or past. Maybe it is a unique failing of liberalism that allows for this exploit. "Pretend to be tolerant and falsely portray your enemies as intolerant so you can justify your intolerance against them" only works in a society that values tolerance. But if we generalize it further, maybe it's not so unique. The camouflage of "Pretend to be X which is seen as good so you can tarnish your opponents as not-X and therefore evil, even if they're actually more X than you" is a strategy that has been tried and worked many times in the past. Inquisitions allowed evil and cruel people pretending to be good Christians to persecute and do very un-Christian things to people they didn't like. The Red Scare allowed people to accuse others of being communists do very authoritarian and un-American things to people they didn't like. The Pharisees pretended to be good Jewish followers of God and persecute people they didn't like. The esteem given to the Catholic Priesthood allowed pedophiles to slip in and molest children, relying on the high esteem to keep them above question. Any time you have a class of people generally considered "good", bad people will want to camoflage themselves under that label to avoid criticism for their misbehavior. So wokeism might just be the most recent example of this succeeding. But I call it really really good at it because unlike some examples (like the Catholic Priest one), it can get called out and noticed for what it's doing and still get away with it by opposing its detractors directly instead of merely relying on stealth alone. You can point out exactly what they're doing and how, a moderate but naive liberal can read literally everything I just wrote and still not really believe what's going on because it's complicated enough that they either don't understand or are not convinced by the evidence. For some reason. I'm don't fully understand it myself because from my perspective it's clear. But it's not merely a lack of intelligence, because lots of smart people are similarly unconvinced. Whatever the woke are doing, it works to convince lots of people, otherwise it would not have gotten away with so much for so long, it would have died shortly after people noticed.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
These are some good points, and I notice some parallels to arguments against Communism that I definitely agree with when applied there. If your thing can't be implemented then it's pointless to try, as the expected value of trying is equal to the weighted sum of the outcomes that probabilistically occur. But I'm slightly more skeptical when applied here, mostly because we observe the actual historical track record of it and its alternatives. Capitalism when implemented leads to mass prosperity for most people, but also mass inequity (though the poor tend to be much richer than they were before the new development), while Communism leads to genocide and mass poverty (and also moderate inequity).
Meanwhile, liberalism seems to mostly work most of the time, with comparatively manageable bugs. For hundreds of years since the enlightenment, we have (usually) not had wars of Protestants and Catholics murdering each other in the streets. We have mostly not had Jihads and Crusades of Muslims and Christians running around America slaughtering each other en masse. We have mostly not had lynchings and race wars, in the most literal sense of fielding armies with generals and battlefields. Collectivist illiberal violence is measured in the ones or tens instead of the thousands or millions. When you look at illiberal societies like the Nazis or the Colonial Monarchies or all of the Old pre-enlightenment civilizations you see wars and bloodshed and slavery and oppression on huge scales, justified largely on the basis of illiberal intolerance. Almost certainly secretly motivated largely due to economic demand for more land, but morally justified to the people and thus enabled on the basis of intolerance.
I think saying liberalism doesn't work is an overreaction to wokeism as a temporary phenomenon. It's a cancer, but I don't think it's a terminal case. Liberalism as defined by the enlightenment has kind of sort of worked for hundreds of years, gradually getting better and more refined, and most of the things it has caused have improved the world. There are bugs and issues and overreaches that have made things worse, but only in comparison to a hypothetical better liberalism that keeps 90% of its features and discards the 10% bad ones, not some brand new overhauled system that tosses it all away and starts from scratch.
In the end, I think your arguments about practicality work against you here. Hypothetically a totalitarian regime with eugenics, mass cultural reprogramming, mass incarceration etc led by a perfectly benevolent AND perfectly competent god-king who used them for the greater good would be better than what we have now. But in practice trying to implement that would be rolling a d20 and hoping for a nat 20, while all other results will lead to corruption, abuse, and most likely genocide (of the more violent sort, not mere sterilizations). Liberalism's got the better track record here.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Because the entire tactical advantage of wokeism is that instead of the old style of racism, which everyone agrees is bad, it's racism which is really really really good at camouflaging itself. Which means pretending to be "liberals" while condemning the actual liberals who have existed for decades.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I'm not sure what the alternative is. It seems to me like all of the problems with liberalism amount to "what if people try to impose not-liberalism?" Which, sure, difficulty practically implementing a set of ideals is a form of criticism against it. We should try to uphold liberalism, and when people try to tear it down and create unfair and unequal laws and norms we should oppose them and maintain the liberal order. That's how you uphold any order. The solution to "people trying to stop liberalism" certainly isn't "voluntarily stop liberalism", that's just surrendering immediately.
And even if you make some other order, it doesn't escape "what if people complain" unless you suppress them somehow, like if the alternative is "uphold a brutal dictatorship where we genocide anyone who opposes our regime" which tries to prevent dissidents from organizing that way. But that seems like a bad society that I don't want to live in, even if the dictator happens to share my skin tone.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
It requires belief in oneself, a firm hand, and commitment to the ideal.
How do you keep untalented people who just happen to be minorities from crying “discrimination” when they’re passed over for promotion or don’t get into the college they want to etc.?
You don't prevent them from crying discrimination. They're allowed to speak. And then you investigate in a fair and unbiased manner that neither privileges them nor disprivileges them in comparison to other races, and upon finding a lack of discrimination you dismiss the matter. If they keep whining you ignore them. They're allowed to whine, you're allowed to ignore their whining. Same way the law does when white people whine now. There are no exceptions to the rules.
How do you keep the government run by politicians running for office from turning directly to the racial spoils system and promising all kinds of set asides, promising to appoint a given group into high positions?
In principle, you continue to hold to the ideals. Racial spoils are discriminatory and racist. Don't do that. In practice, it seems hard, but no harder than it would be in any other kind of system. How do you prevent the pre-enlightenment government from doing the same to their preferred demographic? I'm not sure how pointing to a flaw where the current system is being illiberal and say "see, liberalism doesn't work". Obviously we need more color-blindness not less. There are no exceptions to the rules.
Islam is especially illiberal and discriminatory and bad. The solution is to call them out and push them back instead of treating them as special victims who can do no wrong. Liberalism doesn't mean never being harsh to anyone, it means being harsh to someone if and only if the content of their character demands it. There are no exceptions to the rules.
The problems with wokeism are the abandonment of liberal ideals, not their continuation. I don't think this was inevitable, I don't think the seeds were planted long ago, and I don't think it's unavoidable. You simply do what liberalism actually says to do and don't be a hypocrite or a grifter. Now in practice convincing and/or forcing other people to go along with this is hard, but no harder than convincing and/or forcing people to go along with anything else that isn't immediately self-serving. So unless your proposed alternative is anarchy or some Randian "everyone act according to their own self interest at all times", it will run into the same problems of people trying to defect and exploit it for personal gain.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I didn't do it, I swear! I smelled like that when I found it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Do you have a link to people discussing and/or providing evidence on outer wilds? Because I definitely found it weird how he kept abandoning trails and ignoring leads but stumbling onto important locations anyway, but at the time chalked it up to some combination of luck and intelligence.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Pop is a verb. It means things. People use it to talk about non-beverages, creating potential collisions in language usage. While collisions in language happen all the time and are manageable, it's still a point against.
Coke is a horrible term to use, because Coke is a specific beverage. Use of brands for generics, like saying "Kleenex" for tissues only works when those things are interchangeable. If you ask someone for a Kleenex and they bring you a Puffs tissue you can just use that instead. You might not even notice. If you ask someone for a Coke and they bring you a Sprite you're in for a rude surprise
Soda is clearly the superior choice. The only collision is for things like Soda Water, which is just carbonated water that they use in soda, or sodium compounds in chemistry (which the majority of people don't talk about).
You have been Culturally Imperialized, by the correct and dominant Empire. You are welcome.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
So it's more an issue of extremism? The conservatives care about the environment in a balanced way with tradeoffs, while the progressives want to move fast and break things and damn the side effects? Because that generally tracks with my overall model of how the sides operate. But then why don't we hear more about moderate conservative conservation efforts?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
But in practice I almost never hear conservatives talk about the environment or recycling or trying to impose climate agreements or sanctions on other nations with heavy pollution.
I suppose in practice my immediate family is reasonably conservative and cares about recycling and not littering. But I never hear about it from conservative politicians or political advocates.
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