MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
12hr ago
The difference is that an officer physically grappling them physically restrains them. The officer has a plausible means of preventing the escape beyond their gun. If the officer did not have a gun, or was not allowed to use their gun, a physical grapple is still a useful and legitimate means of restraining a suspect. A normal, non-police officer attempting to do a citizen's arrest might plausibly physically restrain someone this way because it literally restrains them.
In the car case, the officer does not have any means of preventing escape other than their gun. Their body is not going to stop the car, they don't expect their body to stop the car. They do not intend to physically restrain the car, and they very dearly hope they don't have to try. If they did not have a gun or were not allowed to use it they wouldn't stand there in the first place because they're not stupid and they don't want to die. The only reason to stand in front of a car is to threaten the suspect with a gun. It is not a restraint it is a threat.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I'm not saying people actually have a right to flee. They're still breaking the law. I'm saying their fleeing is not equivalent to violence and deliberately booby trapping their flight path to be deadly is wrong. Ie, imagine the police officers were going to bust into a drug house but, before entering, they stick landmines at all of the doors and windows so anyone fleeing gets blown up. Yeah, the drug dealers should get arrested and don't deserve to escape. But if they try to flee they shouldn't die for it. I'm pro-death penalty for especially horrific acts of villainy. I'm pro police officers killing people if forced into a dilemma where it's their life vs the life of a criminal threatening them. I'm not pro killing literally any criminal for literally any crime. Consequences should be proportional. Fleeing is not proportional to death. Police officers endangering themselves in order to create an artificial escalation so that fleeing is proportional to death is not the fleeing criminal's fault, but the police's, so does not change the moral calculus here.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
You say this as if this is not already the case in our current reality. How exactly do you think that police use of force laws work? Because I guarantee you it's not the free for all that anti-police activists like to think it is.
The "almost" equivalent is the part where the neck garotte would probably be illegal in our world, but is legal in this hypothetical.
Nobody has a legal or moral right to flee from the police, nonviolently or otherwise! Preventing criminals from fleeing the police is a good thing! They shouldn't do that! Why do you seemingly care so much about making sure that criminals have a fair shot at beating an arrest?
I'm not saying people actually have a right to flee. They're still breaking the law. I'm saying their fleeing is not equivalent to violence and deliberately booby trapping their flight path to be deadly is wrong. Ie, imagine the police officers were going to bust into a drug house but, before entering, they stick landmines at all of the doors and windows so anyone fleeing gets blown up. Yeah, the drug dealers should get arrested and don't deserve to escape. But if they try to flee they shouldn't die for it. I'm pro-death penalty for especially horrific acts of villainy. I'm pro police officers killing people if forced into a dilemma where it's their life vs the life of a criminal threatening them. I'm not pro killing literally any criminal for literally any crime. Consequences should be proportional. Fleeing is not proportional to death. Police officers endangering themselves in order to create an artificial escalation so that fleeing is proportional to death is not the fleeing criminal's fault, but the police's, so does not change the moral calculus here.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
It's the far extreme on a spectrum of "deliberately put oneself in harms way that the suspect did not themselves intend to put you under". If you barge into a restaurant kitchen and the chef is holding a knife and you dive underneath him, he is not threatening you with the knife. You threatened yourself. Millions of people drive cars. Technically they are deadly weapons but they aren't generally going around threatening people with them. If you jump in front of a moving car then the driver is not threatening you, you are threatening yourself with it.
If you jump in front of an unmoving car then there's some ambiguity there. But if your goal of moving in front of it is with the purpose of threatening yourself with it (the police don't expect their body to stop the car, they expect their guns to stop the car) then something fishy is going on. From the misbehaving police officers perspective, the car's status as a weapon is a feature, and the policeman's vulnerability is being leveraged this way. If the police had magical invincibility powers that made them unharmed by getting hit by cars the strategy would no longer work. We want to incentivize police officers to keep themselves more safe, not incentivize them to endanger themselves to exploit laws intended to protect them. Clearly something has gone wrong when that has become the case.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
I'm not entirely sure where I stand on this issue, but to push back on the idea of it being a slippery slope, I think we can steelman the "fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence" idea to something like "the police should not deliberately block off only nonviolent methods of fleeing in order to force an equivalence between fleeing and violence.
Imagine a dystopia in which police have a secret goal of wanting to shoot as many people as possible, but are legally prohibited from this because their laws are almost equivalent to ours: you can only shoot someone in self defense (or defense of another), but have some extra loopholes that allow the following scenario. The police always travel in pairs, and instead of normal handcuffs they carry one cuff with a long thin wire dangling off them. When a police officer cuffs someone it doesn't directly restrain them in any way, but the police officer ties the wire around their own neck. This means if the suspect attempts to run and gets far enough away, the wire tightens and slices/strangles the officer. The other officer can then legally shoot the suspect in order to save their partner's life. That is, the officer is deliberately endangering themselves in a conditional way in order to create opportunities to shoot people.
The steelmanned argument would then place "standing in front of a driven vehicle" in this same scenario. You are not physically restraining a person. You are not actually preventing them from escaping. Instead, you are creating a scenario in which you deliberately endanger yourself conditional on them fleeing as an excuse to shoot them. This is roughly equivalent to just training a gun on them and saying "don't run or I'll shoot you", which police officers are generally not allowed to do. This is a loophole in which they are allowed to do it. Saying "we should close this loophole, you can't just put yourself in danger for the express purpose of giving yourselves opportunities to shoot people" does not slip into "violence is allowed" because it's categorically and consistently anti danger/violence. It's not necessarily about deliberately giving people opportunities to flee, or even failing to close off opportunities to flee if you can actually do that, but it's a claim that abusing your legal power and using yourself as a hostage is not a legitimate means to close off escape.
Of course, I expect a large fraction of people do believe weaker versions of this and just hate police. But I think there is some legitimate point here in the stronger version.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
The health of the market relies on the wisdom of crowds, which requires crowds of people to be able to reliably win from it. Insider trading is bad not because in some moral sense "unfairness" is bad, but because if it happens often enough that ordinary people learn that it's unfair they'll stop participating. Prediction markets are zero sum to begin with, so I don't expect them to survive long-term without subsidies, but what life they do have is built by the belief that smart people can earn money from their intuitions. If that fails to be true because insiders keep swooping in and snatching up all the money at the last minute, then fewer non-insiders will participate, and we'll only ever get accurate results when there are insiders.
This would be less catastrophic than if it happened to the stock market, since the death of prediction markets wouldn't ruin us the same way the death of capital investing, but it's still a potentially existential crisis within its demand. This isn't just about people's moral intuitions, there are stakes.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
The story is they took pictures already existing and nudified them. I highly doubt they were pictures of her wearing a burka.
The pictures could have been literally anything. Are you not aware of how powerful AI has become? I use the Burka as an example not because I think she was wearing one, but because that's all that would be needed. Boy gets picture of girl's face in literally any photo that contains her face, boy gets nude picture of literally anyone else that has nude photos, boy tells AI "put this girls face on that body". Boom, a "nudified" photo. It's not authentic, it's not her real body, but the AI's good enough to make it realistic enough that the boys can look at it and giggle and masturbate to it and tease her about it, and horrify her or anyone who cares about her if they saw it.
Or skip the second photo, just tell the AI "nudify this picture" and it uses the body contour lines and imagines a naked body of an underage girl with approximately the same size and pose embedded into the photo. Again, literally any photo containing her face, and I guess enough of a body (in any amount of clothing) that there's a spot to put the imaginary naked body.
just that it is expected of teenage boys.
I expect teenage boys to not care about the "authenticity" of a 90% exposed bikini-clad body in order for their nudification to count. I expect teenage boys to not need a thirst trap of a girl in order to get horny enough to want to see her nude. I expect teenage boys to just get horny. I expect teenage boys to see literally any girl and want to see her naked, even if she's ugly, if only out of curiosity. For all we know they could have gone "uggh, Jenny is such a prude, she never shows any cleavage and she always looks scornfully at us whenever we talk about girl's tits. We should make a nude picture out of her, wouldn't that be funny? Hah, and then make fun of her about it, she'd get so mad. Trololol."
I expect teenage boys to get horny, and to learn to control it and not victimize other people in the process. If one boy had, on his own, in private, asked an AI to generate a nude of her and then he masturbated to it and never told anyone, I would have no problem with that. Yes, it probably counts as child pornography in a technical and/or legal sense, but if she wasn't actually involved in the creation of it and she never finds out about it then nobody would be harmed by its existence. Heck, if every single boy at her school entirely on their own initiative had AI generate a nude of her and masturbated to it in private and never told anyone about it and nobody ever found out, this would still be fine. The problem is the social dynamic, the sharing, the teasing, the humiliation. Shame is a valuable tool that society can wield in order to disincentivize anti-social behaviors that the law either can't or shouldn't get involved in. Slut shaming is a valuable tool that society used to use in order to disincentivize slutty behavior. This breaks down when it isn't being wielded against sluts, but against anyone for any reason. This is the same as the wife that gets mad at her husband because she had a dream that he cheated on her. It's a dream, it's not real. I don't think we should send people to prison for AI-faked videos of them stealing, I don't think we should scorn people for AI-faked videos of them saying horrible things, and I don't think we should shame people for AI-faked nudes of them. And because the human brain is wired in certain ways I think that sharing faked nudes of someone is inevitably going to lead to shame and humiliation of the same type as sharing real ones, even if not quite at the same level of magnitude. And that's wrong to inflict on someone who hasn't earned it.
On the contrary, when someone does do something wrong, punishments help correct their behavior so they don't do it again. Someone who incorrectly inflicts this humiliation on an innocent person, needs to be punished in order to correct their behavior. A healthy young man should enjoy his sexuality in a way that doesn't victimize people. Beating the crap out of these boys would help them learn that lesson and become better men.
Are they normally the same people? It seems to be in this case, but that's what's confusing me. Because normally I think it's the "hypocrisy" of different people who believe similar things for opposite reasons.
The liberal, sex positive, man says "no big deal, free sex is great, everyone likes sluts". The conservative, sex negative, man says "women shouldn't sleep around, nobody likes a slut". In most cases of a woman fucking around and finding out, both say "stop complaining, you did this to yourself." If you just read a bunch of comments by people criticizing slutty women you might think they're massive hypocrites, but if half the people believe on thing and half believe the other and they're literally different people then each one can have an entirely consistent worldview internally and just present a united front on this one particular issue. This happens all the time on different issues. I constantly see people who have superficially similar external opinions to me with stupid garbage reasoning underlying them.
But it seems to me like in the AI case that shouldn't happen, and the various sides should strongly disagree, because the woman didn't do this to herself so the conservative wouldn't assign any blame. Any assertions that this could be fixed by a man (father or husband) controlling her and her deferring to his authority make absolutely no sense because that wouldn't have stopped this either. If you think women sharing nudes is bad and want to disincentivize the behavior then it makes no sense to punish someone who didn't engage in this behavior with the same treatment as someone who did. That's not how incentives work.
It's exactly the sort of thoughtless pattern matching I would expect to see from a normie who just parrots party lines, not here on the Motte.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
Did you read the story? It was not a thirst trap, it was AI generated. She did not consent to this. If a girl sends nudes to a guy and he starts spreading them around, he's a jerk, but she made her own bed and she has to lie in it. With AI you can make convincing edits of literally anyone. Any picture of your face can be swapped onto a fake body. Any full body image of you can be nudified with realistic seeming body proportions. Even if you've never been online a day in your life a school photo in the yearbook or even just a quick cellphone pic someone takes of you without your knowledge or consent, and there you go.
This isn't sluts getting slut-shamed: as far as we know this is a completely innocent and pure 13 year old girl who was victimized through absolutely no fault of her own. Her only crime was existing as a 13 year old girl, and the only thing she possibly could have done to avoid this is to live in a bubble where nobody can see her face, or disfigure herself so horribly that nobody would want AI nudes with her deformed face on them. We're talking beyond Islamic levels of repression, since even a burka would reveal enough of her face to enable this.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6d ago
That's as good an excuse as any to end the whole series, then.
I greatly enjoy this series and appreciate you doing it and, prior to seeing the mod comment, was wondering if there was a way to report a series of posts for "quality contribution", because while I don't think any individual one of these posts rises to quite that level I think the series in aggregate is worth that.
I think you're being a little overdramatic here. This post has 4 stories in it, you could easily have included only 3 of them and, while you'd have lost 25% of the available content, it also would have taken 25% less time to type up. It does seem annoying, and goes against the Motte's general anti-censorship atmosphere, but if I squint I can see their point in that this is "Friday Fun Thread" and not the culture war post. They're not just picking on you to be mean.
I don't know, ultimately you get to choose what you do with your time and whether you're willing to compromise. I just think that this is a fun feature of the Motte that you create each week, and would be sad to see it go.
MathWizard
Good things are good
9d ago
Definitely slop, but comparable to Netflix tier human-made slop and not the kind of garbage tier we'd have seen a few years ago. They're getting somewhere, but they're not there yet.
I actually wonder if the bottleneck on AI is eventually going to be high quality training data. If there's only 20-30 good 2D Disney movies, and the rest are mediocre, then AI might struggle to have enough data to generalize and make original movies in that style unless it borrows from the mediocre ones. If the majority of modern movies with high quality CGI have garbage plots filled with woke nonsense and bad characters, then AI might accidentally keep filling its plots with bad characters because that's what the humans it's trained on having been doing for the past several decades. Slop in, slop out.
MathWizard
Good things are good
12d ago
My Vanguard stocks are up 14% since this time last year. That's my lazy rule of thumb on how well the economy is doing, so that probably means the economy is doing well. There's a bunch of other possible explanations such as inflation, giant economic bubbles, or expectations that GDP will go up soon but hasn't yet. But the Trump administration faking numbers is unlikely to cause this, as the greedy and intelligent investors are unlikely to be conned so easily.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
I don't do this. I save my nighttime thoughts for later when/if it's an appropriate time/place to say them out loud, if they're worth saying out loud at all. I guess I only have a very small number of data points to work with, but I'm also extrapolating from the general stereotype of men being more stoic.
MathWizard
Good things are good
15d ago
Is this a thing for everyone? Because I have also observed this.
My guess is that it's the thing you do where it's late and night and your mind starts wandering about all sorts of heavy topics: plans, ideas, memeories, past arguments, regrets, etc. And women just have to say it out loud right then and there because that's when they thought about it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d ago
I would still consider a scenario that's like 90% socialist with 10% capitalist hack to be socialist, just like I'd consider a scenario that's 90% capitalist with 10% socialist hack (like universal healthcare) to be capitalist. I'd still consider a long-term successful example of that to be pretty surprising.
Unless it's like post-singularity with some genius AI overlord who can simultaneously solve the economy, efficiently produce tons of resources, and doesn't need much human labor so can just distribute them without much concern for proper incentive structures. But I'd expect such an AI to also be able to solve capitalism's problems and create libertarian capitalist utopia too. For now, when dealing with humans, you need the signalling mechanisms.
MathWizard
Good things are good
18d ago
Capitalism tends to produce more efficient/powerful/good outcomes than Socialism.
I can imagine a world filled with rational and/or kind-hearted beings who were able to cooperate together efficiently under a socialist system and share things with a lot less deadweight loss than a capitalist system where people keep trying to exploit each other for profit. I just don't think that's the world we live in, I don't think that's the kind of species we are. Capitalism's greatest strength is its robustness. It can take selfishness and wastefulness and corruption and theft and stupidity, and it automatically pushes back and has individual pieces break without destroying the greater structure, so it can evolve and become stronger. Negative feedback loops instead of positive feedback. Socialism allows corruption to fester and grow like a cancer. At least, that's the world I think we live in. If that were to not be the case and whatever excuses socialists make about why it's always failed were actually true it would change a lot of my beliefs about economics, politics, and human nature.
MathWizard
Good things are good
19d ago
The trial judge rejects the defendant's argument. In this case, defendant actively engaged in a fistfight with the officers, showing that he indeed was willing to carry out his threats to harm them. The trial judge imposes a total sentence of four years (with the possibility of parole after two years) for the two threats. The appeals panel affirms.
This creeps me out. The idea that he doesn't get in trouble at all for attacking people (which he did), but he does get in trouble for "terroristic threats" (I would not consider threats against a specific person to be "terroristic"), and the guilt is proven by the fact that he did attack people (even though he was acquitted of this).
Is this simply that the criteria for "assault" are strict and he didn't quite meet all the criteria? Because what this looks like to me is an ad-hoc "we think he should get a little bit of jail time but not a lot, so let's just convict him of something that carries a smaller penalty than assault." and abusing the law to get that outcome. Because in what world do you prioritize punishing words over actions?
MathWizard
Good things are good
20d ago
The treaty influences the interests that a power thinks it has. And the domestic and international support it gets. If Turkey suddenly starts bombing Libya with normal combs, the U.S. might not get involved. If Turkey suddenly starts gassing them with chemical weapons then the U.S. might get up in their face about it and either attack them or provide defense to Libya (possibly in exchange for concessions). It would have no bearing on the actual strategic value to us of invading Turkey or defending Libya, but politicians care about getting re-elected, and telling people "we helped defeat the evil chemical weapon users" sells a lot better than "we picked a side in a war".
Power is ultimately derived from strength. But power that does not move does not count, and treaties are an excuse to move for anyone who already wanted to but lacked a sufficiently official reason.
MathWizard
Good things are good
23d ago
Sure. But then the second graph demonstrates the sensitivity of the model to this assumption. This turns out to be a critical assumption that heavily influences the results, at least the part of the results we care about. Therefore any conclusions/morals/takeaways need to emphasize this caveat.
MathWizard
Good things are good
23d ago
Here’s another graph where the benefit of other people caps out at 50% of them going outside. The situation is much better! Your couch can be pretty great before the activity starts seriously dying off. But again, just like before, once it reaches that critical threshold, average happiness gets worse for a bit before it gets better again in the world of only shut-ins.
[Insert Graph that looks barely at all like the first one]
So the moral of the story is, to avoid isolation and depression, move to a big city, pick popular hobbies, and if someone asks you to go caroling this Christmas, go even if you don’t want to, because it will make the experience better for everyone else.
I was with you up until this conclusion. How on Earth do you look at that second graph and draw that moral from it. The existence of a tiny window where happiness is a decreasing function while being increasing in the vast majority of space suggests that the moral for the second set of parameters is "we should prioritize making indoor activities more fun because in almost all cases it increases happiness. Also we shouldn't pressure introverts to participate in social activities because they're clearly enjoying themselves more via their revealed preferences."
We get very different conclusions for the first and second set of parameters if we're being honest instead of using motivated reasoning based on a pre-supposed moral. The actual moral for the overall model should probably be something like "this deadweight loss phenomenon appears under some model parameters but not others, so the applicability of this to the real world depends a lot on the circumstances and we need to measure and investigate further to determine which world we live in, but it's an interesting possibility especially in less crowded spaces such as rural areas."
MathWizard
Good things are good
25d ago
A more charitable read would be that by blithely denying the label and then agreeing dismissively and moving on he demonstrates a level of disdain/apathy for the label. He doesn't care whether he technically meets the dictionary definition of the word "racist". It's a word. He cares about [crime statistics] and object level concerns. Having the confidence to take one for the team and say "if you're going to derail the object level debate and go on some unimportant tangent about whether I'm a "racist" then fine, I'll let you win this point, since I don't expect any of my audience to care anyway, so we can move on to something worth talking about."
He's not taking it seriously, but in 2025 taking a debate about whether someone is "racist" or not seriously is pointless. Everyone just uses it to mean people they don't like. I would argue that Morgan defected first by bringing it up in the first place, so a sarcastic dismissive reply to that particular point and then a transition back to something that actually matters is an appropriate debate tactic that doesn't make me trust him less.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
This is a really bad take. It's trivial to conceive of a preference ordering consistent with any standard, being:
-
Having a partner who adheres to X standards
-
Having no partner
-
Having a partner who does not adhere to X standards.
As a typical example for non-strict standards, consider X = "does not regularly smear shit on themselves". Most people would rather die alone than live their life with a shit-smearing partner, but still would like a partner in general as long as they can find one that meets their standards. If these standards are stricter then they're making a larger trade-off: stricter standards are going to drastically lower the probability of finding someone who meets them, but presumably increases the value of finding such a partner.
So if they have a strict set of criteria and stick to it anyway despite knowing it reduces their chances, it means their preference for those standards is stronger than their preference for having any partner, which is nonzero evidence that their preference for a partner is small, but it's absurd to extrapolate from that to concluding that their preference for a partner is negative. That scaring off most potential partners is actually the goal rather than an unfortunate side effect. If that were the case they could just call themselves asexual and not mention standards at all.
Small non-negative numbers exist.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
If you pay each employee a generous $100k/yr then you can easily do that with 1/3 of your money. I'm not able to easily verify prices, but AI suggests that the apartment or house would be somewhere around 30k-100k per month which... on the lower end would eat up a large chunk of your money, but is still in the right ballpark and order of magnitude, so you could probably afford one but not both.
Inflation is not uniform. And land in particular is especially resistant to technological improvement, so it makes sense that its relative price has increased much more (as population grows) than most other things. Meanwhile stuff like super fancy technology is much cheaper than the equivalent in the 1950s, and those all averaged together produce the effective inflation rate. So the modern version would give you have a smaller house but with fancier computers and smart technology, which is either better or worse depending on your preferences, but should average out to about the same.
Or, another way of thinking about it is that the $1.1M person is less rich today compared to everyone else than the $100k 1959 person would be, but in a world with cheaper and more plentiful goods and services their purchasing power is similar (greater among goods and services which have gotten much cheaper, but lesser among things that haven't because they're not actually as rich as the 1959 person)
MathWizard
Good things are good
1mo ago
Is that relevant?
There are a number of differences. First, the car is both the weapon and the means of transportation. The chef could easily drop the knife and then charge the police officer which, while they definitely should not do, would not be deadly force and not deserve death, even if it does deserve harsh punishment.
Second, the police officer has a legitimate means of stopping the chef by physically blocking the door. Because people can stop people, but people cannot stop vehicles. The police officer fully expects that if the chef comes at him he can physically restrain him. The police in front of a car does not intend this. The officer does not have any means of preventing escape other than their gun. Their body is not going to stop the car, they don't expect their body to stop the car. They do not intend to physically restrain the car, and they very dearly hope they don't have to try. If they did not have a gun or were not allowed to use it they wouldn't stand there in the first place because they're not stupid and they don't want to die. The only reason to stand in front of a car is to threaten the suspect with a gun. It is not a restraint it is a threat.
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