curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
make sure to use o1, it's by far the best at complex reasoning and should be competitive at the later hardest ones, which are the most interesting
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
It's very rare anyone cares about being competent and effective at mass killing. Anyone sophisticated enough to potentially do that is sophisticated enough to have more useful goals (and also is probably embedded in modern social structures that think killing people is, like, bad). If you're a mass shooter who wants to kill people as a form of revenge, killing 100 isn't going to communicate much that killing 5 didn't. https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror
It's loosely analogous to 'why are so few suicide attempts successful'? I can't imagine it's difficult to effectively kill yourself if you prepare well, it's just that most people who want to do it are doing it for reasons that don't fit well with effectiveness
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
People might be interested in a longpost about overcoming those chronic issues?
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
You're Donald Trump. Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy extended you an invite to her podcast, to appear fair after inviting Harris. For the sake of the question's premise, you've accepted. How do you play it? Is there any way to make it +ev for your campaign?
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I agree, but you do need to make a recurring payment to the grocery store for the egg itself, and another recurring payment for the electricity, which I'm not sure is philosophically different in kind.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
This is directionally supporting, not opposing, but
For instance, one argument might be that "people will not be able to build up wealth"
I don't think anything in this vision prevents you from buying index funds, which will build wealth faster than alternatives. Real estate has appreciated over the recent past, but YIMBYs would argue it's just because local governments restrict good land use and properties in desirable locations are effectively taxi medallions.
"But stocks are just an abstraction that depends on the global economy!" Yeah, so is your property, you own it because the legal system and culture think you do and your use of it depends on your remote developer job.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Trump, Harris, and Walz are all quite smart, as one would expect from people who've managed to get some of the most coveted positions in American politics. They're not particle physicists, but it's a strong selection effect. They sound dumb in public, just like Vance did in the OP, because the score they're optimizing for is the one from voters, and voters aren't smart and aren't noticing the things you are.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I had really hoped Vance was smarter than this. If he was baited into it he shouldn't have bitten and if it was intentional then he should have known better.
Why do you think it's a blunder? This is the classic politician move, if you're asked about a losing issue, just deflect. It sounds bad, but it's less bad than actually addressing the question. There's a reason they all do it. It distracts, it muddies the waters a bit. My opponent's asking me this ridiculous question to distract from Border Czar Harris's invasion of migrant criminals and nation-destroying inflation et cetera.
Assuming he can't say "yes" because Trump won't let him, what else should he say?
The real blunder is that Trump won't just shut up about the election and let Vance say he'd certify. People who care about Trump saying the election is rigged are voting for him anyway. There's no harm in just lying here.* I have to imagine Trump and the people around him really believe it!
* obviously it's bad and corrosive but i'm taking the perspective of political strategy here, and they all lie (sorry, strategically take positions) anyway
in my opinion trump should keep fighting about election fraud if he's correct, and not if he's wrong. the election fraud discourse over the past few years has both been, as far as i can tell, objectively very wrong, it's a classic example of a "conspiracy theory". IMO "conspiracy theory" is a very poor name, and what people really mean with that word isn't that something's a theory about a grand conspiracy, but a pattern of poor reasoning that leads certain types of people to wild, dramatic, and false conclusions. the election fraud isn't a "conspiracy theory" because it'd require a bunch of democrats to conspire to rig the election - that could totally happen! - it's a "conspiracy theory" because the reasoning people use to support it is of the kind people use to claim JFK vaccine CIA aliens.
we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on,
the reason we have a lot of service workers, and not a lot of factory workers, is that the production of cheap consumer goods has gotten really efficient, and people (including you) would rather pay money for good service at a restaurant, or enjoyable content delivered via the internet, than for more cheap consumer goods. infinity percent tariffs on cars would not revitalize detroit!
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
The problem there is that we would have to essentially run a full title for all land going back to patent.
Would you? If you're the state, you can simply make it so that "in fifteen years, we will switch to a central registry. If you think you have a claim to this land, contact us before ten years from now, or you lose it".
And even if not, it's a one time payment that permanently does away with 'running titles', so it's still probably worth it in the long run.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Uh... which wikipedia article (interesting argument, by the way) conclusively proves central developments of history aren't deliberately implemented?
Just, like, a holistic understanding of history? Like, in one sense, progressivism and liberalism were very much deliberately implemented, propagandized, and put onto the masses by the elites. But they did that because of some combination of really believing it, it being in their material interests, and all sorts of other things. I don't think there's room for 'womens rights movements exist mostly because some people (who?) wanted to do population control'
You didn't answer:
Like, are you implying that the reason liberalism and progressivism exist is that it's a ploy by the elites to reduce the global population
Which was the most important question. I strongly disagree with what I understand you to have said so far, but I still don't really understand what your core point is.
Step me through it
Most directly, they just pattern-match it to a 'thing conservatives say' and then react negatively because it's a thing conservatives say. That's most of it.
Likewise, when I react negatively to "hey, let's find a way to keep fertility rates from crashing", I think it's reasonable to conclude I don't want to keep fertility rates from crashing.
They imagine, because politics makes people insane, that you want to force women to have children and not ever have abortions and be submissive religious housewives. If you made them choose between a fertility rate of 1.2 and 2.0 they'd choose 2.0, but people generally don't have reasonable preferences about society as a whole, so they just don't think about it
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
And where do central developments of modern history come from, are they by any chance deliberately implemented?
I honestly do not understand how one can have this perspective while also having read, like, multiple wikipedia articles or a single book. It indicates what appears to me to be a complete misunderstanding of history? Like, are you implying that the reason liberalism and progressivism exist is that it's a ploy by the elites to reduce the global population? I don't get it.
I mean, it's only so long you can twirl mustaches and laughing like a me monocled villain, without people noticing.
Yeah real life isn't a movie where the villains are indicated to the audience with artistic foreshadowing.
Also the reaction to fertility concern belies them supposedly not caring about it.
This is the same bad logic as "the conservative reaction to concerns about structural racism proves they're actually racist nazis". In politics, people on all sides have a lot of insane reactions to a lot of things, often without particularly deep philosophical reasons.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
My interpretation was just that the markets were wrong, as they are sometimes, and didn't correctly take into account different arrival rates of different sources of ballots. I don't find that surprising, markets in new / infrequent things aren't that efficient and are often wrong. The people setting the prices are human, and humans need practice to get good at things. Markets in stocks are somewhat efficient because there are many stocks and many people trading them for a long time, and even then...
This happened at the same time as the midnight ballot counting that restarted after kicking out neutral observers
I think this isn't indicative, really. Election day was a day, and a lot of things happened on that day, including dozens of claimed frauds, so the drop would've happened after one fraud. I don't think this is a particularly strong rebuttal but it's what I think
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Why are we assuming that this is just some magical "global trend" appearing out of nowhere
Because it isn't a 'magic global trend that appeared out of nowhere', it's a central political/moral/philosophical development of modern history, something that basically all politicians, intellectuals, philosophers have been debating for the past few hundred years? You can read historical progressives and talk to existing progressives, and they're much more concerned about stuff like freeing women from domination than they are overpopulation.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
And I don't think it is, but I don't think that's what OP was talking about. "scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the ... simulationism ... out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing ... "
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
The best evidence I have is the midnight flip is forex markets.
elaborate?
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
Ok I think that was a combination of changes brought on directly by technology (women always did a large amount of critical labor within the household, farming or making clothes or similar, cleaning, physically maintaining the household, and as technology automated that having them work made sense) and changes brought on for direct political, eg progressive, reasons which in turn was enabled by technology. I believe little of that had the explicit aim of lowering the birth rate. There was, of course, the overpopulation panic, but I think the impact of that was very small compared to the global trend of progressivism and technology!
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I wasn't trying to use a specific meaning of 'physicalism', just a general sense that 'physics is all there is', but
In philosophy, physicalism is the view that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical,[1] or that everything supervenes on the physical.[2] It is opposed to idealism, according to which the world arises from mind. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substance" view of the nature of reality, unlike "two-substance" (mind–body dualism) or "many-substance" (pluralism) views. Both the definition of "physical" and the meaning of physicalism have been debated.
this also works
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
there was pretty compelling appearance of fraud in the seemingly sychronized one-way anomolies that took place on election night
This kind of thing deserves a really good blog post that I can't really write. everything is like this. Every election, every mass shooting, every presidential assassination attempt, the covid vaccinations, there are always unexplainable anomalies that clearly prove something's going on, even if we don't quite know what it is. Some numbers just aren't right, the times don't line up, some things are suspiciously aligned, some evidence conveniently disappears. An election security engineer at Dominion voting systems used to be antifa. (and, of course, his last name was Eric Coomer - they want you to know it's fucking with you). The numbers don't pass the statistical tests, the dem numbers spiked at the last minute, a pipe burst and they stopped counting, more people voted than were registered to vote, a van seemed to have huge folders of fake ballots ...
The thing is, the world's really complicated. Weird things happen sometimes. Pipes sometimes burst. More often than that, people make mistakes. They do the statistics wrong (if >50% of published academic papers can do it, the substack blogger 'bad cattitude' can do it too). They see a huge change in the reported number of votes on a website and think that means the underlying was changed, when the website was just wrong. They hear a second shot, maybe a third shot.
People constantly make mistakes. I do something pretty dumb on most days. I thought it was Sunday more of last Saturday than I'd have liked to (I was pretty sick, admittedly). And there are more minor mistakes, misreading a point in a paper or blogpost or doing some math wrong or misplaying in a game. And a big problem with internet politics, and especially with what people call 'conspiracy theories', is nothing forces you to notice mistakes. You don't show up at the wrong time, you don't lose the deal, the shed doesn't collapse. You just post, and if it's interesting enough it gets likes, and then a bunch of other people hear it, and it repeats itself. And then you keep making mistakes, and you don't learn how to catch them and it builds on itself. And so a thousand different reasons why the election was stolen, or why covid's not real / is still, in 2024, literally a genocide of the disabled / the vaccine is killing a million people spread and mutate across the internet.
I'm pretty sure none of the anomalies were objectively surprising or worrisome. Every one I've dug into, or seen ymes dig into, has ended up being nothing. Not responding to most of them was reasonable. Of course some of the media, and especially progressives on twitter, was unduly dismissive for poor reasons, but that happens with everything on every side. And then, uh, the president of the united states believes the theories and tries to get Pence to throw the election to the House and j6 happens. The world sure is complicated.
It's not really a moral failing to mess up a statistical test and think the election is stolen, or at least any more than every other mistake (and tbh they might all be). But it's still unfortunate.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
The situation is symmetric though. The union's doing this exactly because it has the negotiating power to extract profits for its members! They already make double what the average menial laborer makes and want to double it again.
Also, the margins aren't increasingly thin. Stock prices (discounted future profits) keep going up, and stuff keeps getting cheaper. The things that aren't getting cheaper are often an illusion (healthcare is more expensive mostly because we're using more of it, education's getting more expensive because ... people want more of it, and price isn't tied to anything). Housing's bad, but you can't win everything.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
I don't think that's a huge component, no. Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing, and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians). What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?
Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past
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