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Walterodim

Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t

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joined 2022 September 05 12:47:06 UTC 

				
User ID: 551


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
Walterodim


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 12:47:06 UTC
				


				
					

					
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User ID: 551


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Scott: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.




The precision of the estimate is unreasonable but yeah, the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure some of the patients. If someone was under the impression that the purpose was to cure 100% of people that walk through the door, they would be operating under a poor map of reality.




The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.




Yes, again, this is pretty much the purpose of the Ukrainian military. Much like the cancer hospital, rational actors would probably prefer that it be able to achieve total victory, but because that isn't actually possible, constructing a machine that grinds Russia into a years-long stalemate is much more practical.




The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.




Again, perhaps too specific, but yeah, the purpose of the British government is approximately this. If your model of the British government was that it was entirely to serve the British people, you'd come away with a worse model than the guy that looks at this outcome and concludes that this is pretty much what the system is for.




The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide.




This one is just sleight of hand - the purpose of the bus system is to move a whole bunch of people, and it does exactly that. If the objection is just that systems also have externalities that doesn't really seem like it's actually arguing with the central thesis of POSIWID.


Scott's central examples of how wrong POSIWID is are all things that I think are tolerably good examples of how POSIWID is a better model of reality that listening to people tell you what a system is supposed to do. If you look at the outcomes, you'll get some reasonable understanding of what the system is constructed to do.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 9, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Even without a motor, cycling is just much more dangerous per mile than being in car for obvious reasons. Make a mistake in a car at 20 MPH and you're in for an annoying morning. Make the same mistake on a bike and your life is in jeopardy. Worse still, it doesn't even have to be your mistake. One of the best things that ever happened to my future self was getting T-boned by someone that ran a stop sign and hit me when I was driving a small car in my early 20s - real lesson in the fact that you can just be minding your own business and have your life changed by some reckless idiot.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


From what I can tell, most of the accusations here are very minor, though. Using immigration laws to sidestep due process is wrong, though.




In many of these conversations, the term "due process" is doing a ton of work that isn't consistent with my understanding of it. Without looking anything up and prior to these arguments, if someone asked me what "due process" meant, I think I would have said that it refers to having a clear and legible legal standard that can't be circumvented to achieve an end goal. That doesn't actually mean that it must take particularly long, that there is no discretion involved, and that there must be some remedy to having it executed. In the case of the Hamas-sympathetic immigrants, I do not interpret "due process" as meaning that they're entitled to anything other than the explicitly laid out statutory considerations, which include discretion for removal at the behest of the Secretary of State's judgment. That's it, that's the due process, it's that when you're a non-citizen in the United States, the Secretary of State has discretion for your removal. If you think that's a bad law, that's fine, but the law exists and was passed legitimately by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President.


As a matter of principle, I am completely fine with the due process leading to deportation being pretty short and shallow. You just don't have any actual right to live in countries that you're not a citizen of (Schengen and other arrangements notwithstanding). If the host country simply thinks you're really annoying, they can tell you to leave.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yes, those are also examples of positions that people hold that empirical evidence won't move them off of. Some of that may be because they don't think the evidence is compelling, but most of it is that these just aren't questions that are amenable to rigorous testing.


I think there are good non-empirical arguments for why transing children is a terrible idea (and people have made them in this thread) but I don't expect them to be compelling to strict utilitarians, particularly the utilitarians that are credulous about any institution that cloaks itself in the aesthetics of science. If my position depended on whether some shoddy, non-replicating study is consistent with it or not, I think that would be much thinner than reaching conclusions from considering the situation with the context of history and human nature.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll bite that bullet - my opposition to gender transitioning prepubescent children does not hinge on science and I would not be convinced by studies that purported to show that it's actually very good for children. Many questions are good questions to apply the scientific method to and I don't think this is one of them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
People vastly overestimate the percentage of government expenditures are on various things that I would personally prefer to zero out. If they were right, the benefits of zeroing those things out would be much, much larger than what I hope for.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, in the context of the Olympics, it's a high bar. I guess these days it's sub-27 for men and sub-30 for women for it to be considered a fast race.


In general conversation, I would probably call someone "fast" if they could go sub-35. I suspect that my definition works pretty much the same as yours though - that's "fast" because it's faster than me rather than it being relative to a given percentage of the population. For reference, I haven't run a 10K in a couple years, but split the first 10K of my last half marathon at 38 minutes and continued at the same pace for the rest of the race (on a fairly hill course). Other recent race results suggest that I'd run 36-low on a good day on a fast course or track. I'd probably agree that the most common spot for people in the hobby running community to start calling someone "fast" is BQ or equivalent speeds at shorter distances - sub-18 5K, sub-38 10K, sub-3 marathon are probably pretty common numbers.


To be a bit corny, I don't like to call people slow as long as they're trying. It's all so relative, we're all working towards goals, and I'm behind too many people by too much to feel good about calling other people slow. That said, if someone demanded that I tell them whether I think they're slow, I'd probably say that a healthy young male that can't crack 50 minutes is slow.


For all numbers adjust by ~11-12% for women.


Good luck on getting a BQ!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, as long as we're on the topic of innumeracy and poor estimation skills, I actually do still feel a moment of surprise when I realize I'm interacting with someone that's missing such a basic and core experience. It's one of those things that I know intellectually is some relevant percentage of the populace, but it's still surprising to encounter. This is a similar sort of thing to realizing that you might have been arguing with a 13-year-old about something.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for March 26, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I smoke cigars, generally about once a week when the weather is nice during the summer. The nicotine is a pleasant part of the experience and that usage pattern does not cause any apparent compulsion to consume more. I probably wouldn't bother with a product that was just nicotine without the tobacco, but I'm also just not much of a drug guy in general.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
American trade representative Jameison Greer is the name I've seen thrown around for who they might have thought it was. That might still be too charitable - the simplest explanation is that many people just don't really look all that closely at who else is on a group chat. You would kind of hope that some measure of care would be taken when we're talking about sensitive information, but people just get used to what they're doing and don't think about it much.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I mean, on the one hand, I can't recall the last time I actually watched the Olympics either. On the other hand, you are rarely comparing similar numbers here either. If it's some track event, all the men's times will be clustered, and then all the women's times will be clustered say, 30% slower. You aren't comparing decimal places here. Even casual observers should notice.




It's only ~10-12% for running events and once you get to anything other than 100 meters the numbers aren't things that are going to be intuitive to the average person. There aren't very many people that know how long a 1500m race takes to run off the top of their heads.


This isn't to defend the author's studied obliviousness to easily observed realities, just saying that I bet most people would have no idea if a 10K time was fast or slow from a quick look at the corner of the screen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


At recess I read books. I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn't have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.




This seems to be pretty much the universal experience of people that advocate for trans participation in women's sports. They have no idea how large the gaps are between men and women because they have somehow managed to take pride in avoiding anything to do with physical fitness. I guess I can kind of, sort of squint and see how that happens, but the part I don't understand is their willingness to jump into arguments about a topic that they just don't care about at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure exactly where the line is, but I think it stops well short of organizing building occupations like Mahmoud did. I don't really care what their cause is, foreigners that organize the occupation of university buildings should be deported.


At this time, it's not clear what exactly this girl did; it seems likely to be much closer to any reasonable line than the Mahmoud example. The administration testing where the line is does concern me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They do:




A Venn diagram, also called a set diagram or logic diagram, shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets. These diagrams depict elements as points in the plane, and sets as regions inside closed curves. A Venn diagram consists of multiple overlapping closed curves, usually circles, each representing a set. The points inside a curve labelled S represent elements of the set S, while points outside the boundary represent elements not in the set S. This lends itself to intuitive visualizations; for example, the set of all elements that are members of both sets S and T, denoted S ∩ T and read "the intersection of S and T", is represented visually by the area of overlap of the regions S and T.[1]






In Venn diagrams, the curves are overlapped in every possible way, showing all possible relations between the sets. They are thus a special case of Euler diagrams, which do not necessarily show all relations. Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 by John Venn. They are used to teach elementary set theory, as well as illustrate simple set relationships in probability, logic, statistics, linguistics, and computer science.






A Venn diagram in which the area of each shape is proportional to the number of elements it contains is called an area-proportional (or scaled) Venn diagram.




If you're going to be pedantic, at least be right! The complaint that I should have said "an area-proportional Venn diagram would have an almost complete overlap" is just about maximally pointless.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm personally willing to bite the bullet and say that I think foreign nationals should generally avoid making themselves part of American politics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right, the Free Palestine and BLM Venn diagram will have an almost complete overlap.


Frankly, I would be fine with deporting aliens that protest for far right causes as well. I think guests should simply not be shit-stirrers, regardless of my agreement or lack thereof with their positions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I wanted Khalil deported on the I Don't Really Care Margaret heuristic but my immediate impression with regard to Chung does not match that. I strongly suspect that there are going to be some specifics that make this much less clear once they're available, but it certainly isn't obvious at the moment.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have spotted a missed opportunity.


You could have done this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for March 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Personally, I'm shocked that your dad is only human. I doubt it even!


Jokes aside, be well and best to you and yours.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I fucking hate that this is how Darryl Cooper is becoming known to a broader audience. His Jim Jones and Israel-Palestine podcast series are careful, empathic, and passionate. I'm not enough of a history buff to know how accurate they are, but they certainly aren't shows that I would associate with someone that is a flamethrower. I know he's always been a pretty far-right guy, but I do have to wonder if the attention has gotten him to a spot where he's more intentionally inflammatory.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


However, I disagree that lack of a suit (for Musk or Z.) objectively can be interpreted as disrespect.




Why do you disagree? I don't think it can be objectively interpreted as disrespect if people are misaligned regarding the expectations for a given setting, but if everyone is familiar with the expected level of formality and one party unilaterally settles on wearing joggers instead, that is absolutely a sign of disrespect. In the context of meetings between heads of state, Zelenskyy's choice of attire is certainly a signal, the only question is what exactly he's signaling.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think this is a bridge too far, even for Europe.




I would have thought a dozen Rotherhams and a Bataclan or two would be too much, but I was wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, shit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, it's why I use that example. Anyone that's experienced a decent shower hates these stupid trickle flow showerheads. I can barely think of a better example of what I mean when I say that we pay federal employees to make our lives slightly worse in pointless, annoying ways that no one would ever have considered a federal issue in the past.


They're also a fantastic example of how the rules are only for the hoi polloi. Anyone with resources is going to just get a rainfall shower or other high-end fixture, not buy a showerhead off Amazon and strip out the regulator.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Many (perhaps most) of these regulations don't exist by statute and could be unraveled quite easily. The problem was putting a bunch of people into makework jobs where they filed all of the appropriate paperwork in the rulemaking process that created a bunch of pointless rules for the industry to follow. Replacing the showerhead flow regulation enthusiasts with people that undo that swiftly would, of course, be fought by environmental groups during the rulesmaking process, but there are usually not statutory requirements that this sort of thing continues.