domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
1m ago
your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly
Fair point, I overlooked this part. Sorry.
(I would however counterclaim that your moderation on charity is selective enough to border on the anarcho-tyrannical. I don't recall seeing many instances of people getting modhatted for the very regular sport of slightly shifting the interlocutor's categories for the sake of argument, and to begin with your own insinuation that I am only motivated by personal animosity or tribalism is hardly charitable either.)
That's the wildcard rule, applied not for what he said, but for grumping about what someone else said--so you mischaracterized my criticism in exactly the same way that coffee_enjoyer mischaracterized it, by suggesting it is about my "taste" rather than about coffee_enjoyer's insistence on his own taste being the proper determinant of quality. So right from the starting gate, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.
How is it a mischaracterisation of your criticism to describe it as being about your taste, when the very first thing you say is that his post is "obnoxious", which is clearly a judgement of taste?
To begin with, he is not the moderator, nor the AAQC compiler. I would have no objection to the essence of what you said if you had said it with your modhat off. How can you treat taste-based opinion posting as analogous to taste-based moderation?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? (...)
(...)
So beyond that, what "argument or evidence" do you think you have in mind, that you think should change moderation policies here? Sometimes you write as if you think people should be moderated more ("Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago...") but your argument in this case is that coffee_enjoyer, at least, should be moderated less. As far as I can tell, you are engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: "why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?"
The change I would prefer would be to make shutting down consensus a goal that is at least equal in weight to enforcing post quality. The dominant consensus on many topics has become sufficiently overwhelming that there are hardly any users left that are willing to put in the time to argue cogently against it, and that includes topics on which I agree (such as categorical opposition to wokeism, or favouring market economy over socialism). A forum which produces a stream of quality posts for just one side is a partisan thinktank, not whatever I thought TheMotte was supposed to be; and either way without real opposition the quality of the monoculture is bound to decline eventually. Ideally, this would involve subjecting posts that exhibit the pattern of being highly-upvoted while no post disagreeing manages to breach positive double digits to an extremely stringent interpretation of the rules ("moderate more"); but at the very least, being extremely lenient with anyone willing to oppose them and argue back ("moderate less") seems like a step that you can take notwithstanding the usual "well, we can't moderate posts nobody reports!" excuse. (I have reported a fair number of posts throughout the years, but it seems like only a small fraction of those elicited any visible mod reaction.)
Therefore, "moderate people who get lots of upvotes more, and those who get fewer upvotes less" is more like it. I might find it hard to dispel the accusation that this amounts to "moderate my enemies more", since I am on the balance unhappy with the Overton window here and therefore naturally am an "enemy" of the majority of highly-upvoted positions; but this does not mean that I am "friends" with most of the downvoted ones, unhappy families all being different and what-not. I have no idea where coffee_destroyer stands on other topics, and even on Israel/Palestine he is only directionally on my side since my position is closer to "they both deserve each other, and I resent being asked to help either". I would also like tankies, SJWs, actual neonazis and actual "white genocide now"ers to be given much more leeway to nitpick and be obnoxious towards popular positions, even though I dislike all of these groups.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
4m ago
Agree, the length especially made me think that it was real. It would cost a pretty penny to generate a video that long.
SteveKirk
5m ago
Yeah in retrospect it actually doesn't seem great vs "literally just brush your teeth", but at least it was better for getting a measured dose.
WhiningCoil
27m ago
Hey, another "You can't post that, it's boo outgroup". Employees of the current party in power did that thing they do again, where they openly express their hatred and willingness to hurt people like me.
EXCLUSIVE: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs
A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire.
I know, it's not the smoking gun that the whole FEMA effort in Appalachia was slow walked because those people vote wrong. But it's yet another data point that, no, seriously, these people hate you and will do anything in their petty bureaucratic power to make your life worse because you vote wrong.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
32m ago
@Capital_Room, @naraburns, and anyone else who wants to: I'm asking you now for a number on Trump getting murdered or otherwise failing to assume power (e.g. faithless elector scheme, fake elector scheme, 1,000,000 fake votes showing up).
It's a bit early to tell — everyone still seems to be reeling and emotional over the results. That said, while a lot can happen in two months, and I'm not ruling out any of the above, I'm going to have to rate it fairly low — something like 10-15%. The surprising lack of Valkyrie memes (or references to von Stauffenberg in general), as well as the relatively conciliatory attitude of Democrat party elites — "Kamala Calls For Peaceful Transfer Of Power To Adolf Hitler," as the Babylon Bee calls it — makes it seem more unlikely.
On the other hand, said "peaceful transfer of power to literal fascist" attitude on the part of our elites raises my estimation as to their confidence in having "Trump-proofed" the government over the last four years, and that people on both sides should probably stop acting as if Trump is going to have any more authority or control over the executive branch than Biden currently does (i.e. basically none).
As long as I've been politically aware (~30 years now), the Republican party has consistently failed to turn electoral "wins" into actual political victories (save tax cuts for the wealthy, a bigger military, and "well, the left only got part of what they wanted this time" that is really just losing more slowly). The go-to excuse has always been whichever branch[es] they didn't control. Why can't a Republican president get things done? Democrats have the House and/or Senate. Why can't a Republican Congress get things done? They'll get vetoed by a Democrat president. Why can't a Republican president and both houses of Congress all together get anything done? The liberal activist judges on the Supreme Court will just strike it down.
But now we've got the closest thing to a trifecta. The White House, the Senate, and probably the House of Representatives — and with a lot more "MAGA" populists and fewer old party-establishment swamp-creature squishes. Plus, the most favorable Supreme Court in my lifetime. So, when 2028 rolls around, and nothing's been accomplished and everything has still moved leftward, what excuse is left? How do you keep right-wing voters believing that if they do everything they're told, and just show up and vote in large enough numbers, they can win, once it's finally made obvious that the game is rigged, and that "If you lose, you lose. If you win—you really lose."?
So, I actually have some hope. That is, I hope the next four years will finally convince enough people that voting doesn't matter, that there's absolutely no way forward for the right within the system and the law, and to give up entirely on that futile path.
Corvos
32m ago
Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply that drinking bottled water was stupid in literally all circumstances, only that it would be strange to but it when properly treated tap water is a viable alternative.
I would normally refill a flask or old bottle from the tap if I wanted portable water, but I drink bottled water in countries where the taps aren’t safe or if I’m suddenly thirsty when out and about.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
33m ago
According to the World Bank, Russia is now a high-income country. Real GDP per capita growth was at 3.6%!
The World Bank also says that the year before, 2022, saw real GDP per capita decline of -2.2 %. And that for 2023 total GDP and GDP per capita were both lower than in 2022.
https://data.worldbank.org/country/russian-federation?view=chart
If an Australian politician could deliver that kind of growth, they'd be heralded as a living god and probably get Putin-level approval ratings
According to the World Bank Australia saw real GDP per capita growth in 2023 at 3%, and in 2022 it was at 4.3%.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
37m ago
Like the IBC spent the last three revisions updating the spacing of outlets on a kitchen island, but there's no standard place to mount an extinguisher.
Oof, that's annoying. Especially doesn't help that mine is mounted under the kitchen sink, which is a great way to rarely see or think about it.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
46m ago
Is your bathroom fan on a timer that runs for hours a day?
It is not, we just tend to run it a lot cause GF and I tend to nuke the bathroom. Plus the white noise helps me sleep, usually.
Having a washer and dryer in the house rather than a shed sounds like a lot of trouble. I'd never even thought about dealing with lint in an interior.
To be clear, the bathroom fan is on a different duct than our dryer - there was just so much dust buildup/clumping on the fan intake that it was basically the consistency of lint. Sorry if that was confusing. I've had a washer/dryer combo in every place I've lived in and never had much trouble beyond the dryer not drying effectively. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
49m ago
This makes me think of someone stuck on a very sticky wicket, trying to justify an argument that was fundamentally wrong. Of course there are facets of any sophisticated but wrong argument that are right. You can highlight the correct facets and minimize the wrong facets. You can pre-prepare reasons for why you might be wrong to conserve credibility.
Nate has the rhetorical skills to pull it off. But it still feels very slimy. The 90 IQ twitter pleb mocking him with '60,000 simulations and all you conclude is that it's a coin flip?' may not be that numerically literate. But he has hit on a certain kind of wisdom. The election wasn't a 50/50 or a dice-roll. It was one way or another. With superior knowledge you could've called it in Trump's favour. Maybe only Bezos and various Lords of the Algorithms, French Gamblers and Masters of Unseen Powers knew or suspected - but there was knowledge to be had.
I prefer prediction models that make money before the outcome is decided, not ones that have to be justified retroactively. Nate wasn't heralding before the election that this 6% was the modal outcome, it wasn't really useful information.
nomenym
1hr ago
Is the problem a lack of trust or a lack of trustworthiness? Are they more trustworthy than we think? Or is it good for us to believe they're more trustworthy than they are?
-_-_-_-_-
1hr ago
Federal Executive: Trump's first term included him saying "take the guns first, and do due process later" and the ATF continuing to be the ATF.
States and Federal Courts of Appeal: Whatever the fuck they want.
SCOTUS: Issued Bruen, then ignored violations of Bruen.
Even in the absence of new federal gun control statutes, why should we expect gun control to significantly decrease? (With regards to your reply to Hieronymus, "legal gun owners" want to remain, you know, legal, and DIY tech is established FAFO territory controlled by the fuzz, not the populace.)
dr_analog
razorboy
1hr ago
This will almost certainly not affect your life in any way!
And this is almost certainly wrong. It won't be the most important thing in most people's lives, but the federal government writes laws by the thousand and writes regulations by the million and spends dollars by the trillion. Even the second and third order effects on people not directly impacted can be huge.
I should say, won't matter in any legible way versus the counter-factual.
Like, obviously inflation affected people but it is debatable whether this would have been worse than high unemployment, and it's not clear at all that Biden would have done one and Trump would have done the other.
ace
1hr ago
Is it a priori plausible that IQ is so sensitive to a naturally varying element which is sometimes found in much greater concentrations?
You mean like lead? Yea, I think that's plausible.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
I can't discern him breaking any rules, or you explicitly accusing of breaking him of any rules, apart from the subjective "wildcard rule" about obnoxiousness.
Are you not reading carefully, or are you just reading selectively? Look at my mod comment again. I first said
grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best
That's the wildcard rule, applied not for what he said, but for grumping about what someone else said--so you mischaracterized my criticism in exactly the same way that coffee_enjoyer mischaracterized it, by suggesting it is about my "taste" rather than about coffee_enjoyer's insistence on his own taste being the proper determinant of quality. So right from the starting gate, you have demonstrated that you don't know what you're talking about.
Then you said
someone who only ran afoul of that rule
but this is clearly an unforced error. In my very first mod comment I also wrote:
your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly
"Be charitable" is a very clear rule. Coffee-enjoyer broke it, as I demonstrated by mentioning how he broke it, and I said all of that quite clearly. So the rest of your comment fails to land entirely; I'm sure you can think of some other reason to criticize my moderation, and yet at this point it seems that your real goal is just that--to criticize my moderation, regardless of anything I have actually said or done. By your own logic, at this point it seems like you should probably just recuse yourself from criticizing my moderation approach.
I will address your parting question anyway:
Do you imagine there is any argument or evidence at all that could persuade you to change your current approach to moderation, or is it a matter of either having to take your ride to wherever it leads or getting off?
I imagine there are many such arguments and evidence; I hardly imagine myself to be a paragon of human judgment. But as you have not presented any such arguments or evidence--as you indeed failed to even notice the rather explicit rule breaking I spelled out in my initial post--what is it you expect me to change?
That is, is there some specific change you have in mind? You mention recusal but actually the whole mod team does recusals pretty often, calling for others to come in and handle stuff they don't think they can be impartial about. However it's basically never about topics, because the whole mod team has opinions on just about everything. If we recused ourselves from topics we happen to know and care about, none of us could moderate anything! Rather, usually mods will recuse themselves from dealing users who get under our skin (or are just particularly under our skin on a given day). You mentioned darwin; back in the day, I recused myself from moderating him a lot.
So beyond that, what "argument or evidence" do you think you have in mind, that you think should change moderation policies here? Sometimes you write as if you think people should be moderated more ("Plenty of completely normal posts these days would have been moderated 5 years ago...") but your argument in this case is that coffee_enjoyer, at least, should be moderated less. As far as I can tell, you are engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: "why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?"
And once it is recognized that that is the substance of the question being asked, well, it kind of answers itself, doesn't it?
Quantumfreakonomics
1hr ago
We had been dating for over a year. None of that mattered. It was like it retroactively made everything we went through together a lie to her.
justmotteingaround
1hr ago
Nothing was more "move fast and break things" than entire neighborhoods of kids riding their bike behind "the fog truck" spraying DDT everywhere.
spring
safe, legal torment nexuses
1hr ago
I'm almost done with it and all in all I've been very pleased with it. There are several design choices Earendel made for SE that I much prefer over SA though, mostly related to ships and platforms.
Reaching the derelict platform in SE is both a really cool moment. But it also serves as a good introduction to working in space as you can very quickly see which buildings you might want to rocket up. Its also provides a very tactile and satisfying experience of scavenging for new toys. In SA you launch your first platform and you get a popup about building out your platform. It's not particularly well explained, noob traps abound and unless you had the foresight to build a lot of rocket silos you will be waiting awhile before you even start building out your platform simply due to the time it takes to launch stuff into space.
SE's focus on doing research on your space platform also makes SE feel very distinct from the vanilla experience of working on terra firma, and it acts as a focal point to your interplanetary activities. You go planetside, you build a base, you rocket your new widgets back to your platform to do more science. SA has you shipping all your science back to Nauvis, it's the vanilla experience but more so.
All that said most of what I haven't mentioned is lightyears aside of SE. SE's planetary outposts felt like setting up mining outposts with 10-20x the busywork. Each planet in SA provides fresh and unique challenges that require novel approaches to factory design, especially Gleba. Interplanetary logistics mostly just works compared to the SE's which despite my best efforts I never managed to master.
I'm pretty iffy about quality, it's too good not to use, but simply unlocking introduces UI frustrations, never mind actually trying to design and deploy it at scale.
TheFooder
1hr ago
I've often thought, "If they just told us what the trade offs were and were honest about it, they'd get my vote," but I doubt that's a winning strategy.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
I legitimately can't tell if it's real or not.
It's easy to tell it's not AI: It's coherent over a very long time which is beyond what video AIs are capable of currently.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
I think being compared to what appears to be a braver and more charismatic character is... pretty positive. Nice.
Factorio is a uniquely addicting game for me. I love it - however I can't escape the fact that the time I spend playing it is the same muscles as programming (which has a high $ROI compared to gaming), and I just don't have the time right now. If my battletech group takes a sabbatical I may be able to schedule 1-2 days a week to play.
I suspect that most of the 3d games use a grid system somehow. My buddies have really liked Satisfactory if you'd prefer to get the 3d experience.
Also, speaking of factories, I watched an awesome little sci-fi vignette about it recently: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cntb3wcZdTw (Mid voice acting/writing but can't have it all)
I literally typed "bomb ranges near me" onto google and pressed enter.
Sadly I can't be of much more help than that
It typically takes a while to get permission, but when you have a Federal explosives License (from the ATF) it's a lot easier to get allowed in.
spiky_fungus
1hr ago
600-700 tonnes
surely more?
What a brilliant way to make a paper trail that's less deniable than trying to blow the whistle "without evidence." If your boss doesn't overrule you, he's nailed himself.
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