I’m really upset that my favorite ship in Strawberry Rationalist Girl RenegadeAngles-san isn’t official in the new season and I’m planning to hold the government of Sapporo hostage in the name of queer spider-cyborg representation and morphological freedom until the studio agrees to make it canon.
I’ve got three airsoft rifles, a crew of fifteen dedicated hardcore brotakus, and a tank. I really think we can pull this off. You in?
Are Brexit and Trump the first signs that the Dire Problem is coming to a head? What political upheavals will we see when Google perfects the self-driving car and the TruckApocalypse comes?
If the Dire Problem is supposed to be job automation, most of the best studies I’ve seen suggest that job automation isn’t having real effects right now (yes, everyone is confused about this, but the studies are pretty unanimous). I don’t know whether that will continue past the Truckpocalypse (<– correct form, your portmanteau is way too unwieldy).
My guess is Trump and Brexit have more to do with income inequality caused by other stuff, increased class differences coming from the income inequality, and various social stuff coming out of those class differences.
mitigatedextras sideblog for stuff that doesn’t make the cut for the main blog exists, if that’s your thing, dear readers
can you imagine if I had a sideblog for things that I thought weren’t good enough for this one
Mathematically, assuming a uniform distribution in the Tumblr space, as the number t of Tumblrs goes to infinity, the probability of a blog with the same contents as argumateextras existing approaches 1.
woke: everyone should work for Google, then the diversity of Google’s workforce achieves perfect representation
you may just have a point
i cannot be held responsible for what happens when Google achieves Corporate Diversity Nirvana and transcends on the golden path to the ultimate state of multicultural being, okay
like, it isn’t my fault when they do this and ascend to the pantheon just because i pointed it out first
the fault of the immortal godmind of the ultimate corporate body of social justice manifesting physically is your fault for reblogging me
You see, a suspicious bastard lies awake at night wondering if their friends have ulterior motives for defending them. But a really suspicious bastard lies awake at night wondering if their enemies have ulterior motives for attacking them.
I’m just trying to bring about World Revolution! Why doesn’t anyone believe me?!
Weird question time: what does it mean not to have a stable sense of self?
I ask because I am not sure I’ve experienced that. Every time I’ve felt something that I can imagine describing that way, it hasn’t been about not knowing what my self was, it’s been about being ashamed. Like, being convinced that what I know is important to me is bad and trying to disavow it and feeling unmoored in response because nothing I tried to replace it with felt right.
Is that what not having a stable sense of self is? Or does not having a stable sense of self mean literally not being sure what you like and want, rather than just not being sure it’s ok to want or like those things?
I don’t know if i have a stable sense of self, but like, i feel that i get easily convinced or swayed by people and I pick up mannerisms from people i like and talk to or hang out with a lot, i feel like i don’t have very much of a personality. I do have likes and opinions and aesthetics that i like, but not that many that are strong and i feel like it’s hugely affected by people i like around me or that i respect or follow online. I find it hard to decide whether i like something a lot of the time when it comes to things like media.
Yessssss,
just keep reading this blog and start believing that we need to replace the government with the thing that comes after what happens when you fuse think tanks, political parties, a hypothetical National Utility Function, and stock markets, wearing uniforms from old governments whose era long since passed, and preparing for the final robot war to seize control of the Moon
I now have a Twitter (which is to say, I remembered the e-mail for my old Twitter), and I don’t understand how to use it.
do i just… start posting things no one has any capability of seeing in the first place? i replied to people, but it doesn’t show on my timeline and “joins in on already existing twitter war” is a niche clearly filled
I thought you enjoyed yelling at people that you think are doing politics stupidly, as a recreational activity? Wouldn’t Soldier in the Great Twitter War be perfect?
140 character limit is like a noose
“Your beliefs are a like a religion. Suicide and self-harm are still incredibly high after HRT & GRS.” “In fact, transgenderism is much worse than religion. At least religion saves people from suicide.”
“Interesting thought! Interesting thought. But no. What’s actually true is” and i have no more space
Ugh, you are so unimaginative, Ranma. All you have to do is post strings of (X/140) tweets and then get accused of “manthreading” by a shtty BuzzHuff writer that has no idea what your gender is.
I don’t know why anyone would think Twitter is an inherently limiting platform that promotes bad discourse norms by its very form, lol.
Beheading Mount Olympus: Mountaintop Removal Mining As Strategy In The Global War On Gods (2034), Journal Of The Society Of Effective Atheism
Oh sht, do you have it? I haven’t been able to read it because it’s behind a paywall and my religion prohibits me from buying access to overpriced science journals.
I’m not religious, but you can’t really listen to sacred music without feeling that “divine” inspiration
I mean, we musicians treat music like it’s just a standard commodity now, and we play it as if it’s divorced from the thousand year tradition of Christianity.
I can’t imagine having faith in a higher being, but when I listen to Bach, I feel that there must be one, or, at the least, I can see quite clearly what can be achieved if you simply act like there is one.
“Act like there is a God” is not unreasonable praxis for most people.
Pro-tip that is only somewhat meant snarkily: If you’re going to use facts and logic to make a argumentative point, just use the facts and logic. Facts and logic should be able to stand on their own, they don’t need a preface saying you’re going to use facts and logic.
If you say “I’m using facts and logic“ there’s a subtext there that is “unlike you, who are irrational and hysterical.“
There’s a roughly similar point for talk of “bias” that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
“That sounds like something a racist misogynist would say. I bet you talk about forking dongles near womyn, discouraging them from entering the tech industry with your disgusting sexual harassment.”
Total mystery why someone would assume certain factions were hysterical and illogical or not acting in good faith.
And yeah, I know it isn’t all like that, but aside from lopsided media exposure there is a culture war going on, and doxxing/firing/etc have been deemed Justice so a lot of that social capital has been blown, including for leftists more generally.
Nobody acts in good faith, we all run on corrupted hardware (but this is no excuse to handwave anytime you fuck up yourself). Fallacy bingo, histrionic accusations that a participant in a debate has no skin in the game and getting huffy about the opponent not being charitable are all manners of trying to goad the opponent into adhering to one’s personal shibboleths and should therefore be ignored.
In my opinion the best way, morally, to deal with all this diversity fighting is to just ignore it and act on your own morality. Nothing you do will ever be good enough to satisfy the culture warriors, and therefore their demands should be treated as irrelevant. Never agree to repay an infinite debt.
I have no interest in supporting a movement that awards social status for destroying people like me. I’ll help individuals, listen to those I trust, and act on my own morals. But without further information suggesting I should actually trust them, I won’t give the typical SJ thinkpiecer the time of day.
Burning enormous amounts of social capital fighting The Gays™ by the righties was also incredibly stupid.
Pro-tip that is only somewhat meant snarkily: If you’re going to use facts and logic to make a argumentative point, just use the facts and logic. Facts and logic should be able to stand on their own, they don’t need a preface saying you’re going to use facts and logic.
If you say “I’m using facts and logic“ there’s a subtext there that is “unlike you, who are irrational and hysterical.“
There’s a roughly similar point for talk of “bias” that I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
“That sounds like something a racist misogynist would say. I bet you talk about forking dongles near womyn, discouraging them from entering the tech industry with your disgusting sexual harassment.”
Total mystery why someone would assume certain factions were hysterical and illogical or not acting in good faith.
And yeah, I know it isn’t all like that, but aside from lopsided media exposure there is a culture war going on, and doxxing/firing/etc have been deemed Justice so a lot of that social capital has been blown, including for leftists more generally.
But if there were, you know it would be the kind of guys that beat up Sihks for “being Muslim” and not something that proceeded in any sort of way that made sense even if it were evil sense.
This is true.
Let’s stick to the “no race war” plan.
Cartman will be disappointed.
In the Trolley Problem, I push Cartman in front of the trolley.
But if there were, you know it would be the kind of guys that beat up Sihks for “being Muslim” and not something that proceeded in any sort of way that made sense even if it were evil sense.
I’ve seen a few people make connections between the fact that a infinite number of cryptocurrencies is possible and worries about inflation, and I’m never quite sure what to think about that. What does the fact that dogecoin exists do to the value of bitcoin?
Guess the trouble there is that we don’t know where the value of bitcoin comes from. Hell, recently it’s becoming more clear we don’t know where the value of dollars comes from.
Well if you don’t have US dollars to pay taxes to the US government while living in the US, you’re gonna be in trouble. So that props up the value of US dollars since there is a certain force-backed demand for them.
Of course memoguy isn’t going to issue lots of citations. Feminists control the academy and do things like classify “forced envelopment” as something other than rape.
“men and women are exactly the same in every regard, and we need to even out the gender distribution in every male-dominated field so women can improve it with their exact sameness.”—@garmbreak1 (via argumate)
The purpose of BigCorp diversity training is to show where the lines are that you aren’t supposed to cross, and nerdboi crossed them, openly, then said loudly why do we even have those lines.
The purpose of BigCorp diversity training is to limit legal liability and quiet down outside politicals that might protest BigCorp.
Look, I know I’m not an economist, but even I know buying secondhand goods drives up their price, making people more likely to buy new, since the difference in price between new and used shrinks, making the difference in quality (in terms of wear) more relevant.
(from my current understanding of the situation) the drawback of solar and wind power is less that it’s more expensive than coal, and more that it’s *cheaper.* Cheap energy is an unfortunate prospect for energy companies because it’s one big game of chicken: as soon as one company starts switching to solar power and energy costs pennies on the dollar, suddenly every energy company is making pennies when they used to make dollars.
I think this is part of the issue, but @xhxhxhx did a good effortpost about alternative energy a while back that I felt left me a better understanding of some of the other issues involved. I won’t just reiterate the same thing worse, but from the sounds of it, a lot of the problem is the way supply tends to fluctuate independently of demand. It seems like there’s a lot of potential for a big breakthrough in power storage at this point, though I am also kind of terrified of the failure states of something capable of storing that kind of energy.
The difficulty of the transition factors into that theory, if it were extremely easy, there would be no stopping it. Instead, there can be this situation where someone is going to have to spend a lot of money discovering how to solve the storage problem, then have that process immediately taken and used by others and therefore make none of that money back.
I dunno, I think whoever invented better storage tech would make bank. Power companies would pay, electric car companies would pay, those goofy people trying to sell consumer solar stuff (presumably made possible by govt subsidy or something) would pay. Storage technology is pretty bad today, and it would be huge if we made major advances in it.
They would pay whoever produces the machines. That doesn’t have to be the one who developed it.
I mean, there are patents and shit. And if there isn’t any such protection, it’s pretty much orthogonal to the energy sector and more a general condition of the country/legal system you’re operating under. I don’t actually think that it’s likely to be a power company that would develop or produce better storage tech, but I do think they’d pay whoever did.
There are patents, but like you said, they can be tricky to enforce. There’s the the problem that someone can come up with a competing technology right after you come up with yours, or that you can spend a lot of money and develop nothing.
You want to think of this as an allocation issue. The rewards from this technology can go to consumers, capital, or labor. Consumers can make out like bandits here. I think the people who work on it can cash out in their next job. But the person who paid for the development? They might get a small piece, could cover their actual development costs before risk-adjustment, but not enough to make it worth the risk.
Depends on what tech it is. Super Ultimate Pumped Storage would have trouble, some battery tech probably not so much.
In case you haven’t noticed recently, democracy has major issues. Every major developed state is strewn with dysfunction and programs that are actively at odds with their intended purposes. Our politicians are either incompetent idiots or shrewd operators working against our interests.
Policies routinely have reasonable stated values, but terrible efficacy.
Organizations such as the RAND Corporation knew the Iraq War would be a lot tougher than the Bush administration said it would be. Policy plans coming out of think tanks seem to be better than the actual policies we get.
If we didn’t know they’d immediately get subverted, we’d almost be better off with think tanks running the country.
Better results are necessarily different results, and systems produce the outcomes they incentivize, so to change the results it is necessary to change the system.
The truth is, it may be possible to get something like think tanks in charge of the government, a hybrid between them and political parties, but we will have to add selection pressure to ensure they work towards correctness.
I propose a new legislature, composed of a new kind of corporate entity, the Delegate Candidate Organization (DCO).
Every three years, at election time, each voter delegates their vote to a DCO. The top 50 Delegate Candidate Organizations then form the legislature, becoming that term’s Delegate Organizations. This legislature is known as the National Delegation.
In a second election, those DCOs that did not make the cut delegate their votes to members of the top 50.
(In an optional alternative, the vote could be split between DCOs by categories by voters, allowing a truly innovative level of representation. Bills would have to pass on all categories to pass, and the tax category would determine how funding is obtained, but not total expenditures. Sadly, this is probably too complex for typical voters.)
A Delegate Candidate Organization receives its funding exclusively from the State. For each delegated vote it receives, the DCO receives $5 in annual funding, and an additional $5 times its percentile standing in a legislative outcome prediction market.
(That might sound like a lot. America has around 300 million people, so you could potentially be looking at three billion dollars. I would answer that the 2016 Presidential election cost $2.6 billion by itself, and that money had to come from somewhere and is already influencing our political process. The size of the US economy is $18,570 billion dollars. The real question is whether better policy by the DCOs could improve that by 0.016% or more, which would make the National Delegation pay for itself. I believe that it would.)
The key factor that makes DCOs behave more like think tanks is that a significant chunk of their funding depends on correctly estimating the outcomes of legislation. What keeps them honest? First, competition with other DCOs that will pressure them against spoiling the metrics. Second, voters.
When a piece of legislation is to be passed, DCOs make predictions on outcomes and bet on them in a virtual currency called Credibility Score (or just “Cred”). Each outcome must be represented by a basket of multiple metrics, to prevent min-maxing.
This structure allows us to build a differentiation between a policy’s values and its efficacy. Previous discourse has often viewed policy as solely a matter of efficacy, but of course in practice people have different preferences and are not a unified mass just waiting for enlightenment into [your political ideology]. Preserving the values component (in part through voting) also allows bits of efficacy that have slipped through to be represented on the other side of the equation.
The bets serve two purposes. The first is to reward policymakers that are actively effective at achieving their stated objectives, and punish policymakers that are too unaligned with reality. The second is to effectively tell voters what the plans will actually do, not just wishy washy language pols want people to hear.
“This bill will reduce gun crime.” “By how much?” “Uh… a, uh, lot.”
Not only can the DCO specify what its % estimate for a decrease in gun crime is, but it can also communicate its level of certainty - by how much it bets on the outcome as a percentage of its current Cred reserves, data that can be mined by political scientists and journalists.
DCOs must be able to amend predictions when new legislation is passed. A court will also be required to punish those who tamper with metrics, and resolve other disputes. The details of that are a challenge in themselves, but should be feasible to work out.
Each DO has as many votes in the legislature as have been delegated to it. A majority is required to pass legislation.
The accumulated Credibility Score/Cred across all bets is used to determine the percentile standing of all DCOs, used to determine funding (as above). Percentile standing is listed on the ballot next to the DCO’s name, but to simplify things for voters, DCOs are listed in the order of votes received in the previous election.
Practical experiments will be necessary to assess the viability of this model, but I have high hopes for it. If we want to advance as a civilization, then we must develop new organizational technologies.
Think you need to take a closer look at Robin Hanson, something I thought I’d never say
Specifically, the problem is that predicting the results isn’t the issue, it’s predicting the change in results given some policy change
I think Hanson has people bet on outcome both with and without policy
I may have to look into that, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable. Betting for outcomes based on whether the bill passes or fails to pass certainly provides more information for our voters/etc.
One big problem is that people are going to use this not to predict, but to hedge
It will be financialized
If you believe Hanson that markets are perfect, that’s not a problem it will all work out
if you haven’t had your skull smashed with a brick every day for the past 20 years or worked in the econ dept at GMU, you should be skeptical.
Sorry, I guess I should have been more clear in my intentions earlier.
While the probability estimates produced by the prediction market are interesting, the real purposes are more like:
1. Punish politicians that are actively at odds with the truth/reward those who have some idea what they’re doing, so that eventually the system is dominated by more clueful politicals who spend less time huffing ideology. Hopefully, this will result in more effective policy which is more aligned with reality.
(I’m of the opinion that there are many policies that it’s said you can’t do, because markets etc, but which you could do if you were smart about it. So I want those to come up, actually testing some of these policies before they come up, etc.)
2. Make politicians be more specific and truthful about the outcomes of policies in measurable ways, making it more difficult to do one thing and say another.
3. Track the effectiveness of policies over time so that better policy can be created in the future (through the metrics gathered to feed the market, not the market itself).
Would hedging interfere with those? I’m not so sure. It is, itself, information. It may also depend on the market’s design itself.
Alright, then you’re gonna have the problem of “who gets to decide what comes up for prediction and how?” with the various possibilities for manipulation.
Yes, a challenge in itself. My opinion is that it must be easier to get stuff into the prediction pool than it is to pass the legislation. Otherwise, it just degrades to normal legislature with some fluff on top.
So, off the top of my head, it may require 30-40% approval to get an item into the prediction pool, perhaps with a limit on the number of items each DCO can put into the pool.
Second and related is that you can basically rewarding people who are connected rather than accurate
To some extent, this doesn’t matter, connections are a part of effective policy too, much as I wish they were not
But it comes down to who can manipulate the outcomes and who has the inside track on what people will do.
- court will be needed so they can sue each other when they cheat
- baskets of metrics harder to game than single metric, so all metrics must be baskets
- hard to actually game some of the more challenging ones by outside interference if metric collection is at all accurate, simply too costly, borders on cost of actually fixing the problem
I’ll expand on this when I have access to an actual computer, which will be a while.
The Rand Corporation has done more than basically any group in the twentieth century to shape what kind of world we’re living in now, and they’re weirdly unrecognized for that
the fact they’re responsible for the MAD nuclear deterrence doctrine alone is mind boggling
Did you know they were aware that the Iraq War would be, well, more like it actually was and less lile the Bush administration thought it would be? Which is less impressive by itself, but more impressive relative to the cluelessness of various other US government institutions.
After that, I began to wonder if government quality could be improved by replacing the legislature with think tanks.
at the same time, RAND also made a doctrine for waging a “victorious” thermonuclear war against the Soviets. A large number of think tanks also pushed for a war with Iraq, which is why Gore was hore hawkish compared to Bush on this.
Tom Schelling, who’s undoubtedly a genius, is responsible in part for the Vietnam war.
National Review, Heritage Institute and a bunch of Kochtopus’s tentacles that all shill for the “global warming doesn’t exist because there was winter once” meme are technically think tanks as well.
Replacing the legislature with think tanks would delegitimize their rule in the eye of people (which is the primary reason for democracy, the idea of legitimate control) while these tanks are frequently wrong and not free of bias.
That’s why you make them bet on the outcomes of their legislation. Some think tanks are significantly more ideology-huffing than others, so you have to weed out the weak “this liberal democracy thing will totally work out in a nation with such high illiteracy” ones. Eventually what you’ll have left, after they all lose huge standing in the market or massively adjust policy to actually fit the situation (oh hey let’s try a 20yr mil governorship to actually make the necessary conditions for democracy before doing the democracy) will be less stupid.
And actually my plan is for elected thinktankparties, see my National Delegation post.
The Rand Corporation has done more than basically any group in the twentieth century to shape what kind of world we’re living in now, and they’re weirdly unrecognized for that
the fact they’re responsible for the MAD nuclear deterrence doctrine alone is mind boggling
Did you know they were aware that the Iraq War would be, well, more like it actually was and less lile the Bush administration thought it would be? Which is less impressive by itself, but more impressive relative to the cluelessness of various other US government institutions.
After that, I began to wonder if government quality could be improved by replacing the legislature with think tanks.
I kinda don’t know how to react to that.
The first problem is believing that the Bush administration actually believed their own PR. The second problem is not assuming that Rand wasn’t working hand in hand with the administration. The third problem is believing government institutions are clueless. The fourth is not acknowledging that think tanks already have more de facto control than most official government positions, hence the origin of the term “deep state”.
They probably didn’t believe their nonsense about WMDs, they probably did believe they wouldn’t make a clusterfuck that would ruin the Republican brand for many people and lead to ISIS.
From what I’ve heard, the admin basically ignored any naysayers, so if RAND told them how it would go, that doesn’t mean they listened to them.
Honestly, there is a lot more incompetence than scheming a lot of the time. Also incompetent scheming. But it’s like assuming Trump is playing 4D chess, when it seems in reality there is no Trump Master Plan. Also lots of individuals working locally at cross-purposes.
Think tanks have some control over legislation because legislators are lazy, but most legislation that actually gets passed is worse than what the think tanks come up with.
The Rand Corporation has done more than basically any group in the twentieth century to shape what kind of world we’re living in now, and they’re weirdly unrecognized for that
the fact they’re responsible for the MAD nuclear deterrence doctrine alone is mind boggling
Did you know they were aware that the Iraq War would be, well, more like it actually was and less lile the Bush administration thought it would be? Which is less impressive by itself, but more impressive relative to the cluelessness of various other US government institutions.
After that, I began to wonder if government quality could be improved by replacing the legislature with think tanks.
the billion dollar app idea is to make a virtual friend you care about more than anything else in the world, then charge you a monthly fee to keep it alive.
waifu hostages are an illegal industry, Argumate, even I agree with the World State on this one
I think I understand why nrx essays are always at least 10000 words long now.
Themes and Influences
Counterintuitive Insight Porn: The Last Psychiatrist, Hotel Concierge, Malcolm Gladwell
Gratuitous Longposts: Steve Yegge, Scott Alexander, (maybe Oswald Spengler)
Going out of your Way to Appear Like More of a Dick: Zed Shaw, Jim Goad, Friedrich Nietzsche, (maybe Nydwracu)
Giving Catchy Names to Patterns: Paul Graham, Big Yud, Robin Hanson, Richard Dawkins, Venkatesh Rao, David Chapman, Christopher Alexander, Ward Cunningham, Friedrich Nietzsche, (maybe Oswald Spengler)
Reading Old Books: Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler
Not mentioned above: Hannah Ahrendt, Robert Jay Lifton, Eric Hoffer, Jane Jacobs
Style
A good way to get a feel for the style of an artist and why it works is to look at what happens whenotherstry tocopy him and to see what works and what doesn’t.
Darkly Hinting at the Fridge Horror is definitely the theme that ties them all together in Moldbug’s writing. But his essays don’t start out that way.
The Blueprint
Like an old The Simpsons episode, which starts out with a simple problem and its zany solution to set up the main plot of the episode, these essay start out with the description of a historical situation, or a very technical/procedural/non-ideological problem of modern society. The digression into history allows the author to set up the mental stage in a way that does not immediately raise ideological shields, activate old thought patterns and fall victim to cognitive dissonance. If I write about Kings, Jacobins and Girondists, you are much more likely to pay attention than if I wrote about Democrats and Bernie Bros.
In this historical situation, you start the narrative. You explain the problems of the common man, based on the contents of this old book you read about the man who you assume was quite common and typical for his era. This might even be a great idea to counteract your biases. The biases that colour your perception of history are not so much your own, as they are the biases of historians who tried to fit long-term historical trends into neat theories of historical development. In hindsight, the right side of history is curiously always the one that won in the end. Isn’t that neat? The older a book is, the more time was there in the meantime for written history to congeal into an overarching narrative.
After you have used the old book to start the historical narrative, you can extrapolate into later eras and today. Viewed from the past, the present looks not inevitable, but terrifying, and the future will be as terrifying!
Now, you need to go back into the past. Do not dwell too much on the present - yet! Start with another anecdote or statistic about New England in 1850. You must let the first anecdote percolate in the mind of the reader. If you let them think about the present again, they might reject everything you said based on tribalism, ideology or wishful thinking. The past is a place where intuitions don’t apply and we can examine situations on an intellectual level. (If not: Abraham Lincoln was a Republican! The Progressive Era was kind of racist!)
Repeat this a couple of times, so that the reader can form new intuitions based on these examples. Now tie this back into your Big Buzzword Theory! Give a catchy name to the pattern, and link back to an earlier post where you explained the pattern and its implications in more general terms.
Now, the the takeaway: Apply the theory to he present situation by showing how the situation fits into it and how it is similar to the earlier instances of the pattern, but don’t draw the conclusions explicitly! You can darkly hint, and leave it to the reader to figure it out. You must end the essay now.
When he walks away to the next tab, the epistemic fridge horror will slowly thaw and make him realise: “Oh my god! I don’t believe in democracy any more!” That feeling fades after a couple of hours.
TBH I think it’s pretty fucked up that boys get circumcised in America but it really isn’t something to have a super strong principled position on
It just seems like a really weird topic to fixate on
When it goes bad… well, worse, I guess… it can cause some pretty serious damage. Assuming all the people that reaaaally get into the Discourse against it are those dudes, can you say you wouldn’t do the same?
Meat industry has major global warming issues, but meat an important source of nutrients. Should work to help global warming by accelerating vatmeat development. Also valuable for vegans, vegetarians, some kinds of Consequentialists.
Here’s a fun question I got asked during a job interview. (I will not, of course, say where.)
Ten prisoners are going to be executed at dawn. The executioner gives them one chance at survival. In the morning, the prisoners will line up in single file, and the executioner will place a white or black hat (randomly selected) on each prisoner’s head. He will then ask each prisoner the color of the hat they are wearing, starting at the back of the line. The prisoners can only respond with “white” or “black.” If the prisoner is correct, they will go free; if they are wrong, they will be executed.
Each prisoner can see all the hats in front of them, but not their own hat or the hats behind them. Each prisoner can hear everything; they know the responses of the prisoners behind them and whether or not they were executed.
The prisoners can meet beforehand to decide on a strategy.
What is the maximum number of prisoners you can guarantee will be saved, and with what strategy?
Hint #1 [rot13]: Gurer vf n jnl gb thnenagrr gung avar bs gur gra cevfbaref jvyy fheivir.
Hint #2 [rot13]: Vs avar bs gur gra ner thnenagrrq gb fheivir, gurve nafjref zhfg or qrgrezvarq ol gurve bja ungf. Bayl gur svefg cevfbare pna neovgenevyl pubbfr jurgure gb fnl “juvgr” be “oynpx.” Jung fbeg bs vasbezngvba pna ur pbairl hfvat bayl bar ovg?
There is a real-world technical problem that can be solved using a similar strategy.
you know what would have been cool is if, given that it was a job interview, they’d asked the question in the context of the real-world technical problem that resembles it
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
neoliberalism-nightly said: consider this. the state would like this to happen in order to prevent a fiscal crisis
That only works if you kill them near the end of their career, not near the beginning and while they’re still raising children, and it’s a dumb plan relative to alternatives.
neoliberalism-nightly said: well, why can’t it
It costs a lot of money to raise and educate a kid. If the fiscal crisis is a rising portion of elderly retired relative to workforce, reducing the size of the workforce or destroying your investment before the costs can be repaid is not what you want to do.
...Huh, it just came to me, with a burst of clarity as I read that #reblog2016 "youth pastor" post, why the whole Hello Fellow Teens I Am Here To Relate To You bit is so risible and cringey. It just has "what makes an adult cool in the eyes of teens" exactly backwards: cool isn't acting like YOU, an adult, are a fellow teen; it's acting like THEY are fellow adults. At least to the extent of not talking down to them--which putting on a weird act about how you are With It is.
Actually, employees burning out or dying is an externality.
The company profits from the temporary boost in productivity while destroying the future economic value of up to an entire lifespan, denying other companies and the economy as a whole future production. As employers do not own employees, this creates a Tragedy of the Commons situation, justifying the existence of state interference. (etc)
neoliberalism-nightly said: consider this. the state would like this to happen in order to prevent a fiscal crisis
That only works if you kill them near the end of their career, not near the beginning and while they’re still raising children, and it’s a dumb plan relative to alternatives.
Sometimes right-wingers must be really kicking themselves for denouncing the term ”micro-aggression“ instead of co-opting it.
Nah, right-wingers can’t co-opt that, that isn’t how it works. You have to wait for the kinds of violence and broken promises you can associate with careless previous rhetoric, then use it ironically. Like “cultural enrichment”.
Like “Happy Holidays”
It’s not “PC gone mad”. It’s a *micro-aggression*
Nah, Happy Holidays can’t be used ironically politically in that way.
Left-wing people don’t treat socon offendedness seriously and in fact revel in it. They can’t win by co-opting microaggression, progressives will just argue white people aren’t allowed to use it so it doesn’t count blah blah blah. It’s not even a very powerful word.
I mean you’re probably mostly joking, but the alt right and some of the other right wing shitposters are a lot better at this weaponized language thing. You have to either offend the lefties or use language that makes them look bad to others even if they aren’t offended - like “cuck”. (And I know rattumb thinks it’s lame, but as an insult it’s brilliant.)
But don’t offend the normies. It’s a careful balance.
I now have a Twitter (which is to say, I remembered the e-mail for my old Twitter), and I don’t understand how to use it.
do i just… start posting things no one has any capability of seeing in the first place? i replied to people, but it doesn’t show on my timeline and “joins in on already existing twitter war” is a niche clearly filled
I thought you enjoyed yelling at people that you think are doing politics stupidly, as a recreational activity? Wouldn’t Soldier in the Great Twitter War be perfect?
Sometimes right-wingers must be really kicking themselves for denouncing the term ”micro-aggression“ instead of co-opting it.
Nah, right-wingers can’t co-opt that, that isn’t how it works. You have to wait for the kinds of violence and broken promises you can associate with careless previous rhetoric, then use it ironically. Like “cultural enrichment”.
