Untitled. Wait... Curse you, Russell!

pushing the 'no such thing as inborn talent' line seems downright cruel sometimes

oh, no, it's not that i had any advantages over you. i just put in more work. no don't look at people who are getting far better results than you with half the effort, they don't exist. just bang your head against the wall harder, you lazy piece of shit.

you can say 'your skills can and will improve with practice' without saying 'the amount of practice you put in is literally the only thing that matters'. and you should, because the second thing is a fucking lie.

Some of the God damn people teaching programming are like this

"It is hard but everybody can learn if you just-" no the fuck everybody can not.

It's not the hardest thing in the word, you probably only need to be in the world top 1% technical intuition[1] to even begin to do it but then, you're on the path! Next step is the one where you find out if you also have talent for abstract spatial reasoning. And then, you're on the path.

[1] If you think this is wrong, I invite you to come at me

The link you gave in the footnote is about what adults know, but your claim is about what people can learn. There’s a big difference between the two.

the twisting of information here is so obvious... you know damn well this woman would not have been so hurt if things had happened as simply as this guy presented it

One of the big issues I have with Reddit stories is the way that they kind of... bring out the worst in everybody.

The reality is, most Reddit stories probably didn't happen. Places like r/AITA, r/petty;pro;nuclearrevenge, r/choosingbeggars r/niceguys;nicegirls, r/relationshipadvice, they aren't so much hubs for sharing wisdom as they are content farms. They rely on a steady stream of stories to bring traffic to the sub, and the quantity of the traffic is vastly more important than the quality of the posts. If you rot your brain enough scrolling through the same subreddit, or listening to a Youtuber like RSlash make videos reading these posts out loud, for hours on end, you start to notice how similar all these stories are, especially in terms of pacing and escalation. If it's not fake, then it has to at least be trimmed to fit into the existing mould that Redditors have come to expect. Because everyone needs to feel righteous about something, and anonymous Reddit stories provide that in spades, whether you agree with the OP or unite against them.

And I guess in that way, Reddit stories stop being useful as information about actual events that happen, and they become purely reflections or projections of ourselves. We see in a fake Reddit story what we want to see, and the truth doesn't matter because there is no truth.

For example, if you are accustomed to thinking of heterosexual relationships as a dynamic in which the man is always an abusive jerk and the woman is always grinning and bearing it, that is what you are going to bring to a fake Reddit post which features that dynamic, even if it purports to challange your preconceptions. The very weakness of Reddit posts becomes a strength! After all, everyone already knows they're fake. It's simply up to you, the audience member, to decide for yourself which parts are fake. Obviously, when you deconstruct and reconstruct the story in your mind, you find that the fake part is obviously any part that disagrees with your preconceived notions of who is Right and who is Wrong. You write your own version of the truth into the story, one in which the husband has an entirely different characterisation to the one written on the page. You can invent motivations, events, entire histories, out of whole cloth! Why not? Everyone knows Reddit stories are fake, everyone knows that first person narrators are unreliable, and everyone loves the opportunity to glimpse what might really be going on underneath the surface.

And that's probably the worst thing about it. Nobody can say that you're wrong to rewrite a man who was slightly disappointed by his birthday cake as an abusive jerk who treats his significant other like a servant. There's nothing incorrect about applying a probably fictional characterisation to a probably fictional story. I can't prove it wouldn't have happened that way if it had happened in real life.

All people can really do is nod along enthusiastically and say "ah yes, that checks out with my own preconceived biases", or shake their fists impotently and cry "hey, my preconceived biases tell me that's not how it happened at all!"

Why are people even talking about abuse? This is literally about cake. What.

I was thinking the same thing. It was her not listening to him. He did overreact, not gonna lie, but she should have been more considerate due to it being his birthday.

Automatically seeing a relatively minor disagreement as abuse because a husband and wife are involved is actually kind of fucked up.

(FYI, I voted "yes, but understandable." Technically, they're BOTH in the wrong.)

I would like to think that neither are in the wrong - your emotions cannot be wrong so and you're not supposed to lie, so OP did nothing wrong, and she is also not wrong because you are in fact allowed to have emotions in response to other people's emotions.

These two people were simply not meant for each other.

I think the story is plausible as presented. She tried to do something nice (which is good!), he didn’t receive it well (which is fine!), she was hurt (understandable; it is hard to put in extra effort and have it backfire), both overreacted (humans are great at that). Whether or not you think this post is fake depends mostly on your expected base rate.

This is exactly how arguments between two well-meaning people can happen. It doesn’t even mean they shouldn’t be together, just that they need to calm down.

If I had to rate it Reddit style I’d say NAH but both could have done better.

REDDIT DUDES ARE MAD ABOUT KARLACH TOPPING THEM

People can gloat all they like, but people probably shouldn't be "jumpscared" into sex acts they don't want to perform.

It's not so much that they were jumpscared into "sex acts they didn't want to perform" because ultimately it's a fictional character and pixels on a screen. What's really happening here is that these men were fully expecting a sex scene where they would assume the dominant role because in their minds that's the role for men and women are meant to be submissive. But instead this character didn't act according to their cisheteronormative standards and they felt emasculated because they felt she didn't behave the way she's "supposed to".

@bird-bureau​ Thank you for very succinctly saying what I was attempting to get across.

That’s fine for a movie. Or probably a game where you have a specific defined character you’re playing. If you want a sex scene with Samus or Link or Dante from the meme or one of the many Assassin’s Creed people from before they let you choose your character... sure, fair point. That’s no different than writing fanfic smut with those characters.

But Baldur’s Gate, like most games where you customize your character, is letting the players play as themselves. An idealized, superheroic fantasy version of themself, but themself.

It is doing them a significant wrong to have them then experience a scene they wouldn’t be okay with in real life, being inflicted on their self-insert. A much smaller wrong than doing it to them in real life, but a real wrong.

And it wouldn’t be hard to fix, either. I don’t even know this woman beyond a couple screenshots, but, IDK, her holding your chin in her hand and saying ‘I’m not always gentle’, that seems in-character. So do that, and let them back out from there. If they push past that and still aren’t okay with what happens? Then it’s their fault.

But you do, actually, have a duty to signpost sexual things a self-insert wouldn’t consent to, so that they can back out. That’s not something you should inflict on the unwarned.

Unequivocally false. A fantasy or idea including a character labeled "self" is still a fantasy or an idea, and the language of consent is not appropriate to use in that situation. It remains fiction, and should be treated as fiction, and you are still policing speech and creative expression rather than actual sex.

Causing somebody to vividly imagine themselves having sex they don't want can be 'rude' or 'boorish', but it is not 'harm' and there's no question of duty. We get to tell the stories we want to tell, we get to make the art we want to make. That's true even if our audience is encouraged- or even expected- to identify with a character.

(Nor is there a particularly strong line to be drawn between a self-insert and any other character; for example, does the blank-slate generic protagonist in every dating sim count as a self-insert, even though there was no character creation screen? Is hurting Frodo in the narrative more unethical than hurting Aragorn, on the grounds that Frodo is British-coded and clearly intended as an entry point to the world for a presumptively British audience?)

Modulo harms caused in the actual production of content, for example in some kinds of live-action pornography, there's just no version of this story that doesn't involve one person dictating the proper range of creative expression for somebody else. You can't frame it as protecting people, because it takes place entirely in the realm of fantasy. There is no coercion, there is no violence or threat of violence, there is no sex. It is a story that you don't like, or that is likely to be disliked by some fraction of the audience. It's fine not to like a story, but being offended is not the same as being harmed and it never will be.

Missing the point. I didn’t say harm I said it was wronging them. Which it is, just like making casual jokes along the lines of ‘don’t drop the soap’, if not more graphic ones. And in the same respect.

And there is quite obviously a clear line for self-inserts. I would say dating sims do obviously count; generic voiceless protagonists in other genres may for young franchises but develop clear character after a while.

It being fantasy does not actually matter for whether consent is an appropriate. That is irrelevant. Fiction usually is a bad place to use consent because ‘don’t like, don’t read’ applies to fiction, not because fiction is fantasy. This kind of scene, particularly in a video game with a self-insert protagonists, does not have that protection by default.

First, I'm perplexed by the claim that 'don't like, don't read' doesn't apply here- if only because the scene is clearly a fiction, as well as a fantasy; I sincerely don't understand what distinction you're trying to make here. (The thing probably even starts with the standard legal disclaimer that 'all characters and events depicted here are fictional, similarities to living persons are purely coincidental.') Is there any question that neither Karlach nor her strap-on are factual, or that the player can trivially walk away from the game whenever they choose, if it is not to taste?

But perhaps more to the point, the distinction between fantasy and reality is absolutely key for the question of whether consent is an appropriate framework. To reiterate the obvious, there was no sex. Nobody got pegged by Karlach, because there is no Karlach and there is no protagonist, and hence nobody to provide or withhold consent.

Would it clarify things to say 'speech' instead of 'fantasy', maybe? Your own comparison is to making a joke about 'dropping the soap', or other forms of crass humor- but of course we've never used a consent framework for being the target of jokes, either. Crass or otherwise. You can ask permission before you make jokes about people, and in many circumstances it's considered polite to do so, but you don't have to, nor can you plausibly build a society around the notion that people have the right to control what is said to them, or by who. Except, of course, through exercising their own freedom of association. As you say- don't like, don't read.

(I mean, among other problems, how would you get consent to ask somebody's consent for things?) We do make exceptions for, like, death threats or harassment- speech is not immune from moral considerations full stop, but mere offense does not rise to the occasion. There are issues of libel and reputation, but of course the speech under consideration here is private (except for a few streamers), with no public/interpersonal element extending beyond the subjective experience itself. There are cases where individuals have a duty within their role to avoid crass humor or offensive expression, such as an on-duty cop or a priest, but there is no such universal obligation that we're born in to. There is only decorum, or the lack of it.

Also, I'll point out that Link, one of the prototypical silent protagonists, is one of the specific examples you gave of a character with no moral restrictions on smutty fanfiction. The franchise has certainly matured a bit since the original games were released, but if this is such a bright and clear line, perhaps you'd be willing to provide the specific year at which (according to you) it became okay to write porn about Link? It must be wrong in 1986, when the original game was released, because the franchise was new and that Link was a functionally blank slate, but what about 1990? 2000? What implications did that really bad cartoon show in 1989 have for the morality of Link/Ganon slashfic?

Whatever your point is doesn’t make any sense to me. You’re drawing distinctions where none exist - no one argues it’s reasonable to include rape and torture in a D&D game without warning your players and getting their buy-in (i.e. consent), but that’s somehow different from a video game? The game has too many paths for warning players what it’s going to contain to be practical, therefore DLDR obviously can’t function here.

And bringing up Link/Ganon slashfic is just pointless. That’s not the game. That’s fanfic. None of this applies to fanfic, you can just write fanfic like any other kind of fanfic.

I think togglessymposium is used to thinking of the word “consent” as applying *only* in a sex context, when it is actually much more broadly useful.

almost all wine is basically fine and the good wine isn't so much better that it's transformative, so unless you want to join the fandom or get a job in the field, becoming a wine person actually mostly just gets in the way of your ability to enjoy wines in a spirit of innocent joie de vivre, to an extent that it usually outweighs the benefits of a more refined taste

this is also how fonts work

Pursuant to this: you know what, I think I'm just a denialist for the whole "you need to use these high-quality professional fonts because they're better-designed" thing, this sounds like a racket to me. Maybe someday it'll just click, or maybe I'll get in deep enough that I can't tell it's a racket, but: this is bullshit, right? Assuming you're actually reading your own typesetting so you see how it looks on the page, there are only two cases where it seems like font choice actually matters enough to get an expert to tell you what to do:

That's it! Don't tell me "oh but the kerning, oh this one has more warmth", listen to me: for stuff that's all aesthetic, like ads or packaging, I'll concede it, but for anything more functional than that, if you don't notice then your audience won't notice either, except for the minute fraction who are graphic designers or font nerds and can be sorted into the same slush pile as people who count semicolons or want you to treat "data" as plural. The people you are making this shit for could not tell Arial from Helvetica if you put a gun to their heads! Yes, there's probably some subtle aesthetic aura but unless you're just really into this as a hobby, it's not worth spending any time or money on that unless you're already spending so much time or money that it's a drop in the bucket.

But that's not even the worst part of it, the worst is the whole complex about avoiding a font because it's popular. There's a direct correlation between popularity and quality, so to get around this you either have to spend an enormous amount of time slumming around looking for the best "undiscovered" fonts you can find, or else you need to use fonts that are positional goods, fonts that are overpriced to the point where it becomes a mark of distinction. The ideal of course is to just commission your own font, but I think if you're not at the point where that makes financial sense then you should probably just suck it up. This dynamic might be inevitable with funky display fonts, because those are all in some sense about shouting HERE COMES A SPECIAL BOY, but people do this shit with normal body fonts too and it's like oh gosh, is Times New Roman a cliché? I should hope so!

I think it's always been this way to some extent but the gap keeps shrinking in terms of what you can do with the best "grab something common and free and don't think about it" option and it just feels increasingly silly to bother with it all. If there's a level of expertise at which all this makes sense I don't think I want to reach it.

Write in LaTeX or Markdown but specify the render in Times New Roman to annoy people who consider it déclasse to use Microsoft Word™.

I think it’s better now, but IIRC for a while it was unreasonably difficult to use TTFs in LaTeX, so it depends how much effort you want to go to for trolling.

That post yesterday about intonation in written text reminded me:

This is a silly question because it does not matter at all without first answering this question:

"Can I include a line break in my child's name?"

I am reminded of a person (now deceased) in my family whose name had different spellings (I'm not sure if it was regional or generational or what) and did not care how you spelled it - if you wrote them mail, any of them would be fine. This annoyed my dad to no end:

"right but which one is their name" - "their name is (says name)" - "spelled with a (--) or with a (++)?" - "either spelling is fine" - "right but which one is their name?"

"Can I include a line break in my child's name?" No. No you can not. Names do not have line breaks. Because names are transcriptions of the sounds we make when referring to each other, and there is no "line break" sound.

Extremely cringe and statism-pilled to think that your real name is some text string in a government database, rather than how your kith and kin refer to you.

See also Patio11's essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"

I see two possible interpretations of the question that aren’t quite answered by that:

Also I want to push back slightly on “names are transcriptions of the sounds we make”. That is no more true for names than for any other written language. It can often work as an approximation, but especially with the rise of real-time, cheap, text-based communication, it is not a perfect description. Some communication is primarily text instead of primarily vocal.

Closing thought: Someone probably *has* tried to get an emoji in their child’s name, and they likely had more success than if they’d tried for a linebreake.

we could have reached the stars by now if it wasn’t for the fact that we spent fifty years screwing up how to encode basic text as bytes.

but did we at least learn how to encode text as bytes?

Are you in a mental state to receive bad news?

Does it matter what my answer is?

It decides whether I answer your initial question

You already have through meta-information.

Yeah but not with *how* bad it is.

If you want it to sound like good news, we *have* learned how. Several times. Some of those ways are even mostly compatible with each other most of the time, and some mostly work for many languages.

Except Clinton has committed actual crimes, while the inidictments against Trump are embarassingly weak.

Just from the federal Court of DC indictment for conspiracy to defraud the US, obstruct an official proceeding, and deny rights. These are all very strong; any one of them would probably be enough to convict on at least one count. Open and shut case, though obviously they’ll do it in great detail so that it’s extremely obvious they were impartial.

I (a non-lawyer, grain of salt, etc. etc.) feel like the most open-and-shut case is the “perfect” phone call, and the one most relevant to the comparison here is the improperly-stored classified information.

Mark Vomit (2020)

you may also know Mark Vomit from such hits as "You Are Not Immune To Propaganda" (featuring Garfield)

...literally none of those are mandatory though

I have been forced to use a Facebook account for thingr completely unrelated to Facebook, and… I thopght I had an example of important government-provided videos only available on YouTube but I forgot what. In a strict sense of “mandatory”, no, pretty much nothing is mandatory. But there are things that now can *only* be done with new technology that could previously be done before that technology existed.

So constexpr is really just C++ for "this is a pure, total function" in the functional programming sense?

Edit: and this is different from const because const only guarantees non-mutation, not that there aren't side effects. Ok I think I get it.

Unfortunately, no.

You can call a constexpr function at runtime, and at runtime it behaves like all other functions - the compiler is no longer around to refuse compilation with inputs that aren't in the valid range.

You can get totality with consteval because the validity is only handled by the compiler, so you need to force compile time evaluation if you want totality.

And even then it doesn’t need to be a total function. You cannot *actually throw* in a constexpr context, but you can have a *throw statement*. If you throw on invalid inputs, then it’ll refuse to compile. It’s for pure functions where every input you happen to provide at compile time is valid.

I've run tar about a hundred times today for testing purposes, and at the risk of sounding like a dangerous madman fit only for the asylum, I daresay I've started to remember how the options/flags work.

The handful of options I use regularly make sense. Anything weird and I’m just as lost as everyone else.

Don't worry, the compiler will optimize it for you:

(C++ doesn't throw on overflow so I had to handle that inline but otherwise we're 1:1)

Okay, so there are a number of things going on here. By declaring it as constexpr, you tell the compiler to actually evaluate the entire function during compilation - this 'optimizes' it by making the entire program just return '1', the correct result for the number given, but it doesn't actually include *any* of the code. If you took out 'constexpr' we'd be able to see what's actually going on here. Ideally you'd also change the input to come from either command line args or stdin so that the compiler can't do any code optimizations based on the call being a constant.

Second, the function itself has actually been optimized from the original version by moving the recursive call to the end of the function. The compiler can safely turn that from a function call (puts a pointer on the call stack, takes up memory) to a jump statement (does neither of those things) - this is 'tail-call recursion', and it's good if you're on a system where function calls are expensive, like embedded systems, or if you generally want your code to run faster.

Nah "constexpr" is just a habit, it flows out of my arms by default.

Any decent optimizing compiler will handle this for you even if the function isn't constexpr, and even if the recursive call is later:

This still allows tail-call optimization. At the point you make the recursive call, the compiler knows no further code from the caller will run. It doesn’t matter that in the source file there’s more code; it’s impossible to get there so it’s still a tail call.

It is with a Heavy Heart I must inform you that C++ does not have guaranteed tail call optimization, and if you actually implement this with a throw on overflow, it does loop through max/2 possibilities

I never said it was guaranteed. I said it was still possible.

What happens if you use exceptions *but* say constexpr (I’m pretty sure try/catch is allowed in constexpr now but could be wrong)? My guess is it compiles to the same thing because constexpr doesn’t force the compiler to do it at compile time, and that the compiler gives up if you try to force it some other way.

Don't worry, the compiler will optimize it for you:

(C++ doesn't throw on overflow so I had to handle that inline but otherwise we're 1:1)

Okay, so there are a number of things going on here. By declaring it as constexpr, you tell the compiler to actually evaluate the entire function during compilation - this 'optimizes' it by making the entire program just return '1', the correct result for the number given, but it doesn't actually include *any* of the code. If you took out 'constexpr' we'd be able to see what's actually going on here. Ideally you'd also change the input to come from either command line args or stdin so that the compiler can't do any code optimizations based on the call being a constant.

Second, the function itself has actually been optimized from the original version by moving the recursive call to the end of the function. The compiler can safely turn that from a function call (puts a pointer on the call stack, takes up memory) to a jump statement (does neither of those things) - this is 'tail-call recursion', and it's good if you're on a system where function calls are expensive, like embedded systems, or if you generally want your code to run faster.

Nah "constexpr" is just a habit, it flows out of my arms by default.

Any decent optimizing compiler will handle this for you even if the function isn't constexpr, and even if the recursive call is later:

This still allows tail-call optimization. At the point you make the recursive call, the compiler knows no further code from the caller will run. It doesn’t matter that in the source file there’s more code; it’s impossible to get there so it’s still a tail call.

thinking about the time when movie posters and book covers had detailed original paintings made for them compared to what we have now

Just gonna add on my personal favourites

Capitalism will always choose a cheaper, crappier product.

Only if most people prefer the ‘crappier’ version. Which they do. Your preferences are not universal.

Preferences are not *universal* but I expect this one is fairly common. But having a good poster is expensive and, from the studio’s POV, I’d bet it’s largely a positional good. Assuming we did come up with a definition of “better” you agreed with, are you going to watch more movies if they have better posters? Are you even going to preferentially watch movies that do have better posters?

vriska did nothing

jan misali is officially a condemner of the actions or vriska serket.

what actions

All of them; you condemn all the actions of Vriska Serket. And every non-avian dinosaur in my room is wearing bright red lipstick.

Aren’t universal qualifiers fun?

Assumption of shared background of knowledge is a much more accurate phrase of what I meant, thank you for that haha.

Specifically I just want to learn, for the moment, how computers work. The engineering that goes into them, what parts do what, and how they are used in sharing and accessing information.

Now I'm just trying to search online, I'm not taking a class at college or anything (though I am considering) so that does mean the information I'm accessing varies wildly in quality 😅 but I'm struggling because with what I'm finding online is a lot of "how to do x" when what I want to learn is "what is x, how does x do this and why does x do it".

I guess now that I think about it I'm interested learning in computer engineering? But it's a little tricky so far because I don't really understand comouter engineering or the functions a computer can do, and it seems like to learn one I need to know the other, if that makes sense?

If the answer is open up 40 Wikipedia tabs at once, I can do that, I'm very good at doing that lol I just wanted to know if you had any tips so I wouldn't have to resort to that

I think probably you still need to get much more specific? As described, this is not 40 Wikipedia tabs, this is about 40,000 Wikipedia tabs. I have a whole-ass CS degree and 15 years of experience, and the vast majority of my map of "how computers work" still says "here be dragons".

It would help a little if you specified a starting point, something like "hardware" (probably not the most useful place to start), "software" (better but still enormous), "networks / the Internet" (big overlap with software but somewhat distinct in focus).

I think “how computers work” is narrow enough you can get an overview, with the understanding that itʼll be missing pieces and every single piece it does have is far more complicated in the real world.

Thereʼs a book/free online at-your-own-pace course, From Nand to Tetris. I donʼt know how good it is, not having done it myself, but it in theory covers everything from logic gates through to how to make Tetris. It isnʼt on physical hardware (which both doesnʼt exactly use Nand gates as described and does use lower-level components), and I bet it wouldnʼt cover some important real-world topics like an operating system that can run multiple programs at once, but it can give a basic idea of lots of parts.

If you want something more real-world focused instead of theory-focused, Iʼm not sure how to help but would also be interested in hearing about stuff.

I'll say this again: atheists arguing about what the doctrines of a religion "really are" are making a category error. The idea that there is a correct interpretation of (e.g.) the Bible, and that all other interpretations are examples of false Christianity, is an idea that only makes sense if you accept the premise that Christianity is true in some form to begin with.

I've had the following argument many times:

Atheist guy: "Christian doctrine says X"

Me (also an atheist, to be clear): "not necessarily; here are a bunch of Christians who don't believe that"

Atheist guy: "well they just don't understand Christianity. Christian doctrine says X and they're just wrong about Christian doctrine."

And I hate this argument so much. There is no ground truth against which to check what the "true Christian doctrine" is, because Christianity is not true! Christian doctrine is whatever Christians say it is, it all has equal epistemic value! Yeah, I do agree the some positions have more textual support in the Bible than others, but like... if there's a Christian sect who holds some really heterodox theological position I can't really say that their claims are substantively any farther away from some True Christian Ideal than the claims of e.g. the Catholic Church. I don't believe that a True Christian Ideal exists because that is a Christian notion and I am an atheist!

Same goes for other religions.

I think... no.

Would you let any other -ism or -anity get away with this nonsense?

I’m gonna say communism is against the free market, even if some splitter groups do in fact think markets are a good solution.

I’m gonna say Die Grünen are for climate change, even if some rare few of them do in fact support nuclear power.

And I’m going to say that Christians believe (insert Apostolic Creed), even if there are some people out there calling themself Christian who do not.

Sure, there is no background truth of Christianity to check the Creed against - but there is also no background truth of German primitivism, or Marxist theory. There is just what people do, and people who are Christian proclaim the Apostolic Creed.

I agree with the broader point you’re making, and was thinking something along those lines when reading OP, but… you chose a bad example there. Many modern Christians do not believe in the Harrowing of Hell; one could say the *definition* of Protestantism denies the holy Catholic church; and many would less strenuously object to many other aspects. I would say many parts are ~universal to modern (though not all historical) Christians, but the whole Creed is I think only Catholics and maybe Eastern Orthodox.

wait python doesn’t accept posix file names?

It does; I have no clue what the first complaint is about. There are reasons to not want spaces in *any* filename, sometimes, but I don’t know of anything in Python specifically which makes it a bad idea.

@raginrayguns

I am open to this, but every time I have tried to learn about "timeless decision theory" I have bounced off a) the motivation for it, which is coming up with mathematics congenial to his cult and b) also not having any understanding and view of non-occult Decision Theory.

I don't even know if the whole "Decision Theory" current is 'important philosophy', let alone Yudkowsky's contribution. It doesn't seem to lead to anything practical except justifying his cult. What would you say is serious about it?

like i am skimming through the paper again now. I don't particularly *want* to put my soul into an -ism that gives the scientifically mathematically true answer to 'how to make algorithmic decisions when god is inserted into the calculus'.

Here he comes up with some parable about bewitched ice-cream that is supposed to illuminate something, which doesn't illuminate anything for me. I notice he expects me to have a strong conviction about the right answer to this, and that it's supposed to react in some entertaining way with a conviction i am also supposed to have about the classic god-boxes problem.

Like, here's the intuition I *actually* have: someone presents me with the boxes and puts on a priest hat and says "ohhh.....god knows your heart and has ordained what's in this box.....choose..."

Assuming he's a real priest (which he probably isn't, but assuming) he is putting me in what seems to be to be obviously a situation where reason doesn't apply, because there is in fact no rational way this could work -- God is sovereign and is hiding his will from me, but I am evertheless obliged to choose -- my freedom is coming up with an apologia for god's actions after choosing.

Not being able to use reason, but also being obliged to treat with God, I am obliged, therefore, to fall back onto what I *do* know about God's will -- revelation. I think about it for a minute and think "hang on, this is just Abraham and Isaac. I am Abraham, the first box contains Isaac and the second box contains the nation of Israel god has offered me. I know that in order to obtain the nation of Israel, I must follow God and sacrifice Isaac. I know this is irrational, just as Abraham knew that Isaac was how he would become the father of Israel, but I must do like Abraham."

This is, of course, folly. The only way I would *know* it was the right answer is if I had the second hand faith of Abraham that comes from believing in the revealed truth of his story, and model.

It does not seem to me to be a coincidence that this problem speaks deeply to R. Yudkowsky and R. Nozick, who are both convinced that they have caught God in a bottle and have analysed him into numbers and letters, and therefore that "it is perfectly clear and obvious what should have been done", where I see only a problem of faith.

This R. Eliezer is very unlike the other R. Eliezer, of "My children have triumphed over Me! My children have triumphed over Me!" fame. The rabbis in the Oven of Akhnai story were similarly convinced that ventriloquising their own judgements in the name of the Predictor was sound religion and sound reasoning, and an obligation to be followed and cut into the flesh of all successive generations, including R. Yudkowsky and R. Nozick.

Extend, like, five seconds of charitable thought to it.

The prior work in the field, particularly Causal Decision Theory and Evidential Decision Theory, was not good. You got extremely wrong answers to common-sense scenarios that did not involve any Omega or one-boxing or whatever.

TDD gives better results, in those common-sense scenarios. That’s a real accomplishment even outside of whatever shade you want to throw on the aspiring-rationalist movement.

then why is he talking so much about it and trying to tell me to open my heart to the possibility of acausal woo and my true nature in higher-order time as agent always-already having written the future

what is the common sense that i am missing out on?

The ability to make unforced future commitments (impossible under CDT) without making deliberately bad decisions because you don’t understand cause and effect (required under EDT)

And to answer the queseion of why focus on absurd scenarios: it’s common in thought experiments to try to remove extraneous detail. Nobody is *actually* in the trolley problem IRL, but it still nicely illustrates a divide in how people think of things.

Newcomb’s problem is a simplified problem, in the sense of removing extraneous detail, of any situation where someone is predicting what you’ll do. It’s presented with someone who is perfect at making that prediction to remove attempts to trick them, but the math still works if they are human and can guess slightly better than a coinflip. That is why Newcomb invented it almost two decades before Yudkowsky was born, and other people analyzed it a decade before he was born, and it was in a pop science magazine six years before he was born.

More everyday, informal situations where FDT is useful are any time you use the word “promise” when there’s no enforcement mechanism for if you break the promise.

the problem is that if 1 is a prime number, then no number is. One of the definitions of a prime number is that it’s a number that is evenly divisible by no prime numbers other than itself.  Well, if one is a prime number, then EVERY prime number is divisible by one, because anything divided by one equals itself, so nothing is prime, which... kind of defeats the point of having a category of “prime numbers” in the first place. Secondly, a fundamental idea of math is that any number can be broken down into a unique string of “prime factors” - for example, 69 (haha) is evenly divisible by 3 and 23.  42 is made by multiplying together 2, 3, and 7.  5040 is constructed by multiplying 2*2*2*2*3*3*5*7.  You take a string of prime numbers, any string of prime numbers, and you will get exactly one composite number that can only be broken down into exactly that one string of prime numbers. If 1 is a prime number, you can add as many 1s as you want onto the list and make it a different unique string that still becomes the same number in the end.  This breaks a fundamental rule so important it’s literally called The Fundamental Theorem Of Arithmetic, so... breaking it is Kind Of A Big Deal, as a whole bunch of other more specific mathematical proofs are built upon the idea that the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic is true.

TL;DR: 1 is not a prime because math breaks in a couple Very Important Ways if we call it prime, so instead 1 has its own very special category (The Multiplicative Identity) and then all the prime numbers can Be Prime and let things just work.

when I think of 1 all sad and alone, the loneliest number, we could say, carefully excluded from the Cool Kids Prime Club despite being absolutely foundational to its definition of "any number divisible only by itself and 1", excluded for being overqualified for being both itself and 1, I get too sad to care about any theorems fundamental or otherwise 😔

It’s not that it’s excluded, exactly; it’s that it’s too important to just be in the primes club. Its in its own cooler club, the units. There is only one unit in the natural numbers we ordinary talk about with primes, but in other number sets there are others (like -1). A unit is any number which has a multiplicative inverse in the set we’re talking about. Since 1/2 isn’t a natural number, 2 isn’t a unit in the natural numbers, but 1 is always a unit whatever collection of numbers it finds itself in.

this is the fucking funniest thing ive ever seen im in tears of laughter. (right axis) . this is a work of fucking art

As you all can see when I started to purchase $10 pocket knives at gas stations in late 2017 and continued to do so once a year every year the gap between my annual military expenditure and that of the U.S. quickly began to close.

here it is on one axis lmao

Thank you for this simplified lesson in what propaganda looks like.

This pisses me off. It’s not propaganda, you paranoid fucks. It’s a perfectly reasonable way of putting an outlier on the same graph as the other entries being tracked. It would be preferably if the right axis was an integer multiple of the left axis, but there’s nothing unreasonable about this graph.

It’s fine if presented in a good context. As-is, it is misleading unless you read closely. There are ways they could have been less misleading (eg. color the right axis blue to show it only applied to the one line, mention in the title not just a parenthetical in the legend, surely a bunch of other options I’m not thinking of because I’m not a data visualization person); they did zero of them.

In conclusion, I don’t alwaws agree with Randall Munroe’s takes, but https://xkcd.com/558/ is a good one.