Random Walks

If the WHOLE COUNTRY'S economy cannot work without the labor that UPS workers provide, than their labor is worth their demands and more.

No other conclusion can be rationally made from this information.

If the economy cannot function without UPS, then UPS needs to be broken up.

[Image description: A series of posts from Jason Lefkowitz @jalefkowit@octodon.social dated Dec 08, 2022, 04:33, reading:

/end image description]

1) Do you think that we as a species are not also putting tremendous effort into automating industrial tasks?

2) Do you think that the technology that went into Dall-E, etc. is exclusively useful for automating things that humans do recreationally, or do you think that perhaps that same technology might also be able to help automate more menial things like producing better automatic translation or digital assistants or even eventually more easily trainable industrial robots?

— Adam Serwer, Fear of a Black Hobbit

One of those “sounds neat” ideas, and its not 0% false, kids have an easy intensity adults often can’t match, but it absolutely fails the sanity check right out the gate. Adults consume media and love it all the time! People leave movie theatres or close books satisfied and excited, its very common. I watched two of my top five *anime* for the first time as a full adult, let alone movies or books.

Its examples are telling - the original Star Wars, to take one, was amazing primarily due to its special effects. Its a well done vessel for those special effects, don’t get me wrong, but that was its magic and its not a check you cash again as easily, you need to elevate the material now. But the reality is the latest Star Wars movies, or the Hobbit movies, or whatever, are failing hard at that goal. I watch them, and they suck, and then I watch amazing things the next day and love them.

This is a fake insight that makes the rounds a lot and pretty much never holds up.

You’re honestly telling me that modern videogames, the best of the hundreds released every year, give you the same emotional intense you got from playing Super Mario Brothers 3? (Or whatever came out when you were 8.) They definitely don’t feel the same way to me.

Or are you arguing that all these modern games, even all the indy 8-bit darlings, are technically worse than Super Mario Brothers 3?

Like I’m sorry you don’t like the political implications of it, but “we can’t recapture the feelings of our childhood” is much older and more widespread than gamergate-critics.

Yes. I’m pretty sure I got as much out of games like Hallowknight, Elden Ring and Baba is You as I got out of whatever I was playing when I was 8. Though I’m pretty sure that if they decided to come out with a Commander Keen remake today I would get considerably less out of it in part because it likely just wouldn’t be as good as other stuff coming out today.

You really can't overstate how little anti-worker rhetoric has changed over a hundred fifty years.

(source)

I will never understand the human urge to leap from “lots of people have thought this was true over a long period” to “and therefore it must be false”.

(one could argue this graph shows high workforce participation in 1948, making it hard for participation to have been declining since 1894. But wages were rising very quickly from 1894-1948, suggesting it was taking more and more money to keep the same number of people in the workforce)

And what do you think happened to the prime-age female labor force participation rate during that period where the male rate dropped all of 8 points over the course of 58 years?

Here's some more Biodiverse Memes! Y'all are strongly encouraged to repost to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and other websites. No need to credit.

Some of these are new, some are from earlier. Wanted to make some (somewhat) positive ones since the point isn't to be "anti-lawn," it's to get people to appreciate how beautiful and important biodiversity is and how easy it is to have biodiversity in your surroundings :3

Go wild, give them to the other websites so the people there can see

someone post these to r/lawnporn i was permanently banned so i can’t to it

Serious question: If I want a yard that I can run around in, what are my other options? I’m not committed to the idea of grass, but I also don’t want it full of shrubs or trees, and will need something that can survive being trampled.

if only there was a way to stop my back pain

(this is me btw)

iirc there are no scientific studies that have shown a link between posture and back pain, and some evidence that what is usually considered “good posture” can cause it, esp. if it’s forced. “good posture” as a concept originates in weird victorian pseudoscience. unless you’re doing something that actually causes pain in the moment or have, like, an injury that shows up on X ray, you’re probably not giving yourself back problems.

Whoa! Important if true. Do you have any recommended reading on this? As someone with terrible posture, a bad ergonomic environment, and occasional back pain, this is Relevant To My Interests.

Notes toward a history of posture

Fitness, posture, and other school health myths (bit on posture starts at p. 10)

“Sit up straight:” time to reevaluate

these are among the sources cited by aaron_kubaldc, a guy on tiktok (yeah, yeah, I know, but he cites his sources!) who talks more generally about why chiropractic stuff is bullshit & how to approach issues like back pain from a more evidence-based direction

what is good seems to be (basically) not sitting in ways which are deliberately uncomfortable (for instance, because you’re trying not to “have bad posture”), to move or shift position when you feel uncomfortable (i.e., what people tend to do anyway), and stay the fuck away from chiropractors, who are at best useless quacks

pain is complicated and has lots of difficult-to-disentangle physiological and psychological feedback loops, so it’s easy to convince people through the magic of confirmation bias that any pain they have is because of posture. it doesn’t hurt that by the basically random criteria we have for “good posture,” tons of people have bad posture. but the human spine and back is pretty resilient, and you can’t give yourself a debilitating injury just from how you sit. sitting too much doesn’t increase back pain, and looking at your phone too much won’t fuck up your neck.

I would like to disagree strongly but qualifiedidly about chiropractors. I have seen multiple ones who are, at best, quacks.  I’ve also seen ones who have fixed problems that had been building for years with no other treatment helping (including a great deal of ‘science-based’ physical therapy). Sometimes your problem is that the joint is twisted the fuck out of alignment and it’s making absolutely everything around it worse.

I know that I can see a physical therapist weekly, do half hour or more physical therapy each night (for my legs, knees, and lower back), take my usual meds plus a higher dose of ibuprophen, and then use a heating pad, ice pack, or both to get my back to chill out enough to let me sleep.

Or I can see a (good) chiropractor every couple weeks to get my pelvis aligned correctly and all the other issues basically go away.

The stuff about “popping the back” is generally nonsense, though.

this response surprises me. i thought most people understood chiropractors as belonging to the same general class as homeopaths, reiki healers, and acupuncturists, i.e., if you don’t trust someone to cure your arthritis by moving their hands around in the air over you you’re not gonna trust a chiropractor. like obviously if you feel you’re getting value for money you’re not literally getting scammed, but the evidence for chiropractors doing anything useful is bad, and the evidence they can actually cause some kind of long-term effect on the spine or on joints by briefly messing with them is, as far as i can tell, totally nonexistent

I knew a chiropractor as a friend of the family, who frequently complained about the bullshit of other chiropractors and who, the one time I asked for anything, gave some advice that actually worked, so I’ve always assumed it was a “chiropractors aren’t necessarily bullshit, but it’s become a popular buzzword among nutcases so now it’s 5% legit chiropractors and 95% quacks.” 

Hmm... and 95% of chiropractors being quacks would make it much harder for any studies done to detect that the good ones are actually doing something useful.

I’ve talked about this before but a big thing about rainforest destruction is that even if every single agricultural industry agreed to stop using it, the people with the power to sell that land would still do so to the highest bidder and the highest bidder is still going to be someone who will just cut it all down. Making $1 off a bag of mulch is still more desirable than sitting on that land making no money at all. This is another of those things where you can only fix the environmental problem with you fix the human poverty first.

This is why environmental services and ‘natural capital’ has a place in the environment and sustainability discussion. Putting actual numbers on the value of, say, carbon sequestration or erosion control or pollinator provision or (especially relevant for tropical rainforests) water cycle regulation, can sometimes get through to people in a way that “save the jaguars!” doesn’t always do.

Not that we shouldn’t be also trying to solve the problem of human poverty, but this seems not that related.

On the one hand, the easy fix for this issue would be to have the land be publicly owned, or put strong regulations on what the private owners can do with it, or even provide monetary incentives for the private owners to not destroy it. All of these could be done without ending the problem of human poverty.

And on the other hand, unless by “fix the human poverty” you mean build a post-scarcity utopia where nobody has any need for money, I don’t think that it actually solves the problem here. It’s not just poor people who try to make money. Even if we eliminated situations where people didn’t have enough money to live comfortably, there would still be an incentive for those who could to make more money off of this land in order to live in even better conditions or use the extra money to gain social status or just to retire earlier.

lol. lmao even.

The vast majority of post-op trans QoL studies use sample sizes of less than 30 people, unless it's a meta-study that's compiling the work of multiple surveys. I don't think you want to challenge the findings of almost every single study of trans healthcare.

This is an interesting point.

I don’t have the exact link, but I was reading about the mathematics of polls, and even small-ish polls have low margins of error. If a poll of 50 people finds that 70% support Democrats, then the real number that you'd get with 500 or 5000 people is probably very close. I've found this myself when I run online surveys - after the first 20 people, you usually have a really good idea how they'll turn out.

In theory, you should be able to apply this intuition to studies. A study is just a poll taken after you've done some randomized intervention (or measured some other independent variable). But I agree with some of the people responding here that I don't trust any study done with fewer than 50-100 people, and I feel most confident when there are 10000+

I think there are two things going on here:

- It's easier to do statistical trickery with fewer people. For example, if you only have twenty people, then taking out two outliers can change the entire result. You can always find a reasonable-seeming rule which changes the results to what you want, like "we only counted people who gave full answers to all questions" vs. "we counted any answer as long as it was intelligible". Most scientists try to do sketchy things like that, and so you need a study big enough to make this hard.

- Large studies are good not because the sample size is bigger, but because anything that big is going to have a really professional operation with statisticians who know what they're doing, independent auditors, etc. And since they're going to be important, they'll be critiqued by lots of people who will find any flaws before they get to you.

I'm not sure if either of these is true, or how to weight these factors, but I feel like something like this must be going on.

If you have a study with N people and you want to estimate the fraction of the total population that has some attribute, you can do so to accuracy about 1 in the square root of N. So if you want 1% accuracy, you’ll need something like 10,000 people in your survey and if you want 10% accuracy, you’ll need about 100.

If the effect you are looking for is large, then small studies with good statistics should find it. If the effect you are looking for is small, you’ll need a much larger study.

@argumate​ making a new post so i don’t keep reblogging a wall of text

so i mean leftist newspapers do exist - one of my favorites, the outline, went out of business last year since it’s very hard to maintain a media outlet that isn’t instantly paywalled if you aren’t being subsidized by a billionaire.

the overall problem isn’t necessarily whether or not media will cover you (though that is sometimes a problem) but how they’ll cover you, because like it or not, most people receive their news through major media outlets. if there’s ingrained hostility against you, it makes it that much harder to win an election.

it’s also hard to convince billionaires to support you when part of your political messaging is that they shouldn’t exist!

the reason the Yudkowsky comparison falls a bit flat is that it’s not enough to get a million views on your leftist manifesto - fox news averages 2.4 million views per day. that’s the scale of your opposition!

but i feel like this is getting a bit doomerish so let me summarize the point i’m trying to make.

the general argument you and other ratblr people are making on my posts is “well, the democratic system is still reasonably fair, so you have to stop making excuses and go get more votes.” this is an infuriating argument, because any leftist with basic pattern recognition can point to a dozen examples of why it isn’t true.

i’m going to assume you’re talking to leftists, by the way, since i don’t know many other groups who think about revolutions after they lose elections. anyway. as i’ve said many times, i agree with you on that! i think revolution is a terrible idea, in the current state of things. i think we both share an interest in finding a way forward for the left that doesn’t involve mass violence.

so… make an effort to analyze why electoralism hasn’t worked for the left, specifically. if your solution is “have you tried doing electoralism again but harder this time” that’s not helpful! that brands you as someone who hasn’t bothered to put in the effort to understand why the electoral situation for leftists is often a lot more complicated and challenging than it is for politicians who have actual institutional backing, and it makes people who have put that effort in want to dismiss you.

the reason why i am pessimistic about the electoral chances of leftists is not because i want leftists to stop trying and go have a glorious revolution, it’s because if we’re going to start making this shit work, we need to have a proper understanding of the structural barriers in the way of actual change so we can start chipping away at them. if we do exactly what you’re implying, tweak our messaging and find the most photogenic leader and cultivate relationships with the media, we might lose the next primary by 5 million votes instead of 10, or whatever. but if we want to win, we need to actually understand why the playing field is unbalanced and talk about what we might be able to do to fix that.

I think one could quibble as to whether or not electoralism has “worked” for the left, like obviously there have been wins and losses over the years and one could go as far as to argue that electoralism has worked better for the left in practice than alternative attempts at achieving and maintaining political influence.

I also think it’s important not to get too binary in thinking that it’s an all or nothing thing, like imagine explaining sorrowfully to someone from the 1820s or even 1920s about how the left never wins, it would give them a very different impression of 2020 society than actually exists.

jouissancelover said: “a way forward for the left that doesn’t involve mass violence” implies the status quo doesn’t already involves mass violence, which is especially untrue for people outside the imperial core who are being oppressed for the benefit of western nations & needs just as much (if not more) consideration in achieving liberation ASAP & by any means necessary

I want to argue with this one. If the status quo involves mass violence, then a way forward that doesn’t involve mass violence is a change. I’m skeptical of a way forward that involves mass violence against different people, because it seems like every time people go “let’s take this tactic oppressors use and use it against the oppressors!“ they end up ignoring the source of their problems and fighting with a different oppressed group.

Do you think that “they end[ed] up ignoring the source of their problems and fighting with a different oppressed group” is an accurate and fair summary of the legacy of the sixteenth to nineteenth century liberal revolutions in England, USA, France, Latin America, Haiti, etc. and the USA Civil War?

I mean, there’s plenty you could criticize about those revolutions! Some of them did just end with a new king or dictator on the throne within a generation (England and France), and they mostly were appallingly terrible at cross-subaltern solidarity because they mostly weren’t even trying to do that (see: pretty words about liberty coming from owners of slaves and slaughterers of native people).

On the other hand, most liberals and leftists (and even most conservatives nowadays) recognize the present world order as a vast improvement on the world order of 1750, and the present world order was forged in fire and blood by toppling privileged incumbents from their (often literal) thrones in a process that involved lots of violent revolution and arguably violent revolution adjacent conflict (US Civil War). We used to live in a world where most of humanity was ruled by unelected feudal lords who passed office and power and privilege down to their children and a significant fraction of humans were literally slaves, and we don’t live in a world like that anymore, and lots of violent revolution was involved in that change!

I dunno, maybe all that fire and blood was actually unnecessary. The feminists and LGBT rights people won without doing any significant violence, as did the 1960s US Civil Rights movement that ended segregation and Jim Crow. Maybe the democracy and anti-slavery movements could eventually have won the same way. Maybe the kings and feudal lords and slave-owners would eventually have more-or-less peacefully surrendered just like the patriarchs and homophobes and segregationists did (yes, I’m very aware that “more-or-less” is bracketing a lot of violence in describing e.g. the end of Jim Crow as a “peaceful surrender”).

On the other hand, it may require a certain baseline level of civilization for those sort of peaceful political pressure strategies to be effective. Ghandi’s and MLK’s strategies might not have worked so well against the Nazis. And I think the bloodier stages of the liberal revolutions may have played a necessary role in creating that baseline level of civilization. ‘60s civil rights marcher strategies required the presence of a mass media willing to show something vaguely approximating their side of the story and a general public that would react to footage of a woman getting knocked down with a high pressure fire hose and ripped up by police dogs with moral outrage. Would those things exist in a society that was still running on something like the political institutions of 1750? Women, a historically very demilitarized class, seem to have been pretty consistently kept in a subaltern position for almost the entire history of agricultural society - until the liberal revolutions happened, and then all of sudden they developed highly effective insurgent political pressure groups organized around their interests as a class (feminism), I suspect partly because the liberal revolutions forged powerful social technologies for subaltern groups to organize, and partly because the liberal revolutions changed society in ways that made it harder for privileged incumbents to use violence to suppress subaltern activism and organization.

I think the liberal revolutions are a pretty powerful counter-example to a lot of meta-level “violent revolutions never fix things” arguments.

There was a fair bit of terrorism—arson and bombing, mostly—associated with the suffragettes, though I’m unsure how big a factor that was in expanding the franchise to women. Likewise, I would guess that “There’s no Obergefell without Stonewall” is probably true on some level, but the relationship probably isn’t as direct as that statement might imply. 

But it does also seem to me that, in a much more direct way, part of Martin Luther King’s effectiveness was that he didn’t exist in isolation, and white folks could see that there were alternatives: if you don’t break bread with MLK today, then Malcolm X will show up tomorrow. 

But then, the Rosenstrasse protest was able to prevent the deportment of nearly two thousand Jewish men from Berlin in 1943, through largely nonviolent protests. Though there are some confounding factors—would the Nazi government have preferred a massacre or mass arrests (as they did consider) if the protests had taken place elsewhere than Berlin, or prior to WWII?—it does shine light on the fact that, ultimately, even the most violent, oppressive regime requires a certain amount of engagement (collaboration, even), and simply refusing to support the regime can render it nonfunctional: violence may have its uses, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally necessary. 

There’s this survey I recall hearing about (and which I’m having trouble finding, and may be misremembering; if anyone can find it for me, I’d be grateful), asking Saudi men whether they support greater freedoms for women and then asking them again in private (possibly after telling them that other men do support this? I don’t recall for sure), and getting better results the second time, when they don’t have to maintain a reputation in front of anyone else. I wonder how much of leftism’s apparent weakness is attributable to this sort of coordination problem, and to what degree the utility of violence is that it basically breaks down that external/internal barrier so that you can see more clearly, “Oh, looks like those people have more support than I thought!” 

I think part of the point of Democracy is that it makes it easier to change things by non-violent means than by violent ones. Like if you are trying to reform the brutally oppressive autocracy, you might be able to make some headway by garnering enough public support for non-violent protests, but you also run the risk of getting a lot of your supporters violently murdered and accomplishing nothing. Revolution may just be the only way to change things. But in a Democracy, there’s at least a system in place for changing things if you can get enough popular support. Like sure, the electoral politics in the US are stacked somewhat against certain kinds of candidates, but are they more stacked against you than the odds of trying to run a successful revolution against the US military? If you cannot garner enough popular support to win an election, how are you going to get enough popular support to win a revolution?

Also, I realize that the original post here was from December of 2020, but

seems a little dated now.

Straight dudes will be like “ew, gross” at the idea of shipping Venom and Eddie Brock, then turn around and draw boobs on a gelatinous cube.

but the gelatinous cube is not (necessarily) in a toxic relationship 

The cube does acid damage, so I’m pretty sure it’s toxic.

Wait for real? Since when does HBO own Sesame Street, wasn’t it on PBS or...????

Yeah, that’s not great, but it sounds like the new episodes *are* still airing on PBS about a year late. It’s not like many of them are time sensitive.

@emilyisliving on Instagram

This makes some reasonable points, but other are overreaching, misleading, or just wrong.

In terms of charity, Bill Gates at least has donated about $50 billion so far (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fact-check-bill-gates-has-given-over-50-billion-charitable-causes/3169864001/). I guess in 2019 he donated less than an average year, but it seems like however you calculate it, he has donated a pretty substantial portion of his net worth already.

Many self-made billionaires do benefit from exploiting others, but I don’t think that this is universal. J.K.Rowling is worth somewhere in the ballpark of a billion dollars, and I don’t think she had to do any significant direct exploitation. Sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if the publishing industry she worked with exploited some people somewhere along its supply chain, but I don’t think that this makes her much more culpable than you or I are by interacting with companies that exploit people somewhere in their supply chain.

The claim that it would cost only $20billion to end homelessness in the US is just wrong (https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/social-justice/20-billion-not-enough-eradicate-homelessness/536-87f9cba3-5654-4f5b-845c-2f57716c8850). It would cost somewhat more than that PER YEAR to solve the problem.

The cost of solving climate change is more complicated with estimates varying wildly, but from what I can tell $300 billion is the lowest estimate, with most being in the tens of trillions (so like 100 times a much).

Also, the claim that the top 26 billionaires have a much wealth as the world’s bottom 3.8 billion people is true only in the same sense that *I* own more wealth than the bottom 2 billion people in the world. Not because I am particularly wealthy, but because these people have a negative net wealth.

Like I agree that having individuals hoard so much wealth is not very efficient and can have corrosive effects on Democracy. We should be taxing the very wealthy at a higher rate than we are, and should be doing more as a society to support those that are not well off. But if you are going to make the argument for... whatever it is that this is actually arguing for, you can do so without being so misleading about your facts.

i know we're all probably past realizing this but can you believe that science has come to a point where we're coming up with all of these way better and way less harmful alternatives to things like plastic just for them to never be implemented on a large scale and instead be used in small and impractical situations that provide net zero benefit just because the companies that do produce plastic don't want to let go of their stranglehold on the markets.

this is what we mean when we say "capitalism prevents innovation" in all of its ability to apply to the real world and not in some weird theoretical context. at the end of the day, capitalists want to turn a profit. and they can't do that unless they buy out all the competition. going back to our plastic example, pretty much every executive in the plastic industry can agree that any widespread alternate to their product is gonna hurt their profits, so they can either choose to completely reform their companies and produce the alternative, or they can take the easy route and just spawn kill any plastic alternative kickstarter. this is what lenin meant by monopolies; it's not just one company, but a number of companies that can all agree that anything outside of their jurisdiction is Bad and needs to be neutralized. it's how entire industries can thrive despite the general population knowing that what they're doing is bad.

Ha ha there were news stories about biodegradable eco-friendly plastic alternatives when I was a child in the NINETIES. That’s thirty years we knew how to do that and are still using the oil-based plastic for most things. Thirty years since I heard someone say we would have straws and trash bags and pens made of this cool new decomposing stuff. Maybe it had some problems, but still, thirty years that it could have been used for SOMETHING and not a peep about it, because yeah, corporations, against what should be the natural order, pretty much all have the power to decide when their services are obsolete rather than be rendered obsolete by healthy competition and consumer choice.

I’m kinda skeptical of this narrative. What is true is that capitalism doesn’t CARE if something is biodegradable. Neither the companies that make the plastics nor the consumers that use them are immediately affected by the problem of buildup of plastic waste, and to the extent that they are its in a tragedy of the commons type way that doesn’t motivate any individual to do anything about it. What these actors DO care about is how cheap/durable/generally useful it is. Like if someone invented a plastic alternative that could do all the things plastics could do at half the cost, plastic companies might buy them out, but it would be to start producing this new stuff at scale and beat out all of their competition and make a gazillion extra dollars. The fact that this hasn’t happened makes me suspect that all the plastic alternatives developed to date are some combination of more expensive/ too specialized / not useful, which is why they haven’t replaced plastics yet.

Capitalism only cares how cheap/useful/flexible something is, not whether it’s good for the environment. If you want to help the environment you either have to hope that the cheapest/most useful material happens to be biodegradable, or you need to institute regulations to *force* Capitalism to care.

Humanity is incredible.

“You’re indecent and subhuman, and I’m not going to help you stop, but I still love and care about you”

Okay, I’m curious, what’s the nature of your beef with altruism?

It’s wrong and to the extent it’s practiced consistently it can only result in misery and death. There is no justification for it.

My beef is primarily in the nature of ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ: My life is my own to enjoy, and the emotionalistic sophistry (often eventually backed by a gun) employed to get me to give it up is infuriating. Secondarily, I’d like it if the people I care about would stop sacrificing their lives to the extent that they do.

Isn’t this a bit self-contradictory? “Caring about other people is bad for you, and I care about you so I want you to stop”? Surely the true anti-altruist action would be to keep this truth to yourself and your closest friends.

It sounds more like you disagree with certain common forms of attempted altruism on altruistic grounds, rather than opposing altruism itself.

Then again, maybe “it would get people to shut up about altruism” is enough of a selfish reason to spread anti-altruism.

Altruism is not “caring about other people”. Altruism is the belief that the primary beneficiary of your actions should be others and that the standard by which your actions are justified or not is the welfare of others*.

I care about other people because they benefit me and the things I value. The people I’m closest with do the most, of course, but I do have a generalized benevolence toward unknown** human beings anywhere on pure potentiality grounds; I’d certainly be better off in a world where everyone was a rational egoist with all that implied! But the extent to which I’m willing to work for that outcome is limited both by my chances of success and how it funges against my other interests; if I had to choose between spending my life doing the research I want to do or being certain to achieve world-wide cultural change in favor of my beliefs, I’d choose the former.

*: nothing of consequence changes if you include yourself as an equal among all of humanity in “others”

**: There are plenty of people I don’t care about at all, once I know them as opposed to my values

I think altruism describes actions intended to benefit others, not a particular belief or the belief that all actions should be determined this way. The thing you seem to be describing is more like the hard core version of utilitarianism.

I take actions intended to benefit others when and to the extent that those others are people who I think support me and/or my values. Is that altruistic?

You can be altruistic only to specific groups of people without it ceasing to be altruism.

If you are doing it only because you expect them to benefit you in the future, it is not.

Humanity is incredible.

“You’re indecent and subhuman, and I’m not going to help you stop, but I still love and care about you”

Okay, I’m curious, what’s the nature of your beef with altruism?

It’s wrong and to the extent it’s practiced consistently it can only result in misery and death. There is no justification for it.

My beef is primarily in the nature of ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ: My life is my own to enjoy, and the emotionalistic sophistry (often eventually backed by a gun) employed to get me to give it up is infuriating. Secondarily, I’d like it if the people I care about would stop sacrificing their lives to the extent that they do.

Isn’t this a bit self-contradictory? “Caring about other people is bad for you, and I care about you so I want you to stop”? Surely the true anti-altruist action would be to keep this truth to yourself and your closest friends.

It sounds more like you disagree with certain common forms of attempted altruism on altruistic grounds, rather than opposing altruism itself.

Then again, maybe “it would get people to shut up about altruism” is enough of a selfish reason to spread anti-altruism.

Altruism is not “caring about other people”. Altruism is the belief that the primary beneficiary of your actions should be others and that the standard by which your actions are justified or not is the welfare of others*.

I care about other people because they benefit me and the things I value. The people I’m closest with do the most, of course, but I do have a generalized benevolence toward unknown** human beings anywhere on pure potentiality grounds; I’d certainly be better off in a world where everyone was a rational egoist with all that implied! But the extent to which I’m willing to work for that outcome is limited both by my chances of success and how it funges against my other interests; if I had to choose between spending my life doing the research I want to do or being certain to achieve world-wide cultural change in favor of my beliefs, I’d choose the former.

*: nothing of consequence changes if you include yourself as an equal among all of humanity in “others”

**: There are plenty of people I don’t care about at all, once I know them as opposed to my values

I think altruism describes actions intended to benefit others, not a particular belief or the belief that all actions should be determined this way. The thing you seem to be describing is more like the hard core version of utilitarianism.

Humanity is incredible.

“You’re indecent and subhuman, and I’m not going to help you stop, but I still love and care about you”

Okay, I’m curious, what’s the nature of your beef with altruism?

It’s wrong and to the extent it’s practiced consistently it can only result in misery and death. There is no justification for it.

My beef is primarily in the nature of ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ: My life is my own to enjoy, and the emotionalistic sophistry (often eventually backed by a gun) employed to get me to give it up is infuriating. Secondarily, I’d like it if the people I care about would stop sacrificing their lives to the extent that they do.

On the contrary, anything that consistently results primarily in misery and death is not altruism. It is at best a misguided attempt at altruism.

i feel like everyone else can just brush off the widespread(?) online existence of people who think they can do real magic but like. i cant. im obsessed. someone could follow your blog or like respond to one of your posts or whatever and the whole time they think they can do real actual magic. and they think theyre like. a sane person? like. they genuinely believe they can do magic. and yet somehow this fact does not totally dominate their life. they can still go to work or school, somehow not making the connection that if magic was real it would affect everything all the time

I mean, this generally is just part of the “99.99% of people don’t have a rigorous model of the world, and if you start going through their beliefs it all falls apart of contradicts itself somewhere” thing it took me many insufferable years to realize.

oh god, you’re right 

Only 99.99%?

God help me I’m trying to figure out how Bitcoin works.

Here’s where I’m stuck.

Imagine something much simpler than Bitcoin. Each node just maintains a spreadsheet of who has how many Bitcoins. If Alice wants to send a Bitcoin, she sends a cryptographically signed message saying “please transfer one Bitcoin from Alice to Bob”, and then everyone does this. What goes wrong?

I think the answer is something like: if one of the people with the spreadsheet dishonestly changes the numbers, then there’s no good way to know which spreadsheet is right. So you include a ledger. You have a record of every transaction, cryptographically signed, and then if I try to dishonestly pass off a spreadsheet that says you gave me money when you didn’t, you can point out that there’s no record of that transaction, signed by you.

Okay, fine, so spreadsheet with a really long ledger at the bottom. Now what goes wrong?

I keep reading people saying “double-spending”, but I don’t get how this works. If I try to spend a bitcoin I don’t have - if I send the message “Scott sends ten bitcoins to Bob” when in fact I have zero bitcoins - presumably someone maintaining the spreadsheet sends Bob a message saying “no, we checked and he can’t do this”. But suppose I do have ten Bitcoins. I tell Yolanda “Scott sends ten bitcoins to Alice” and Zachary “Scott sends ten bitcoins to Bob”, and potentially Yolanda could tell Alice “yeah, this checks out” and Zack could tell Bob the same thing. But my understanding is that the solution to this is to wait a few seconds before confirming transactions, during which time Yolanda and Zack can talk to each other, realize something is wrong, and take some action - either cancelling both transactions, or using whichever one has the earlier timestamp.

My understanding is that actually, for some reason, this doesn’t work, and you need mining and proof-of-work. What is that reason, and why do mining and proof-of-work solve it?

Timestamps can be forged. Here’s how to double spend in your system.

1) Create a second account for yourself, say Alexander. 2) Have a primary account with 10 bitcoins in it. 3) Spend the money. So send a message saying “Scott sends 10 bitcoins to Alice”. Wait until Alice accepts the payment as valid. 4) Create a new message with an earlier timestamp that says “Scott sends 10 bitcoins to Alexander”. The ledgers will accept this transaction and invalidate your payment to Alice because you retroactively had no money in the account.

But generally speaking, in order to prevent this kind of thing, you need a way of actually finalizing transactions so that they are at least very hard to undo. However, you cannot finalize two conflicting transactions, so you need a way to ensure that of two conflicting transactions only one gets finalized.

Timestamps in particular don’t work for the reason described above (that a new transaction with an old timestamp can un-finalize a transaction). Now if you had a *fixed* set of ledger-keepers you could just have them essentially vote on what to finalize (it’s more complicated than this, but this is basically what people mean when they talk about consensus algorithms). This unfortunately, doesn’t work if you want to allow anyone to start keeping a ledger, since you could just start keeping a million ledgers and thus have a million votes.

And this is where proof of work comes in. Basically proof of work gives you a number of votes proportional to the amount of computer time you are willing to spend solving hashing problems (I mean this isn’t exactly the implementation, but morally it’s the right idea). That way, it doesn’t matter how many ledgers you keep, you can’t take control of the system unless you are able to expend more computational power than everybody else.

God help me I’m trying to figure out how Bitcoin works.

Here’s where I’m stuck.

Imagine something much simpler than Bitcoin. Each node just maintains a spreadsheet of who has how many Bitcoins. If Alice wants to send a Bitcoin, she sends a cryptographically signed message saying “please transfer one Bitcoin from Alice to Bob”, and then everyone does this. What goes wrong?

I think the answer is something like: if one of the people with the spreadsheet dishonestly changes the numbers, then there’s no good way to know which spreadsheet is right. So you include a ledger. You have a record of every transaction, cryptographically signed, and then if I try to dishonestly pass off a spreadsheet that says you gave me money when you didn’t, you can point out that there’s no record of that transaction, signed by you.

Okay, fine, so spreadsheet with a really long ledger at the bottom. Now what goes wrong?

I keep reading people saying “double-spending”, but I don’t get how this works. If I try to spend a bitcoin I don’t have - if I send the message “Scott sends ten bitcoins to Bob” when in fact I have zero bitcoins - presumably someone maintaining the spreadsheet sends Bob a message saying “no, we checked and he can’t do this”. But suppose I do have ten Bitcoins. I tell Yolanda “Scott sends ten bitcoins to Alice” and Zachary “Scott sends ten bitcoins to Bob”, and potentially Yolanda could tell Alice “yeah, this checks out” and Zack could tell Bob the same thing. But my understanding is that the solution to this is to wait a few seconds before confirming transactions, during which time Yolanda and Zack can talk to each other, realize something is wrong, and take some action - either cancelling both transactions, or using whichever one has the earlier timestamp.

My understanding is that actually, for some reason, this doesn’t work, and you need mining and proof-of-work. What is that reason, and why do mining and proof-of-work solve it?

Timestamps can be forged. Here’s how to double spend in your system.

1) Create a second account for yourself, say Alexander. 2) Have a primary account with 10 bitcoins in it. 3) Spend the money. So send a message saying “Scott sends 10 bitcoins to Alice”. Wait until Alice accepts the payment as valid. 4) Create a new message with an earlier timestamp that says “Scott sends 10 bitcoins to Alexander”. The ledgers will accept this transaction and invalidate your payment to Alice because you retroactively had no money in the account.

Continuing discussion from here, looking for help:

I wanted to replicate a purported link between ambidexterity and authoritarianism. I had a dataset with ambidexterity and people’s answers to various political questions. I chose four questions that I thought were related to authoritarianism, and got these results:

1. p = 0.049 2. p = 0.008 3. p = 0.48 4. p = 0.052 I judged this as basically presenting evidence in favor of the hypothesis - after all, two of the four tests were “significant”, and one was very close. In the comments, Ashley Yakeley asked whether I tested for multiple comparisons; Ian Crandell agreed, saying that I should divide my significance threshold by four, since I did four tests. If we start with the traditional significance threshold of 0.05, that would mean a new threshold of 0.0125, which result (2) barely squeaks past and everything else fails. I agree multiple hypothesis testing is generally important, but I was skeptical of this. Here’s my argument.Suppose I want to test some hypothesis. I try one experiment, and get p = 0.04. By traditional standards of significance, it passes.But suppose I want to be extra sure, so I try a hundred different ways to test it, and all one hundred come back p = 0.04. Common sensically, this ought to be stronger evidence than just the single experiment; I’ve done a hundred different tests and they all support my hypothesis. But with very naive multiple hypothesis testing, I have to divide my significance threshold by one hundred - to p = 0.0005 - and now all hundred experiments fail. By replicating a true result, I’ve made it into a false one Metacelsus mentions the Holmes-Bonferroni method. If I’m understanding it correctly, it would find the hundred-times-replicated experiment above significant. But I can construct another common-sensically significant version that it wouldn’t find significant - in fact, I think all you need to do is have ninety-nine experiments come back p = 0.04 and one come back 0.05. What if you thought in Bayesian terms? I’m really weak in Bayesian statistics, but my impression would be you treat each test as giving a separate Bayes factor. So you start with (say) a prior of 1:19 against, and then the four tests give you the following (approximate) Bayes factors: 1. 19:1 in favor 2. 100:1 in favor 3. 1:1 either way 4. 19:1 in factor Multiply it all out and you end up with odds of 1900:1 in favor - pretty convincing. But I’m not happy with this; I got to just ignore the totally negative finding in test 3. Shouldn’t getting a result of “no difference” increase your probability that the reality is “no difference” compared to “some large difference”? But here the best it can do is nothing. In fact, this is a big problem. The story of the past few years has been “early small study finds p = 0.00001, later big study finds p = 0.5, we shrug and say early excitement was misplaced and there’s no real effect”. But the way I’m doing things here, the first study should make us believe there’s very likely an effect, and the second study should move us in neither direction, keeping us at “very likely an effect”. That’s clearly not how we think. Maybe I need a real hypothesis, like “there will be a difference of 5%”, and then compare how that vs. the null does on each test? But now we’re getting a lot more complicated than just the “call your likelihood ratio a Bayes factor, it’ll be fine!” I was promised. I think I’ve reached the limits of my statistics knowledge here, which surprises me for such an easy question. Interested in hearing what other people know.

I think the right way to do this depends a bit on what exactly you are trying to test for. If you are actually thinking of these as four different experiments, I think it’s fine to cite p-values for each of them, just remember that every 20 experiments you run, you can expect one false positive. You really need to report results as experiments 1, 2 and 4 were significant, but 3 wasn’t. As long as you publicize your negative results as much as your positive results, I’m not sure that there’s an issue with this.

However, what you seem to be doing is using these 4 experiments as four different ways to test a single hypothesis. For this, you really should be combining all of your little tests into one big test and outputting a single p-value.

Probably the best way to do this is to start from scratch with your original data and think about the best way to construct a single hypothesis. Maybe run some kind of ANOVA.

If you want to just work with the p-values, one valid way is to take the max and discount by a factor of 4 for multiple hypothesis testing. Alternatively, you could do something like look at the second-best p-value and discount by a factor of 4/2 (but don’t do both of these and take the better one, since then you’d need to do multiple hypothesis testing over these meta-tests).

If you *did* assume that under the null hypothesis your tests were independent of each other (which really isn’t the case here since all four measure kinda the same thing), you could multiply all the p-values together and discount by something like 2^{# tests - 1}.