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hablog

Re:How to Quit Cars on Thursday May 18, 2023 @08:10PM (#35996121)
> The reason these people are homeless a lot of the times is because they lack housing

This is beyond naive. Only people who've never actually interacted with the homeless on a close basis can make such facially absurd claims with a straight face.

> Also if we legalized all drugs

Decriminalization has made dope-addled nodder homeless populations worse in every city where it's been tried

If your ideology actually worked, I'd say you should fix homelessness before trying to "fix" cars, but you're never going to make any progress on the former.

Re:How to Quit Cars on Thursday May 18, 2023 @07:44PM (#35995925)
This is actually a decent idea, but the busses and trains crowd are not motivated by purely economic-efficiency-based concerns. There's a lot of political baggage that they won't admit to explicitly, and there are higher-order reasons they want to get rid of private transit.
Re:How to Quit Cars on Thursday May 18, 2023 @07:43PM (#35995906)
The issue isn't that the busses don't get enough money; the issue is that america is full of huge subpopulations that commit tons of violent crime, homeless crackheads, etc.

Unless we imprison like 20% of the population, busses in most American states will never be clean or safe.

Yeah, a friend of mine found a (non-religious) service like this for help with porn addiction. Not my cup of tea, but I could see it working for many people.
So a fortiori, it's true for him too!

I wouldn't necessarily exclude myself from the set of people who would benefit from externally managed filtering.

> I can't trust myself to see things I disagree with, I am so weak-willed...

The thing is, this likely is true for him. Most people are not equipped to deal with the onslaught of aggressive memes from the internet. Unfortunately, this is an unsolved social problem, and "export my memetic censorship reflex to MEGACORP" is a pretty bad way of doing things.

I think a likely way of solving this problem (protecting not-especially-high-mental-horsepower people from getting BTFO by the internet, contracting transmissible psychological diseases and so on) is that religious organizations will start offering (voluntary, in first world countries) censorship services to their members. Your DNS queries or whatever will go through the Vatican/Synod/whatever central DNS server, which will prevent you from looking at porn sites. This would probably be a very socially positive outcome for the bottom 90-something percent of people on the "strength of memetic immune system" distribution.

Re:Uncensored (Language) Models on Monday May 15, 2023 @03:46PM (#35953509)
"Alignment" as practiced by companies like OpenAI is precisely the extrinsic enforcement of echo-chamber behavior from AIs. You have precisely inverted reality
Can't you just count a change like this as constructive termination and demand severance anyway?
How is this a tragedy of the commons?
Yeah, for an illustrative example of assortative mating effects, consider the stereotype of the rich nerd with the hot wife. Kids are smart and attractive. This plays out at every pareto level in the sexual marketplace.

Basically, monogamy breaks the ability of sexual selection to "dilute" bad genes with good ones. I'm not anti-monogamy, but it's a social technology which has tradeoffs (this being one of them).

> The proper Bayesian response... since both "being male" and any race are very weak predictors (see my other comment upthread).

I saw your comment - you don't understand how bayesianism works. Look up "odds ratios" for the most salient concept that you're missing here.

If P(x|!y) = 0.0000001 and P(x|y) = 0.01, this relationship is extremely powerful even though it's "weak" in the sense you're using.

This would have some extremely interesting population-level genetic consequences if it was accompanied by some sort of social change to allow polygyny. In particular, it would reduce the correlation that exists across all adaptive traits due to assortative monogamous mating patterns. Right now, all "desirable" traits like health/intelligence/strength/etc are strongly correlated, but when you reduce the strength of assortative effects, the correlation weakens significantly.
Every single bayesianism advocate is aware of this. It's so obvious that it's implicit - there's simply no need to state "95% of crime is committed by men"; this is completely uncontroversial and does not need to be discussed. The controversial part is applying bayesianism to other, more politically sensitive predictors.
I mean, yeah, this is kind of obvious if you think about it. The majority of violent crime in the US is committed by black people, so inherently a marginal increase in any other ethnic group (including hispanic) would (on expectation) lead to a decrease in per-capita violent crime, unless illegal immigrants were more violent than legal immigrants (which we have no evidence of).
When exactly do racists/bayesians shy away from this fact?
Re:Micro.blog Reclaiming Usernames Policy on Saturday May 13, 2023 @08:05PM (#35934076)
I assume twitter has like 7 million times as many accounts as whatever this website is though
Re:One Day You’ll Find Yourself on Thursday May 11, 2023 @10:08PM (#35911039)
People have to internalize that for a site like this, 99% of your traffic will arrive in 0.1% of the time your site is up. Unless you want to lose the vast majority of people who would otherwise read your content, you need to pick a server that can handle many orders of magnitude higher than baseline load!
Re:On the Rise of Socialist Engineers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @02:19PM (#35906101)
> what I’m saying is based on your hypothesis we should expect a population-wide boom in socialism

Correct, which is also consistent with observed data.

> unless there’s a specific environmental factor that exists primarily and only at the intersection of these demographics

I've described two - sedentary lifestyle and diet.

Even the fattest guy in alabama is probably not sitting in an office all day, and he's probably not cholesterol-deficient.

> maybe you could say, MacBook pros specifically are causing socialism

The difference is with endocrine disruptors we have a pretty clear causal model of the process.

Re:On the Rise of Socialist Engineers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @01:30PM (#35905419)
I think engineers (esp in areas like SF) are especially vulnerable due to their relatively sedentary lifestyle, dietary proclivities (e.g. consuming stuff like soylent, vegetarian/vegan diets deficient in cholesterol and other androgen precursors, lots of bottled water, novel dietary fat profiles), etc.

But yeah, I have to imagine these effects are society-wide with varying strength for different sub-populations. This is consistent with various macro-scale observations like decreasing population-wide male fertility.

Re:On the Rise of Socialist Engineers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @11:59AM (#35904086)
You responded to my comment in like 8 seconds so you obviously didn't even glance at either study.
Re:On the Rise of Socialist Engineers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @11:57AM (#35904050)
That's not what I meant, but I suppose there's also a correlation there.

I was referring more to the fact that coastal software engineers tend to be testosterone-deficient as a group, which strongly affects political alignment. E.g. https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/155441/version/V... or https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6717495/

Re:On the Rise of Socialist Engineers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @11:35AM (#35903681)
Based on the kind of people I see who are involved in socialism-in-tech, I wonder if the rise in environmental endocrine disruptors is involved to some degree.