Bistrofan

Karma: 182

Bistrofan 10 May 2026 3:17 UTC
6 points
2
on: Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis
Now of course sometimes it does make sense to point out a different person or institution is at fault. For example, if Alice saw a bad headline and wrongly blames Carol, the innocent columnist, and plans to angrily email Carol about it, you can gently point out it’s not Carol’s fault but her editor Eddie. Alice can angrily email Eddie instead, problem solved! [1]

However, often these explanations are delivered in a way that doesn’t suggest a different person to blame, or that you’re wrong for wanting a solution to begin with, somehow?

In defense there, that’s often taken as implicit and or likely. It’s a common mistake to think that authors write their own headlines and for people with complaints about headlines to blame the author for it. Chiming in with “Authors don’t make their own headlines” doesn’t fix the issue of bad headlines, but it does correct the (likely) mistake that Alice has in her head about who or what to blame.

Although in that case I suppose you could get really annoying and go “erm actually, it’s the financial incentives that really determines how headlines turn out because good headline writers fail and stop writing headlines”. And understanding that allows us to look at the actual questions.
1. Is there an actual issue now that we understand the real cause.
2. Is there an actual fix?
If it’s “authors keep making bad headlines” that seems more fixable than “financial incentives reward bad headlines and good headlines literally die off”.

Bistrofan 28 Apr 2026 0:51 UTC
16 points
3
on: In defense of parents
Kids, especially little kids, still need guidance but I think you’re missing the point here. Children nowadays are very coddled compared to the past, and that seems to be genuinely stunting their emotional growth into maturity. My parents had tons of stories about them going out and playing in the woods only coming home for lunch and dinner. My mom would go biking miles away with her friends and explore the world around them, interacting with people all over and learning independence. Now half of parents apparently don’t even let their 9-11 year olds go to another aisle alone!. I’ve seen kids now still have babysitters at the age where my peers were the babysitters. Kids would be working the farms for their parents, carry buckets water and clean up the house, look after younger siblings. Benjamin Franklin was an apprentice printer at 12 years old. David Farragut was famously in charge of a captured British whaler at that same age during the war of 1812. Page apprenticeships in the medieval times started at 7 years old. Even today across the poor part of the world, child labor is the norm. I’m not expecting every kid to be a Ben Franklin or a Farragut, and I don’t think we should be pushing for much child labor anymore when our society can go without that and parents don’t want it for their kids, but when push comes to shove most children are way more capable than we give them credit for once you start actually expecting it from them. Modern wealth just allows us to coddle our kids in a way that the people of the past and the modern global poor don’t get, and we’ve forgotten just how independent the children really can be.

Heck in Japan, there’s a long running reality show about toddlers going to the local store and getting groceries. Now obviously I’m not saying toddlers should be expected to do everything perfectly, but contrast that with not even allowing an 11 year old into another aisle.

Bistrofan 25 Apr 2026 21:51 UTC
4 points
3
on: Bistrofan’s Shortform
I noticed something interesting with the recent button debate see here for context is that a lot of people seem to assume red 100% would be possible, and anyone who doesn’t do it is just dumb and therefore red has no downsides. But as some have pointed out, “people” likely includes young children who wouldn’t be able to understand it. Half of everyone under idk, let’s say 2 just dies. Depending on your thoughts about fetal personhood, this phenomenon might even apply to half of all pregnancies.

A red vote is not just “I live” without any consequences, tons of children, fetuses, and many loving parents (hoping to save their children or die with them if it fails) will die too. Not to mention young children aren’t the only group to essentially pick at random. The mentally disabled/the blind/people with dementia/etc are also at risk and so too are the people who love them, someone who pushes blue to try to save their blind spouse, or their disabled sibling. The world doesn’t just carry on as normal, it’s suddenly destabilized and society as we know it could collapse.

One interesting tweet I saw says

I would like us to run this once a week until everyone always votes red

This is humanity ending when you consider the young children are random, especially if you consider fetuses as voters there as well. What happens in a world where every week half of our babies and pregnancies just die? To his credit, he recognized this and accepts he was wrong but it’s a good example of the shortsighted belief that red doesn’t hold consequences.

Now maybe voting red is still worth it, that’s an interesting discussion to have. But it’s definitely not as simple as people are making it out, and most likely the only world where things don’t go to hell in some form is >50% blue.

Bistrofan 19 Apr 2026 17:43 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: EniScien’s comment on: Having OCD is like living in North Korea (Here’s how I escaped)

Then there is very confident assurance that you can’t stop having some feeling. Which is simply not true, according to my experience. You can. And even do it immediately.

One of the required secondary powers of OCD is this, a disordered ability to shut down your intrusive thoughts and feelings. If they could just make it go away intuitively, they would.

Maybe it’s possible for many to train their feelings away with enough sustained effort still, but it’s clearly far more difficult to stop the thoughts than most people face.

Bistrofan 23 Mar 2026 5:09 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: China Derangement Syndrome
I’m a supporter of helping protect Taiwan, but it’s useful to know the Chinese view is that Taiwan is a part of their country going back to the civil war, one they have never officially conceded as having ended and have never acknowledged Taiwan as anything but an internal issue to them.

Sure at some point it gets kinda silly to keep insisting “someday we’ll get them” instead of just giving up, but that does mean it’s not a good example of China being hostile towards foreign powers.

Bistrofan 28 Feb 2026 0:44 UTC
27 points
22
in reply to: yams’s comment on: yams’s Shortform
Not to be overly political (although how do you avoid it with a topic like this?) but I think it’s just another part of “MAGA maoism” as it’s been called. The idea of the Republican party as a small government free market pro liberty group died with Trump, who painted over that whole philosophy with his focus on culture war grievances, state control, and “owning the libs”.

Matt Yglesias had a good piece two years ago about how the tariff regime essentially makes a mini central planning department and we’ve seen Trump expressly use it as such, trying to bend the economy to attack companies and nations over personal grievances.

And Scott Lincicome of the CATO institute has covered this new brand of “state corporatism” as he calls it quite well IMO, about the nationalization of various companies and the various market distortions it creates.

“First they came” is a famous poem about the oppression of people, but it’s also a good general warning for all sorts of behavior. What someone will happily do to another is what they can happily do to you if you ever cross them. Whether that be the chick who cheated on her husband for you cheating on your new relationship, stuffing people into camps, or using the full force of government to smash your company into bits if you aren’t compliant.

There’s likely to be more of this behavior coming in the future. They’re trying to unlock themselves a new power, and what hammer doesn’t seek out a nail?

Bistrofan 27 Feb 2026 5:22 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: RationalElf’s comment on: RationalElf’s Shortform
A substantial amount of the files are redacted, and there’s apparently a lot that hasn’t been released at all yet either. It’s hard to get a good idea of something if you can only see a small percentage of it, especially when that small percentage has been curated. Right now it feels kinda like going to North Korea, seeing a show village and declaring the country a rich and free democracy. The play looks great, and you’ll never know otherwise if you don’t get a look behind the curtains. And when the curtains do open, surprise there’s even more curtains!

And one of the big issues here is with trust. Maybe a redaction is personal information of a victim, or maybe it’s something else that needed to be covered up because it looked bad. The unknown is unknown after all. I’m not sure how much I can trust the Trump admin here at all when there’s already been multiple controversies with unwarranted redacting and the multiple u-turns that have already occured around the files, so “nothing to see behind the curtains” is not particularly convincing. At the very least the behavior has been very very suspicious.

There’s also some really interesting things to consider about the arguments around the files. One common claim was “if there was anything potentially damaging for Trump in them, why did the Biden admin not release it”. Now we know there is tons of stuff about Trump. Nothing that is definitive proof of criminal behavior, but things like the birthday book letter and accusations certainly seem like they could have been harmful for his campaign.

So now we’re stuck with “There is potentially damaging material about Trump in there, so why did the Biden admin not release it?”. Perhaps they’re more ethical than the argument makers thought and didn’t think it fair to leak those files. Or maybe there’s something that both admins don’t want revealed, whether it be a third party or a MAD scenario. I don’t know, but it again sure is weird!

Bistrofan 25 Feb 2026 18:24 UTC
2 points
0
on: Why American Politics is Different Now (for Richard Ngo)
For much of the twentieth century mass media was policed by The Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required media outlets to cover controversial issues in a balanced manner that represented both sides of the argument.

The issue is that arguments often have more than just two views. Like let’s say someone goes on TV and argues for a 50% vice tax on alcohol, there’s a number of different possible responses here.
1. Keep the status quo
2. Vice tax but a lower amount
3. Vice tax but a higher amount
4. Prohibition again
5. Some other type of new limit on alcohol
6. Some other other type of new limit
7. Some other other other type of new limit (and so on for as many potential methods as exist)
8. Subsidies to encourage alcohol instead.
Who gets to demand a response here? And if the “I want more people to drink” guy gets a response, does it use up the opportunity from the prohibition one? Heck even “same side” responses could be difficult cause they still differ too. Does a “I prefer a 40% vice tax” response count the same as a 20% vice tax response? Does “I want drinking alcohol to require a drinking license” count the same as “I want alcohol consumption to be illegal if consumed over X limit?”

Maybe we try to solve some of this by only allowing “mainstream” views a response, but now we have to determine what is mainstream enough and what isn’t. And we still have the problem of determining how to separate out different views to begin with. Maybe we collapse the status quo people with the pro alcohol subsidies people because they both reject the tax, and then the guy who gets up on TV and actually gets to talk is the subsidies guy despite not actually being popular.

And I’m sure many can relate to seeing a person argue something on the internet you generally agree with, but then use bad arguments and behavior that you think are terrible. Maybe you believe in a 20% vice tax for X and Y reasons, but the guy who gets on stage to represent the view says “I support 20% because the voices in my head told me to.” Would you feel represented by that? I wouldn’t, and I would think it bullshit if the government tried to say that man gets to take the place of my well thought response.

The fairness doctrine just doesn’t seem very workable as a concept. To even do a somewhat decent job, government will have to get into and sort out the most niche debates on everything said on TV or radio, and there will still likely be tons of mistakes that happen. And I’m not even gonna get started on how much corruption/bribery/dealmaking/etc is going to be encouraged by this level of bureaucracy and decisionmaking.

Bistrofan 25 Feb 2026 2:26 UTC
7 points
1
in reply to: Tom Smith’s comment on: Tom Smith’s Shortform
It might not be intended this way but the discussion being centered around domestic surveillance of Americans does have a possible implication that foreign communications are already being covered by Claude without protest from Anthropic. If that’s the case then attempts by the government to turn it domestic shouldn’t be much of a surprise to them IMO.

Bistrofan 25 Feb 2026 1:59 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: Richard_Ngo’s comment on: ricraz’s Shortform
One of the big issues with IQ discussions is that you end up taking the public’s struggle with statistics which is already terrible even when they’re trying and then add on a whole bunch of bad faith intention and discourse on top.

Like this is just anecdotal but the amount of people I’ve seen in this and similar discussion seemingly unable to recognize that averages aren’t necessarily that meaningful to any individual experience is crazy. A group with an average of 95 IQ is still going to have lots of individuals within it that are over >100! If you take a random person from average 95 IQ group and a random person from average 100 IQ group, there’s a not that far from equal chance that the former person is higher than the latter! Less than the ⁵⁰⁄₅₀, but it’s close. “Less than a coin flip” is not equivalent to rare.

Bistrofan 11 Feb 2026 23:13 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: Bistrofan’s Shortform

A simple steelman is something like “if we’re very wrong about A[G/S]I, then birth rates are a big issue, so we better invest some resources into it, in case we’re wrong”.

This would be understandable if it weren’t for the timelines here. Let’s say AGI takes ~10x the amount of time (40 years instead of 4 years from the 2026 date) and the few billion people (which to note is just the population of the 1900s) happens in 100 years instead of 200, that would be 2066 vs 2126.

Despite being absurdly friendly on the timelines, it’s still not even close! That suggests to me a very rocky confidence level being held about AGI actually happening, unless one believes that the superintelligence smarter than all humans put together wouldn’t be able to help the birthrate.

Edit: Actually I’m messing up the math a little because I’m mixing up scenarios and hypotheticals. If the whole world had South Korea levels it would be much lower than a few billion in 100 years. But that’s already the unrealistic worst case scenario, the world overall right now still has a positive replacement rare and estimates put around 10 billion people by 2084 which is still two decades past our order of magnitude AGI predictions.

Bistrofan 11 Feb 2026 15:00 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Bistrofan’s Shortform
Yes and I have a major example, one of the leading CEOs in the AI industry. He believes that AI will be more intelligent than all humans currently alive by 2030 while also saying birthrates are a top priority for all countries.

But birth rates aren’t that bad that they’re ending civilization anytime soon. Even if every nation was at South Korea levels in 200 years we’d still have >2 billion people. If he believes AI will be more intelligent than all humans combined in less than a decade, then why worry about something centuries out with easy solutions presented by the thing coming in just four years?

Bistrofan’s Shortform

Bistrofan11 Feb 2026 4:35 UTC

2 points

17 comments1 min readLW link

Bistrofan 11 Feb 2026 4:35 UTC
10 points
6
on: Bistrofan’s Shortform
A lot of the rationalist discourse around birthrates don’t seem to square away with AGI predictions.

Like the most negative predictions of AGI destroying humanity in the next century or two leaves birthrates completely negligent as an issue. The positive predictions with AGI leave a high possibility of robotic child rearing and artificial wombs (when considering the amount of progress even us puny humans have already made) in the next century or two which also makes natural birthrates irrelevant because we could just make and raise more humans without the need of human parents to birth them.

And stuff like say, the concerns about old people consumption outnumbering youth worker production don’t work well if one also believes that the upcoming AIs are going to make most work and labor obsolete to begin with. If pretty much everything is done by robots, then the issue of not enough young labor pretty much ceases to exist.

I don’t know if this is just the result of hedging against the possibility that this sort of AGI doesn’t happen, or if people just haven’t thought it all through much.

Bistrofan 25 Jan 2026 20:35 UTC
7 points
0
on: What’s a good methodology for “is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion?”

How many incidents will an LLM find of a president ignoring a court order?

To my knowledge at least, there hasn’t really been an actual time this has “truly” happened even now. It’s often said that Andrew Jackson did but the situation is complex enough that it’s arguable it shouldn’t count and the famous quote of “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!” seems to be apocryphal.

Now there are lots of ways to essentially get around the court order for a long while without actually violating it like a favorite of modern presidents to go “ok X justification doing thing was ruled unconstitutional, but that doesn’t mean Y is, and if that gets ruled it doesn’t mean Z is” or dragging things out in court exhausting as many appeals and pauses as possible to delay for months/years but I’m not aware of any direct violations at least. Even something like this list I found not only gets the facts wrong about Jackson but openly contradicts itself in the parts about Lincoln and Roosevelt where the executives “victory” is not because they ignored the court, but because Congress acted.

“The Supreme Court ruled the act unconstitutional as the government could not levy a tax on companies merely to have that money paid back to farmers. However, the act was adjusted two years later and continued in its new form.”

Like that’s literally not defying the courts. That’s the previous act being ruled unconstitutional and a new act being made that didn’t contain the specific unconstitutional part in it.

Which is to say that you also need to be careful about what is actually happening. Biden’s quotes about how the supreme court “didn’t stop me” looks like the admin ignored a court order, but they were really just did that workaround in the previous paragraphs of doing Y and Z. The Trump admin right now is talking about their tactics with tariffs if they get ruled against and many make it look like they plan to defy the ruling, but it so far seems to just be the same exact tactic of pivoting to something else and claiming it gives authority.

Bistrofan 23 Jan 2026 0:54 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
I assume 3 and 4 are the main reasons. If you want to know what’s happening locally, join a Facebook group and you’ll know things way faster than your local paper most of the time. Also parts like the classifieds/job information/etc are all replaced by the Internet so a huge function of local newspapers has become obsolete.

National news is also slowly dying too, just not to the same degree. I think the loss is mitigated now by distribution. National news appeals to basically everybody, so something like NYT and WAPO can pick up subscribers from the other side of the country or even across the world (like how I read the BBC sometimes as an American). Meanwhile I don’t care about the local happenings of Raleigh or Wichita or other places I don’t live that much.

I also think there’s another point that news agencies have learned tragedy and controversy sells more, and local papers just can’t generate as much of that as the national news can. There’s just not that much bad and controversial stories going on nearby most of the time.

Bistrofan 20 Jan 2026 23:27 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: quinoa marisa’s comment on: Why I Transitioned: A Response
Yeah what caused it is definitely still up in the air, although I doubt it’s going to end up as an either/or situation. Even if we can point to social factors as a major cause, how environmental stimulus impacts people differently still depends on their preexisting biology so it’s going to be a mix there regardless. Just how much? I don’t know.

Because the answer to this question has massive implications for what healthcare should look like for trans people.

Now I’m very libertarian so I don’t think it should impact much at all for adults. Trans people already have the freedom of choice and they’re using it. In terms of bad healthcare decisions, there’s a lot worse going on where people can even straight up die from foregoing useful stuff in favor of magic herbs and other snake oil so it’s not even a major priority if we were to crack down on bad healthcare. Which to be clear, I’m against doing even for that worse stuff.

Regarding children is definitely a harder choice but that gets into the messier topic of child freedom vs parental authority.

Bistrofan 20 Jan 2026 19:39 UTC
9 points
4
on: Why I Transitioned: A Response

I’m trans so I have a motive to search for evidence that suggests I am ~biologically valid~ and not subject to some kind of psychosocial delusion.

I’m personally not a fan of viewing things this way to begin with because I believe all differences in human behavior is “biologically valid”.

If two people are exactly the same in every way except one prefers purple and the other prefers green, I expect we would find a difference somewhere in the human body and brain that matches this and explains it. Whether favorite color comes from a single part of the body or a complex emergence of various parts, I still expect a difference. I expect if Omega were to come down and examine a person’s body/brain, they would be able to predict basically everything about that person. “This guy likes green, likes to wear shorts during winter, has a crush on Heather at work and is still embarrassed about that time he peed himself in fourth grade”. We are not Omega, human understanding of our own physical existence is poor and we can’t tell the sorts of things it could but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t exist.

Trans people are “biologically valid” by default in the sense that their behavior is explained somewhere in their physical self the same way the green fan buying a green shirt is “biologically valid”. Omega could look at someone and tell “this person will call themselves transgender, take cross-sex hormones and present the cross-sex social role accordingly”. Omega also could tell if someone was gay. A similar pet peeve of mine is the debate over whether or not homosexuality is a choice. The issue to me is that we can always go up one step further on the free will ladder “ok that’s a choice, but why did they make that choice?” and eventually end up, always, with that their biology made it so.

Of course other people have different views on free will especially those who believe in metaphysical existences like a soul. Even Omega could not determine the difference between the soul that prefers green and the soul that prefers red just by looking at their physical body, but I’m not religious or spiritual. And I’d argue that a soul doesn’t even really change the discussion, because I assume Omega with a Soul Reader should be able to do it again.

That doesn’t mean anything has to be viewed as morally acceptable. I still think there are people who are immoral and bad even if I believe it’s the result of their biology. I still think there are people who are dangerous and need to be locked away even if in the far off abstract it’s not “their fault” that their biology drives such behavior. And that doesn’t mean that trans people have to slot into man-made category A instead of man-made category B, or whatever.

But I do think “is it biologically valid” a silly argument to be having to begin with.

Bistrofan 15 Nov 2025 1:04 UTC
12 points
2
on: Paranoia: A Beginner’s Guide

The CDC started lying about the effectiveness of masks to convince people to stop using them so service workers would have access to them as political pressure on them mounted.

That’s the common explanation given, but from my understanding at least it’s (at least partially) incorrect and the original recommendations were due in part to not understanding Covid was airborne. And that was because of a major communication error ~60 years ago from “Alexander Langmuir, the influential chief epidemiologist of the newly established CDC” who had pressed back on airborne viruses being common as he thought they were too similar to miasma theory.

Like his peers, Langmuir had been brought up in the Gospel of Personal Cleanliness, an obsession that made handwashing the bedrock of US public health policy. He seemed to view Wells’ ideas about airborne transmission as retrograde, seeing in them a slide back toward an ancient, irrational terror of bad air—the “miasma theory” that had prevailed for centuries. Langmuir dismissed them as little more than “interesting theoretical points.”

Langmuir seems to have finally accepted it after a period of time, but the focus was on <5 micron particles and that got snatched out of context and only particles smaller than that being airborne became the medical gospel.

At least, if this wired article about the scientists who tried to convince the WHO that Covid was airborne is accurate

Bistrofan 2 Oct 2025 3:31 UTC
10 points
8
in reply to: artifex0’s comment on: Transgender Sticker Fallacy

A high school coach who has to choose whether to allow a trans student to compete in female sports is faced with a difficult social dilemma. If they deny the request, then the student- who wants badly to be seen as female- will be disappointed and might face additional bullying; if they allow it, that will be unfair to the other female players. In some cases, other players may be willing to accept a bit of unfairness as an act of probably supererogatory kindness, but in cases where they are aren’t, explaining to the student that they shouldn’t compete without hurting their feelings will take a lot of tact on the part of the coach.

One big part of the issue here is that sports doesn’t have a single goal. At the top of top levels, winning is basically all that matters and you’re trading players around, kicking off people who suck and doing basically everything you can to see who is best.

But most sports isn’t at the top of top levels. A friend group’s weekend pickup basketball game isn’t likely to kick one of their friends out because he sucks unless it’s so massively disproportionate that they’re basically not even playing the game anymore. The YMCA soccer teams I was part of as a kid would field me for part of it despite obviously being a weaker player (in part because I was scared of getting hurt going after the ball cause all the kids just crowd around it).

With casual games like at schools, we typically even shame people who take it too serious and make fun of the behavior like this South Park episode. A quick search on why to play sports comes up with the Google AI recap of

People play sports to improve their physical and mental health by increasing fitness, strengthening bones, reducing stress, and releasing mood-boosting hormones. Sports also provide social benefits, such as developing teamwork, leadership, and communication skills, while building confidence, resilience, and a sense of purpose. Additionally, sports teach valuable life skills like time management and problem-solving, encourage healthy lifestyle habits, and offer a fun way to socialize and make friends.

Interestingly, none of these many reasons chosen by the AI overview is “racking up wins”. After all, the majority of people doing sports will by basic logic not be in the top 1%, or top 10% or even top 49%. And almost every single person participating in school sports will not make it to professional. They simply can not get to the Top of the Top. And yet, they play anyway, so clearly there must be other reasons.

For the majority of actual play, skill level matters mainly for keeping the game feeling like a game. A top 1% basketball player vs your average Joe is such a a wide gap that the average Joe might as well be sitting on a bleacher. A grandmaster chess player vs a novice is going to fall asleep from boredom. A challenger League of Legends team could probably end up ¹⁰⁰⁄₀ against a Bronze one. But as long as things are equal enough that the game can be maintained, most play doesn’t need to be too concerned about skill level because the truth is that they suck, they will always suck, and they’re playing for a different reason than just getting wins.

Bistrofan

Bistro­fan’s Shortform

Bistrofan’s Shortform