FiftyTwo

Karma: 4,850

FiftyTwo 6 Nov 2025 12:14 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fiction
I agree with everything you’ve said. If anything, I think the effect is underrated because it’s socially taboo to admit we’ve been majorly influenced by fiction. We all want to convey that we are Very Serious People who make decisions by reading serious scientific papers, not that we got into environmentalism because we watched Fern Gully as a kid, or whatever.

Part of the challenge with using fiction to persuade people is that fiction is often most effective for conveying views when it’s not being explicitly didactic, e.g., compare Soviet and Chinese propaganda films, which are universally terrible, or at best cheesy, with how America in the 20th century gained a huge amount of soft power through media that implicitly conveyed its worldview. Many people have that complaint about HPMOR.

To some extent this just comes down to the quality of the underlying work, people only call something didactic when it’s too obvious. But it adds additional constraints to the problem, writing a fun adventure is hard, writing a fun adventure that also teaches people about endocrinology is much harder.

I also think fiction is generally harder than nonfiction. Most educated people can write a comprehensible essay fairly easily (arguably they do so several times a day with emails, tweets, etc.), but would struggle to write a good short story, especially if it was also trying to convey the same information. The floor on bad factual writing is that it’s basically readable, the floor on bad fiction writing is that it’s excruciating.

FiftyTwo 25 Oct 2025 14:13 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
What are you basing the claim that the vaccine is responsible for increased deaths in 2021 on? The NZ statistical agency’s 2021 report says that its due to an aging population and rebound from 2020 when isolation measures decreased rates of non-COVID winter diseases. Basically 2020 was an unusual year for the obvious reasons while 2021 was closer to normal, but still lower than 2019.
In 2021, the crude death rate was 6.8 deaths per 1,000 people. This was up from 6.4 per 1,000 in 2020, but down from 6.9 per 1,000 in 2019. The crude death rate has been below 7 deaths per 1,000 people since 2003.
Median age of death seems to have also continued to rise, which you woudln’t expect if there was a significant surge in vaccine deaths among young people. NZ’s official vaccine safety reporting attributes 2 deaths to myocarditis following vaccination.

FiftyTwo 25 Oct 2025 13:09 UTC
3 points
0
on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
There’s no good history books even trying to untangle the hyperobject that was the COVID-19 pandemic^[5], almost nobody trying to figure out where our sense-making failed to, ah, make sense, almost nobody trying to steer the ship^[6].

A slight counter to this, several countries have done, or are doing, major enquiries into their response. A good first step would be to give praise and attention to these and lobby for their recommendations to be implemented.

UK Module 1 on preparedness failures has been published and seems particularly relevant to your points. Excerpt from the executive summary:
- The UK prepared for the wrong pandemic. The significant risk of an influenza pandemic had long been considered, written about and planned for. However, that preparedness was inadequate for a global pandemic of the kind that struck.
- The institutions and structures responsible for emergency planning were labyrinthine in their complexity.
- There were fatal strategic flaws underpinning the assessment of the risks faced by the UK, [...]
- The UK government’s sole pandemic strategy, from 2011, was outdated and lacked adaptability. [...]
- Emergency planning generally failed to account sufficiently for the pre-existing health and societal inequalities and deprivation in society. [...]
- There was a failure to learn sufficiently from past civil emergency exercises and outbreaks of disease.
- There was a damaging absence of focus on the measures, interventions and infrastructure required in the event of a pandemic – in particular, a system that could be scaled up to test, trace and isolate in the event of a pandemic. [...]
- In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a lack of adequate leadership, coordination and oversight. [...]
- The provision of advice itself could be improved. Advisers and advisory groups did not have sufficient freedom and autonomy to express dissenting views and suffered from a lack of significant external oversight and challenge. The advice was often undermined by ‘groupthink’.
Quick list of links to other countries reports that I haven’t looked into in as much detail but may be relevant: Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, France, Germany, Ireland, European Union (European Parliament COVI)

FiftyTwo 25 Oct 2025 12:54 UTC
3 points
0
on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
Yeah, that’s right. They were starved of funding, neglected, or mostly forgotten. So far, HERA has received 1.28 bio. €+1.27 bio. €+0.73 bio. €+0.358 bio. €=3.28 bio. € of the promised 4.5 bio[...]
What would you consider to be the correct amount? And how would you calculate that figure? I assume something like, if we take the 5 trillion US cost figure, and a 1% chance of something comparable happening per year, then up to $10 bn yearly would be reasonable for the USA to spend?
I think a more concrete idea of what we are not doing that we should be doing would help with the call for action part of this.

FiftyTwo 25 Oct 2025 12:42 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: maxnadeau’s comment on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
It comes back to the wider problem that there is little demand and interest from voters in preventative measures, vs. things that have a more immediate visible impact. This is so sticky its remained even in the aftermath of a very visible pandemic.
So the natural selection effect of politics is always going to push against it. You need a way to change public opinion, or at least elite discussion, on the topic to make it more politically viable, otherwise you are relying on politicians and political parties to act against their self interest.

FiftyTwo 25 Oct 2025 12:36 UTC
2 points
0
on: Humanity Learned Almost Nothing From COVID-19
A related takeaway is that good government matters a lot for a response. And if you live in a democratic country that should influence your decision on how to vote and what other political activity you engage in.
Partly you can just look at their stated policies on pandemics, or if they don’t have any it can normally be reasonably inferred from other things. You should probably also prioritize general competence and ability to react well to new information more highly, relative to ideological alignment with you, than you would have otherwise.

FiftyTwo 25 Oct 2025 12:12 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: avalot’s comment on: When Both People Are Interested, How Often Is Flirtatious Escalation Mutual?
I’m confused by what is meant by “flirting” as an activity if its separated from the romantic context? How is that distinguished from friendly conversation?

FiftyTwo 25 Oct 2025 12:00 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Against “blankfaces”
There’s a sense in which a lot of rules are attempts to solve coordination problems across time. A rule may work most of the time, but not in specific edge cases. But it may be the case that even in those edge cases its best to continue to follow the rule, because the benefit you get from consistency is higher than the harms of enforcing it in the edge cases, or the costs of building in more discretion.
E.g. if you allow for this reasonable excuse you then have to allow for all equally reasonable excuses, removing the benefit of the rule. Or if you allow the lowest level decision maker more discretion you risk them using that discretion corruptly or incompetently. And either accept those costs or build in additional oversight structures which are costly.
Often what seems like blind rule following from the outside is someone who has correctly made a utilitarian tradeoff, you are just on the wrong side of it.

FiftyTwo 1 Oct 2025 19:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: deep’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Reminds me of something about trauma being adaptive responses to a particular situation that are no longer adaptive in the current situation. E.g. being hyper vigilant is useful in genuinely highly dangerous environments but not elsewhere

FiftyTwo 1 Oct 2025 19:32 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: nooch’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Voldemort believes himself to be basically immortal at this point, so he can get away with taking some riskier decisions than he might otherwise. Worst case scenario he has to go embed himself in somebody else’s head and start over. Presumably he can blow up his body or something if necessary.
Harry doing the memory erasure only happens because of the specific combination of information and abilities Harry had.

FiftyTwo 1 Oct 2025 19:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
The biggest flaw I find in the story when recommending it to other people is that Harry’s character can be very off-putting. Lot of people have told me that he seems to be right about everything and feels didactic. Knowing the full scope of the story we know that he does make a lot of mistakes, but they’re not spotlighted in the early chapters where people drop off. So a hypothetical rewritten version might benefit from having him be visibly wrong about something early on.
I think plane crash does a better job with this as Keltham is visibly wrong about important things from the beginning. Not just the things he’s being actively deceived on but also where he’s confidently wrong about things due to overestimating his own knowledge.

FiftyTwo 1 Oct 2025 18:24 UTC
2 points
0
on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
The ancient forebears of the wizards, thousands of years earlier, had told the Source of Magic to only levitate things if you said...
‘Wingardium Leviosa.’
Harry slumped over at the breakfast table, resting his forehead wearily on his right hand.
I always read this as just a punchline about how incredibly silly sounding it was, and his despair at the idea of that being ingrained in the fabric of the universe, not him noticing a timeline issue.
In universe you could possibly explain Latin and other later languages as being influenced by the language of spells, rather than the other way round

FiftyTwo 27 May 2025 14:21 UTC
6 points
3
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Meditations on Doge
This is tangential to the main point so I don’t want to go too deep into it. But since you raise it, that link doesn’t show evidence of the original claim Trump made in the State of the Union, which I as referencing. Which was specifically: “Eight million dollars — for making mice transgender. This is real.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/transcript-president-donald-trumps-2025-state-of-the-union-address)
The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specific medical outcomes. These include topics relevant to transgender patients (e.g., immune responses under hormone therapy https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830), but also other populations with atypical hormone profiles. The largest grant ($3.1m) https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description is about asthma disparities that occur between cisgender men and women, with trans women mentioned in the context of distinguishing hormonal and chromosomal factors.
This is importantly different, because Trump’s original claim relies on the absurdity heuristic to make the research sound worthless (since mice do not have gender identities). It’s simply false to say the aim of the experiments was “making mice transgender.” That was not the goal of any of the studies, and the researchers involved would almost certainly say that’s a meaningless concept in the context of lab mice.
This seems symptomatic of a wider pattern in these kinds of arguments about government spending. The original claim is phrased to sound so absurd anyone would agree it’s waste. But it reduces to a more specific and controversial claim where there would be a difference in opinion about whether it’s valid use of government money. So “waste” = “spending I disagree with” again.

FiftyTwo 26 May 2025 23:06 UTC
20 points
5
on: Meditations on Doge
Cases of genuine reform and improvement of processes, both in government and the private sector, tend to take the form of upfront investment of resources to overhaul systems, deploy new infrastructure, train staff, etc. which then lead to efficiency savings in the long run.
(Sticking to Eastern Europe, Estonia’s “e-government” programme involved significant upfront spending but radically simplified and reduced the costs of large parts of their government, as well as enabling growth of private businesses. Or for US examples look at the roll out of the UPS ORION route optimization system which cost something like $250m to roll out, but now saves $400m in fuel a year).
The problem with DOGE and other similar ideologically motivated attempts to cut government is that they instead cut the funding first, and leave the agencies to work out how to do their job with decreased resources. If you’ve just fired 10% of the federal workforce the people remaining don’t have the slack to consider ways to improve their systems, they are just struggling to keep the current system from collapsing. So you end up with something that costs less, but is providing you with less outputs per dollar of inputs. And doing these things in a messy and rushed way as they have been adds chaos and inefficiency to the system.

FiftyTwo 26 May 2025 22:37 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Bistrofan’s comment on: Meditations on Doge
It’s not just a question of “where would we need reform?” or “what kind of reform would work” but “what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?”
Most of the time when people talk about “government waste” what they actually mean is “government spending money on things I disapprove of”. When right wing lawmakers talk about money wasted on apocryphal transgender mice, they aren’t asking about how many transgender mice were generated per dollar, but the existence of the supposed project. Or one of the most frequently cited examples of government ‘waste’ is overseas aid, which is often very effective at fulfilling its aim, but its not an aim they agree with.
So in practice arguments about government waste tend to be ideological arguments in disguise, which causes people to be distrustful of them.

FiftyTwo 26 May 2025 22:33 UTC
0 points
−2
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Meditations on Doge
The issue in Eastern Europe being described seems to more fit the “rule of law” vs “rule by law” phenomeon, often used when describing authoritarian regimes, and particularly China. Where the law exists as a tool for the state to deploy at its discretion, not a consistently applied set of rules that limits them.
Generally the solution to this is not fewer laws, as that also leaves the authorities with great discretion, but to have strong counterbalancing institutions like an independent judiciary, press, opposition parties, etc. that will force them to act within the law.

FiftyTwo 26 May 2025 22:22 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
I think there’s also a strong preference towards Wizard over King power (at least in this cultural space) because being seen as actively seeking power over others is considered threatening. Saying you want to tell people what to do because you think you know better than them how to get things done is going to make people defensive and wary.

FiftyTwo 26 May 2025 22:16 UTC
10 points
1
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
The main reason I haven’t been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you’re describing is that it seems to me like there’s an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel,
The post inspired a similar thought in me as well. There’s a reason that people in any complex field have a wariness of anyone coming in thinking that they’ve discovered a new way to do everything better from first principles. And modern culture tends to valorize disruptors and innovators more than people who grind away slowly on incremental improvements to complex systems.
Though I do feel like there are a lot of people out there who don’t consider knowledge based solutions to their problems as much as they should, so maybe its a reverse all advice you hear situation.

FiftyTwo 26 May 2025 22:10 UTC
17 points
6
in reply to: Dweomite’s comment on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
On my model, the strongest individual people around are kings, but adding more kings doesn’t typically make civilization stronger
I don’t think this is true, at least when generalizing “King” to “manager”. One of the major ways societies develop is by getting better at coordination and resource management. Not every manager in e.g. Costco is a king, in the sense of having singular total authority, but they are all making decisions about the allocation of resources that are conveyed to those below them in the heirarchy, that adds together to a complex supply chain network that can achieve material prosperity that farmers alone couldn’t manage.

FiftyTwo 26 May 2025 22:04 UTC
4 points
0
on: Orienting Toward Wizard Power
I have a somewhat similar feeling of having become less ambitious and agentic over time. Part of the issue is that a lot of the cool weird stuff I tried when I was younger didn’t really work out, so the expected value is low. And my current life status makes me more risk averse.
Or to use your analogy, if the last 10 times the wizard has tried something clever, 9 times the result was some useless green goop, and 1 time a smoking crater where your castle used to be. Then its entirely rational to reallocate funds away from the wizard towards hiring more guys with swords, or castle masons.
So I think the challenge is to make these experiments low risk, and intrinsically enjoyable in some way, so even if they fail you don’t lose out. And also be mindful of what domains are best to apply a wizard approach to, and which need the application of mundane forces at scale.