The basic law school class or casebook (a casebook is the law school version of a textbook) is generally titled simply “corporations” or “business organizations” or something like that.
River
A variant of (3) would be election months. In Virginia, where I vote, they have (what they call) a version of absentee voting where a person who expects to be absent on election day can go into a government office on the weekend for a couple of months before the election and cast their vote in person that way. We could expand that—every day of the week for October and maybe September, an office is open to accept in-person votes. We could even randomly assign each voter a particular day in that month(s)-long window to come in and cast their votes, so that we don’t end up with too many people in the same physical space on any one day.
This certainly can come up in close friendships. There was an incident last summer where a then-close-friend of mine told me an outright lie about what they were doing on a particular evening, in a one-on-one conversation, and I caught them, and that lie certainly contributed to the breakdown of the friendship and my current distrust of the person. If we had had a convention like this explicitly established, who knows where we would be instead. Probably would have ended up in the same place for other reasons, but it is hard to know.
On the other hand, I don’t think I would value a friendship as much if it had this convention attached to it.
Minor factual quibble: Truman didn’t spend “years” as Vice President, he was sworn in as Vice President less than 3 months before being sworn in as President. Which possibly makes the fact that he wasn’t read in on the Manhattan Project a little less surprising.
A lot of this reads like you are trying to apply the structure of an experiment to a thing that is, um, not an experiment. Like, we all learn the steps of an experiment in school (where they often incorrectly call the experimental method “the scientific method”). But there are whole sciences, like astronomy, and cosmology, and geology, that don’t do experiments, they just make observations and analyze them in the context of what we already know from experiments in other areas of science. That is what LIGO does. We can’t do experiments on gravitational ways, because we don’t have the capacity to produce gravitational waves. All we can do is observe them. And that is still a perfectly valid scientific endeavor. And in particular, it is a scientific endeavor in which the notion of a “control” doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. Now, I don’t have the technical competence to evaluate these kinds of high level physics things for myself, I don’t know the math of general relativity, so I’m not going to try. But I generally trust the scientific community, and I’m not going to update much on a blog post that seems to misunderstand what these things are trying to do.
Is there a reason to think this would be different than any other kind of induction or Bayesian reasoning? We use probabilities to describe things for which there is a true answer that we happen not to know all the time. Probability is often (arguably always) subjective in that way. For example, what is the probability that you, Eigil Rischel, have any siblings? The answer, in an objective sense, is either 0 or 1. The answer, from your subjective perspective, is either very close to 0 or very close to 1. But from my perspective not knowing anything about you, I’m going to put it at 0.7. If I wanted a better estimate, I could actually look up what fraction of people have siblings and use that. If I wanted an even better estimate, I could ask you. But right now, from my perspective, the probability of you having siblings is 0.7. This seems straight forward for physical truths, I don’t see any real difference for mathematical truths. You should be able to use all the standard rules of probability theory, Bayes theorem, etc.
I’m unsure that your second bullet point follows. For that limit to work, I should be able to pick a (finite) N such that if psi(n) for all 0<=n<=N, then the probability of “for all n psi(n)” is greater than or equal to .9. I don’t know how to find such an N. How do I know that the limit isn’t 0.8? Intuitively I feel like just checking more and more values of n should not get us arbitrarily close to certainty, but I don’t know how to justify that intuition rigorously. Infinities are weird. Possibly infinities give us different rules for certain mathematical truths, I don’t know. I would be curious to hear other people’s thoughts.
Can you give an example of two sets of preferences which are prediction-identical, but which lead to will lead to “vastly different consequences if [you] program an AI to maximi[z]e them”?
The difference is that spin is a quantum mechanical concept, and this result becomes surprising in light of other things we know about quantum mechanics. Specifically, in quantum mechanics, it’s not just that we don’t know a particle’s properties (like spin) before we measure them, it’s that the particle has both properties, it has both spin up and spin down, until we measure it. We know this from things like the double slit experiment, where a single particle goes through two different slits at the same time and then interferes with itself. So when we have these two particles whose spins sum to 0, and we move them far away, and two observers measure their spin at the same time (so that the observers are outside of each others light cones), how do the particles coordinate so that their spins still sum to 0? They both had both spins when they were together, they didn’t pick individual spins until the measurement occurred, and yet they still somehow coordinated to have opposite spins, despite being outside each others light cones. That means information must have moved between the particles faster than the speed of light. That violates one of the fundamental premises of special relativity. That is the surprise.
Because this is how all properties work in quantum mechanics. This was the point of my reference to the double slit experiment, which is the classic example of this idea (called “superposition”). In the double slit experiment, you shoot a particle at a barrier that has two openings in it, and watch where it goes. If you shoot a bunch of particles through at once, then they interact with each other and produce a particular pattern. If you shoot them through one at a time, and they randomly picked one of the two holes to go through, you would expect to see them cluster in two places. This is not what you actually see. What you actually see when you shoot them through one at a time is exactly the same pattern that you saw when you shot them through all at once. Therefor, individual particles actually go through both holes at once and interact with themselves, they are in two different states simultaneously until someone observes them, and forces them to be in one. This is how all quantum mechanical properties work, including spin.
I’d like to see discussion on how a persons behavior should change after they have had covid, how much should we trust that immunity.
I’m not particularly familiar with predictit, but someone please explain where I am going wrong here. Lets say I buy 100 of these contracts for $85, and I win as seems virtually guaranteed. Then I receive $100. From this $100, predictit takes 10% of the winnings, or $1.50. I then withdraw the remaining $98.50, of which predictit takes another 5% or $4.93, leaving me with $93.57. I then owe taxes on the $100 of income, which even if I am in the lowest tax bracket is $10. That leaves me with only $83.57 when all is said and done, which is less than the $85 I invested. Haven’t I just lost money?
I am not a tax professional either, but I generally rely on tubotax, and that is very clear that you do not get to deduct the cost of the shares from the winnings. I’m not entirely clear whether the taxable income is the $100 nominally won, the $98.50 after the first fee, or the $93.57 after the second fee, but those numbers are close enough that it doesn’t really make a difference. See https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/jobs-and-career/how-to-pay-taxes-on-gambling-winnings-and-losses/L7JNH7mjn.
To your second question, if Biden becomes president, then Trump’s cabinet will likely resign, and if they don’t then Biden will fire them. If the senate refuses to confirm Biden’s appointees, then the answer to “Who is the senate-confirmed X on Feb 15 or March 1?” is nobody, and therefor definitely not Mike Pompeo or Bill Barr.
Where does it say that you can deduct the $85? All I’m seeing is that you can deduct gambling losses, and if you win the bet (which is the scenario we are considering), then I would think your gambling losses would be zero.
I’m pretty confident that the $85 would only be a loss if you loose the bet, which is not the scenario we are considering. I haven’t found anything specifically on predictit, but here’s what I found on slot machines, and I think the analogy is pretty clear:
”A taxpayer recognizes a wagering loss if … the total dollar amount of wagers placed by the taxpayer on electronically tracked slot machine play exceeds the total dollar amount of payouts from electronically tracked slot machine play during the session.”—https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2016/oct/taxation-of-gambling.html
From the first link I posted: “[Y]ou can’t subtract the cost of gambling from your winnings. For example, if you win $620 from a horse race but it cost you $20 to bet, your taxable winnings are $620, not $600 (after subtracting your $20 wager).” If you think Turbotax is wrong, I strongly encourage you to offer more than your word as a random person on the internet.
In the US, legally prohibiting lying would be unconstitutional (US v. Alvarez), and for good reason, I certainly don’t trust our political leaders to adjudicate what is a lie and what is not.
US v. Alvarez doesn’t make any distinction between prohibitions on lying that are content-based and prohibitions on lying that are content neutral. And I don’t think you can make such a distinction, any prohibition on lying necessarily permits a person to assert the negation of whatever is prohibited, and would therefor necessarily be content-based.
It is certainly true that US v. Alvarez allows a lot of specific prohibitions on lying in contexts where there is concrete harm, I just took the post to be arguing for a broader prohibition on lying, a prohibition on all lying, which I think would be clearly unconstitutional under US v. Alvarez. Could we expand the contexts in which a legal prohibition applies? Possibly to some degree, but I don’t think the very abstract metaphorical war that the post talks about would be a harm that any court would recognize, and I’m not sure the kinds of narrow prohibitions would address the posts concerns.
You’ve misunderstood my claim. But since you want to go into the legal technicalities, let’s go there. There actually was no majority opinion in US v. Alvarez. There was an opinion by Justice Kennedy for himself and three other justices, which talks a lot about content-based discrimination. The idea here is that lies are a subcategory of content-based discrimination. Suppose there is a statute prohibiting me from lying about how many chairs there are in this room, and I assert that there are three chairs in this room, when there are in fact only two. I have violated the statute. But had I made a different claim on the same topic, had I asserted that there are only two chairs in this room, I would not have violated the statute. That makes the statute content-based.
The controlling opinion in US v. Alvarez is actually the opinion by Justice Breyer, not Justice Kennedy, and Justice Breyer more or less skips over the whole issue of whether it is content-based, but ends up applying strict scrutiny anyway. According to Justice Breyer’s controlling opinion, regulations of false speech in areas that “would present a grave and unacceptable danger of suppressing truthful speech”, such as “philosophy, religion, history, the social sciences, the arts, and the like”, get strict scrutiny. Regulations of “false statements about easily verifiable facts that do not concern such subject matter” get intermediate scrutiny, which means they still might not be constitutional.
Both opinions recognize that there are a lot of specific categories of lies, such as perjury which you mention, that are generally thought to be proscribable, and which US v. Alvarez does not touch. Neither opinion suggests that these categories of lies are somehow content-neutral. Even for content-based regulations, courts then have to ask whether the government has a compelling interest in prohibiting the speech, and whether the prohibition is narrowly tailored to that compelling interest, before declaring a prohibition on speech unconstitutional. There are a variety of other exceptions to free speech that the Supreme Court has recognized over the years (defamation, true threats, incitement of imminent lawless action, etc.) The idea with many of the categories of presumably proscribable lies mentioned in US v Alvarez is that these categories of lies are proscribable because they generally cause significant harms, even though they are content-based. This is how Justice Breyer puts it: “I also must concede that many statutes and common-law doctrines make the utterance of certain kinds of false statements unlawful. Those prohibitions, however, tend to be narrower than the statute before us, in that they limit the scope of their application, sometimes by requiring proof of specific harm to identifiable victims; sometimes by specifying that the lies be made in contexts in which a tangible harm to others is especially likely to occur; and sometimes by limiting the prohibited lies to those that are particularly likely to produce harm.” Since you mentioned perjury and lying to cops specifically, here is what Justice Breyer has to say about that: “Perjury statutes prohibit a particular set of false statements—those made under oath—while requiring a showing of materiality. See, e.g., 18 U. S. C. §1621. Statutes forbidding lying to a government official (not under oath) are typically limited to circumstances where a lie is likely to work particular and specific harm by interfering with the functioning of a government department, and those statutes also require a showing of materiality. See, e.g., §1001.”The point: US v. Alvarez actually is a serious impediment to any prohibition on lying aimed at improving the general epistemic environment of public debate, and for good reason: any such prohibition has to be enforced by the government, and allowing the government to decide what counts as a lie is a recipe for censorship. People like Donald Trump sometimes win elections, and do you want him deciding what counts as a lie and is therefor prohibited?
This argument about affidavits seems wrong to me too. I’ve never heard of an affidavit being used in a context where there wasn’t the idea of the document being used in a court proceeding, and I’m not sure such a thing would be allowed. Can you please cite a particular statute that you think would allow a podcaster to legally bind himself with an affidavit? And if such a thing did become common, do you think courts would be willing to be the arbiters of which statements were true in podcasts, or do you think they would be unwilling to enforce what they would (rightly in my view) see as a misuse of a tool intended to protect only their own integrity? The latter seems much more likely to me.
I imagine those would make life harder for people with pets or babies crawling around.