jaspax

Karma: 706

jaspax 10 Nov 2022 15:54 UTC
14 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: What it’s like to dissect a cadaver
This had entirely the opposite effect on me, but was an interesting read nonetheless.

jaspax 19 Oct 2022 17:13 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: the gears to ascenscion’s comment on: Untapped Potential at 13-18

The big problem with giving kids jobs is that most kids are not strong enough self defenders to defend against potentially-subtle attacks and manipulation by people employing them

I disagree that this is “the” big problem; in fact it seems to me to be quite a small problem. There are plenty of bosses who are sort of jerks, or who manipulate their workers into maybe working extra hours without pay or whatever. This is bad, but it’s not the magnitude of harm that requires society to pour tons of extra effort into eradicating it. If it escalates into something like outright wage theft, then this is already illegal and at most we might want to make it easier to report and investigate these things. (For really serious cases such as a manager sexually assaulting a subordinate there are several responses: first, this isn’t all that common, second, it’s already very illegal.)

In any case it seems weird to use this as a counter-argument given that the alternative is legally requiring students to be in school for 4-8 hrs/day without any compensation at all.

jaspax 17 Oct 2022 15:29 UTC
10 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: joseph_c’s comment on: Balsa FAQ
Those benefitting are usually not politicians, they’re commercial interests who make money from the status quo. They will oppose efforts that cause them to lose money even if the change is a net good overall, but you can quiet them down by giving them a bunch of money. Typically doing so is still a net good, because the cost of buying off the opposition is (usually) less than the value gained by the rest of society.

Perhaps the verb “buy off” is not the best one here, but I’m not sure what else you’d use. If you’re morally offended by the idea of offering payments to lessen the sting for people who suffer a concrete downside from your policies then, uh, don’t go into politics I guess.

jaspax 12 Oct 2022 14:08 UTC
22 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Celarix’s comment on: That one apocalyptic nuclear famine paper is bunk
Upvoted because this is a good comment, but strong disagree with the underlying premise. Actual global nuclear war would render existing partisan divides irrelevant almost instantly; typical partisan culture-war divides would be readily ignored in favor of staying alive.

I could imagine more relevant international divides of this type, such as wealthier and militarily powerful first-world nations hoarding their own resources at the expense of poorer nations, but I don’t think that partisanship within single nations would overwhelm the survival instinct.

jaspax 14 Sep 2022 15:04 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Astynax’s comment on: Simple proofs of the age of the universe (or other things)
“SA and Africa look like they fit together” is a good example, because at first glance it looks just a dumb coincidence and not any kind of solid evidence. Indeed, it’s partly for that reason that the theory of continental drift was rejected for a long time; you needed a bunch of other lines of evidence to come together before continental drift really looked like a solid theory.

So using the continental drift argument requires you to not just demonstrate that the pieces fit, but include all of the other stuff that holds up the theory and then use that to argue for the age of the earth.

Unfortunately I don’t know of any other evidences for the age of the earth or universe that have shorter argument chains. It’s genuinely hard! (And partly for that reason I wouldn’t be too surprised if new evidence caused us to revise our estimates for the age of the universe by a factor of two in either direction.)

jaspax 14 Sep 2022 11:23 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Simple proofs of the age of the universe (or other things)
A fun inverse of this exercise is to go to something like Proofs for a young earth and see how many of them you can counter-argue (and consider how convincing your argument will be to someone with a low level of background knowledge).

With that in mind, I’m not really happy with any of the provided proofs for the age of the universe. While there are a bunch of accessible and intuitively-plausible arguments for getting the age of the earth to at least several million years, determining the age of the universe seems to depend on a bunch of complicated estimates and intermediate steps that are easy to get wrong.

jaspax 29 Aug 2022 5:05 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: [Review] The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
I’m not trying to argue for a general inversion of the principle, ie. I’m not suggesting that non-consent is somehow automatically justified. Mostly I was observing the thing where two people on “opposite” sides of an issue nonetheless have major unstated premises in common, and without those premises the contention between them dissolves.

As I alluded to by saying “left as an exercise to the reader”, I don’t have a full explanation at the ready about the ethics of non-consensuality. Mostly I just wanted to bring the readers’ attention to the way in which consensualism is being assumed by the above, and that the argument fails hard in the cases where consensualism is rejected or simply doesn’t apply.

(If I were to make a general gesture towards the ethics of non-consent, I would start by talking about the phenomenon of dependency, where one party explicitly requires the cooperation of another party in order to live. Such dependency relations are by definition unequal, and in the natural world they are also often non-consensual, but despite these features they still place binding moral obligations on both parties.)

jaspax 26 Aug 2022 6:19 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: [Review] The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
What if we don’t accept the starting assumption that non-consensual, unequal relationships are bad? I read the arguments against the social contract and democratic theories of the state, and I agree with the author that they are inadequate defenses for state authority, but that’s because they’re trying to construct the state starting from consensualist and egalitarian premises.

But consensualism and egalitarianism are false starting points! Relations which are both non-consensual and unequal are sometimes right and good, and my argument for this is that such relations are an ineradicable feature of physical reality. The prime example of this is the relation between parents and children, but many more examples may be found.

(Constructing an argument for the state beginning from the position of non-consensualism and inegalitarianism is left as an exercise for the reader.)

jaspax 22 Aug 2022 6:53 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Embracing the Opposition’s Point
As someone much more sympathetic than you to Peterson, the line that most stuck out to me is one that doesn’t even contain an explicit argument:

Peterson acknowledges that weirdos (which I read as unusually flexible, open-minded and creative people) have their place in society.

Uh, you define “weirdo” entirely in positive terms. That’s going to really change the way that the argument reads! It seems to me that you’re stretching yourself to justify Peterson’s talk about weirdos because you’re mentally reading it as “society should grudgingly tolerate open-minded and creative people”, which requires some more severe mental gymnastics to justify.

I think you get closer to the intended reading if you take “weirdo” in mostly negative terms, as “non-cooperators in collective social games” (reading “game” in the expansive, non-pejorative sense). The statement “society should grudgingly tolerate social non-cooperators (because they sometimes discover useful new behaviors)” makes a lot more sense, and the tradeoff becomes clearer. You can further refine the argument if you use the word “cooperate” in place of “conform”. And as a general exhortation it makes sense: you should cooperate as much as possible with the people around you, and only beg off when the cost of cooperation gets too high.

jaspax 10 Aug 2022 9:44 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Post-mortem?

Was it part of a heavyhanded but ultimately highly effective Covid Zero policy which led to it turning into a hermit country enduring devastating economic fallout while merely postponed the inevitable variant which could defeat Covid Zero?

Strong vote in favor of this interpretation of China’s policies. Doesn’t give me much to say about the post-mortem, though.

jaspax 10 Aug 2022 9:34 UTC
17 points
13 ∶ 0
on: Proposal: Consider not using distance-direction-dimension words in abstract discussions
Counterpoint: spatial metaphors are so deeply embedded into human cognition that getting rid of them is likely to massively impair your ability to think clearly, rather than enhancing it. Lakoff’s work on cognitive metaphors, and the whole field of cognitive linguistics more generally, have shown that mapping concepts onto experiences of space (and related bodily metaphors) is central to linguistic communication and all forms of abstract thought.

Refusing to use spatial metaphors may be an interesting training exercise, much like walking around your house blindfolded, or making things with your non-dominant hand. Trying this out might be a good way to develop other cognitive modalities and notice ways in which you were misusing the spatial concept. However, I find it unlikely that this makes your thinking as a whole clearer or more accurate. The things you make using your non-dominant hand are probably objectively worse than the things you make with your dominant hand, but the practice of doing it makes you more capable once you remove the restraint.

(Tentatively, I endorse the strong view that there is no such thing as abstract human cognition; instead, all human thought is based on metaphors from embodied sensory experience.)

jaspax 11 Jul 2022 7:42 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sameerishere’s comment on: Babysitting as Parenting Trial?
I endorse this conclusion. Speaking only for myself, I am not a person who “likes kids”. I tend to be indifferent and easily bored by other peoples’ kids. But I feel completely differently about my own kids, and the anecdata that I have available to me suggests that this is a common experience.

jaspax 30 Jun 2022 7:15 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: kman’s comment on: Challenge: A Much More Alien Message
I don’t know if it’s necessary to delete, but I’ll bet you’ll get a lot more uptake if you repost another in August.

jaspax 29 Jun 2022 11:48 UTC
12 points
5 ∶ 0
on: Challenge: A Much More Alien Message
Meta: in the future, it would probably be better to space these challenges out more. I think that a lot of people blew their effort and interest on the previous one. It might be interesting if these came out once a month like the D&D.Sci challenges.

jaspax 27 Jun 2022 15:40 UTC
7 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Contest: An Alien Message
The nature of binary representations of floating-point is that nice bit-patterns make for round numbers and vice-versa, so I’m not sure that we can conclude a lot from that. The fact that the floating-point interpretation of the data results in numbers that cluster around certain values is telling, but could still be a red-herring. Part of my reluctance to endorse that theory is narrative: we were told that this is a simulated alien message, and what are the odds that aliens have independently invented double-precision floating point?

In any case, I’m reading those threads attentively, but in the meantime I’m going to pursue some hunches of my own.

jaspax 27 Jun 2022 15:15 UTC

6 points

1 ∶ 0

in reply to: jaspax’s comment on: Contest: An Alien Message

Okay, here’s something interesting. Showing binary representation, in blocks of 8 bytes:

00000000: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11110100 00111111  .......?
00000008: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 00000000 01000000  .......@
00000010: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 11100000 10111111  ........
00000018: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11100100 00111111  .......?
00000020: 11001101 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11001100 11110000 00111111  .......?
00000028: 10011010 10011001 10011001 10011001 10011001 10011001 11100101 00111111  .......?
00000030: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 11110010 10111111  ffffff..
00000038: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 11110010 00111111  ffffff.?
00000040: 11011000 10100011 01110000 00111101 00001010 01010111 11111011 00111111  ..p=.W.?
00000048: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 11011000 00111111  .......?
00000050: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 11011000 10111111  ........
00000058: 10100000 01110000 00111101 00001010 11010111 10100011 11010100 10111111  .p=.....
00000060: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 00000010 11000000  ffffff..
00000068: 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 01100110 00000010 01000000  ffffff.@

The obvious pattern now is that every 8 bytes there is a repeated sequence of 6 bits which are all the same. Despite my initial protestations that the latter part of the file is less regular, this pattern holds throughout the entire file. The majority of the time the pattern is 111111, but there are a decent number of ones which are 000000 as well.

jaspax 27 Jun 2022 14:54 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: jaspax’s comment on: Contest: An Alien Message
Actually, the opener is quite a bit more structured than that, even: it’s three 4-byte sequences where the bytes are all identical or differ in only one bit, followed by a different 4-byte sequence. There is probably something really obvious going on here, but I need to stare at it a bit before it jumps out at me.

ETA: Switching to binary since there’s no reason to assume that the hexadecimal representation is particularly useful here.

jaspax 27 Jun 2022 14:49 UTC

3 points

1 ∶ 0

on: Contest: An Alien Message

Hex dump of the first chunk of the file:

00000000: cdcc cccc cccc f43f cdcc cccc cccc 0040  .......?.......@
00000010: 0000 0000 0000 e0bf cdcc cccc cccc e43f  ...............?
00000020: cdcc cccc cccc f03f 9a99 9999 9999 e53f  .......?.......?
00000030: 6666 6666 6666 f2bf 6666 6666 6666 f23f  ffffff..ffffff.?
00000040: d8a3 703d 0a57 fb3f 0000 0000 0000 d83f  ..p=.W.?.......?
00000050: 0000 0000 0000 d8bf a070 3d0a d7a3 d4bf  .........p=.....
00000060: 6666 6666 6666 02c0 6666 6666 6666 0240  ffffff..ffffff.@
00000070: 713d 0ad7 a340 fa3f d8a3 703d 0a57 f53f  q=...@.?..p=.W.?
00000080: d8a3 703d 0a57 f5bf 8fc2 f528 5cef f13f  ..p=.W.....(\..?
00000090: 007b 14ae 47e1 aabf 007b 14ae 47e1 aa3f  .{..G....{..G..?
000000a0: 6666 6666 6666 f2bf 6666 6666 6666 f23f  ffffff..ffffff.?

I just picked out enough lines to make some obvious observations. There are multiple sequences of ffffff, which I assume to be some kind of record separator. The beginning of the file is highly structured; the latter part of the file much less so. The obvious conclusion is that the first part of the file is some kind of metadata or header, while the main body begins further down.

jaspax 20 Jun 2022 10:40 UTC
1 point
on: Parliaments without the Parties
I read the first paragraph of this post, and before reading the rest I said to myself, “I sure hope this person has a good model for why parties exist in the first place so they can ensure that their replacement actually works.” Unfortunately, the rest of the post didn’t pan out.

I’m very sympathetic to your goals here, but without a better model for the behavior of political coalitions, I strongly suspect that these proposed solution will either fail or make things worse. In particular we need to consider both the intra-parliamentary function of parties (allowing representatives to coordinate with each other), but also the public, communicative function of parties to allow voters to choose a candidate and have a good model for his behavior without having to invest tons of time.

jaspax 13 Jun 2022 11:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Filter out tags from the front page?
Thank you!