Kenny

• Kenny 15 Jan 2021 17:12 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Are UFOs just drones?

  I don’t know enough about ‘generic UFO sightings’ to answer.

  “actually aliens” seems very very unlikely – definitely not literally impossible tho.

  My priors are that a lot of historical UFO sightings really were experimental aircraft. I’d expect some number were early drones too. Others seem to have definitely been, e.g. weather balloons.

  Other sightings, particularly the relatively well-documented recent ones, seem very similar to ‘ball lightning’, which is also so little understood that it’s not even clear that it’s real. Assuming those observations are both accurate (e.g. the relevant ‘equipment’ was working correctly) and being interpreted accurately, they don’t seem to be drones, unless the drones themselves include novel propulsion systems (which is very plausible assuming the existence of such novel systems).

  (And, as a a kind of reference point, ‘rogue waves’ seem to have been similarly so hard to study, until very recently, that their existence wasn’t entirely clear.)

• Kenny 15 Jan 2021 17:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are UFOs just drones?

  Yes, I agree with everything you wrote, but the caveats are where I’d focus any investigation:

  1. Is the equipment functioning properly?

  2. Are there other plausible interpretations of the data gathered by that equipment?

  Some of the best UFO sightings seem pretty similar to ‘ball lightning’ which also isn’t either well-explained or particularly well observed. (I think there’s one plausibly somewhat-detailed observation of it to-date.)

  I don’t know enough ufology to know what the deal is there.

  I also don’t know enough about specific events, the observations made, the raw data collected for those events, etc..

• Kenny 15 Jan 2021 16:53 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Covid 1/​7: The Fire of a Thou­sand Suns

  You (or someone) could use a payment processor with a subscription feature, e.g. Stripe, and lose only 2.9+%.

  Maybe the easiest/​cheapest option would be to just create a new email address and accept direct payments via Zelle/​Venmo/​PayPal/​etc., but some of those don’t support recurring payments.

• Kenny 14 Jan 2021 18:07 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are UFOs just drones?

  But how plausible is the evidence that the observations really (accurately) are of “a case of anomalous compared to matter”?

  Like, what’s the evidence that what’s been observed – and among the best data, i.e. “footage and data released by military and other official channels” – really has been of solid objects?

  I don’t recall the newer (and better) evidence being of solid objects but of ‘lights’.

  (I’m genuinely curious about both questions. I read about, or even watched some, of the recentish U.S. Navy (?) pilots observing a UFO off the cost of California (?) but I don’t remember any particular evidence about the object(s) being solid.)

• Kenny 14 Jan 2021 18:06 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Sherrinford’s comment on: Avoid Un­nec­es­sar­ily Poli­ti­cal Examples

  This is kind of reasonable, but I think it should be rounded-off to ignored – in this case.

  In general, language is ‘merely reasonable’ – it’s always a bit Humpty-Dumpty.

  I don’t think the use of any phrase, historical or not, could be considered explicit reference of its “context”.

  Even words like ‘family’, historically, sometimes referred to the ‘servants’ (and slaves) of a household. But it seems reasonable to continue using ‘family’ – the common agreement of English speakers/​listeners/​writers/​readers is that’s perfectly okay and unobjectionable.

  Or maybe you’re right? ‘delenda est’ is very different from ‘family’. There really aren’t any other uses or interpretations beyond, at most, metaphorical violence. I certainly don’t like (some) other violent words or phrases (sometimes), even when they’re obviously metaphorical. And it’s not obviously wrong to think that avoiding ‘violent’ language might be net-good anyways.

  But this post was cross-posted from the author’s personal blog and is a (mildly) contentious exception to the kinds of posts that are normally considered worth listing on the ‘front page’ of the site. Because of that, I’m still inclined to let this pass.

  But I’ve definitely changed my mind about the phrase being entirely innocuous.

• Kenny 14 Jan 2021 17:17 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Covid 1/​7: The Fire of a Thou­sand Suns

  Aaron gave me the details on how best to pay you but it’s not info I’d publicize without your explicit consent.

  I’d like to pay you, others seem to want to do the same thing, but I don’t want to create extra work for you for this.

  Would you mind someone setting up a Patreon on your behalf and then paying you any money collected via it (i.e. via the method Aaron shared)?

• Kenny 12 Jan 2021 22:25 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: kjz’s comment on: Avoid Un­nec­es­sar­ily Poli­ti­cal Examples

  That’s good data – thanks!

  I agree that “debate is war; arguments are soldiers” is probably a better rhetorical tactic than “politics is the mindkiller”. The latter’s much more of an ‘insider’ phrase.

• Kenny 12 Jan 2021 22:22 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ryan_b’s comment on: Avoid Un­nec­es­sar­ily Poli­ti­cal Examples

  Yes!

  This is a useful thing that’s often done on Stack Overflow too – ‘duplicate’ questions are closed and linked to the ‘original’ question but not deleted. That allows multiple ‘vectors’ (e.g. via different web searches) to converge on canonical info.

  What you pointed out is different – approaching “the same point from a different level of group development” – but seems broadly similar and, I’d guess, would be similarly useful.

• Kenny 12 Jan 2021 22:19 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Sherrinford’s comment on: Avoid Un­nec­es­sar­ily Poli­ti­cal Examples

  Those are the reference category of counter-examples to the current system and some of us are uncomfortable with them as-is. (I’m mostly fine with them overall, all things considered.)

  Calling for the “delenda” of the WHO, or the FDA, seem obviously different than the ‘original’ usage, e.g. “Carthago delenda est!”. Zvi is calling for radical reform, or possibly (?) abolishment, of government organizations – not the literal destruction of their leaders or employees.

  Referring to DeBlasio as a “worst person” is also pretty narrowly restricted to his pandemic-related actions.

  On second thought – you’re right that there’s pretty overt politicization, but maybe not in the ‘standard’ (prototypical) U.S. left-versus-right – it’s more a ‘pandemic-emergency versus business-as-usual’ pair of coalitions (as I understand it). This seems – to me – pretty orthogonal to the standard left-versus-right conflicts. But they are overtly political.

  I’m still inclined to give those posts a pass on that kind of thing given the enormous value those posts otherwise have. (I also share the general ‘delenda est’ sentiment towards the referenced organizations and administrations – as organizations and administrations, not as groups of individual people. So I’m definitely biased.)

• Kenny 12 Jan 2021 6:47 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: TheSimplestExplanation’s comment on: Covid 1/​7: The Fire of a Thou­sand Suns

  What was that lesson?

  That’s there’s no widespread support for allocating scarce resources by price.

• Kenny 12 Jan 2021 6:30 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Covid 1/​7: The Fire of a Thou­sand Suns

  Any reason(s) why the crowdfunding isn’t public? Patreon seems like it would be really easy.

• Kenny 11 Jan 2021 22:06 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Are UFOs just drones?

  Nothing needs a single explanation, so no. But this seems pretty uncharitable as-is; or maybe a kind of covert radical skepticism. Or maybe I’m just failing to think of a better set of multiple explanations – what is yours?

  To clarify, by “UFOs” I was thinking of what, in this answer, is referred to as “Masses that move at ludicrous velocities and perform hard stops, turns, and accelerations.”.

  Obviously, there’s a big space of possible objects that could be considered ‘UFOs’:

  1. Flying objects that can’t (or just weren’t in some specific instance) be identified to some standard resolution, e.g. ‘That looks like a X aircraft but a little different.’

  2. Objects or phenomena that aren’t flying but appear to be, e.g. due to a mirage.

  My question is implicitly ignoring [2]. It’s also ignoring ‘mundane’ instances of [1], e.g. weather balloons, (early) experimental aircraft, stealth/​spy aircraft. Those seem all accounted for by reasonable common-sense explanations, e.g. someone saw an aircraft they didn’t recognize or couldn’t clearly identify.

  The specific subset of [1] that didn’t (at the time) seem explainable as aircraft, because they (seemed to) move in ways that aircraft can’t/​couldn’t, seems much more likely to me to be people observing drones, e.g. un-piloted aircraft. And, given that UFOs (by definition) can’t be clearly identified, it seems likely that observations about them might be inaccurate, e.g. because their distance, velocity, or movements might not be accurately observable (especially given the salient comparisons available to observers). So what seems like objects that exhibit “ludicrous velocities and perform hard stops, turns, and accelerations” might well just be un-piloted aircraft that can exhibit a smaller degree of those same characteristics (because they’re not constrained by needing to not kill or injure pilots or passengers).

  Obviously this couldn’t explain things like, e.g. Bob Lazars claims.

• Kenny 11 Jan 2021 21:34 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stuart Anderson’s comment on: Are UFOs just drones?

  Masses that move at ludicrous velocities and perform hard stops, turns, and accelerations.

  What I’m thinking here – in the form of the proposed hypothesis in the question – is that the anomalous movements are anomalous relative to aircraft, which, until recently, were all piloted (as far as the ‘public’ knew). Un-piloted craft are capable of (relatively) “hard stops, turns, and accelerations” that pilots can’t physically withstand.

  If the movements people are observing really do consist of “ludicrous velocities and perform hard stops, turns, and accelerations” – even assuming the UFOs are un-piloted (or not piloted by humans or somehow don’t have the expected effects on their pilots or passengers) – then I readily admit that they can’t be (mundane) drones as they are widely/​publicly understood.

  But I’m not sure how much weight to put on the ‘ludcrity’ of observations generally.

• Kenny 11 Jan 2021 21:29 UTC

  3 points

  on: Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners

  Yes! Bets – and even just ‘modeling’ owning-up to being wrong – are wonderful tools, especially for children (as they haven’t learned that most people avoid them).

  This ‘area’ came up (in my mind) most recently in a disagreement about something my child was taught in school. We didn’t bet tho and the outcome turned out to neither fully support either ‘side’ – but that’s a good opportunity too for learning about disagreement and updating on new evidence.

  I haven’t yet spotted an opportunity for using ‘bonds’ but now I’ll look for them even more vigorously!

  I do think there is some risk with this approach that the child will have a bad time just to get the money, or say they are having a bad time and they are actually not, but this isn’t something we’ve run into.

  I’ve run into this – in ‘pre-bet’ circumstances – but it seemed easy enough to ‘strategically dissuade’ by expressing skepticism of their sentiments; that’s resulted in honest confessions the few times it’s come up.

• Kenny 11 Jan 2021 21:22 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Bucky’s comment on: Bets, Bonds, and Kindergarteners

  I’ve made sure my child has a ‘budget’ they can spend – and some portion on anything (that’s not egregiously dangerous or inappropriate). That seems to have quickly demonstrated the value of money to them.

  But I like betting with any kind of payouts too – and you can approximate ‘odds’ by agreeing to ‘lopsided’ payouts, e.g. ‘you have to give me a hug if you lose; I’ll take you to the Zoo if you win’.

• Kenny 8 Jan 2021 21:25 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Covid 11/​12: The Winds of Winter

  I was following the GitHub project directly for a good while and that was a great way to follow your activity. And it’s impressive! You all are killing it! Thanks again!

• Kenny 8 Jan 2021 21:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Kenny’s comment on: Sig­nal­ling & Si­mu­lacra Level 3

  There’s an attention component to chunking. I could chunk some set of things into neat categories – if I examined it closely for a sufficient duration. But I mostly don’t – relative to all possible things I could be examining.

• Kenny 8 Jan 2021 21:21 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Sig­nal­ling & Si­mu­lacra Level 3

  I agree that chunking precedes naming – historically. But I think most (a lot?) of people learn the name first and have to (try to) reverse engineer the chunking. Some of this definitely happens iteratively and interactively, e.g. when teaching children.

  And I’m very unsure that there is one simple way for “how we chunk the world into objects”. I think that might explain why some people chunk the same words so differently: there’s no (obvious) unique best way to chunk some ideas for everyone.

  I know that people that are relatively competent at chess reliably chunk board states in a way that I know that I don’t (as I’m not at all good at chess).

  Similarly, people that already knows a variety of different plants (at least) seems to chunk them in a way that I don’t.

  We must do that before attaching the word “tree” to the concept, because otherwise it would take millions of examples to hone in on which concept the word is trying to point to.

  I don’t think this is true. If anything, some ideas/​concepts seem to start with very coarse chunking based on a very small number of prototypical examples, and then it does take ‘millions’ of subsequent examples to refine the chunking. And that is definitely sometimes mediated directly via language.

  I think there is a lot of pre-verbal or non-verbal chunking involved in thinking.

  But I also think it’s very common to not have a chunk (“concept”) before learning the word, even of something like apples.

  Tho I also think the opposite is pretty common – ‘Oh, that’s the word for those!’.

• Kenny 8 Jan 2021 21:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Sig­nal­ling & Si­mu­lacra Level 3

  OK, but I claim there is a difference between “literally” and a mere intensifier.

  I’m confused. Perhaps we’re writing past each other!

  There is a meaning or sense of ‘literally’ that is not an intensifier – I believe this is true.

  In most cases, for myself personally (and subject to all of the limitations of this kind of memory and for myself personally), I seem to be able to interpret specific uses of “literally” unambiguously.

  There are occasional exceptions tho!

  Also, people who can’t tell the difference between “A->B” and “A, and also B” are pretty frustrating to talk to.

  I agree!

  I agree that there isn’t some general method to distinguish the cloud from the literal meaning, or pick out which literal meaning, but I claim people do anyway, sometimes making quite a strong distinction.

  I agree – people do it (pretty reliably) anyway and there can be arbitrarily strong distinctions maintained.

[Question] Are UFOs just drones?