theunitofcaring:
Thought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week:
what we need are variable length television episodes. The entire problem with Law and Order is that, if they’ve found the bad guy and we’re only at minute 20, he’s not the bad guy. Even if it’s four minutes from the ending there’s probably still a twist coming, so someone is going to pull out a gun and/or jump out a window. You know everything you need to know about how an episode is going to play out just by looking at the clock.
Movies have this problem too. No, the protagonist isn’t going to die, we’re only 45 minutes in. No, their grand plan to crush the villain isn’t going to work, we’ve still got another hour that they’re going to have to fill somehow. Okay, this grand plan is going to work, because we’re down to eight minutes.
Reading a detective story or law story is pretty much the exact same problem - setup, obvious misdirection, apparent resolution that we know is a lie because we’re only halfway though the page count. I knew Harry Potter wasn’t dead because I could feel seventy more pages in my hand.
And that’s print, so we can’t fix it, but now that lots of people read on ebooks I’m astonished there’s not an app that lets authors set false endings and false lengths to their stories. And has no one recut Law and Order to be a thousand times less predictable just by virtue of not always lasting exactly 43 minutes plus commercial breaks? I would pay a lot of money for a Netflix-of-lies full of television episodes and movies of varying length and thus, for once, genuinely unpredictable.
Obligatory excerpt from Gödel, Escher, Bach:
Keep reading
nostalgebraist:
From philosophical Bayesians one hears things like “if you buy this set of axioms about how to describe your beliefs, then you should reason in this way.”
One objection being that sometimes you haven’t thought of everything, and what probability should you assign to the set containing “all things I haven’t thought of”? You want to fail gracefully.
So: would it be possible to do the same kind of axiomatic theory-building with “fail gracefully” as an explicit goal? Imagine people telling others that if they violate this or that principle, they will fail poorly. We all think “knowing you’re probably missing something” is good, but could it be formalized? That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it would be interesting to see what sorts of monsters would result from the attempt.
(There are probably things like this out there right now that I am just ignorant of.)
Ironically, this sounds like exactly the kind of problem that MIRI is trying to solve.
funereal-disease:
funereal-disease:
funereal-disease:
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guys
Bernie Sanders is ON YOUR SIDE
you cannot literally shout over the man and then accuse him of not speaking up for you
slartibartfastibast said: “He’s just some old white guy. Jews are white now, and therefore have never ever been victims of racism. Also, some people just like to get mad at shit. Probably a sadism thing. Maybe we should stop encouraging them.”
I want to stop encouraging them, but it’s really hard when this stuff has real-world implications. We can’t claim this shoddy state of discourse is just an online thing anymore.
it just
it really burns me up because Sanders IS 100% ON THE SIDE OF RACIAL JUSTICE. Quoth the man verbatim: “Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control[.]” That is more than just about any other politician is willing to say. But because he doesn’t know the right buzzwords, because he came of age in an era where organizing was different, more inclusive, less steeped in toxic identity politics, he’s Public Enemy #1. These people do not care what he actually believes. They care about his ability to hit all the right identity politics keys.
Things I regret having read.
queenshulamit:
Visa exemption form asks “Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?”
Who says “yep, planning a genocide here, just thought I’d let you know because genocide is fine but lying is wrong”
Obligatory link to Math Overflow on “mathematical urban legends”:
When the logician Carnap was immigrating to the US, he had the usual consular interview, where one of the questions was (and still is, I think): “Would you favor the overthrow of the US government by violence, or force of arms?”. He thought for a while, and responded: “I would have to say force of arms…”
"I prayed to Alison, goddess of opposing ridiculous water rationing schemes, and sacrificed my sleep to her, and lo: it did rain."
dataandphilosophy:
Status: More of a fun idea to play around with than a serious proposal.
Largely a reaction to this article.
One of the basic problems facing the humanities is that people don’t want to major in English because the pay is terrible. The article mentions this, and then goes on to discuss whether post-modernism is at fault. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that differences in job markets are responsible for most of the difference in major choices.
So how do you preserve the humanities without impoverishing the poor sops who go into them?
Required double majors, and you can’t do double technical or double soft. If you want to major in philosophy, that’s fantastic! You’ll also be studying math, cognitive science, CS, German and French, or something else that gives you useful job skills. Want to major in statistics? Have a great time! You can study political science or sociology if you want to supplement it or history or English Lit if you want to learn about your place in the world.*
*: A good stats education should do more for your ability to think critically about the average sentence that is intended to be factual in the modern world than your average study of english literature.
Who exactly is supposed to benefit from having technical people do a soft major? The students don’t; there’s a case for making everyone do a broad liberal-arts education, but not for picking a random specialty unrelated to their actual field. Nor do the humanities, as a collective human endeavor, benefit from having a large number of additional undergraduates who aren’t going to do any real work in the field, are operating outside their comparative advantage, and in most cases don’t want to be there at all. To the extent that humanities departments benefit from this, they are just being parasites.
(Note: I completed most of a Humanities & Arts major at a STEM school alongside my CS major, but had to abandon it after a falling-out with the only professor in my concentration.)
"Gosh, why does it always have to be woman who quits her job to take care of the multi-million dollar philanthropy organization?"
Anonymous asked: I want to always be on the same side in a fight as you.
ilzolende:
sinesalvatorem:
ilzolende:
[tries to think of what I would actually want to do in a fight] All right, you fight a person, I’ll run away while simultaneously calling 911 on my phone.
Actually, hold on. I’m probably most at risk of getting into a fight while in school. If Previous School Psychologist is to be believed (yeah, right, but she is more informative than a coin flip, in part because when she lies she has actual motivations in doing so), if the sequence of events
- Alice asks Bob an insulting question.
- Bob responds to Alice with another insult.
- Alice hits Bob.
- Bob sort of stands around or tries to leave or otherwise does not assault Alice.
- Eve the Administrator comes over and spots Alice hitting Bob while Bob does not hit Alice.
results in Alice and Bob both getting suspended for mutual fighting.
So if someone attacks me in the situation where I think I’m most at risk of getting into a fight, I have no actual incentive to not respond with violence. People suspending you while feeling bad about it is still people suspending you. So I suppose I might actually end up fighting someone.
Anyway, glad that someone would defend me and not fall prey to bystander effect if I were attacked! That’s always nice news.
They’d suspend both of you? What? Have they NEVER heard of incentives? Well, I actually wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t.
In high school they tried to ensure they only punished whoever started a fight. Unfortunately, since the teacher isn’t always there, sometimes bias would come into play and they’d decide that obviously the Good Kid couldn’t have started the fight. Luckily, this never negatively impacted me because I was always one of the Good Kids.
I’m not sure the school actually would. I’m just repeating what I’ve been told by a manipulative person who has probably lied to me about other things questionable sources and adding disclaimers. I think Previous School Psychologist was trying to get me to be less assertive when people insulted me and trying to create incentives for that? I don’t know. Take Previous School Psychologist‘s words with plenty of salt. Even if you only have the slightly radioactive (KCl) kind of salt. It’s still safer.
On my district not having heard of incentives:
In middle school they would punish the entire PE class when a subset of the class was sitting down and not standing while waiting for the teacher to show up. This was pretty annoying on its own, because I would get punished no matter what I did. (Looking back, if I saw someone else sitting it would have been rational for me to sit as well. Not that I did, because, uh, maybe 8th-grader!me wanted to signal compliance? IDK.) Punishing a group for the actions of an individual is no fun for the group.
But it gets worse. Usually, the idea behind this practice is to get people to punish their peers so that you, the authority figure, don’t have to do the hard work of “identifying responsible parties” or “making sure that all punishments administered adhere to actual rules for doing so, because if third parties get caught doing stuff that breaks the rules you won’t be treated as responsible”. I’d somewhat caught on to the idea that a goal of punishing students as a group was to get students to enforce the rules on each other. And then it turned out that I could also get punished (okay, more like “lectured by angry person” than “required to do push-ups”) for … telling other students to follow the rules. Apparently this was bad because I “wasn’t the teacher” and enforcing the rules “wasn’t my job”.
This was very annoying. It wasn’t clear what action people expected me to take and were trying to get me to take via implementing that incentive system.
Obligatory link.
pluspluspangolin:
slatestarscratchpad:
For the record, and I assumed this was standard Internet convention but maybe not for some people, when I use all-caps it is never signaling non-ironic yelling.
See for example
http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/120297365546/you-are-cute-3
http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/120313956501/i-have-seen-you-irl-somewhat-recently-ssc-meetup
http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/122264516751/nonternary-su3su2u1-perversesheaf-sure
http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/122395504561/osberend-slatestarscratchpad-l-in
and every other time I’ve used all-caps in all of history.
If you missed this every time and thought I was yelling at you, well, uh, sorry, I guess.
dude
your usage is exactly the opposite of standard convention, in which all-caps does indeed equal yelling
(or rather, at least one of us is drawing from a non-central reference pool, and I don’t think it’s me)
He’s countersignaling. And assuming that among sufficiently sophisticated internet users, all-caps is used almost exclusively as countersignaling.
Anonymous asked: I'm very interested in your last post because one of the biggest things that "doesn't work for me" about the rationalist/transhumanist/etc. vision of the future and the work to be done to improve the world is the lack of... warm feeling? towards the past. Like, I definitely have a kind of nostalgic longing for various past times that is totally unaffected by how I personally would have been treated in them (badly, in all likelihood). [Part 1]
theunitofcaring:
[Part 2] And no matter how much better the future can be or how hard I’m working to bring that about, thinking about it doesn’t deliver anywhere near the emotional or aesthetic hit that these idealized versions of the past do. I pretty much share your worldviews and I’m not making any kind of factual/moral dispute–I just think that my experience is pretty common and probably quite underrepresented and under-accounted for around here.
Thank you for sharing that. So this is admittedly probably a little easier for me, because the world I idealize and long for is Middle-earth and quite literally never existed, but I think it’s useful to remember that - it can exist, if we want it to? We talk about idealized versions of the past because the things that are emotionally meaningful to us, if they did exist, existed at a terrible cost to other humans - and right now, they probably couldn’t exist without that cost.
But there’s no reason the future has to be a shiny technoutopia, if that doesn’t feel meaningful to you. If the things that pull on your heartstrings, and mine, are cathedrals built by hand and grand succession struggles and scribes writing out books by hand -
- you know, we don’t need to take those things hand in hand with dysentery.
I want to end scarcity. And once we end scarcity I want to be immortal. And once I’m immortal I want to settle a planet with some other crazy people who want to recreate Middle-earth, and I want to build Imladris with my hands and have twelve kids and teach them swordfighting. And admittedly it’s easier for me because my idealized past literally never existed in any form, but whatever it is that gives you nostalgic longing, you can have it. It’s good to remind yourself that the things that make you feel warm and fuzzy never really existed, but it’s not good at all to follow that up with ‘and they never will. Because Progress.” Follow it up with “but someday they will, because we’re the ones behind the reins of Progress, and it’s what we want, so why would we settle for anything else?”
This is beautiful. The shiny technoutopia is totally my aesthetic—but a truly beautiful future is one that’s awesome for everyone, in whatever way they desire.
