fnord888

[fnord888]

Submitted by @sky-the-snail-fanatic

[fnord888]

No, see, they're not female space marines. It's a gene-seed thing. The aspirants are perfectly normal men, but they grow tits, lose facial hair, and have facial shape changes after implantation.

(And yes they still have dicks under the armor)

#not like this is any weirder than the space wolves #40k #discourse #is this shitposting?

[fnord888]

I don't know how much Stroop test results vary from person to person, but AFAIK it's well established that a majority of people get some degree of interference when the color word and the actual color don't match. Obviously that's a *very* short and simple text so it might be different for longer ones, but it suggests some amount of automatic reading is common.

when I see english text, I read it. there's no decision or effort or anything, the part of my brain that parses normal text is automatic enough that I read a short phrase the same way I notice a car is blue

this is true also for non-english text in a latin script that is short enough. it is not true for japanese - even if a sentence in japanese is composed entirely of characters I could read if I tried, it doesn't happen automatically. I have to try

and now I'm wondering if this is closer to how many people relate to text in their native language. I am constantly baffled by people having not read some obvious sign or some such. but if they had to try to read it, even a little, that would explain it

#psychology #literacy

[fnord888]

Leaving aside the artificial sweeteners debate, it's worth noting that fruit juices and lemonade won't necessarily have much less sugar than a (non-diet) soda, so using them to replace your soda drinking may not be helpful for that reason.

(You could get sugar-free versions of those drinks, but then it's artificial sweeteners again)

So i am kind of addicted to diet soda, flavored/fizzy water, diet sports drinks etc (American needs large beverage etc). The regular ones are too sweet for me but i know even the diet shit contributes to weight gain. So, if i were to say cut my consumption of those down to 2/3 or half of what i drink now (replaced with water, oj, lemonade, etc), would that hopefully get rid of some belly fat? Is 'hard fat' from drinking carbonated beverages really a thing or is it just pop-nutrition woo?

#nutrition

[fnord888]

I mean, we also expect adults to get vaccinated. We generally don't outright force them, but we pressure them in various ways, and think less of them if they don't. While it's more acceptable to violate babies' autonomy that that of adults, I don't think medical treatment type examples establish it's more acceptable to inflict pain on them than adult.

I think the 'care less/no agency' dichotomy is a bit of a trap - we lack agency, therefore we care less. Ethics like most things are forged in the breach.

Sure, we end up not caring about harms we don't have agency to prevent. But the inverse is not true: there are certainly harms* we don't care about despite having the agency to prevent them. Setting aside animals for a moment, take a look at, like, rocks: no one would argue it's immoral to "harm" a rock, even to do so intentionally**. Hence rocks are not moral patients.

*Or "harms" since the whole point is that we argue they're not actually harmful because the "victim" doesn't suffer.

**Or at least, not because the rock suffers. Obviously people might object for other reasons to you harming particular rocks with historical significance (for example).

One bullet I happily bite in debates around animal utils & happiness is a comparison often made of like "you can't say the pain of an animal means less because its less intelligent, that means you would care less about the pain of a baby, its probably not self aware either". Which, yes, is true, which is why I dont care about baby pain as much! I dont think this is a hot take at all actually- babies scream and cry about literally anything and have no clear logic to it, we socially ignore their pain all the time. People dont put it that way but revealed preferences they definitely do not treat baby pain that seriously. We generally do not view them as being in a hellish maelstorm, instead just probably not sensorially developed.

'Not caring as much' is far from not caring, of course, I don't like babies in pain. And this entire analogy is based on the premise that say chickens are dubiously self aware and maybe don't experience pain in the same way, which is not at all proven (just like with babies, this is probabilistic), I'm not really commenting on the object-level debate much at all here. But this isnt the only context where arguments around "you wouldn't treat a *baby* differently ethics-wise, would you?" can come up where the answer is "actually probably yeah I would".

#ethics

[fnord888]

Is it a matter of ignoring babies' pain because we care less, or because there's nothing we can do to effectively prevent it?

I don't think it's generally considered more acceptable to intentionally inflict pain on a baby than an adult (admittedly, the "generally acceptable" standard never treats inflicting versus not ameliorating as equivalent).

One bullet I happily bite in debates around animal utils & happiness is a comparison often made of like "you can't say the pain of an animal means less because its less intelligent, that means you would care less about the pain of a baby, its probably not self aware either". Which, yes, is true, which is why I dont care about baby pain as much! I dont think this is a hot take at all actually- babies scream and cry about literally anything and have no clear logic to it, we socially ignore their pain all the time. People dont put it that way but revealed preferences they definitely do not treat baby pain that seriously. We generally do not view them as being in a hellish maelstorm, instead just probably not sensorially developed.

'Not caring as much' is far from not caring, of course, I don't like babies in pain. And this entire analogy is based on the premise that say chickens are dubiously self aware and maybe don't experience pain in the same way, which is not at all proven (just like with babies, this is probabilistic), I'm not really commenting on the object-level debate much at all here. But this isnt the only context where arguments around "you wouldn't treat a *baby* differently ethics-wise, would you?" can come up where the answer is "actually probably yeah I would".

#ethics

[fnord888]

Note that the Ones Who Got Away report is for 500k+ advance offers. If that report suggests they're overpaying, it suggests they're overpaying by offering massive advances to celebrities. If celebrities have to settle for smaller advances, that doesn't seem like a disaster for publishing diversity (indeed, it could even be good if means they offer the same total amount of advance dollars but split among more people).

But, again, don't make the mistake of conflating "most books by celebrities don't make money" with "the expected value of a book by a celebrity is negative". The point of something like the Ones Who Got Away report is to make sure you've calibrated your bidding strategy correctly, which implies you want to have a bidding strategy in the first place. If the correct move was to never bid that high, you don't need a report, you just need a bidding cap.

(Also, advance bidding wars cannot be dollar auctions because the key feature of dollar auctions is that the losers also pay their bid, which isn't the case in normal auctions like these. There may be other biases at play (it sounds like FOMO is the problem that the Ones Who Got Away report is meant to combat), but not that one.)

Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.

#economics

[fnord888]

I don't think that's the right takeaway from the article, and that's certainly not the takeaway the author has. Even leaving aside the self/independent publishing angle, publishers aren't investing a broad portfolio of mostly-failures out of "a vague sense of obligation", but because investing in a broad portfolio is the way to get the handful of outsize successes (the venture capital comparison is in the article itself). The numbers from the articles show that even the celebrity books, that publishers are willing to pay for, mostly fail; they're paying for the mean result, not the median.

Notably, the numbers in the article don't support the conclusion that they could make more money by just sitting on their back catalogue and not publishing anything. The backlist is a third of their revenue, which is a lot but still a minority. And only a portion of the backlist is perennial classics; it's not specified but I would guess a large portion of backlist revenue would dry up over time if they don't keeping adding new books to their back catalogue (one of the quotes says a new hit for the backlist is worth millions for them).

Yes, all the money goes to established, successful authors and celebrities, but the fact that most people trying to write for a living fail* isn't really news, I don't think (and if you succeed, you fall into the category of "established, successful authors" more or less by definition).

Deeply dispiriting post: testimony from a DOJ antitrust action reveals the entire book publishing industry is celebrity memoirs, established franchise authors like James Patterson, children's books, Bibles, and back catalogues (e.g. Lord of the Rings). Publishing new authors is not even a rounding error; you get the sense it's only done anymore out of a vague sense of obligation, and the moment one of the Big Five decides on the defect strategy, and stops doing that to save a few more bucks, it will end entirely.

#economics

[fnord888]

#personally i just married a blue witch and went to space

Actually, the remarkable thing is that most people (who finished the game) married a blue witch and went to space, at least going by Steam Achievements. The completion rate for Age of the Stars is substantially higher than the rate for Elden Lord. Which is amazing, considering getting that ending requires following a long and often cryptic optional quest chain.

Which is to say, Elden Ring is about how, no matter how fucked everything is, if you reach out and put in the effort, you can still find someone to connect with.

Dark Souls isn't just about how fucked everything is. It's about hope in hopeless times, the power of small acts of kindness in a cruel world, and how through the indomitable human spirit even the lowliest wretch can fell giants.

Bloodborne is about how fucked everything is.

#although also that other thing too #gaming #elden ring #analysis

[fnord888]

I think the modeling assumption that the government trying to reach some budget of cumulative emissions is flawed. You correctly point out that the public emission targets don't matter, but the alternative to the public emissions targets isn't some other, private emissions targets, it's an entirely different way of deciding policy like "we want to do enough to get the green votes while not doing enough to lose the business votes".

So what do individual consumption changes do under that paradigm? It's not clear to me that "enough to get the green votes" is decreased by non-policy-driven changes in energy demand; to win votes, the government has to been seen to do something. Maybe the government could take credit for emissions changes happening in the background, but that's a time-limited thing: they can only take credit for things that happened while they were in office, not while the other guys were. That doesn't give the indefinite decay towards a prior equilibrium.

On the business side, "enough to lose the business votes" definitely *sometimes* decreases from exogenous changes (coal companies getting pissed about reduced coal demand), but it doesn't seem like it always will, and indeed sometimes it could actually increase (if companies care about not seeing electricity prices rise, falling consumer demand could offset cost-raising regulations).

But I'm not married to that particular analysis, my point is that there are many ways that the "government fuck decay rate" model could break down in ways that change the conclusion.

It's often said, as a truism, that while climate change is caused by systems, your individual choices can still make a difference, but might not actually be true- not just that you are small, but that the difference your consumption makes is actually zero.

Standard economic analysis

The standard economic analysis is that if you buy more carbon-intensive goods, that has two effects: it increases the total quantity of carbon-intensive goods sold, and it increases the price of carbon-intensive goods (only marginally, because you are small).

This means that while you buying one unit of carbon-intensive goods doesn't increase the amount of carbon-intensive goods as sold by one, it still increases them, and the amount it increases it by depends on the price elasticities of demand and supply (i.e. the slopes of the curves). If supply is very inelastic, we expect it to make close to 0 difference, and if demand is very inelastic we expect it to make an almost one-for-one difference. Suppose PED = PES and you emitted one extra tonne of CO2, the net effect of that is only an extra half tonne of CO2.

Aside: do these diagrams actually work? Yes. This result seems counterintuitive: the price of electricity isn't going to be put up just because you used more electricity this year, so it isn't going to result in others using less - there will be no offset. And this is correct, the world comes in discrete changes. But if enough people use more electricity, prices will go up, and you have no way of knowing whether you're the one who'll push it over the edge or raise the price of electricity from 29p to 30p. So we just look at averages, and on average you will raise prices by the amount shown on this diagram (i.e. very small, because you are very small, but enough to offset an amount of consumption that matters for our purposes).

Accounting for the government

But this standard economic analysis takes place in a policy vacuum. I mean, the same welfare effect would also hold if the government's climate policy was optimal because something something envelope theorem, but the government's policy is ummmm not optimal. In any country. Governments are not trying to set a socially optimal rate of carbon tax (which would be crippling to many industries) they are trying to do something more like reduce emissions enough to satisfy an electorate that doesn't care much, and no further, because they don't want to shrink the economy.

In an idealised version of this strategy, individual actions actually have 0 effect, regardless of PED or PES, because of the policy feedback mechanism: a British person emits one less tonne of CO2 so the UK government go 'oh look an extra tonne of CO2 we can emit without exceeding our internal targets' and spend less on mitigation to cancel it out.

Whilst your individual effect is small and unlikely to be noticed by policymakers, many people's changes will be noticed, and your emissions might be the straw that broke the camel's back, so we can treat the government as if their targets are responding to your individual emissions, just like in the aside. Note it isn't the official targets that matter, but how much governments privately feel they can get away with.

If the government are decided to emit 500MTe, then 500MTe are going to be emitted by someone, regardless of if you're the one doing it. You didn't help the Bangladesh farmer who's losing their livelihood because of harsher monsoon seasons, you just helped Clyde who wants to pay less tax on his SUV.

This argument hinges on this policy feedback mechanism actually being one-for-one, which we don't know, and which is fundamentally an empirical question. Specifically in the long-run. I'm sure it's not actually one-for-one- and if we model the government as maximising some utility function of economy and environment, it can't be.

We would also need to multiply this 'do your actions have purpose (because government is a fuck)' coefficient by the 'do your actions have purpose (because markets is a fuck)' coefficient to find out the actual effect of your actions. The crux of my argument is that the government's fuck coefficient is likely to be very small.

What is the government's fuck coefficient?

The long-run government fuck coefficient is built up over years of repeatedly adjusting policy to look more like what the government wanted to do anyway: if the government undershoots their carbon budget one year, the government will want to take that as license to emit more the next year, and whilst this won't be one for one- it might be quite small- over many years it will add up to mean emissions were basically what they would have been anyway.

Policy and emissions are slow to adjust- maybe a year after you reduced emissions by a tonne, policy change adjustments have only offset it by 10%, leaving a government fuck coefficient of 0.9 which seems pretty good (it means you had 90% as much effect as you thought your were having). Then the next year the government has 0.9 extra tonnes in their budget, and again their policy only offsets 10% of that, leaving a government fuck coefficient of 0.81 after 2 years. This continues year after year, so that in 30 years time, the government fuck coefficient is 0.042- i.e. you think you've saved a tonne of CO2, but because of the policy feedback mechanism, your net effect is only 42kg. Lets call this 10% figure the government fuck decay rate (GFDR).

Maybe the GFDR is lower than that, which would mean your individual consumption has more impact for longer. But as long as this GFDR is constant over time, your impact exponentially decays over time. The government fuck coefficient goes to zero. Remember, this isn't your effect on annual emissions decaying over time, it's your effect on cumulative emissions - this means your individual actions really are being undone. Not that annual emissions adjust back to the status quo but cumulative emissions do.

The government fuck coefficient after t years is (1-GFDR)^t

Self criticism like some kind of Maoist

The one weak point in this analysis I can see is it assumes governments' emission preferences care about cumulative emissions, not just annual emissions - i.e. that governments will think they can get away with doing less this year because they did more last year, or ten years ago. This is what gives a GFDR that isn't 0. If they largely don't think like this, the GFDR could be way less than 0.1 per year, leading to a government fuck coefficient that isn't near 0 even decades in the future (and what really matters is what the effect is decades in the future when hopefully governments will doing the right amount of mitigation, at which point there is no more decay).

The GFDR might also decrease over time, as after a certain amount of time historical emissions may basically be considered water under the bridge.

But if the GFDR is anything close to 0.1, we have to accept that, bizarre as it seems, saving energy today doesn't actually result in there being less carbon in the air in 50 years.

This doesn't mean we should do nothing, but it means our actions should be entirely focused on shifting government preferences, rather than on changing consumption habits. Assuming my analysis is correct.

#economics #climate change

[fnord888]

Urine is (infamously) yellow in snow. Maybe not common enough to create the same level of association, but people would at least know it's yellow (at least in locations that got snow).

We think of urine as yellow, but this is only apparent if you're peeing into a white bowl, right? Historically you would have peed on the ground, or a latrine, or a non-white container. So probably if you showed someone in the past a yellow and brown image their first association wouldn't be "ew, excrement" the way it would be for the moderns. If you think about it our negative associations with that pair of colors represent a victory in sanitation and civil engineering. Nothing represents the uplifting of mankind as much as the ceramic toilet. Anyway

#history #possibly #gross

[fnord888]

This comic is out of date! The US tax deadline this year (2024) is *TODAY* April 15th!

If your taxes aren't done, you can apply for an extension.

(This comic is from a past year with a different tax deadline)

#us

[fnord888]

@sabakos this is why rescue services are generally publicly funded, so they can be provided at cost. firefighters are another common example - they can and often do levy fines against businesses for false alarms but for general members of the public they exist to provide service-at-cost

The thing is "at cost" can still be a lot of money. Like "how dare you charge $100,000 for water, you should forgo your profit margin and charge only $90,000" does not have a lot of sting.

(Obviously, you can do enough public funding that it's not necessary to recover costs from individual users; indeed I think that makes a lot of sense in many cases, including fire departments and national health services. But when it's not done you get this issue)

Another meditation on the "man dying of thirst" counter example to benefit from trade :

Imagine, I hear about all those guys dying of thirst in the desert. And I say hey, someone should do something! So I go and buy a camel and a big ol barrel of water to keep on my camel. And I wander the desert, looking for men dying of thirst, to provide them water. But I'm not independently wealthy. I need to eat. So I charge them for the water. And yknow, I don't find people very often. It's a big desert. So to support all the time I spend wandering without finding people, I need to charge quite a bit. Then, is it okay to charge a man 10k for the water to save his life? 100k? Discuss

#economics #ethics

[fnord888]

Yes, the point is that jumping all the way to a claim that art has value independent from its effects on humans rather than evaluating art's effects on humans in a more sophisticated fashion is, I think, biting the wrong bullet.

(I also think the hypo somewhat conflates two issues, the "stupid (dis)pleasure" issue and the "what if a good thing is actually bad because we're unrealistically certain of an unlikely bad consequence" issue)

I guess you can take roughly two attitudes towards human endeavors (in a very broad sense "the things we make"):

human endeavors are valuable insofar as they provide pleasure (etc.) to humans

human endeavors are valuable in their own right; they are imbued with value by those who endeavor for them

I think view (1) is more philosophically elegant, but I don't think it really "works" when applied to actual human life. I think taking view (1) seriously requires contorting ourselves pretty significantly from our natural inclinations, indeed from many of our most productive (even in the sense of view (1)) inclinations, for the majority of people. It may not be so for certain personality types overrepresented on this corner of the internet.

But like, imagine being an artist, and trying to actually live and work according to the maxim that your art should produce maximum pleasure in your audience. Where does this lead? Does it in fact lead to art that accomplishes that goal? Or does "making new and interesting art is valuable for its own sake, even if it displeases people. Improving my artistic abilities is valuable for its own sake, even if it is difficult" lead to better art? I think it's very probably the latter in most cases.

I just think that most people, even most people who argue for a deflationary view of value as in (1), would sort of be miserable if they actually took it seriously. They pay lip-service to it as a justification for their actions, but they don't actually think that hard about whether their actions really advance it, and they don't live by it, and they would be less happy if they actually tried!

#ethics #aesthetics

[fnord888]

I mean, I think the sort of "displeasure" experienced by

A slightly larger group of people [who] totally hate it for dumb reasons. They'll think it's communist or something, and get mad about it on social media. Half of them won't even bother to look at it, they'll just hear about it through the grape vine and get mad.

generally isn't a harm that should be accounted for, so there's no contradiction.

I could go into more detail on why I think that, but you're basically on board with that point anyway. Indeed, calling it "dumb reasons" is practically begging the question.

I guess you can take roughly two attitudes towards human endeavors (in a very broad sense "the things we make"):

human endeavors are valuable insofar as they provide pleasure (etc.) to humans

human endeavors are valuable in their own right; they are imbued with value by those who endeavor for them

I think view (1) is more philosophically elegant, but I don't think it really "works" when applied to actual human life. I think taking view (1) seriously requires contorting ourselves pretty significantly from our natural inclinations, indeed from many of our most productive (even in the sense of view (1)) inclinations, for the majority of people. It may not be so for certain personality types overrepresented on this corner of the internet.

But like, imagine being an artist, and trying to actually live and work according to the maxim that your art should produce maximum pleasure in your audience. Where does this lead? Does it in fact lead to art that accomplishes that goal? Or does "making new and interesting art is valuable for its own sake, even if it displeases people. Improving my artistic abilities is valuable for its own sake, even if it is difficult" lead to better art? I think it's very probably the latter in most cases.

I just think that most people, even most people who argue for a deflationary view of value as in (1), would sort of be miserable if they actually took it seriously. They pay lip-service to it as a justification for their actions, but they don't actually think that hard about whether their actions really advance it, and they don't live by it, and they would be less happy if they actually tried!

#ethics #aesthetics

[fnord888]

He got really into politics, right? Trying to leverage his celebrity into pro-democracy/anti-Putin activism, which seems like a worthwhile shot to take even if it didn't work. I guess he's mostly involved in that stuff rather than chess, even after fleeing Russia.

Kasparov is kind of a weird figure - he's either the greatest or second-greatest chess player of all time, he basically was chess for two whole decades, and yet I feel like I barely see him at chess events - other former world champions like Anand and Kramnik are much more active. And it's true they're technically the generation after him, but he's only 60! He's really not that old.

Reminiscent of Michael Jordan, I guess.

[fnord888]

#noticing confusion#biology is a mess#maybe Rabies has just gotten worse?

I think it's not that rabies has gotten worse so much as it's always been highly variable. So waiting increases risk (and, as noted in the story, may require more aggressive treatment)

sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really. 

#biology #medicine