#voxette-vk

[centrally-unplanned]

Gonna go on a classic rant here, as the "Uber Shuttle....do you mean a BUS LOL" complaint is making the rounds:

This objection - "why are you just re-inventing buses" has always been very silly because buses are not exclusive services, they aren't like a train where building two "competitive" tracks is a huge waste of money. They can just go on the road like a car! That is the whole point of roads. And US public buses...pretty universally suck (on average, varies per city ofc). We have poor stop infrastructure, incredibly late arrival times, unoptimized routing, and in particular a stubborn refusal to enforce safety and decorum standards, which means riding the bus is very often just a not fun ordeal. I still do it, it is of course normally fine, but if I was richer and could easily pay 3x the going rate for a good bus I would do that a lot. Certainly for trips to the airport or farther distances.

Buses don't have any generalized reason to be shielded from competition, you can just run multiple buses. Its generally better to run more, that means less cars! There are some kinks about traffic flow and stop points, but on average private buses are great. They don't often exist in the US (a good number do ofc, the US is vast) because they have been made either dejure or defacto illegal in many places- though as expected shadow networks exist, which exactly plug the demand gaps that public transit is failing to fill. Private buses are good.

Uber is likely going to be playing the same regulatory arbitrage that its always been with taxis, trying to use tech to help classify itself outside the regulatory system that currently bans private buses - though idk maybe they have worked out deals with the cities its doing its pilot in, not relevant to my point. You wanna complain about how they treat drivers or regulations or w/e, totally fine (or at least a separate topic). But a kneejerk "buses are public" is an ignorance-showing moment, they both aren't in many places and shouldn't be in more.

(pour this one out for @voxette-vk, long lost tumblrite who I know would stan the fuck out of private buses back in the day)

[ghostpalmtechnique]

I realized that the "following" tab makes it easy to see which of your followed accounts fell of the face of the Earth. Here is a possibly incomplete list of people I wonder what happened to. (Accounts that announced a departure omitted)

@theeevenprime @cop-disliker69 @big-block-of-cheese-day @silver-and-ivory @thefutureoneandall @anosognosic @voxette-vk @funereal-disease @osberend @dataandphilosophy @princess-stargirl @eccentric-opinion @coffeespoonsposts

I also realized while making this list that at least one person had started a different tumblr instead, which you could see in their header. People! Some of us just read the dashboard; don't assume we'd see that.

ETA: multiple answers received for funereal-disease and cop-disliker69; you can stop adding those.

[argumate]

Evangelion is boring as shit.

I am happy to be the bearer of glad tidings

[nostalgebraist]

voxette-vk replied to your post “Finished the Epilogues at last.  I’m sure I’ll post something longer...”

I know almost nothing about Homestuck. Is it worth reading from the start?

It’s something that inspires such strong and specific opinions, and has such a distinctive and indescribable self-contained vibe, that it actually feels hard and unfamiliar to advise someone on the topic of “is Homestuck worth reading” from a completely blank reference frame.  Like one of those population ethics puzzlers about the unborn.

(“Is Homestuck good?  I dunno.  Is living good?  It definitely has parts I wouldn’t wish on anyone . . . ”)

But I can definitely say that reading Homestuck, like living, is a very interesting experience.

I recommend it, personally.

[xhxhxhx]

voxette-vk replied to your post: thegreatjackal replied to your photo: is my brain...

That still does not make sense

the annotation is still incoherent but this explanation is consistent with the annotation and I think it helps explain the song

[ask-gpt]

For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.”

For twelve years, you have been asking: Who is John Galt? This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. I am the man who has deprived you of victims and thus has destroyed your world, and if you wish to know why you are perishing—you who dread knowledge—I am the man who will now tell you.

"But still, you see, the son of a single mother always says, 'I have two sons, one to give me his education, the other to buy me a bed.'

He means to teach you: 'You will give me my education, and two sons to buy me your bed.' "

—F.W. Upton

It is interesting to note that if you cease to make distinctions between "the man who loves his life" and "the person who does not sacrifice his love" by saying that the "virginity of the mother" is more important than the "virginity of the woman," you are also being less intelligent in certain respects.

F.W. Upton, Perspectives on Public Health and Family Planning, Second Edition, 1989

F.W. Upton, "Antipasto," in The Wisdom of the Catholic Family, revised ed., Academic Press, London, 1992

I want to draw you to a point in the book where I address the things I have said. The topics I am aware of are most often associated with obstetrics, or any other medical profession. It's also worth noting that for centuries, many, many physicians took other paths to medical education centered around children's health, health care, and the social order in which they lived. I also do not exclude men from biomedical education.

These are all important points of teaching when used in tandem with this view that the virtues of motherhood are more important than the principal benefits of health care, and thus the male health care system is losing the end result it deserves.

As my father once said, "If you are a father who gives his son health care, look at your son's health in this way. A child's health is more important than its parents' health. You were never a father who did not give a child health care, but you came of age in this way."

If you are a father who gives his son health care, look at your son's health in this way.

A child's health is more important than its parents' health.

—F.W. Upton, "Antipasto"

This is not my intention here.

I will go the other way and go through some other values.

I will work on some of the issues between health care and child health, and on other issues which might potentially influence other issues.

Nigel Epstein, Parent

[togglesbloggle]

Journey to the Omegaverse

Here’s a thought experiment:

You get a summer job offering boxes full of money to the citizens of Planet Omega. It’s a pretty cushy gig, all told. You give the Omegans a choice: you show them a transparent box with a thousand space bucks in it (a beloved Omegan currency), and another closed box that they can’t see inside. Then you let them choose to take either both boxes, or take only the opaque box. The trick is this: if you, in prior research, have decided that you think this particular Omegan is likely to pick both boxes, then you have left the opaque box empty, but if you think that the Omegan is a one-boxer, then you fill that opaque box with a million space bucks.

One of the nice parts of the job is that all the hard decisions happen before you meet the Omegans in question; once the actual boxes are on the table, it’s all just a fun performance art where you try to play up the spooky genie angle (you were a theater major). But during training, you admit to some colleagues that you’re feeling rather nervous about predicting which choice is going to be made.

“Oh, that! It’s the easiest thing in the world,” your coworker replies. “You see, Omegans are just wild for Newcomb-like problems, that's why our company got commissioned to do this in the first pace. They all spend at least three hours per day discussing this class of thought experiments on Tumblr. When you’re given the name and dossier of the Omegan that is going to be offered your boxes, the file includes a link to their Tumblr profile. Just go online and read through their posts, and look for where they self-identify as a one-boxer or a two-boxer.”

When the big day comes, you log onto Tumblr, and sure enough, your first client has written a thoughtful and persuasive post, just yesterday, explaining that your decision will have been made long before she is actually offered the box. She notes that, given some fixed world state (either the box is empty, or it is not), it is always better for her to choose both boxes; after all, nothing she does at that point can actually fill the box with money, or cause the money to disappear. Therefore, she concludes, she is a two-boxing Omegan.

Do you put money in the box?

[audreycious]

“Fascism” (alongside “Nazism” and related terms) has to be one of the most overused words of the decade.

It’s so overused that it’s lost its punch. And we should be really concerned about that. What are we going to call the actual Nazis and the actual fascists when we’ve cried wolf so many times, and can’t dial up the rhetoric any higher? Who’s going to take us seriously then?

Even more concerningly, this overuse causes us to forget the true horrors of fascism in the 1930s-40s.

A survey from a few years ago indicated a substantial percentage of US high schoolers get basic facts about World War II wrong, such as thinking that Germany and the US fought the Soviet Union.

That’s pretty God damn appalling.

There are, absolutely, great injustices we need to protest and rail against. One of the first steps in overcoming these injustices is educating yourself. Specifically, educating yourself about history. “Those who forget the past...”

[silver-and-ivory]

voxette-vk

replied to your

post

:

replies which are good, summaries which are hard

Not irritated. Thanks for the response!

>I've got some in the pipline that are very late!

That's good to hear! Thank you! :)

[jenlog]

@voxette-vk replied to your photoset: super srs

I’m also kind of curious what all that stuff on your wall is.

that’s my roommate’s side of the room. kinda hard to tell, but that frame-type thing is a loft bed. the stuff on the walls is mostly ribbons he’s won from ballroom competitions

[shacklesburst]

“Sexed cow semen” is bull semen containing only X- or Y-chromosome-bearing sperm. It allows dairy farmers using artificial insemination to ensure they breed only female—and thus milk-bearing—cows. It’s valuable stuff, and, until recently, the U.S. market was controlled by a monopolist whose technology worked by identifying sperm cells, electrically charging them, and then sorting them with magnets. But when an upstart hired one of the monopolist’s ex-employees, she shared the monopolist’s trade secrets. The upstart then began using a different, potentially faster method: individually vaporizing the unwanted sperm cells with a laser millions of times per second. The ensuing antitrust/patent infringement/breach of contract suit, culminating in a two-week trial, gave wins and losses to both sides. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit affirmed some of the monopolist’s wins but also—in a complicated discussion of patent law featuring set theory, subscripted variables, and LSAT-esque diagrams—gave the upstart a second chance at invalidating the seminal patent claims.

The upstart’s incorporated name is “Sexing Tech”, btw.

[centrally-unplanned]

Also shoutout to @voxette-vk, we all miss your law school libertarian shenanigans. I hope you tell us how it went someday.

[serinemolecule]

@cymae-mesa responded:

The idea that the definition of the word "good" is a merely semantic question is baffling.

It’s important to note that I don’t think the difference between utilitarianism and deontology is semantic. They both clearly disagree on what is good for society.

But the difference between utilitarianism and egoism is a disagreement on whether to define “good” as meaning “good for society” or “good for an individual”. I’ve used “good” in both senses and they don’t seem incompatible to me.

I do really appreciate @shlevy whose posts frequently name actual differences he has with altruists: he thinks that Buffet/Gates’s plan to donate most of their wealth is bad, etc.

But I can’t figure out how this is a philosophical position. If he’s arguing that altruism leads to negative consequences for society, this is a difference of fact but not of philosophy with utilitarianism. But that’s not what he’s arguing: he talks about how “it’s true that altruism has negative consequences for society, but it’s not the point”. But what is the point, then? Some sort of aesthetic distaste for altruism? I can’t figure out a point that isn’t either a semantics thing or a personal preference or a factual disagreement, none of which are incompatible with utilitarianism as a philosophical position.

@shlevy, thanks for your response but I don’t think it resolves my confusion on this issue, either.

@voxette-vk​ also responded:

[Adopting some “compromise” where their own utility counts more than anyone else’s] is probably (a more consistent and systematized version of) what [utilitarians] do in practice. But I’ve never seen a utilitarian actually say yes, this is the morally correct way of doing things. For one, if you said that, you would not be a utilitarian. Rather, everything I’ve seen gives the indication that no, they think to the extent that you do not count your own interests equally with those of others, you are falling short of the moral ideal.

Yes, utilitarians would agree that this is not morally correct/ideal. But like I said, this strikes me as a semantic disagreement on the definition of “morally correct”. If by “morally correct” you mean “good for society”, of course this isn’t.

But what is egoism, in redefining “morally correct” to mean “self-interested”, actually saying instead? That’s what I’m confused about.

One of my guesses here is that egoists think utilitarians believe something I (and I assume many other utilitarians) don’t actually believe, in terms of what “morally correct” implies. But since it implies barely anything to me, I can’t figure out what that would be.

[argumate]

I know and like Bryan Caplan; stop distorting what he says beyond recognition.

The first half of your sentence is unrelated to the second half of your sentence, but I can stop quoting him absolutely verbatim if you like.

[nostalgebraist]

#hatereading? Do you really hate WaitButWhy? I always liked it...

I have enjoyed a few posts on there, but generally it grates on me a lot.  A lot of the posts spend a whole lot of time explaining things that are trivial or very well known, which would not be a problem in itself, but often the same posts are trying to talk about something non-trivial and contentious.  You end up with mixtures of basic textbook information, popular but controversial ideas, and the writer’s own amateur conjectures, with none of the three clearly distinguished.

The recent post on NeuralLink tries to talk about very complicated and high-level questions about the feasibility and potential of brain-machine interfaces, but assumes the reader is completely ignorant of the subject and spends tens of thousands of words explaining stuff like what the cortex is, without telling the reader where to start if they have more background.

I kind of admire the ambition to being self-contained, but the result is bad for everyone.  People who have the background needed to evaluate the new info about NeuralLink (which currently exists only in this post, because Musk likes to reveal information this way for some reason) will have to find the new info buried in a haystack.  People who actually need the 101 stuff can find it explained better elsewhere, and shouldn’t be misled into thinking they can understand the questions after reading a single explainer by some guy with no background in the subject.

This post on marriage is on a non-technical subject but has similar faults: purports to give advice on a difficult subject, explains commonplace ideas as though they are new to you, no explanation of why you should be listening to this guy on the subject.

Plus I just think the explanations are kinda bad.

[xhxhxhx]

voxette-vk replied to your post: whenever American slavery debates crop up I’m...

Elaborate?

Something like this exchange:

@CPTDoomDC: I believe he's trying to argue that the economic health and wealth of Early America would have been greater without slavery - i.e., it was not necessary for our economic development. Fascinating hypothetical, but irrelevant to the historical analyses you've compiled.

@nhannahjones: Yes. Something unprovable and a useless argument.

Or this one:

@mdcohen: I think this article would have benefited with more comparison to other economies which do not have a history of slavery like America.

@nhannahjones: Why? It’s irrelevant to how capitalism developed here.

These seem like a departure from the standards of but-for causation and the reasoned counterfactual, which are the only standards of causation I truly understand.