Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Lex Clips" channel.

  1. Why do you consider Gender Studies a part of Biology? They are completely anti-biology.
    123
  2. Lex, the "weird kid" from Gender Studies is the one breaking the glass and strewing it around the playground.
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  3. "Hiking alone, you realize that all this has existed long before you, and will exist long after." The weirdest part of being out in the countryside of New England (after living in California) is the idea that many of the buildings there are older than the trees, rather than the other way around. Also the roads. The road network was literally designed by bears, or something.
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  4. "Mexico is full of foreign intelligence agents" Could this have anything to do with the fact that the US / Mexico border is basically lawless, so if a foreign agent wants to get into the United States, that's an extremely simple matter?
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  5. "Can relationships between leaders counteract forces of crisis?" Lex, if you want to break your heart with might-have-beens, read up on Gustav Stresemann and the Locarno treaties.
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  6. "Autonomous weapons systems" It still blows me away that the original Transformers, way back in 1984, put the Autobots (autonomous cars) as the good guys and the Decepticons (drone warplanes) as the bad guys. Autonomous cars are perhaps the first AIs that have to be trained to recognize human beings, and preserve their lives. Drone warplane AIs, not so much.
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  7. "Software is better with the iterative approach, hardware is better with the perfectionist approach" Very true -- unless the hardware is sufficiently modularized, replacing or adjusting it is vastly more difficult than it is to tweak software.
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  8. "Google should fine-tune as little as possible after training the model" Ha, allowing Google to curate the training data is a mistake in the first place.
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  9. In the first eight minutes, nothing was said except generic process ... nine ... ten ... eleven ... twelve ... ... yeah, nothing interesting was said.
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  10. "The sacrifices the Ukrainians are making" Right, Kotkin is willing to fight to the last Ukrainian, isn't he.
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  11. If it's any comfort, a lot of US elites see Mexico as America's best "friendshoring" opportunity. Leaving aside the desirability of being a source of cheap(er) labor under World Systems Theory, the US does not want Mexico to turn into Afghanistan. "There i no hope of our situation improving ... we don't want US intervention" -- Ultimately, Mexico has the attention of great power bad actors from around the world because of its position on the US's doorstep. I don't think Mexico can fight that off, without the resources of a great power itself, and the only great power with an interest in doing so is the United States. A good solution -- one where Mexico is allied with a country with a vested interest in its stability and prosperity -- is only possible through cooperation between Mexico and the United States.
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  12. "There's something about a war to find the core, the spirit of a people, who wish to be independent" What if the answer to that is, "Nope, there isn't enough difference between Ukrainians and Russians after all, to make all this struggle worth it"? Also remember how the Franco-Prussian wars consolidated the pan-German identity of the previously fiercely independent German principalities...
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  13.  @dravennolan4103  Have you ever seen the meme that shows an overhead view of Manhattan, captioned "New York, because we value your time and ability to get places" and an overhead view of Boston, captioned "Boston, because F* You"?
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  14. "Imagine if the wave of migration is a million" All the more reason for the United States to have in place a system that can deport up to ten million illegal immigrants, starting with any who have loyalties or obligations to criminal cartels.
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  15. Yes. The lockdowns will have far-reaching consequences far in excess of the damage Covid could possibly do.
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  16. Michael, do you really think that Twitter won't cancel Trump's account on Jan 20?
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  17. "Flat Earth" videos are a good opportunity to show how to debunk, and how to demonstrate how to discuss demonstrable truth.
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  18. "There is complete freedom in universities on the subject of science engineering" What would you say to Eric Weinstein if he claimed scientists cannot tell ideologues, "Get the h*ll out of my lab"?
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  19. I'd recommend Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, and Jon Anderson if you like conversations like this. Dave: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJdKr0Bgd_5saZYqLCa9mng John: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtnYSEGViOnb7k8ezUaWUww Joe's heading over to Spotify these days.
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  20. I thought Saturn was the one that ate his children? Including jupiter, but with the help of Rhea spit him back out again. After that Jupiter grew to be greater than Saturn. Wouldn't it be weird if the legends were true?
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  21. "A state is unique in that it acquires its goods by force" Do we want to return to a more Athenian model, where private citizens used their fortunes to build ships to defend the Republic? Would we really be better off, if Bezos had an aircraft carrier group or two?
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  22. "Worst case is that we're back where we started, and Google becomes as powerful as the federal government." We can't vote for Google policies. That's a far worse case, as we're beginning to see.
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  23. The CCP thought they were the hero when they imposed forced abortions to control China's population. And when they put Uyghurs in concentration camps, sterilizing them, again to control population. Could such people think of themselves as heroes, if they rebalanced China's aging demographics with a virus that preferentially attacks the old?
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  24. Poland's nobility had the right to go their own way and refuse to allow the group speak for the individual. Poland was partitioned by Austria, Russia, and Prussia in 1772 as a result. There are too many historical examples of catastrophic failure directly traceable to Malice's type of thinking, that could only have been avoided by avoiding this type of thinking. I do not think that someone so obviously intelligent as Malice is unaware of this.
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  25. As far as awe goes, "No Man's Sky" does a pretty good job of giant bounding sandworms that act like a fifty-story-tall sine wave weaving in and out of the surface of the planet you're on. Even that gets old after a while in one play session, but I'm actually tempted to log back in right now to see if I can nab a scan of one.
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  26. "He wanted things to be beautiful and he understood the user" Steve Jobs was a salesman, not an engineer. Greatest salesman of his generation, obviously -- but a salesman nonetheless.
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  27. "Could you imagine if UPS could just take 20% of the Postal Services' revenue?" Would they be obligated to serve markets that were not commercially viable, with that money? Would they have the obligations of a public utility, by accepting that money? Yet here we are, and somehow UPS still exists, even with that 20% being drained away (although now that Amazon is delivering its own packages, it's tough to tell how long that will last.)
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  28. In the Captain America movie, the "wise old man" says that only those who have been without power can be trusted with it. That's never quite rung true, for me.
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  29. "We don't need more chaos right now" The order that the Left is trying to establish and to a great extent has established, is a malignant order. Chaos is exactly what is necessary to dissolve that malignant order.
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  30. "The fact that we don't see aliens makes me suspect it isn't easy to survive in this complicated world of ours" Just as an energy question, if you have technology to generate the energy to escape a gravity well, you have technology to generate the energy to lay down "kinetics" over most of your globe.
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  31.  @TheLouisisawesome  He's clearly volunteering to fight for Ukraine in "the information war". You're probably right that he doesn't have any influence on the outcome, though. The only thing he's doing here is urging Americans to uncritically believe propaganda. We need to seek good information elsewhere, because without good information you can't make good decisions.
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  32. If we're talking about the Oort Cloud, shouldn't we include our neighborhood stars in that discussion? I mean, if the Oort Cloud is supposed to extend out 2-3 light years, and our nearest neighbor (Proxima Centauri) is 4 light-years away, wouldn't it make sense that our Oort Cloud ends and another star's Oort Cloud begins?
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  33. 1. Start with "No Man's Sky" for a game environment. 2. Build Civ on top of it. 3. Add an Ultima-style RPG, using assets from the first two.
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  34. "They're crushing in the information war" Which means we can't take anything they say seriously, regarding whether they're winning the actual war. The fall of Mariupol was not a good sign.
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  35. "As soon as one bad actor gets punished, there's a huge disincentive to act badly" Yeah, it's why the B-52 has only one tail cannon with ten bursts before it runs dry. That's just enough deterrent that it isn't a trivial thing to down them.
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  36. There's a connection between Epstein and Bill Gates, enough to get Melinda to divorce Bill. That could be extremely useful to investigate, if possible.
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  37.  @chrislane8466  Thanks for your kind words. Isn't influence vs. interference in the eye of the beholder, though? When I try to put myself in the shoes of a Mexican, I'm not sure that any level of influence that doesn't feel like interference. When I picture myself as being on my own team (something that's at least as important as seeing from another's point of view) I see America as having some interests that we should pursue even if it might be seen as "interfering". It seems to me that ultimately this problem is only going to go away when Mexico is as prosperous and secure as the United States. This is the "good ending" to World Systems Theory, which I see as a transitory state, as we run out of sources of cheap labor worldwide, and the rising tide of global commerce lifts all boats. This is something we should embrace, and we should plan for a world where the Core / Periphery distinction disappears. The problem is, security issues endanger this future. So do cultural practices like narcotics (ab)use, which weaken individuals and their countries. What's the best way to get from here, to the good ending?
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  38. OK, so Jupiter would have to be 13 times more massive to become a brown dwarf, and 85 times more massive to become a main sequence star, if I understood my quick Google search results. Could there exist an unstable point on the range of masses between planetary and stellar? If it achieves stellar mass, it evolves to be more massive by some mechanism, and if it doesn't achieve stellar mass, it evolves to become smaller (or harder to detect by the approaches we're using?)
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  39. Wikipedia may have "values", but its mechanisms are not hardened enough against corruption / lies. Unfortunately, the mechanisms to harden it against corruption, when couple with its "values", themselves lead to corruption / lies. I don't trust Wikipedia editors to tell the truth about any subject that touches on their deeply cherished Politically Correct values.
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  40. "This is real reality TV" Or it could be the sort of reality TV that flatters the preconceptions of the viewer. That's the problem, dealing with what you know is not true. You can't trust it.
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  41. "For [a CEO or other executive] to use a company for his own political gain is a violation of fiduciary duty to his shareholders" And yet, this happens all the time on the Left -- see the change in social media icons over a little under a week ago. Elon wants to take this system down. He's the good guy, here.
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  42. Being childless is not what winning looks like.
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  43. A heart / lung machine does the job of your heart and lungs (aerating and circulating blood) while doctors are operating on you, and your own organs are "turned off". I could imagine a "brain" machine that could give you the experience of consciousness even if your brain had the demonstrable characteristics of sleep / unconsciousness. Does anyone have any ideas on how you would build such a thing? It seems to me that if you could demonstrate the (subjective) experience of consciousness even while provably asleep, that would demonstrate that machines could be conscious.
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  44. "The other molecule is SO2" :( So you might be getting a false positive from a sulfur compound?
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  45. "CZ isn't the straw that broke the camel's back" He was the stray breeze that brought down the house of cards.
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  46. HEY LEX! Did you notice any large discrepancies between what Putin said and what his translator said?
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  47. "Smarter than themselves" -- define "smarter". An AI might define that to mean, "better at making paperclips" depending an idiosyncrasies of its initial priorities, training, or experiences. The failure mode of AI is going to be the Sorcerer's Apprentice problem. It picks one job, and does it too well.
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  48. Anyone who has read a biographical sketch of Ayn Rand knows that she was anti-family.
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  49. OK, wasn't Michael making himself the butt of the joke there? Listening to what her father went through, only an idiot could talk about doing the same thing for fun.
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  50. "Cleanliness and beauty are not the main measures of a city" Why would you choose to be in a city if it were not clean, safe, and beautiful? Why wouldn't you prefer to be in the suburbs or countryside instead?
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  51.  @daveinpenn  So, lobbyists?
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  52. Yes, people get angry when you talk about killing us off. If you're worried about resource scarcity, get away from the city lights, go out into the country, wait until nightfall... ....AND LOOK UP.
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  53. Tucker, have you ever reached out to Steven Crowder about non-existent people voting in Nevada in 2020?
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  54. Keeping power consumption down is very important for keeping self-driving cars fuel efficient. The amount of power necessary to make perception and planning decisions (and to keep the processors cool) actually adds a noticeable burden to the mileage of the car (a 10%-30% hit).
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  55.  @Dizle81  I'd really like to know where Kotkin is getting his information from, other than the Ukrainian TV production team he admires so much.
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  56.  @Dizle81  That's fair. We can go to him for information about Stalin. Although, didn't Stalin have a great propaganda team behind him, too?
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  57. The advantage of Christianity over Communism, is that even though we look forward to a state where we have "the good things without the bad things", we still have a mechanism (forgiveness) to deal with the bad things in a world and with people that we expect to be "fallen" (imperfect).
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  58. If the USSR had been Anarchic at the time, it would have been even easier for the Germans to overrun Ukraine. In fact, it would have been impossible for any Anarchist to stop the Germans from sweeping all the way to Vladivostok. Michael is not so slow-witted as to be unaware of this.
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  59.  @Ssengel69  Not just myself. This is wisdom from basically every human culture that has ever survived more than 50 years. By 2050, the world will be run by traditional cultures, because childless cultures will die out.
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  60. "The idea that the West is in decline is empirically false" a) The jury is still out, on that b) Is Russia part of "the West"? c) War is one of the most profound causes of decline (the two World Wars utterly wrecked Europe). Long wars, particularly. If the conflict in Ukraine drags on, or drags on and drags more people in, that could finish Europe completely.
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  61. AI neural nets in that they depend on a multitude of connections to make decisions, seem to me to be equivalent to intuition. Consciousness seems more like an expert system - more linear. If neural nets are analogous to intuition, what would be analogous to conscious thought?
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  62. I teach my kids that among the worst things you can do when you drive, is surprise another driver.
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  63. So instead of pure intuition -- convolutional neural nets -- we have moved to something more like consciousness.
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  64.  @immaculatesquid  Note the timestamp on my original comment... it's been a long week.
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  65. Also asteroid mining, and the settlement of freespace / Mars / etc.
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  66. He got through this whole bit without uttering the words "No Man's Sky", didn't he.
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  67. The only place I can see implementing Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" as a plausible part of the process, is in automated cars. Almost no other AI application actually involves perceiving human beings and developing behavior models based on keeping those humans safe. I wonder if Lex ever deliberately attempted to design his AI with those Laws in mind.
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  68. "If you are still flying economy, you are not middle class" You could also say, "If you are not a manager (literally 'bourgeois'), you are not middle class". It's very silly and quite European, (Continental, particularly) setting meaningless boundaries like this. The American rule of thumb is, if you have equity in your house and a retirement account of some kind (you own stock), you are Middle Class. The fact that the American system produced a majority of people who fall into this category is a testament to how far superior it is to the European system. "You will own nothing, and you will be heppy". I'm not sure I know anyone who wants to be 'heppy'. I'm not even sure what it means, to 'be heppy'.
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  69. Lex: "I thought that John Stewart destroyed you in that clip" Also Lex: "I'm a sucker for rhetoric" John Stewart was using rhetoric that a) he did not believe, and b) that (sorry Lex) was not true. Shows like Crossfire where people disagreed with one another, sometimes vehemently, but put them together in articulate argument, were not in fact bad for the country. John Stewart was not in fact a centrist who wanted people to get along, he was (and is) a partisan hack who is happy to have Conservative ideas banished from public conversation, and that was why he took the position he did on Crossfire. Lex, you know you're a sucker here -- be more vigilant.
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  70. It makes sense that branchial space and exponential dimensions. One thing leads to another, and in a large enough system there's no way you'll arrive at some (identical!) future state by wildly divergent paths. I mean, most branches will NOT lead to any merging -- the cookie dough will never unmix.
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  71. Lex, how would a conversation with Eric Weinstein go, in which you made the claim that some of the best research was being done at universities?
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  72. "After he hit 90-something percent, they didn't do any more polling" Is that because the numbers started to slip?
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  73.  @sharksareneat8723  How many fingers do human beings have? There's no reason glove manufacturers should be given any grief for making gloves with five fingers to a hand.
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  74.  @ktcool4660  The man runs an investment fund for Peter fricking Thiel. Any public speaking he does, I don't think he's doing for the money.
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  75.  @Jabranalibabry  I'm still waiting for the Transformers reboot that goes into the "childhood" of Optimus Prime. He is developed as an automated truck AI, but to truly understand human behavior, during his training his inventor puts him in the android body that approximates that of a child -- not particularly strong, and vulnerable to damage in the same way human children are. He is raised with the inventors' sons, going on walks around town with them, playing computer games with them, wrestling with them, all to get him familiar with human body language, human frailties, and the like. All this, so that when his programming tells him "This is a human. They can get hurt, make it a priority to keep them from getting hurt" he has a baseline for making those judgements. And, since this is a Transformers movie, it's also about how the AIs take over the world, and the last of the humans escape to another planet that turn out to be Earth, where they destroy all their technology because they're so terrified of the AIs killing them all.
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  76. Hey Lex, you should look into Gauss' Method for determining an orbit, based on noisy measurements. Let me know if it looks like the Gradient Descent approach to programming an AI. =)
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  77. The problem with reason is it's garbage in, garbage out. Ayn Rand's values were garbage.
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  78.  @jasonblais1667  Genius, but you have to wonder whether Thiel has let him play with a copy of Palantir. It would seem to be the best tool for the sort of job he wants to do.
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  79. "Can you have enough Tom Brady endorsements so that you don't really investigate?" "4 out of 5 dentists agree" "4 out of 5 doctors agree" "96% of climate scientists agree"
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  80. "We should all be very proud of our extremophiles." This world is populated mostly by crazy people, but some people are a really wonderful kind of crazy. =)
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  81. Wouldn't this call everything into question about what we think about the age of the universe? I mean, doesn't all of our knowledge (or current theory, anyway) about the most distant galaxies and their stellar inhabitants, depend on the laws of physics on Earth being the same? It seems like high-energy physics wouldn't play so well with astrophysics if this weren't true.
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  82.  @christianjforbes  Yeah. "Oh". This may be why the CCP is desperately trying to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons it doesn't have, to prevent an investigation. In fact, that threat is circumstantial evidence that this theory could be correct. "Oh what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive". What the CCP doesn't seem to realize, is that without the respect for human rights (which comes ultimately from Christian ethics), the rest of the world can't trust them, and will suspect them of really hideous things because too often we'll be right. Honestly, credit to them for trying to make provision for their countrymen. Good for them. And honestly, good for them, for not wanting to see China prostrated like it was during the 19th century. Prosperity is good, and being able to stick up for yourself is good too. Everyone in the world should have that capacity, and not at anyone else's expense. However, some ways of making this happen are more evil than others. I'm a firm believer in "all get richer, some get richest", as the best mix of idealism and practicality we can reach in this world. What the CCP seems to be doing here is, "Most of us get richer, some of us get very very rich indeed, foreigners get poorer, and some of us and some foreigners get dead." This is not the best we can do in this world. This is something that people outside of China have every reason to work to stop.
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  83. The point was not to "ransack" Iraq. The point was to put it on the same path as South Korea, Germany, or Japan. After 20 years, each of those places still wasn't the "miracle" or the "strong democracy" that they became. And in all three places, we're still there.
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  84. He's not a robot, it's just most of the time he's happy (satisfied?) to be talking to interesting people, at least when he's recording.
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  85.  @DesertsofHibernia  Well, the original poster was looking for honest conversations. A certain amount of affability is needed to get people to let their guards down and talk without self-censoring. I'm not sure what you're looking for and what she's looking for can exist simultaneously.
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  86.  @DesertsofHibernia  Which billionaires are these? How is he being dishonest? I've seen a number of people on his show who have vastly different opinions that are certainly not part of the same "narrative", so I'm not sure I buy that. He's an apostate from the Left, which probably p***es them off to no end... are you sure this bile doesn't explain the narrative you're espousing?
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  87. I though Hilbert Spaces was one of the dullest concepts. I mean, how interesting can a generalization of Euclidean space get?
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  88. Imagine living in a building the size of the Empire State Building instead. If we're getting to Mars, we're going to be building up the capacity to mine and construct there. The number of robots per worker keeps climbing here on Earth. Here, that means that workers are out of work. But on Mars, that means workers and robots can spread across the surface of the planet, building it up as they liked.
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  89. Secularity is not the source of the idea that the universe is logical. The Gospel of John starts, "In the beginning, was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God." (People somewhat familiar with the Bible probably remember that the original Greek word Logos is typically translated "Word".) Some historians of science propose that even astrology (with its degree of animism) was a significant step towards a mechanistic, scientific worldview.
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  90. One problem that faces our society today, is poverty does not destroy the opportunity for leisure.
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  91.  @Teabonesteak  That's one part of the generational progression.
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  92. Has any bright Mechanical Engineering researcher, ever tried to apply Control Theory / feedback principles to our financial regulations? Seems like if we learned more about the mechanics of crashes and fragile financial instruments, we might actually have some better idea of systemic risks.
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  93.  @karenc84121  Doesn't look like it. Financial algorithms are a bit on the sketchy / jury-rigged / simplistic side, compared with engineering models.
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  94. Why do I hear the Dukas' "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" playing?
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  95. "Ukraine will not remain a sovereign nation" Are you talking about if Russia wins and makes it a puppet, or are you talking about if the West wins and all of Ukraine is restructured to service its trillions of debt to Western bankers?
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  96. Why is de-risking based only on diversification? Seems like we should investigate how much a given investment is exposed to positive (self-reinforcing) feedback loops, particularly downside feedback loops.
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  97. "Those are the flaps of the butterfly's wings, that's why it's all such a beautiful mess" Very true; on the other hand, today I keep coming back to the idea that we may be able to discover where the feedback loops are more likely to be set off. The snowflake doesn't blame itself for the avalanche, because the height of the snowpack matters, and it's something we can often track.
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  98. "If you're a Sequoia or a Blackrock, wouldn't you do the due diligence [on crypto]?" Only if your preference is to make money. We should consider that the revealed preferences of Sequoia and Blackrock are to gain political power for political ends, such as ESG and DIE.
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  99. "If you're 18, 19, 20 years old, this is basically destroying your life" - if you lose your life savings Wait, Lex, if you lose your life savings at 18 years old, how much are you really losing?
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  100. Hey Sheldon, some people named James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose did the Sokol Hoax again a year or two back. It was hilarious. Now, the school of thought they were mocking has come back with a vengeance. It's known as "Wokeness", and it is trying to take over all of our institutions (churches, businesses, etc) as well as having foot soldiers on the ground in the form of Antifa and BLM. Eric Weinstein's brother Bret found himself at the pointy end of this stick at Evergreen State College in Oregon.
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  101. Is there a way to calculate the scale at which space starts acting like a continuum instead of a discretized set (if that's the right term)? Edit: I should stop writing down hot takes when it's this late, this is exactly what they talked about next. Although, not at a very detailed level, ironically. So a proton is about 10^-15, and the universe is at a resolution of about 10^-100? Sounds plausible that a proton should see this as a continuum. What's the risk that all this is just a function of the computing approach, though?
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  102.  @facejets  Well, I think there's an issue of a qualitative difference rather than a quantitative difference. An infinitely divisible universe is not the same as a discrete-space universe, and honestly, I'm not sure that one is "simpler" than another.
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  103.  @facejets  Well, reality / space, like what they're talking about here, except they're claiming it's discrete.
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  104. "The State wants one big neck, with one big leash around it." Here, I actually agree with Malice. This drive for the petty bureaucrats to prefer consolidation because that helps their mediocre intellects (and let's face it, compared to well-functioning market emergence, every human or inhuman intellect is mediocre) to navigate the complexities of everything a country consists of, that drive to consolidate is naturally oppressive. George Orwell was part of an army that tried to operate in an Anarchic way, though. It didn't work out so well. Does he ever address this?
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  105. "Effective altruism is the McDonald's dollar menu of charity"
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  106. "Tech trumps other forms of communication" The existence of Freedom of the Press in the first amendment alongside Freedom of Speech, is a direct recognition that the framers knew this.
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  107. "Why don't they look more authentic?" Because they're NOT authentic. The system (up until now) for selecting TV talking heads has not selected for authenticity - it has selected for ambition and attention-seeking, and there have been few enough candidates and few enough gatekeepers that the system was easy to corrupt. Exhibit A: Anthony Fauci.
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  108.  @soumyaripan5131  It's remarkable how many people want to lock humanity into its cradle. I suspect it's a matter of light pollution. Supposedly, 80% of the North American population lives in places it's impossible to see more than a handful of stars, each night. I'm not sure how bad it is in Europe -- I suspect, worse.
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  109. So would Einstein be comforted by the fact that, while God plays dice with the universe, Einstein has given us the tools to understand how those dice are loaded?
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  110. @Alexandros K Just curious, did you upvote it? I've gotten the impression recently that YouTube is playing silly games with my account.
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  111. @Alexandros K Huh. Very interesting.
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  112. YouTube should give the USER the ability to filter their own feed. We have a "SafeSearch" switch on Google search. We can mark things Spam (and check our Spam folder to mark things "not spam") in Gmail. There should be a set of setting boxes we can tic saying "no ethnic jokes" or "no Bible verses" in our YouTube feed, if we're feeling thin-skinned about such things appearing there.
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  113. It's interesting to note that "the information war" is being waged against US. Ukraine is winning... hooray?
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  114. Why do you assume that technological change is accelerating? To accelerate, don't you need a larger change, in a smaller unit of time? Look at the time period between 1970 and 2020. We invented the Internet and the Cellphone. That's about it. Look at the time period between 1870 and 1920. We invented radio, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, sound recordings / movies, LOTS of things that changed life dramatically. If you really want to be depressed about how much we've slowed down, consider how much we settled North America in the years after the Transcontinental Railroad, and compare it to the how much we settled the Moon after the Apollo Program.
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  115.  @jinzok  The tide has turned -- we're getting more Mexicans headed south now. The ones we're seeing now are mostly just passing through Mexico, which is why it's so effective when Mexico closes their own borders.
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  116. Mars has a 24.7 hour day. We'll be fine.
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  117. "No system saves you from the individual, from their greed or lust for power" Isn't this the core of the Judeo-Christian story? Transformation, redemption, atonement, at the level of the individual human heart, wrestling with the reality of your sins? It enlists each person to attend to whether they are right with God.
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  118.  @sorenjunkers3834  Thanks for the interaction. Are you a bot?
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  119. "And the nation is behind him" ... According to whom? All regions of the nation?
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  120. "This is a man whose entire history is about cultivating the right opinions at the right time to achieve the right effect" In other words, he has developed the perfect suite of abilities to thrive in the Woke world. This is what emphasizing The Narrative(TM) or Consensus Reality(TM) over the simple truth, gets you.
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  121. "The US has no economic investment in Ukraine" Aside from all that money they owe us thanks to lend/lease.
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  122.  @iddqdHD  Dear sweet summer child, do you think with all their lobbyists, defense contractors actually need something as messy as a WAR to keep their budgets high? Besides, if defense contractors are so all-powerful in terms of budgeting, why isn't the defense budget keeping up with inflation?
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  123.  @tommyjado127  Weird that someone with Malice's preferences would attempt to impose a purely moralistic binary "right / wrong" dichotomy.
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  124. The next most likely explanation (after accident) is the CCP releasing it on their own population to rebalance their demographics, so China doesn't "grow old before it grows rich".
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  125. It's not just a function of the math.... Chaos is increasing -- we see by the shattering cup, that disorder tends to increase. Or by selecting a frame of reference.... At a human scale we actually see things discretely, rather than in some branchial space. Theories don't imply reality, they describe reality.
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  126. "We don't invest in infrastructure or education, because when we try, the money is stolen" Usually by people doing "diversity training", or creating a luxury "experience" for the underachieving children of the rich. Wait, are you talking about the East, or the West?
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  127. "Something unexpected might happen" Say, China invades Taiwan, and the full military might of NATO and Japan (hopefully minus nukes) swings into action against the Russian / Chinese axis.
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  128. "Government forces people who run businesses well to run them poorly, by people who don't run businesses at all." When Lex mentioned "difficult decisions", frequently those decisions are ones where you have to pick winners and losers, and those whose interests are deprecated, object to that. Those decisions are an inevitable part of "running businesses well." Does Malice not consistently insist that anyone whose interests are deprecated in a decision, has an absolute right to remove themselves from the any process where they find themselves on the losing side of any such decision? What is "forcing someone who runs a business well to run a business poorly" other than those on the losing side, attempting to avoid the consequences of those decisions?
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  129. But divorce court sure tries to outdo that, in terms of inflicting pain.
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  130. One way I found to look at Fermat's Last Theorem, was to see it as a delta not as a sum. In other words, it's obvious that the difference between any two consecutive squares, is the set of all odd numbers. Some odd numbers are also squares. So far so good. If you could look at the entire set of all the differences between any two cubes, and demonstrate that for some reason that no cubes could be included in that set, you might then generalize that to any whole-number exponent.
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  131. Ayn Rand, in her life, was a homewrecking s**t -- and this was absolutely consisted with her books. She was an absolute narcissist. Rand's thought is no basis for a stable culture.
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  132. Maxwell wasn't envisioning the electronics we have today. (Though Tesla is another story.) It gets more complex and morally grey; Wernher von Braun WAS envisioning space travel, but the capabilities he generated were put to use for awful ends, before he they were put to work again to reach the Moon. Even those awful ends, though, gave short-term achievable goals that served as stepping stones to long-term beneficial capabilites.
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  133. "You can tax it" Be VERY careful with this point of view. While "the power to tax is the power to destroy", a government also has an existential motivation to incentivize whatever it taxes. This led to the Opium Wars, and Britain's maritime empire.
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  134.  @obgaming101  Saying the EU is particularly free, is getting to be more and more of a joke these days. It's turning into a bureaucratic dictatorship too. No freedom of speech, the right to bear arms is ignored, religion is deprecated, your movements are tracked, you own less and less all the time, and what material wealth exists is controlled and distributed by a set of unaccountable elites according to their own agenda that you have no say in whatsoever. Freedom is great, but the EU doesn't offer that, really. Back in the day, I saw the difference between East and West Germany. I saw the Trabants, I saw the bombed-out churches, I ate the awful food. Trabants weren't quite as bad as electric cars, vegan food isn't quite as bad as what Erfurt and Dresden had to offer, but the new gods the EU would have you kneel and pay homage to are utterly contemptible. I hope the Ukrainians can somehow win their freedom. Real, Bill-of-Rights freedom, where the government admits that rights are inherent to individual people, and any government that does not respect that is illegitimate and can be turfed out of power, with a process in place to do that peacefully and regularly. Unless by some miracle they get a government that can cleverly play the Russians off of the EU in such a way that they can avoid the authoritarian tendencies of either side, though, I don't see that happening. Instead they've got Zelensky, who's willing to fight to the last Ukrainian as long as he's "winning the information war" (waged against US, by the way) on the cover of Vogue.
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  135.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Depends on what part of Ukraine you're from, apparently. Although, this "information war" has been waged against us so thoroughly, I'm not convinced that anything the Zelenskyy government says is true, about anything. If he said "the sky is blue" I'd go outside to check.
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  136.  @firasbouhamdan9917  I'm having trouble telling one corrupt oligarchy from another. What's worse -- actual neo-Nazi brigades, or poisoning journalists? =( It doesn't help when some of Lex's guests gush so much about how Zelenskyy is "winning the information war", after which we see Z on the cover of Vogue. It's enough to make you want to wash your hands of the whole thing.
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  137.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Vogue is a propaganda rag masquerading as a fashion magazine. Teen Vogue is ever worse. There are a lot of Western media outlets that have clearly been captured by radical (probably foreign) interests. Twitter's only the beginning. There is an information war that is being waged AGAINST Americans. Zelenskyy is, unfortunately, our enemy in this. At this point it's gotten so bad, we really need to bring back the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as the blacklist.
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  138.  @firasbouhamdan9917  An "Information War" is waged by lying to everyone else for your own advantage -- The Ghost of Kiev, Snake Island, etc. Zelenskyy is conducting information war operations against America, and even against his own people. It's clear that he (and especially his allies in the West) will fight to the last Ukrainian, at the risk of destabilizing and even starving a large chunk of the world. I don't like being manipulated, lied to, or handled. People who do that by definition can't be trusted. People who can't be trusted make VERY bad allies.
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  139.  @firasbouhamdan9917  The fact is that footage of the Ghost of Ukraine was generated from a computer game, so yes, that was a lie. If we are to value the political loyalties of the people of a region (e.g., independent Ukraine), then shouldn't we value the fact that the people of the DonBas and Crimea seem to be loyal to Russia and not Ukraine? I've heard that official recognition of those territories as Russian was on the table as terms that would stop the war - less, even, with DonBas simply being independent. It seems that the West is willing for Ukrainians to continue to fight and die, to keep people under the dominion of a country they do not want to be part of. Since this is the whole rationale of Ukraine being independent of Russia, it seems more than a little hypocritical.
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  140.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Supporting a "plausible" claim with obviously false "proof" does not inspire confidence. Exactly the opposite, in fact. I don't like being lied to, plain and simple, and Zelenskyy has been lying to us. I don't trust the people who are his biggest supporters, either. The same American news outlets who are now carrying water for Zelenskyy were talking about the DonBas and Crimea as being basically Russian. It's an admission against interests, which generally makes it more plausible. Similarly, US government officials were talking about Russian offers for peace in exchange for the recognition of Crimea as being Russian, and the DonBas as being an independent buffer state. It seems to me that a neutral buffer state between Russia and everyone else would be a good thing going forward. It bears repeating -- I don't like being lied to, and Zelenskyy's "Information war" involves proven lies targeting the American people, to increase our sympathy for Ukraine on false pretenses. This corrupt strategy is backfiring, and should be abandoned.
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  141.  @firasbouhamdan9917  I think geography is going to determine whether Ukraine is a buffer state or not -- but I was referring to an independent DonBas. If Ukraine is insisting that it needs to be independent from Russia because it wants to be independent, but insists that DonBas and Crimea must not be independent of Ukraine despite the fact that DonBas and Crimea want to be independent of Ukraine, do they have any real moral standing? You're insisting that Zelenskyy be believed without presenting any examples supporting his credibility, and the examples I provided calling that credibility into question were not effectively answered. If Zelenskyy's credibility is to be re-established (big IF, at this point), you're probably not the one to do it.
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  142.  @firasbouhamdan9917  If the people of a place want to be independent, shouldn't they be? If not, what rationale does Ukraine have, for its own independence? Ukraine wasn't a state for several centuries. Crimea wasn't part of Ukraine when it was. If you're arguing that the status quo must never change, why was it a good thing when Ukraine got its independence from Russia in the first place? I'm not saying that Putin is a great guy. I'm just saying that Zelenskyy isn't either. I'm trying to decide whether I should support my tax money (tens of billions of it) going to Ukraine, and risking nuclear war, for something that looks like a civil war in a leper colony. I'm also saying that I can't trust anything Zelenskyy says, thanks in no small part to people like Kotkin gushing about his "information war". You're not being terribly persuasive either. Best thing here may be for us to just ignore them and let them work out their own damnation.
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  143.  @firasbouhamdan9917  If Ukrainians in other regions have a say in whether DonBas is independent or not, why wouldn't Putin have a say in whether Ukraine is independent or not? You're gaslighting at this point.
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  144.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Feel free to bring that up when the Chechnya question comes up again -- although as far as I understand the history of the Caucasus, they would all be terribly disappointed if the fighting ever had to stop. Back to the Ukraine, though - by what rationale does Ukraine have to be independent of Russia, if DonBas and Crimea cannot be independent of Ukraine?
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  145.  @firasbouhamdan9917  You're trying to change the subject -- the actual shooting war in Ukraine is far more urgent than the situation in Chechnya. I don't think that Ukraine's position -- that it must be independent, but Crimea and DonBas must not be, and therefore war must continue -- is morally consistent or defensible.
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  146.  @firasbouhamdan9917  According to the principle that places that want to be independent should be independent, sure. How in the world do you defend your own position, that Ukraine can tyrannize Crimea and DonBas (and risk plunging the world into nuclear war while they're at it)?
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  147.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Status quo back in the 1990s was the USSR. If claiming "status quo" to some arbitrary time in the past is valid, that justifies Putin conquering just about all of his neighbors. Sorry, doesn't work as a justification.
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  148.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Ukraine was indeed one of the republics of the USSR. You're not old enough to remember that, are you. It was part of the Russian Empire before that, and it (or portions of it, anyway) was a part of Poland-Lithuania, before that. Crimea was not a part of Ukraine, but Ukraine was part of Russia, when Catherine the Great (no doubt inspired by toxic masculinity as Boris Johnson so brilliantly asserted) took Crimea from the old Hordes and made it part of the Russian Empire. This is why going back to some arbitrary point in the past just isn't worth it. Anyone can point to a different part of the past where something else was true. The fact remains -- Ukraine has exactly the same right to insist that DonBas and Crimea are part of Ukraine, that Russia has to insist that Ukraine is part of Russia. If the price of a peace that respect the will of Ukrainians to be independent of Russia, is respecting the will of DonBas and Crimea to be independent of Ukraine, there's no moral excuse to turn down that offer.
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  149.  @firasbouhamdan9917  So how long do you think Europe will be able to survive without Russian oil and gas?
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  150.  @firasbouhamdan9917  It's crushing German industry and could lead to people freezing to death this winter. First you'll fight to the last Ukrainian, now you'll let Germans freeze (not to mention, the Africans who will starve because of the grain and fertilizer disruptions.) Has anyone else on your side ever turned to you and said, "Hans, are we the baddies?"
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  151.  @firasbouhamdan9917  My point about Crimea is that there's no special relationship between Ukraine and Crimea. Again, you're not actually providing any evidence to discount any of my points. Call Russia "inconsistent" if you like. The fact is that Ukraine is being similarly inconsistent, making Ukraine... consistent with what you condemn about Russia. And pushing to needlessly continue a war that leads to their own peoples' deaths by violence, Europeans' deaths by cold, and Africans' deaths by hunger and civil conflict, to establish itself in that inconsistency. There are no good guys here. Russia (somewhat shockingly) was offering a decent and principled peace. Ukraine dishonored itself by not taking it.
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  152.  @firasbouhamdan9917  The Ukrainians don't have enough ships to send the grain they have. There are recorded cases of unwilling people being forced to fight for Ukraine. Historically speaking, this sort of conscription in this part of the world has not been terribly humane. Germany isn't the only European country adversely affected by Ukraine's dedication to holding onto territory that would prefer to be independent. European stability broadly is under threat. The attitude of "they deserve what they get" is unlikely to be terribly persuasive.
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  153.  @firasbouhamdan9917  If by "capitulate" you mean let go of territories that wanted to be independent of Ukraine, but when you have to change the meaning of words to win an argument it's a sign you've lost the argument. "Status quo" is meaningless in a region so volatile.
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  154.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Current status quo is Russia in possession of Crimea, DonBas, and Chechnya, yet you're eager to spill blood to change that.
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  155.  @firasbouhamdan9917  How would we know if Ukrainians weren't "eager to fight"? The available logistical facilities for handling grain exports are about 1/10th of what they would need to be, to clear the granaries for the next harvest. Your quote about "100 vessels" is meant to sound impressive I suppose, but it's so out of context as to be entirely meaningless. That's the whole problem here. Plausible story + scanty, overstated, or downright falsified evidence = hoax. You're fighting your "Information war" against US, and it's extraordinarily annoying. There are protests throughout Europe against energy shortages, and the governments of major countries are shifting and falling. Your characterization of "European support" is somewhat... one-sided. And this is just for the tail end of summer. When General Frost starts his advance, European protestors are likely to start setting fire to government buildings just to stay warm. In spite of a couple weeks' worth of back-and-forth, you haven't persuaded me that America shouldn't just hunker down behind Admiral Atlantic and Admiral Pacific, and leave the Europeans to their own damnation. Look, I'm not keen on anything that could be spun as "a defeat for Western arms", although we've done enough damage so far that anyone will be thinking twice about tangling with us (hooray deterrent!), so long as we can restock effectively. Stuffing the Baltics and Poland full of our ordinance is probably enough to persuade Putin not to advance any further. (Playing "Arsenal of Democracy" is fun, for the Eastern European countries that really are democracies.) BUT, Zelenskyy runs a corrupt oligarchy, a lot like Putin's corrupt oligarchy. Sure, Putin could stop the war by simply withdrawing, but then Zelenskyy could stop the war by ceding territories full of people who are no more interested in being Ukrainian than he is in being Russian. Personally, I'm more in favor of the outcome that gives various populations a chance to be part of the state they want to be part of, ends this new risk of nuclear war, stops Ukrainians (and Russians) from getting shot, keeps Europeans from freezing to death, keeps Africans from starving, and keeps Russia and China from getting any more strategically integrated. Honestly, if there was anyone competent at State, they'd be saying to Putin, "Vlad, you can see you're not going to get much of anywhere grinding your way West. How about you get the territories that want to be Russian and that warm-water port you all have wanted since forever as a consolation prize, and then you consider the advantages of a Russian sphere of influence in some brand-new countries like East Turkmenistan, Tibet, Manchuria, and Greater Mongolia? Being a Chinese puppet is no fun, and you'd be happy to have some friends once resource-hungry China reaches nuclear parity with resource-rich Russia..." But, State seems to be dazzled by the stylish "Information Warrior of Kyev", instead of doing their jobs.
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  156.  @firasbouhamdan9917  If that's the standard, then why is it wrong for Russia to conquer Ukraine? (Or DonBas, or Crimea?)
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  157.  @firasbouhamdan9917  You haven't studied the Eastern Front in the 1940s if you think you can't get unwilling conscripts to fight. You're pumping out pro-Zelenskyy propaganda without any evidence whatsoever. To begin with I was kind of taking devil's advocate with my stance on Russia, but you've done such an abysmal job of providing any credible reason to support Zelenskyy, I think it would take a regime change in Ukraine for me to support what we're doing there. Zelenskyy is a corrupt oligarch and encouraged to be moreso by Biden - which (unfortunately for them both) got caught on tape. If there's a compelling reason to support Zelenskyy over Putin, you haven't provided it.
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  158.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Um, you haven't heard what Zelenskyy's "Azov Brigades" have been up to, have you. You're either a shill or a dupe. I really wish that someone defending the Western side could do better.
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  159.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Actual neo-Nazis are "just patriots fighting for Ukraine"?? Wow, when you blow your credibility, you really make it go down in flames, don't you.
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  160.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Praising neo-Nazis for their patriotism is a bit like praising the 9/11 hijackers for their piloting skills. Go on, tell us all more about how these admirable fellows make it clear to all right-thinking people that Zelenskyy is a champion of moral goodness who must be supported, nay, sacrificed for!
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  161.  @firasbouhamdan9917  So, if you praise them often enough, are the neo-Nazi Azov fighters going to turn into heroes? Are you completely in support of the Azov Brigades?
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  162.  @firasbouhamdan9917  Heroes. Wow. Just... Wow. You know, some US politicians thought that we should just have stood back and not interfered while the Third Reich and the Soviet Union destroyed one another. I can see their point. "A pity they can't both lose", as Kissinger said about the Iran / Iraq war. I'm not sure how you managed it (and a little bit of Lex would probably die, if he read this far down in this comment thread), but you've just about convinced me that a good long war of attrition is exactly what this part of the world needs. You should really get yourself out there too, Firas, and be the hero you were always meant to be.
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  163.  @darkrogue234  According to data available on mainstream media before the war, Russification had worked in the DonBas. For about five centuries Crimea was Tatar (conquered by the Mongols, who had a penchant for depopulating natives), not Ukrainian, before being conquered by Catherine the Great. Geography means that Moscow will always seek political unification with a warm-water port, probably Sevastopol. The first mention of anything like "Russia" in history includes Ukraine -- in fact in the "Kievan Rus" Ukraine was in charge of Muscovy. So.... where does that leave us? With hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians (probably more like millions) dying and the world risking nuclear Armageddon, over territory that doesn't want to be part of Ukraine any more than Ukraine wants to be part of Russia. It leaves us with Russia and China driven together strategically, Europe beggared, and Africa starving (with all the political instability that comes with that). Our seemingly desired endgame (Russia's comprehensive defeat) cannot be achieved without neutralizing Russia's nuclear arsenal, a nuclear arsenal which is the only thing keeping resource-hungry China from gobbling up resource-rich Russian East Asia, and in doing so becoming vastly less vulnerable to international economic sanctions. This is a disastrous failure of geopolitics. Foggy Bottom needs to be depopulated, and replaced with anyone in America still capable of competent strategy.
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  164. "People being people, are apt to escalate and be retaliatory" In Njall's Saga (written several centuries before Locke), it was a wheel of cheese rather than an apple that started the whole blood feud. It also explores the fact that pure attention to collective legalism is often not a sufficient safeguard to public order in the face of these passions. Only Christianity, properly acted out through sacrifice, could solve the situation.
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  165. "You don't have to choose between cleanliness and freedom of speech" You DO have to choose between cleanliness on the one hand, and freedom from disgust on the other. It is no accident that Gavin Newsom's San Francisco not only pioneers the celebration of revolting personal habits as "pride" and "rights", it also is the most famous for phone apps tracking s**t on its streets, and toleration of "open-air drug scenes" where people regularly die in the gutter.
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  166.  @scorpo8166  The fact that homeless people were tolerated on the streets like that, points to the fact that the voters (or politicians) aren't disgusted by them, enough to do something about it. You are clearly not old enough to remember an America where this didn't happen. I am. Please readjust your political point of view to take these facts into account.
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  167. "You can't make old friends" the saying goes. I think that we'll look back on today's emphasis on transience, as an evil part of these times.
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  168. The antidote to communism is a worker with a 401k. The 401k, distributed throughout society, is the only way we've ever peacefully arrived to Common Ownership of the Means of Production. Change my mind.
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  169.  @werpe2121  It's times like this that fill me with confidence that AI will never take over the world.
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  170.  Fortunado999  It's specifically not worshiping the flag or the nation (or any other ideology), that's why the words "under God" are in the pledge.
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  171.  @unlomtrash Even so, there may be some interesting discrepancies. Lex should try to book the translator too.
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  172.  @pyotrbagration2438  Is there anything worth expanding on, in the stuff that doesn't translate well? Some people posit that using a different language leads people to some logical connections, more easily than in other languages. Does that come into play here?
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  173.  @pyotrbagration2438 Well, considering there's a war going on, avoiding some forms of misunderstanding is the most important part.
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  174. "The loss lasts longest" I dunno, my grandparents were married almost 70 years. I don't think my grandmother is going to live another 70. Maybe that's why wisdom tells us marriage is supposed to be permanent...
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  175. "There will be poverty in the United States" We have the resources of an entire continent at our disposal. The only way we will be impoverished, is if we let the environmentalists cut off our access to our own resources.
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  176. "[The ruddy little ignoramus] had plausible deniability about the death camps" Are you aware of the propensity of subordinates to try to jockey for leadership -- either via impressing current leaders, or via asserting dominance over other ambitious underlings -- by taking leadership's position and driving it to an absurd / atrocious degree? I'm not saying that happened in Germany then, but this is arguably what happened in the upper echelons of the Imperial Japanese.
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  177. Waitaminute -- I thought that the Young double-slit interference pattern indicated the set of possible outcomes for where the photon lands. Did Wolfram just say that the photon could end up *nowhere*? Could he explain that a little further?
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  178. "You have the NRA, which makes it well-nigh impossible to get gun control." Er, isn't it the second amendment of the Constitution that makes it well-nigh impossible to get gun control? And what good does gun control do, anyway?
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  179.  @cacodemon_doom  So you know how much an aircraft carrier costs, compared to your typical small business' profit margins?
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  180.  @TheLouisisawesome  I don't think I've actually heard anything from the Russian side. I wouldn't trust that either, obviously. But, we're clearly being lied to by the Ukrainian side. I'm also starting to hear people hemming and hawing about how "every side commits atrocities in a war." Translating this from "information war" to English, that means that "Ukrainians are committing atrocities". This does not fill me with confidence that the Ukrainians are the "good guys". The only objective, rational position I can see here, is the only way to limit the loss of Ukrainian lives is to end the war. We've already sunk enough ships to demonstrate what would happen if China launched an invasion of Taiwan. (Also known as "Operation Fish Food", to honor the life ambitions of the brave Chinese soldiers and sailors who would take part). The economic sanctions we've put on Russia would be crippling to China. We've established deterrence in more than one way. At this point, (if the Ukrainian narrative is to be believed) we're risking weakening Russia to the point that they might not be able to resist Chinese aggression in their Far East. Russia, augmented by Russian-speakers in Crimea and DonBas, doesn't worry me very much strategically. All of Eastern Europe in flames, worries me more. Nuclear holocaust seems unlikely, but even a small probability of such a dire outcome has to figure in to our calculations, and that small chance grows with each passing day. What seems like the biggest probability coming out of a long war here, though, is the opening for resource-hungry China to conquer everything from Vladivostok to Yekaterinburg. THAT would spell strategic disaster for the West. China would become THE dominant power on the planet. That new power disparity would render any diplomatic pledge from the US entirely meaningless, and the result of any Eastern European border dispute, irrelevant.
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  181. The best way to create a new consciousness is to have unprotected straight sex, I guess.
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  182. One implication of Copernicus' work is that you could go to the Moon. Implication of Wolfram: we can go to other stars?
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  183.  @ultrafly100  I'm not sure there's really a link, at all. People who have had a good example of wielding power responsibly, and have people willing and able to hold them to account, would be a better bet.
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  184. Wow, Lex found his teeth. Helps to have a pretty girl to protect, I think.
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  185. It's a lot more widespread than you think. In places like California, Wokeness has gotten into school districts statewide. There are enough of them to make it a problem in the wider world, as well. Gillette, Delta Airlines, even the Sandia Labs are getting infected.
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  186.  @la1130  You say you didn't see it in the specific place you were. Fair enough. Others are saying that they are seeing it, and your calling them "liars" when they present actual class materials, is careless at best and completely disingenuous at worst. I can say that even when I was in college 20 years ago, there were a couple of classes in the humanities I took that were indoctrinating students in this direction, and the graduate programs that I looked at in the humanities were all pretty Politically Correct, which is why I decided to follow my Engineering major instead. The idea that this is widespread, is somewhere between plausible and proven.
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  187. "A large number of smart and influential people can all be wrong at the same time" Like the way a lot of smart and influential people don't really have a handle on what computer models are capable of, particularly computer models using massive numbers of chaos-prone convection cells (not to mention a pile of other badly-defined variables) that they're trying to use to predict decades into the future?
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  188. OK, so here's traditional AI training: 1) Define success criteria, construct training dataset 2) Iterate the AI operating on the training data, evaluate against success criteria 3) Automatically adjust AI parameters based on whether the current iteration gives you more success than the last 4) Stop training when you've hit an optimum state This isn't an expert system, with a lot of "if this / then that" rules. The rules emerge from the evaluation of success or failure, and they are not explicit, but rather embedded (largely cryptically) in the multitude of parameters making up the AI. You can structure your training data and success criteria such that you have "exclusion zones" of various weights. The destruction of the AI could be 100x bad. Disobedience to a human command could be 10,000x bad. Harming a human being could be 1,000,000,000x bad (or an absolute fail). But this makes the structure of your training data and success criteria FAR more complicated than it needs to be for, say, an AI whose only task is determining "hotdog / not hotdog". The level of awareness necessary to know what a human is, what could harm a human, what a human command is, what the AI itself is, or what could harm the AI is, is an extremely complex thing to parameterize. Human beings ourselves have a hard time with ethical dilemmas, such as "Is it wrong to lie to a woman about whether she's attractive to someone she's attracted to, if it would hurt her feelings to think she wasn't?" Asimov looks into this, in his short story "Liar!"
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  189. While I was still doing research to decide which way my startup should go, there were dozens of articles I wanted to read, but didn't have the money. If we want more startups, we need these articles to be FREE - or at-cost.
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  190. "We're loaning to Ukraine, and the debt will come due" So which is worse -- being in severe debt to NATO, or being a Russian puppet state? At what point do the balance of incentives (don't forget, the incentive to stop the loss of life) tilt towards surrender to Russia?
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  191. @LtArchieHicox This "multiverse" theory, as far as I can tell, is based entirely on an aesthetic desire to reduce the number of terms in an equation by one. Is it or is it not un-provable nonsense?
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  192.  @fredfred7222  Eh, it's a little reductionist to say that all we do is survive and reproduce -- we do a lot of other things along the way, that other surviving / reproducing creatures don't manage to do. I would say that having the ability to turn an asteroid into a cathedral (given a bit of time to research the relevant tech) would make a universe that we existed all over, more interesting than the barren rocks there are out there now.
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  193.  @chrislane8466  Now that you've looked at this through "their" eyes, look at it through the eyes of Americans who aren't you. What about families destroyed by fentanyl and other drugs? Interdiction is a solution, not a problem. If there's a problem here, it's that we don't do it effectively enough. What about the root cause of many of those deaths of despair, our industrial policy of destroying the American working class? That's not only about offshoring, that's also about endless immigration that ruins working class bargaining power, by the way. Again -- strict limits on immigration are a solution, not a problem. You seem to be able to sympathize with everyone but your fellow Americans. This is how America elects Trump, and if I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, at some level I suspect you know that.
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  194. ​ @tetraxis3011  We're trying to reverse Obama's policies of arming the cartels, as quickly as we can. If you want to help us do that, help expose the fraud that got Democrats elected.
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  195. Synchronicity doesn't break the rules of the universe, miracles do. God can also guide a scarab beetle to Northern Europe, for just such a time as it is needed. Each one shows a different aspect of the glory of God, but does not exhaust it.
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  196. "If I lend you money, you can spend that money, but I can't; so there's no change in aggregate demand" Er, what if I want to spend the money and you don't? Seems that demand is a matter of motivation as much as means. If you'd said that future-me couldn't spend the money because I'd have to pay it back, that would make more sense. However, if demand trails of with people as they age (and future-me is still making money) then a measure of aggregate demand taking into account present-me and future-me will be increased. All that said, I agree with you completely about the risks involved because some debts are never repaid. We still haven't solved the problem of risk, and I doubt we ever will.
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  197. The "vase / faces" and "duck / rabbit" are just visual puns.
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  198.  @ErnestoLopez-kr8zl  a) How would you know that if it even were true, and b) What does that have to do with anything?
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  199. "Just assume the asteroid is trying to kill you." This is the general design principle that Deep Space Industries used, in the design of its asteroid lander.
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  200. Professor Weinstein, could you give us a rundown on how Markets compare to Evolution, as selection mechanisms? It seems to me that they could be considered equally moral.
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  201. Good luck, sir.
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  202.  @ramonalejandrosuare  The war and subsequent rebuilding was more costly than the value of all the oil reserves in Iraq. Your take is an extremely common one (you might even say compelling) until you actually run the numbers. Then you realize it's wrong.
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  203.  @ramonalejandrosuare  Do you have anything that makes this more than a conspiracy theory?
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  204. "I could program a script to tell you every single position he would take" Given your first principles, couldn't someone do the same for you? Would his simply be a little more simplistic?
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  205. Something like 80% of North Americans cannot see more than half a dozen stars in the sky each night. Half your field of view, half the day, has been wrecked by light pollution. This is one of those problems that could actually be solved by legislation, without impacting quality of life. Just changing the cowling on streetlights would bring back the glory of the cosmos.
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  206. Find someone who will use the word "wife" instead of "partner", and it's likely to last longer.
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  207. "There's a law, you can't treat creditors differently you have to treat them all the same" Not true in the world of corporate bonds, as far as I've heard. Each set of bonds is an individual contract, with conditions that are frequently unique, and include who gets money first in an unwinding.
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  208. Do you honestly think that if Russia takes over Ukraine, any of Ukraine's debt to the West will ever be repaid? Wouldn't it discourage financial support for independence movements, if that debt is simply repudiated?
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  209.  @dim._.  Are the Azov fighters off the table now?
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  210.  @dim._.  Are there any other similar groups in Ukraine?
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  211.  @MilanyAece  Well, the Crusaders needed to reverse the imperialist conquests of the settler-colonial Arabs. We'd be a lot better off today if they'd succeeded. I'm thankful things are better between Christians and Jews today. As for the witches though, I'd have to take that on a case-by-case basis. Did any of the people you're talking about ask for forgiveness, or show any kind of contrition, by the way?
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  212.  @DesertsofHibernia  He has people he disagrees with on his program.... it would be very boring and uninformative if he didn't, to be honest. Also, Rubin doesn't tend to have Leftists on because they refuse his invitations. That isn't exactly his fault. I also have serious doubts that an intelligent, well-informed Leftist would be overcome in a debate with Dave. I just can't see that happening. Do you have any evidence for "Koch brothers funding"? Koch seems to be a bogeyman on the level of Soros. I'm not convinced that either of them are as influential as their detractors would have us believe. The long-form interviews I have found on the web (Rogan, Rubin, etc) are typically not edited (that's kind of the point.) If Leftists have fallen prey to unscrupulous editors on the Right, there are well-documented examples of the opposite situation as well. Generally, if a government on the Right "rounds up and executes people suspected of being Leftists" we call that a fascist government. Although, fascist bodycounts (even in the most famous cases) are an order of magnitude lower than governments who call themselves Socialist, so I'm not sure that critique sticks to Fascists better than Socialists. This was kind of a rabbit hole, and hasn't really persuaded me at all. I've seen most of the interviews you refer to so disparagingly, and I think you're being terribly uncharitable. I still recommend Dave as someone to watch, if you like uncensored, open conversations.
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  213. Michael, the reason we hang together is that if we didn't, we would hang separately. There are too many bad actors in this world who would take ruthless advantage of significant disunity on our part. THAT SAID, I'm not sure your most salient points could not be answered by the principle of subsidiarity, under a real federalist system.
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  214.  @robertheadley3483  That's actually a good idea, if you're not too childish yourself.
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  215. Could it be that the universe is computational, but only up to a point? I'm still wondering how Chaos (sensitivity to small changes in initial conditions) works into this.
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  216. Drop a comet on it. =)
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  217. "American independence was won by French arms" Eh, that, and the fact that we had a huge amount of sympathy among British parliamentarians themselves -- and even aside from democratic sympathies, they didn't want to see the House of Hannover acquire massive private estates and revenues in North America.
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  218.  @michaelcarney6280  Yes, although the support (even from the French) was exaggerated a bit in this presentation. The people who did the bleeding, were still American patriots, not French or Spanish. There were more Germans fighting for the English, than there were Europeans fighting for the Americans.
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  219.  @michaelcarney6280  Um, the people you mention fighting for the Americans? They were already independent of the Old Countries, and would stay in the United States after the war was done. In other words, they were Americans. The Germans fighting for the English, on the other hand, were mercenaries who would return to Europe after they were done.
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  220.  @michaelcarney6280  That's about 15% of the total, then, with two-thirds of them being sailors who were out fighting the British anyway. Certainly deserves a "thank you", and it would have been tougher without them, but I wouldn't really say they carried the day. Their blockade of Yorktown was the last nail in the coffin, not the first.
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  221.  @philipvecchio3292  Czechoslovakia in the late 30's was healthy and strong, but not strong enough. Other nations around them looked after their own interests (one might say, "anarchically"), attempting to guarantee "peace in our time", instead of banding together against the common threat. "Appeasement" is about feeding an alligator, hoping it will eat you last. Supporting anarchy basically denies that alligators exist at all.
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  222.  @ChucksSEADnDEAD  Without effective opposition, the Germans would have overrun the oil-producing regions of the USSR very easily. Building enough freight rail to properly transport the necessary resources would not have been any more difficult than building tanks / planes / etc, which they would not have needed if there was no effective resistance. Just give it up already. Anarchy is not viable.
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  223.  @ChucksSEADnDEAD  No, they never got to Baku because they were stopped by a large, organized army.
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  224.  @ChucksSEADnDEAD  They were busy fighting large, organized armies nearby. Read "Homage to Catalonia". Anarchists are no match for organized, ruthless opposition. We have known this for decades.
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  225.  @ChucksSEADnDEAD  I forget, was it the People's Front of Judea, or the Judean People's Front, who were the cringe ones? Security forces busy in one place are unavailable in another. Come on Rain, you're not even trying at this point. You're out of arguments, plain and simple.
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  226.  @ChucksSEADnDEAD  Using slang incomprehensible outside of your subculture isn't much of a way to win an argument, when the facts simply aren't on your side. Your fetish for anarchism doesn't really help you against organized security forces, particularly ruthless security forces. Just a single teenager defending his local town from anarchists (defending himself, really) was able to take down three anarchists who were attempting to sabotage transportation infrastructure (a gas station) after having burned down a number of car lots. I'm glad the Germans didn't succeed in conquering Asia, as they certainly would have if the Russians had been anarchistic at the time. They were stopped because both Communists and free people (both voluntarily and through compulsory military conscription) banded together to stop them. Yes, I used "free people" and "compulsory military conscription" in the same sentence. Sometimes you have to. Large, organized use of force is not the best way to settle differences, but sometimes it is the only way to prevent them from being resolved for you. Malice is smart enough to know this. That's why I think he just wants to smile and watch it all burn.
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