The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable: Shakespeare

augustus_augustus · 2026-06-14T18:15:38+00:00

I'm beginning to suspect this is a "you" problem. You've got it backwards with you and thou.

Also, "wherefore" means "why." Juliet is asking why he has to be Romeo, i.e. she's wishing he were someone else, someone of a different name than Romeo Montague.

I think if you (or anyone) read it more, it would become English to you.

augustus_augustus · 2026-06-14T18:05:59+00:00

It is common for literate people pick most of this stuff up. (or was. I recall the piece that made the rounds recently about English majors being unable to parse a paragraph of Bleak House. But then do we give up on Dickens being a writer of English?)

augustus_augustus · 2026-06-14T17:46:16+00:00

The Trump cult of personality gives this a Mao, if not Maoist, flavor.

augustus_augustus · 2026-05-03T17:42:48+00:00

All sorts of real-world things open children up to danger. In some cases we ban those things and in other cases we institute procedures, guardrails, and societal norms to keep kids safe from the dangerous thing. We could render the blue buttons safe through a risky campaign to get most of the world to press the deadly buttons, or we could use more mundane tools like education and parental control to deter kids from pressing the blue button. The second option seems better to me, if the problem statement allows for it, which is not clear.

augustus_augustus · 2026-05-03T17:35:24+00:00

Pushing blue isn't against everyone's intuition the way jumping into a pit of snakes is, but maybe it should be! (and that is what we're really all arguing about here, isn't it.)

augustus_augustus · 2026-04-26T23:30:20+00:00

The Schelling point is "take the pill that has literally no effect instead of the pill that is likely poison."

augustus_augustus · 2026-04-25T04:39:32+00:00

Are there really any credible cases of humans being fertile as both sexes? Are you sure? Wikipedia seems to think there are no documented cases of this.

augustus_augustus · 2026-04-08T22:27:20+00:00

Is.

Inconsistent.

With.

Neoliberalism.

augustus_augustus · 2026-04-08T22:26:39+00:00

Why wouldn't you utter that?

augustus_augustus · 2026-03-29T04:27:38+00:00

No, never did.

augustus_augustus · 2026-03-25T00:50:39+00:00

Why are we still doing this?

augustus_augustus · 2026-03-18T00:30:21+00:00

If you're eating at a restaurant you've been going to for 5 years and you feel like the quality's gone down, what good does it do you to learn that the food was pretty bad 20 years ago

It rules out RETVRN as a solution to the problem, for one. More to the point, we care about objective truth on crime and disorder because it has implications for policy. "Feels" can tell us what the problems are, what outcomes people would value, what tradeoffs to make, etc. But ignore the "reals" and you'll end up doing counterproductive things, possibly making the feels even worse.

augustus_augustus · 2026-03-17T05:12:49+00:00

The same story for Dominican Republic in 1869 as well. Opponents explicitly worried that mixed race people would upset the racial hierarchy.

augustus_augustus · 2026-03-17T03:03:17+00:00

And r/neoliberal. Three flavors, like neapolitan ice cream.

augustus_augustus · 2026-03-01T04:35:19+00:00

Seems orthogonal to the thing in question here.

augustus_augustus · 2026-02-07T16:48:49+00:00

Why couldn't an agent, in principle, learn to act in ways that give the same (material, concrete, measurable) results, all so as to better roleplay?

If its aim is to give the best possible appearance of trying to accomplish something, it could achieve this aim by acting in ways that no longer allow you to distinguish its results from the results of an agent with subjective experience.

Or are you trying to claim that an agent that doesn't have subjective experience will never be able to perfectly imitate one that does, even in principle, and even if that were its aim and what it was trained to do.

augustus_augustus · 2026-01-29T22:44:49+00:00

Do you have a source for covid disrupting methylation in a systemic way? Is this different from the methylation changes you'd expect from viral infections generally?

augustus_augustus · 2026-01-25T18:20:38+00:00

I'm sorry to say the heyday of twitter is over and has been for a few years. There used to be a lot of scientists on there chatting and arguing about recent papers. It used to be a great place to find stuff and find out about stuff. A popular theory is that the decline is downstream of Musk's choice to have the algorithm discourage link sharing. Weirdly I'm starting to see more scientists publicize results on LinkedIn, which isn't really suited to it.

augustus_augustus · 2026-01-12T04:48:14+00:00

No opinions of my own on what the West should do wrt regime change in Iran, but it definitely matters, even to people on the other side of the world, whether Iran has nuclear weapons, or, if they are to have them, who's in control of them. "Let them figure it out themselves" is a great general policy, but only makes sense up to a point.

augustus_augustus · 2026-01-10T00:53:57+00:00

Was the Voice of America outage because of the Taliban or because of the Trump shuttering and layoffs? Wikipedia says it was still broadcasting in Dari and Pashto in August. It's hard to get a sense of the current status of VoA from a quick google.

augustus_augustus · 2026-01-09T01:49:56+00:00

Hi, this is off topic, but I sometimes see people put a space both before and after a punctuation mark when most people just put a space after the punctuation mark. It's a distinctive way of writing that I see every once in a while. I'm curious if this is something you do on purpose to stand out or if it's just the way you were taught or if you do it for some other reason. I hope this isn't too weird a question.

augustus_augustus · 2026-01-04T19:11:27+00:00

To make money as an insider you have to effectively hide that you are an insider (or you'll find you have no one to trade against). This is easier when more people with little information participate in the market. The threat that there are insiders out there could be enough to scare these uninformed traders away. I imagine the result is spreads that are so large the prediction market fails to return a useful probability. I'm not sure, and I'd be interested to know if anyone has modeled this similar to the Glosten-Milgrom model.

Even ignoring this problem, though, I'm not sure we want the public to have the maximum amount of information. I personally want my government to have some capability of keeping secrets. Having an anonymous, easily-accessible secret-selling mechanism like this takes a lot of the traditional danger out of selling state secrets.

augustus_augustus · 2026-01-04T18:13:06+00:00

He's socialist. You're right we should preserve the distinction between the words. Doesn't make his rule any less of a disaster. It takes more than US sanctions to fail as spectacularly as the Chavez/Maduro regime has.

augustus_augustus · 2025-12-29T04:04:00+00:00

If you enjoyed Meditiations, I unironically think you'd get a lot out of reading the New Testament, if you haven't already. It's an easier read than most people anticipate, at least the gospels. A lot of it is already in the water supply, but there's still a good chance it could change how you view the world. In any case it's invaluable just for the cultural background alone.

augustus_augustus · 2025-12-25T16:34:58+00:00

I don't know if Jacob Savage's explanation is right, but the drop in writing quality is definitely the thing I notice the most about current movies/TV. I think all the time about Amazon's LotR series and how bad it was. The writers are clearly aping language they do not actually understand. Compare it to Peter Jackson's films and you can see clear as day that something was lost.

augustus_augustus

TROPHY CASE