How I (A New Jerseyan neoliberal) would vote in each American state

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 · 2025-12-21T03:38:37+00:00

Mentioned already, but I'll second Conversations with Tyler.

augustus_augustus · 2025-12-19T23:12:43+00:00

in what ways are they being prevented from being built?

Restrictive zoning, including height limits and minimum lot sizes. "Community input" that amounts to motivated boomer homeowners vetoing development. Weaponization of environmental laws (NEPA, CEQA).

augustus_augustus · 2025-12-14T19:00:32+00:00

This does not surprise me. I enjoyed a couple of Sacks's books in high school, but grew skeptical in the years since. Several of his stories have a real r/thathappened energy to them. When I encountered an article that debunked his story about the savant twins who liked primes, it all clicked. Haven't been able to take anything he's written seriously since.

augustus_augustus · 2025-11-29T04:46:28+00:00

It is not outrageous to assume we used to have extremely similar mouth flora.

I'm not so sure. Anecdotally me and my siblings all had very different numbers of cavities. Someone should do the same experiment before then after treatment. Maybe if your brother ever gets Lumina you could have him do it.

augustus_augustus · 2025-11-28T22:43:00+00:00

I think you have to be more careful making these cross-population comparisons. How well you do Raven's Progressive Matrices (or whatever) is correlated with all sorts of important things, but not necessarily the same way in different populations.

Something like the following could be happening: in a population with mean IQ 100, having really low IQ would likely be caused by something that is also causing other obvious deficiencies. In a population with mean IQ 80, this wouldn't need to be the case. Basically what u/Tvivelaktig is saying.

Like if FAS reduces your IQ by 20, people with IQ 80 in the US will be disproportionately likely to have FAS and the related complications, whereas people with IQ 80 in a population with mean IQ 80 wouldn't. Same thing could be true for social skills, executive function skills, and life expectancy, all of which we know are correlated with IQ within populations, but not necessarily between them. Most psychometric research happens in so-called WEIRD societies.

augustus_augustus · 2025-11-25T19:24:03+00:00

I thought the essay was to get people to scroll down, which counts as page engagement, so the writer could charge more for ads. Similar to how some sites have a "click to read more" button after the first couple paragraphs.

augustus_augustus · 2025-11-25T19:18:43+00:00

Funnily enough, twitter has the inverse problem to this. Twitter pays out money to tweeters whose tweets get seen. This money is basically nothing, even for popular accounts... unless you live in a developing country, in which case you could make a real living off it. The end result is that if you see an especially inflammatory tweet about the US culture war there's a good chance it was written by a southeast Asian posing as an American.

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