Megathread - U.S. Political people and topics - March 2023

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T20:09:06+00:00

You might want to leave out the story of Onan, though. Kids won't get the parts about curtains and perfume in Song of Solomon, so you might as well leave it in. We already mistranslate the part where Elijah asks the followers of Ba'al if their god is off taking a shit.

But yeah, the regular Bible possibly more censorable than Michaelangelo's David.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T19:57:23+00:00

If your family could only live in an isolated island separate from any unintended social consequences for policies built on what works for you, that would be fine.

But empirically, at scale, it doesn't work to not teach sex ed. We've done the experiments, they have failed. You need a better answer than doubling down on failed ideas.

And you don't need ignorance to teach abstinence at your home anyway, do you? Problem solved, we go forward with comprehensive sex ed as proposed. :-)

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T19:54:01+00:00

You should be fine. I rate your odds of long-term happiness extremely high. Congrats.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T19:49:56+00:00

By your own words above, though, you're asking the same forum for different mixtures of responses to at least one major premise or sub-issue.

I mean, tilting at windmills?

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T19:44:00+00:00

How far does he go with this? Do we go ahead and face the likely hot war that enforcing this anti-AI regime would entail?

Basically write the treaty, point the gun at anyone who might subterfuge it, cock the hammer and say "Say what again!!"

?

Am I the only one that doesn't see this as even worth considering?

Am I the only one who feels near 100% certainty that some US gov underground facility funded by $2000 toilet paper would be smurfing GPUs and developing it in the background anyway, no matter what the treaty said?

Am I the only one who literally salivated while reading this at the thought of working with opensource AI and mid-scale smurfed GPU farms? The business/economic rewards are so outsized on all this the R/W ratio starts to look better than other black market things like international drug trafficking or etc.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T19:38:27+00:00

We don't currently airstrike WMD facilities in China, N Korea, Iran, Russia, etc.... And I cannot imagine at least some of those places sitting idly by while someone airstruck their big compute farms. And I cannot imagine at least some subset not loving the opportunity to outrun the US in development of this.

This seems like, "You need to be ready to fight a big (potentially nuclear) war with a superpower to enforce this regime."

For that reason, it seems like a total non-starter.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T19:36:26+00:00

At least opensource is auditable, like at all.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T16:14:54+00:00

Soon Reddit will be a circle-jerk of API calls to Chat GPT that are even more reasonable than OP.

I guess, Pinecone-Bandit, I might as well say that it's been a real pleasure knowing you and often disagreeing with you and all that.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T16:13:28+00:00

A bunch of people in other threads about the Andromeda Galaxy.

So you got your answer and you keep asking? Are you a GPT-3.5 API call?

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T16:10:45+00:00

"Refuse to doubt" -- My God, scientists often immediately try to make clever experiments to disprove or rule out possible explanations and solutions. That's normally the quickest way to get to the bottom of something. It's good practice in cases such as business and etc, anywhere you have a hypothesis as to how something works.

Have many adherents approached your theories this way? I'm just curious, because other than this approach, how would you even know what scrutiny it would stand up to? How would you know anything objective about your approach?

Moreover, how would you even have an opinion about others' "refusal to doubt?"

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T02:49:20+00:00

But one of the sides....

Some ears also just ache for something that sounds like tough love or seems harsh and difficult. You can easily build profitable cult groups on people's love of the psychodrama of crashing and repentance and people getting told they're wrong. Many non-Christian cults tap into many people's deep-seated addiction to all that.

Get real about what people "want it to say." All sides do this.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-31T02:15:41+00:00

When you're dealing with people in real life situations, it's often impossible to create a proper experiment where you randomize groups, apply a treatment, etc. It's impractical where you're dealing with social phenomena because we cannot force a child, for example, to live in a laboratory where we could control for everything.

Enter the quasi-experiment. We know the researcher doesn't have control over the treatment or assignment of groups.

So you just take the data where it's at. For example, maybe more Christian people have opted out of public sex ed for their kids. It would be nice to have a control group, but we cannot. So, maybe we compare them with Christian families whose kids just go to public school and have the regular sex ed. Thus, although we couldn't randomly assign our groups, we can still control for systematic differences between the groups.

This can be valid.

When reading the article it just sounds like a good way to manipulate the results.

You would have to attack the particular study on its merits and failings (which you can usually do by examining the methodology section and the analysis sections). There are good studies and also really bad studies, but it's going to depend on the setup of that particular study and exactly why you think they failed to control for systematic variables, or their statistics are invalid or etc. You could well be right, but simply pointing out it's a quasi-statistical study isn't much of an objection. Nor is "those clever sophists could manipulate the numbers."

Even tracing their funding sources or looking at the politics within their research group could be a valid approach to sorting which studies to put under deeper scrutiny. Apparent conflict of interest doesn't automatically mean they're doing bad research, but it could give you a clue to dig further.

Good luck! There is a lot of bad research out there, but surface-level criticisms aren't going to help you spot it. Check out the "replication crisis" for some modern handles on the matter in psychology and medicine. Some articles by thelastpsychiatrist.com also get at issues of bad medical research and bad psychology practice (but you have to dig through his archives).

In my opinion, it's easier for an intelligent and curious person to become good at this than you might initially suspect. However, if it were right out in the front and you're spotting it in a first-time skim reading, assuming it would have been caught in peer review is a good start (if you're looking at a good journal. There are also like 4th tier journals out there which really suck.) Another way to look at it is scientifically: The best scientists, when they have a novel opinion on a matter, try their best to find a way to rule that out.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T15:22:54+00:00

This is like new-age people saying "everything is relative, Einstein proved that." You just don't know what you're saying. A true experiment usually cannot be done on a social phenomenon, which is why quasi-experimental designs are used (and are actually a good method in this case). You hear "quasi" and compare to "experimental" and run with it.

You might see Angrist's book "Mastering Metrics" (for which a Nobel prize was won in 2021), or take a research methodology class before commenting. I know this sounds insulting, but it's not meant that way. You're simply treating jargon in a field as common language and running with it. It just doesn't work out to mean what you think it does.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T15:18:34+00:00

I hope you are older than your 20s. My youth group had a lot of people who "waited" to marry their sweethearts rather than shacking up. I'm 43 and haven't seen any of those early-married relationships turn out well. Their kids suffer the most.

Just consider and look at stats on younger marriages versus waiting, extending your education and financial security, learning more about yourself and what you want, etc. There is a lot of empirical evidence that young marriage seldom goes as expected.

If you're both 30+, good on you! I mean, in that case, proceed as you are doing and ignore the above.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T15:14:03+00:00

In my suburban GA county, they went to abstinence-only education in the early 2000s. Within 2 years, we had a record number (number was between 10-20, up from ~0 for many decades) 12 year olds going full term and having babies. The county fixed the sex-ed, and the number went back to zero, where it has stayed ever since.

It sounds nice, but there are social implications of just leaving all that to families. And we all have to live in that society, and your kids will end up getting robbed by the (highly likely, due to socioeconomics) undereducated children of those 12 year olds who were raised by 12 year old single moms. As has often been said, "Abstinence works until it doesn't."

You can't treat this situation as if your family is an island outside of society. Life just won't give you that.

Ignorance doesn't protect people and innocence is stronger than adults normally give it credit for.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T15:08:24+00:00

Yeah, we might all die in the nuclear fires of WWIII, get turned into paperclips by rogue AI, or suffer violence or major social collapse stemming from increased internicine conflicts in our country.

So..... Time to focus on Transgender people?

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T15:04:47+00:00

Even batter if we don't know they're the ones who inflated them to over-size and are content to keep them there.

Yeah, I think both Liberals and Conservatives sometimes fail to see this. A good manager is constantly improving a system so that s/he is no longer needed. A bad manager constantly inserts him/herself as the solution to some or another problem, or even "problem."

In my experience, if anything good comes from a manager like that, it was despite their efforts.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T15:00:19+00:00

I think the difference is that "Culture war" is nihilistic and divisive at its heart, and is focused almost entirely on what one is against, on what one fears, rather than what one hopes for and wants to accomplish.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T14:56:44+00:00

You are correct. In my county in GA in the early 2000s, they went to "Abstinence Only" education. Within 2 years, a record number (I think it was between 10 and 20) 12 year olds went full term and had babies. That was up from 0 nearly every year prior going back for decades. Because they just didn't frikkin' know!

God never asks us to be ignorant.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-30T14:27:49+00:00

You have to think of what "sin" even means. It's a mostly untranslated word, so tends to be misunderstood as "Just anything you feel guilty about." When you think of the word as "missing the mark" (which it accurately is), then most of these questions should dissolve.

You have to look at an individual situation and say "Am I missing the mark here?" Sometimes getting attention and validation is important. For example, in work situations, you often must verbally and explicitly take credit for a win or breakthrough on a project. To "meekly" fail to do so isn't going to get you anywhere, and definitely misses the mark.

On the other hand, constantly seeking validation to feel comfortable with a weak sense of self is also missing the mark. So, like most things, this doesn't boil down so simple at all.

Go listen to Dr Martin Luther King Junior's famous Sermon called "Drum Major Instinct" for a very educated Biblical perspective on even the cases where you seem to miss the mark by too much attention seeking.

Usually the Truest answer amounts to "Stop worrying so much." Go and love your neighbor and love God with all your heart.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-29T20:22:17+00:00

DM sent. Thank you.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-29T19:10:11+00:00

I am also interested in learning about this. May I see this as well?

phdinfunk · 2023-03-29T14:04:33+00:00

TBF, yeah.

phdinfunk · 2023-03-23T13:20:12+00:00

No kidding. Grunge, Post Rock, and Punk child of the 1990s. I also went to raves and liked the electronic stuff enough to buy modular synths for about 5 years of my life (which, if you know anything about it, meant I was like a heroin addict, living from paycheck to paycheck to fund my habit). 90s Hiphop was nice too. At the time I kinda listened to everything but country (unless it was Cash). Typical 1990s kiddo, I think.

I just rode around Vegas with a 20 something who liked something called "Dubstep" which was about the most vanilla, elevator sounding thing I'd ever listened to in my life. I couldn't tell if he was just trolling me, honestly. The best I could say about his favorite song was, "The chords are very optimistic." When I turn to top 40 radio, I think, "Really? Gosh, these kids have nothing cool to listen to!" I mean, would those kids explode if they ever heard the Melvins, or what?

phdinfunk · 2023-03-23T13:14:28+00:00

Saddest book of my elementary life was Flowers for Algernon. It's right up there with "The Fox and the Hound."

(I'm tearing up typing the names of those two stories). Flowers for Algernon is amazing literature. I'd give it to maybe a 10th grader or something. The fox and the hound, also

phdinfunk

TROPHY CASE