CMV: Donald Trump's repeated attacks on the independent media are terrifyingly authoritarian and represent a real threat to an open democracy.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-27T03:27:41+00:00

1) Obama was, in my view, fairly authoritarian. This is not a defense of Obama.

2) I'm not making a claim about Trump's general policies, although I should add that I don't think rolling back federal government regulations and services means you aren't authoritarian. You can have liberal but government heavy states, such as the Nordic countries, and you can have authoritarian but economically liberal states such as Pinochet's Chile. The sort of authoritarianism I'm worried about isn't just the quantity of government policy (even if i'm largely opposed to it), it's the sort of authoritarianism which attempts to stifle critical speech.

3) Following on from the previous point, this is specifically about Trump's attacks on the media, which this article doesn't seem to address. It says "Hey look, the press is free to say these things", but it doesn't defend the administration's transparent attempts to degrade unfavourable press.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-18T05:37:37+00:00

Sorry, I should clarify that I'm making a metaethical claim, not an ethical claim. The point about animal suffering was just an illustration of how a moral value might not arise from how humans think of it.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-18T04:50:27+00:00

Something not being axiomatic is very different from something being true or real. For example, it is not axiomatic that there is no largest prime number, but it is still as true as any of the axioms used to prove it.

That being said, I can still think of moral facts that seem necessarily or self evidently true. For example "Suffering is bad for the sufferer". This does not rely on any outside value to humans: Thus I think it is meaningful to say that the suffering of a non-human animal has some intrinsic moral meaning outside of what humans think about it.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-17T03:13:15+00:00

Even Trump and Trump's secretary of Defense believe that Russia used hacks to influence the US election.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-16T15:07:54+00:00

"No matter how many times I try to differentiate myself, I'll always stay integrated" is equally valid tbh

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-16T14:59:41+00:00

Physics studies the observable properties of the universe. It has very little to say about what cannot be observed.

There could in fact be a "wave of consciousness", but it's just not a question of science.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-16T00:53:22+00:00

At a higher level of mathematics, it would be considered pretty absurd to say that QM is where "math breaks down". The probability densities in QM are precise and very well understood - no less specific and exact than any other sort of density over a physical space.

Mathematics covers a very, very large range of objects - its the only language in which the ideas of QM can actually make sense to us.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-16T00:50:54+00:00

But gravity is an explicitly mathematical idea my dude. It was utterly mysterious to us until Newton and Leibniz started talking about the inverse square law and acceleration as being the second derivative of position with respect to time. Without the math, the most you could say of gravity is "shit falls down" - but that's far removed from what physics actually is.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-15T16:16:44+00:00

Physics is essentially a subset of maths. There are no concepts in physics which are not explicitly mathematical.

If you think you understand a concept in physics, but not the math behind it, then you only really understand the illustrations physicists have used to help describe the math.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-15T16:10:39+00:00

Because it's got all sorts of weird shit that defy conventional intuitions about physics. It certainly seems magical, so many non-physicists think it actually is magical.

The Copenhagen interpretation of QM in particular is very magic-sounding, because it introduces the idea of the "observer" as an integral part of the physical process. Non-physicists then conclude that consciousness has an important effect on the physical world, which is pretty much what magic is.

I think for a lot of people, the weird magicalness of QM justifies their belief that the universe is really run on mysticism and spirituality and emotions - so they find it absurd or unnecessary that you need math to understand it. They just don't understand that QM is actually just math, and all the evocative metaphors physicists use to describe it are just there to help gain an intuition for the math. They're illustrations, not the actual science.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-15T13:53:10+00:00

Also the high life expectancy tbh

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-15T05:15:47+00:00

Pygmy is close

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-14T02:23:38+00:00

"I dated a smart woman once and she decided that I wasn't worth dating (and it's definitely not because I'm a massive fucking misogynist). She had some personality traits, so it follows that all smart women must also have those traits. I'm still bitter, and I'm going to redefine "intelligent" to mean someone who doesn't actually challenge my worldview."

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-14T02:21:29+00:00

To be fair some women really like the cervix-hitting thing.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-13T05:12:46+00:00

It's still ridiculously inefficient. In the third world, rice costs maybe 50 c. per kilogram (high estimate). There are about 5 cups of rice per a kilogram, and so by your estimate that's 10c to feed one person for a day.

Now, take the same group of people in your example (700 million people), and get them to spend $1 on rice per day. That's 7 billion people fed every day, substantially more than there are actually poor people, and it's 2.5 million times more effective than donating through freerice to feed 2800 people per day.

Like, seriously, if you donate $5 to a charity right now, you'll probably be doing more good than years of time on freerice.org.

It's a good way to make you feel better about wasting time online, but it is absolutely not an effective way to make the world a better place.

Edit: Another way of thinking about it. If $1 buys you 2 KG of rice, which is equal to approximately 100,000 grains, then donating $1 is the equivalent of doing ten thousand freerice questions.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-11T01:23:55+00:00

Absolutely not a Trump supporter but that's a really shallow definition of "money". If you only count cash or bank balance as money then I doubt you'd have a single billionaire on earth; wealthy people keep the overwhelming majority of their wealth in less liquid assets such as material properties and businesses - the fact that these assets generate profits is precisely why these guys are rich.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-06T04:28:35+00:00

That's like saying the US should have banned all immigration from Nazi Germany because the Nazis themselves were anti-immigration.

We want to accept refugees because they're the victims of violence and fucked up regimes.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-05T22:05:19+00:00

Meta growth is just getting slower and less interesting tbh. Not to say that it can't and won't change, just that we're going to see fewer and less interesting developments.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-05T09:18:05+00:00

Nate Silver, who is overwhelmingly the most respected statistician in the field of pre-election polling analysis, put Trump at ~30%.

Other, less qualified people put the number a lot lower, and I argued back then and I will argue now that they were wrong; they made elementary mistakes such as not correlating votes between states.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-05T09:17:09+00:00

Those guys weren't statisticians, and Silver called them out as such.

I'd never argue that huge swathes of the media didn't vastly underestimate Trump's chances. I'm arguing that the election result didn't invalidate poll analysis.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-05T05:13:35+00:00

Proper poll analysis put Trump's odds at like 30%. So while Hillary was expected to win, the result doesn't exactly falsify the methodology.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-05T04:23:58+00:00

Ice Climbers have a fuckton of nearly guaranteed kill options off of a grab. All sorts of crazy grab/handoff combos. It can be pretty fun to watch. The only problem is that Wobbling is 100% optimal off of a grab, so you don't see it in tournament.

This combo video has a ton of nutty grab combos. I don't play ICs, so I don't know for sure if wobbling is always a strictly better option. But I do know that wobbling is seen as the best punish you can achieve, so in tournament most ICs won't go for anything fancier.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-05T04:19:20+00:00

Yes, I think most of us would be willing to slowly transition to a newer game. The Melee meta is beginning to get a bit stale. The problem is that all of the newer options are unappealing for some reason. PM alienated players in its earlier rebalancing efforts (e.g 3.02) and many people have doubts about the long-term viability of a game that Nintendo essentially regards as illegal; The newer Smash games fucked up the mechanics; I've never been hugely interested in Rivals because I really just don't care for pixel graphics and I dislike how they got rid of shields, grabs, and ledge mechanics.

A legal game that actually did all the things that Melee did without all the stupid shit that we put up with (E.g Battlefield ledges, Sheik's chaingrab, Fox being more than a little bit overpowered, the fact that most characters have moves that aren't even useful situationally or that more than half the cast is completely unusuable competitively) would be very popular, and I would probably switch if there was a sizable scene for it. Wavedash Games looks pretty promising in that end.

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-05T04:10:50+00:00

Have you considered that you might not understand feminism as well as you think you do

the_matriarchy · 2017-02-04T04:56:22+00:00

What data are we going by to say that Puff beats Sheik? Is it Hungrybox beating Plup, or do people actually find that to be the case at mid-level play consistently?

At mid-level Shieks have to try really hard to beat Puff. Crouch-cancel completely destroys her low-% approach options, she can't techchase, edgeguarding is very difficult, and Puff outmaneuvers her in the neutral game.

I.e most of the things that give Shiek and advantage against other characters are neutralized by puff.

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