crackrook

Yes that is definitionally cynical and also factually inaccurate. (U.S.) Non-profits are legally obligated to file public tax returns detailing revenues and expenditures. This represents at least one way that you yourself can vet charities. Unless you think a large portion of charities are successfully defrauding the IRS and/or colluding with third-party charity watchdogs the odds of a given charity being an outright scam are low. There is a question of efficiency and impact, there's always the chance that a corrupt local government will siphon away well-intentioned dollars or that medicine will expire before it can be administered; maybe one could make the case that many charities are disappointingly inefficient, but that's very different from saying it's completely futile to donate.

Privilege endures. The lucky player gets a good roll against the odds, the privileged player casts loaded dice. You can be privileged because you were once lucky (e.g. you were born to parents who bequeathed their loaded dice to you), but you cannot be lucky because you are/were privileged

This is probably a bit unhinged but sometimes I will talk to an AI about my interpersonal problems as if I am the other party. I feel that this can be helpful for better understanding the other person, mainly because I first have to make an effort to speak from their point of view (though I suppose a journal would be just as good for this). My hope is that, since the AI doesn't know it's talking to me, it will be less liable to blow smoke up my ass.

I don't know anything about Google's architecture but I would guess that the average Gemini request per search query is < 1, surely there's a lot of caching that can be done and a lot of money to be saved by doing so.

Yes, in my interpretation, though not in isolation.

> It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas.

You originally expressed surprise that skeptics hold this book in high regard. I just find your surprise a bit difficult to understand. If, on the whole, the work advocates for skepticism (among other things), wouldn't endorsing it be the consistent choice for skeptics? I would never throw out a programming textbook if it criticized and emphasized the too-common tendency of programmers to over-engineer solutions.

> He goes out of his way in the book to label skepticism and criticize it.

Respectfully, I disagree, his criticism reads to me primarily as a criticism of dogmatism. First and foremost he seemed to identify as a "scientist", but he also maintained that you can't have effective science without skepticism.

> He did not wish to be thought of as a skeptic.

I would just differ by saying "He did not wish to be thought of only as a skeptic," I am not sure if that is a complete departure from your intent.

I read those Sagan quotes as a criticism of capital "S" Skeptics, those for whom skepticism is an identity perhaps more than it is a means to an end. I feel that Sagan's ultimate goal is to foster skepticism (or at least a refined version thereof), and that he is merely offering a warning about tribalism and ego.

Just reacting to the executive summary: where are the tradeoffs? The port decreased memory usage on the client significantly, by how much did the server's burden increase? How have their hosting costs changed now that less work is being offloaded to the clients?

> I'd love to collect on this debt somehow when you're proven wrong in our lifetimes.

Sorry, this is a thread on an internet forum, I'm afraid I don't owe you anything.

If you want to engage with the actual points I've endeavored to make, in good faith, instead of telling me how ignorant you think I am and doubling down on appeals to authority, I would gladly continue this conversation. For what it's worth: I'd love to see proof that you're right, sneaky non-human intelligences living and crashing known-physics defying spaceships in the shadows would be beyond interesting! However, I don't really feel like I can be "proven wrong" because I'm not really making claims here. You asserted something to be "basically fact", and I haven't told you that you're wrong, my argument was that your theories seem implausible, though possible.

First, "conspiracies can't be true" was definitely not the point. You're right, conspiracies happen, governments do keep secrets! The point was: if a conspiracy theory with poor evidence were to be a reasonable explanation for another claim's poor evidence, I could claim whatever outlandish thing I wanted, e.g. "Unicorns are real, our puppet masters just don't want you to know about them!" This explanation is hard to falsify, and (in my view) shouldn't be our top choice, it's definitely not enough for me to regard the ultimate unicorn claim as "well-established fact."

If I wanted to make a compelling argument for my conspiracy theory, I would not only want to explain how the government has managed to keep this profound secret about unicorns, I'd want to to explain why it was theirs to keep in the first place. In a world with many sovereign nations with a vast array of publicly and privately-funded research institutions, camera-toting citizens, security cameras, wildlife cameras, etc., why is the U.S. government holding all of the compelling evidence? Or is not just the U.S.? Maybe we explain this with more conspiracies? Or maybe one really big conspiracy? Do you think it's likely that the government could keep narwhals a secret?

I haven't/wouldn't make any claims about David Grusch being who he says is, I haven't intentionally made any truth claims at all here; that said, whatever titles Grusch formerly held, and whatever title his lawyers formerly held, those titles don't, in my view, grant him credibility in perpetuity, maybe one could argue that they didn't grant much in the first place. The same goes for members of Congress. Should we believe Marjorie Taylor Greene if she tells us "The Jews" are starting forest fires with their space lasers to serve their malicious globalist agendas, on the basis that she's a congresswoman?

If you or anyone else has evidence, I'd urge them to be agents of truth and go update Grusch's Wikipedia article, at the time of writing this it states: > No evidence supporting Grusch's UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.

Or, perhaps we go searching for explanations as to why Wikipedia or the news organizations it accepts citations from are mere puppets of the conspirators, but at that point, who's being tiresome?

Sorry, dumb thing to write. That's not at all Occam's razor is and I clearly need to get educated.

The person you're replying to wasn't the one who invoked what you call "partisan thought short circuiting," (which, I have to say, reads a lot like parody). It was me. Occam's razor is not at all about "what I prefer" and is entirely about preferring theories with evidence over those that are lacking (instead of inventing new theories to explain away the lack of evidence).

> the correct scenario is wide declassification

It sounds to me like you and I see the same expansive hole where the evidence should be. My preference would be to say "show me a claim without a hole or stop wasting my time," you appear to assume that the evidence exists - because someone "credible" said it's so - and demand that the hole be filled immediately.

To claim there exists a grand conspiracy and web of well-kept secrets, ironically, is to try to explain away the first substanceless claim with a new one.