thesteamboat

Sorry to nitpick, but I assume you mean EU houses are better insulated than those in the US, rather than isolated.

But crucially, the incentives are different than those people have in the middle of their lives.

Most people's usual incentives lead to them optimizing for the short-to-medium term future, i.e. the next couple of months or years.

People on their deathbed will optimize either for the extremely short term (finishing this conversation) or the extremely long term (the last chance to affect how they'll be remembered).

This suggests that if people lie on their death bed, they'll lie in different ways than ordinarily. Even if you can't take deathbed statements as unvarnished truth, their differences from everyday statements can be revealing.

Presumably they (scalpers and miners) are not buying in large enough bulk orders, far enough in advance.

I too wish to add this to my repertoire. I don't think it will replace :s, but occasionally I find myself copying a line to use as a template. When I go to change each line I'm changing a particular part to different things. Assuming I remember, this trick seems like a good approach.

I don't think the parent was talking about JIT power generation but rather using JIT (in other industries) as a comparison to to talk about the efficiency-reliability tradeoff. The analogy here is cost savings of avoiding winterization make the power companies more competitive (more efficient) but less reliable.

You are, of course, right in the all specific details you've brought up vis-a-vis the winterizing and the nature of the power grid. I just think you missed the parent's point slightly.

I have seen you and others make this point in the past, it and always seems equivalent to creationists shouting "Scientists who believe in evolution are the REAL dogmatists who don't want to look at the facts! We are really being persecuted by the religion of Science!"

Your talk on this subject (helpfully posted below) only furthers this when you present a variety of arguments of wildly varying strengths against AI, in the same vein as "37 challenges to evolution". It makes me feel like you have some valid criticism and a lot of bad faith argumentation.

Sadly, I think this characterization is only mostly unfair rather than entirely so. I enjoy your writing and thoughts, and you speak with clarity, but on this subject I think you have constructed a mold of bad-AI-argumentation that you squeeze all AI-argumentation into and in so doing fail to rebut any of it.

Comments are probably have positive usefulness expected value in a probabilistic sense. Unfortunately extracting that value, separating the insights from the dross, is work and requires effort. Effort that perhaps the person doing the original work being commented on shouldn't necessarily be expected to take up.

Additionally, human nature makes it hard to receive legitimate criticism dispassionately, let alone when it comes in a big pile of stuff that also contains pointless abuse.

There is value in comments, but depending on a project's circumstances it may or may not be economical to extract it.

Both sides are guilty to some degree, but, and this is the crucial point, not to the SAME degree.

I think I'd rather have a comment "this site might be helpful" on the page than not. It doesn't take long to classify a link as either potentially helpful or useless, and I'm usually finding the SO page through a google search anyway. That may indicate I don't know the right query or jargon for what I want. In any case, I'd rather that SO err on the side of redundancy.

If you hold that all governments are unethical do you pay taxes, get mail, stop driving if pulled over by a policeman, etc.? Is it equally unethical for a government to provide for collective defense, collect taxes, enforce contracts, imprison people or to control borders?

If you're willing to admit that there are gradations to the inherent unethicalness of government actions then it's at least conceivable to grade them on the same ethical scale as every other group.

You have fundamentally the same position as someone who claims "there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism." There may be some truth to that worldview, but people have to live in the world where both governments and capitalism are the status quo. Both sentiments are broad enough to critique a large fraction of human society, and thus can be pulled out as a 'reason' for targeting any particular aspect one may instinctively dislike without having to put in the mental effort to determine why.

Secondly, you say Facebook has governance only over people who have given their consent. Taking second order effects into account this is clearly not true. Facebook was named as one of the "determining" factors in the Rohingya genocide by UN Fact Finding Mission. Negative externalities exist, and in practice they can be quite common.

> his incentives are still infinitely better than those of any government because Facebook's status is built on consent rather than coercion.

Is your position that all governance is coercive and thus inherently unethical? That seems like a philosophical position fundamentally in conflict with living in the modern world.

Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook's voting stock. While Facebook the platform may have grown in unforeseen ways, Facebook the company remains ultimately (legally) under the control of one man. There is no reasonable comparison between Tim Berners Lee and Mark Zuckerberg when considering how much influence they have over their creations.

I largely agree with you and think that my views fall closer to yours than the GPs. I'd endorse free speech absolutism as probably the best system in the vein of "Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others". That being said

> Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).

I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.

I acknowledge the context of this article is bad behavior by censorious figures, I'll admit it is a serious free speech problem, but unfortunately I must dispute that it is the most important.

I think the mirror of this on the left manifests as performative wokeness, e.g. using whatever leftist language is at hand as a cudgel to settle political scores.

> It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.

I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions. What we had was something like the pretense of objectivity, which was probably good enough for what we needed. I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.