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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I’ve been called many names, including “tankie”, so I’ll take a stab at responding.

    I’m not mad about the debate at all. I expected something fairly similar. I’m mad that Biden and the Democratic leadership seems to have put their own interests above the interest of the party people (edit: Ugh. Terrible typo).

    If Biden had gracefully stepped aside and given just about any other Democrat his full support, we’d be in a much better position now. Instead we have a candidate with a ton of baggage and who presents an easy target for Trump’s style of argument. Many mainstream Democrats, including the NYT, are finally starting to realize this. Unfortunately it’s probably a year too late. At this point it would just make it look like Demoratic kingmakers forced him out.

    If I went by the modern definition of “tankie” as, an anti-american authoritarian communist. I probably wouldn’t be mad at any of this. I’d be cackling with glee because either of the current nominees will be terrible for the US. Neither of them has a serious long term plan. Neither of them can articulate a policy position. Both of them will continue to erode the power and moral authority of the United States.

    Like it or not. Trump is likely to be the next president https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/. At this point it’s probably wise to start thinking about how to limit his impact and how to start cleaning up the mess afterwards.


  • Biden seems to misunderstand why he won.

    He seems to think that people were really impressed with him as a candidate and that since he’s so much more impressive than all the other potential Democratic nominees, he’s the only logical choice to try to beat Trump.

    He certainly enjoyed the support of many people who believe that but he relied heavily on the support of several other cohorts to push him over the edge. Those cohorts didn’t like him. They didn’t like him at all. They just hated Trump more, held their noses, and voted for Not Trump.

    Biden has been telling several of those cohorts that their priorities don’t matter. He had tenuous support from those groups and he took that support for granted. Many of those groups are now thinking, “You failed to deliver on the one thing we wanted from you. I no longer see you as a significant improvement over Trump.”

    Claiming that they’re just throwing a tantrum over a raspy voice further trivializes their concerns and pushes them farther away.

    A clever MAGA troll would make exactly this kind of post. All it does alienate critical voters from Democrats.



  • “Worse than expected,” depends largely on the individual and what they were expecting. It comes down to expecting one thing and being disappointed in the outcome.

    People who expected him to be an ally of immigrants are disappointed in his border policies.
    People who expected him to fix Trumps “easy” trade wars are disappointed in his trade policies.
    People who expected him to support labor are disappointed in his ban of the railroad workers strike.
    People who expected him to champion human rights are disappointed in his support of the IDF.

    He may have met your expectations and the expectations of the majority of Democrats. Biden’s 2020 victory depended on several groups who only showed up because they hoped that he would address their specific concerns.


  • If we’re going by current usage rather than historical precedent, it doesn’t matter that “antisemitc” was originally coined to refer to hatred of Jews.

    In that case we would look to the very common usage that includes hatred of all the other speakers of Semitic languages.

    Or we could use the extremist definition of, “Any criticism of Israel.” If we go by that definition a whole lot of people (including many Jews) would also qualify.






  • A bunch of scientific papers are probably better data than a bunch of Reddit posts and it’s still not good enough.

    Consider the task we’re asking the AI to do. If you want a human to be able to correctly answer questions across a wide array of scientific fields you can’t just hand them all the science papers and expect them to be able to understand it. Even if we restrict it to a single narrow field of research we expect that person to have a insane levels of education. We’re talking 12 years of primary education, 4 years as an undergraduate and 4 more years doing their PhD, and that’s at the low end. During all that time the human is constantly ingesting data through their senses and they’re getting constant training in the form of feedback.

    All the scientific papers in the world don’t even come close to an education like that, when it comes to data quality.


  • Haha. Not specifically.

    It’s more a comment on how hard it is to separate truth from fiction. Adding glue to pizza is obviously dumb to any normal human. Sometimes the obviously dumb answer is actually the correct one though. Semmelweis’s contemporaries lambasted him for his stupid and obviously nonsensical claims about doctors contaminating pregnant women with “cadaveric particles” after performing autopsies.

    Those were experts in the field and they were unable to guess the correctness of the claim. Why would we expect normal people or AIs to do better?

    There may be a time when we can reasonably have such an expectation. I don’t think it will happen before we can give AIs training that’s as good as, or better, than what we give the most educated humans. Reading all of Reddit, doesn’t even come close to that.






  • There is no single reason. It’s the sum of many reasons. They’re too many to list exhaustively but when we see a concrete example the vast majority of people come to the same conclusion on creepy vs appropriate.

    When there isn’t a clear line, trying to define one is misleading. You can always find some couple somewhere on earth with an arbitrarily large age gap where people will agree that it’s the result of informed consent. People then try to make the argument that this justifies all relationships with that age gap even though most relationships don’t have whatever extenuating circumstances made the one example palatable.

    Large age gaps are creepy. Whenever someone has to ask if a particular age gap is also creepy the answer is almost always, “Yes.”



  • The girls themselves are mostly “all for it” when it’s people roughly their age. There are exceptions but most girls that age see 30+ year olds as lame old dudes. Most 30+ year olds aren’t going after high school girls either. That’s why we all cringed at David Woodson’s line in “Dazed and Confused”.

    The people who don’t want them to “exert this right” are the responsible parents, friends and community who know that a 30+ year old dating a teenager is creepy AF.

    The few people who actually support this are mostly rationalizing.