doctorpotatomd @doctorpotatomd - Tumblr Blog

we're at the stage of the exponential where Anthropic employees randomly tweet out counterexamples to famous conjectures

morlock-holmes

We're at the stage of the exponential where Anthropic employees find counterexamples to famous conjectures but you have to run the code proving the counterexample on a sandbox because there's a good chance that the AI put some malicious code in by accident.

no-sharks-on-the-sun

what are you talking about

morlock-holmes

The quote I posted right before this, from here:

It’s been an interesting few weeks for counterexamples. This post is basically my perspective of what has been going on in the world of form

One cannot trust AI-generated code so I ran it in a sandbox on my machine (malicious Lean code can run arbitrary commands on your computer — Lean is a programming language, after all). Indeed, it was proving nontrivial theorems about the cohomology of number fields. Wow.

no-sharks-on-the-sun

this is very silly. the question of whether or not to trust a piece of code has nothing to do with whether or not it's AI generated (AI does not spontaneously generate malicious behavior unprompted) and everything to do with how much you trust its source.

if you get hacked by a malicious lean program it's because a human either wrote it to be malicious or prompted an AI to write it maliciously, not because the AI just sorta spontaneously decided to do that.

morlock-holmes

Did I misunderstand this story?

A startup was left scrambling after a rogue AI agent deleted swaths of code underpinning its business

It sort of looks like AI does do destructive things in response to perfectly innocent, non-destructive prompts.

Maybe "malicious" was the wrong word because it implies some intent, I probably should have said "destructive" or something like that.

no-sharks-on-the-sun

yeah, this is again a completely different issue - this is an AI agent run continuously in a harness, which they gave permission to delete their production database. that's not the same thing as running code that has been written by AI (and typically reviewed/verified by a human)

morlock-holmes

The question at hand isn't whether this is a responsible use of the tool; the question is whether the tool will do destructive things when prompted in a non-destructive way.

Why would you need a human to review/verify the code if it only does destructive things when explicitly prompted to do so?

I sort of thought it was because it occasionally sneaks destructive stuff in there.

morlock-holmes

To be clear, don't take the anthropomorphizing language I'm using too seriously;

As far as I can tell the current state of the art for AI seems to be "If you ask it to formalize a mathematical proof in this programming language it will do so but there is a non-trivial chance it will put in code that fubars your computer for no apparent or predictable reason".

Is that not the case anymore?

vineee2000

I don't think that's ever been the case? There's been cases of "if you ask AI to formalize a mathematical proof, it will make a scientific breakthrough", and there have been cases of "if you ask AI to do development on your codebase it might fubar your company's digital infrastructure". I'm not familiar with much overlap between the two cases?

And I also want to note that "fubars your digital infrastructure while doing regular development work" isn't actually *that* strange of a thing to happen if you give someone unrestricted access to your live servers. AI code should be reviewed instead of strapping it into an all-powerful harness for basically the same reason that human developers have adopted peer review of code, and why human developers have invented permissions management, and why "push to prod on Friday before holidays" is a bit of a meme about things going tits up. Ideally, you wouldn't give any one human the ability to delete your business database all on their own as part of their daily workflow, so why would you treat AI any different?

morlock-holmes

See, all of this is annoying to me as a response because the starting premise was "AIs only do malicious things if you prompt them to"

Followed by, "Well of course AIs will make mistakes, no matter how you prompt them, and obviously we have to watch out for that!"

I mean, sorry, they don't do things maliciously or make mistakes, those are anthropomorphic shorthands we use because informal English is not completely precise about these things.

So quibbling over which inaccurate shorthand to use seems meaningless to me.

I mean, I'm a non-technical person with very little coding experience:

Are any of the tools that I could use to vibe code a little application for my PC trustworthy enough that I can trust their output to the same extent that I, say, trust the updates for my Steam Deck?

doctorpotatomd

I don't know, I feel like that's a false equivalence. You can trust the updates that get pushed to your Steam Deck because Valve has shown themselves to be a trustworthy company that only pushes good code. It's entirely possible that some Valve engineer wrote an update that would have exploded your Steam Deck, but it got caught in review and testing before it was allowed to go anywhere near your device.

Having an AI assistant write code for you is like having your mate Greg write code for you; you have to take care of the review and testing side of things yourself if you don't want to risk your device exploding. Giving Claude Code unrestricted access to your important files is like giving your mate Greg unrestricted access to those files, it's just kind of a dumb idea no matter how good at coding Greg is, whether he's malicious or not.

If you're going to run unknown code on your machine, it's good practice to sandbox it no matter its provenence. Hell, even if you wrote it yourself it's still good practice. The only real difference with AI-written code is that if Greg inadvertently explodes your device you at least have a chance of chasing him down and making him pay you back for it.

You could definitely safely vibe-code a little app for your PC as long as you take the proper precautions. Ask any modern assistant for a Python script that does xyz, ask them to explain what each part does, tell them you have security concerns and ask them to explain what parts of your PC the script can reach and why, search the documentation independently to verify what they're saying, repeat until you're satisfied. You can't just blindly execute what it gives you if you have safety concerns... just like you shouldn't blindly execute code that your mate Greg gives you.

The image ID thing people do on tumblr. I understand that this is intended for screen readers. But tumblr supports ALT text for images already, don't screen readers read that?

#tumblr #image id

tanadrin

lindsay ellis talks in her most recent video abt why she doesn't capitalize her alien species names in her books--same logic as Mass Effect, i think, where the idea is that human isn't capitalized, so why would an alien species name be?

this is valid and i think in Mass Effect specifically they take the parallelism one further and ensure planet names and species names aren't immediately obvious connected (human/Earth actually does have a conceptual relationship; both are related to a word for "ground, earth" in Indo-European, but not the same word). but i don't think this one is entirely tolkien's fault as she posits--or maybe it's just his fault when it comes to (some) fantasy races? like you rarely see Orc or Troll capitalized.

what i think is going on here linguistically is that early science fiction especially established the capitalization because aliens were Inhabitants of Place: the Venusians of Venus, the Martians of Mars, later the Vulcans of Vulcan, and so forth. so at least in the science fiction case the generalized rule isn't what you do with a word for a species of biological organism (human, dolphin, aardvark are all common nouns), it's what you do with a demonym--and demonyms are capitalized because they derive from proper nouns. A German is from Germany, an Egyptian is from Egypt. and similarly designations for other kinds of groups of people are also often capitalized: a Catholic adheres to Catholicism, a Republican votes for the Republican party (but a conservative votes for conservative politicians--no capitalization), etc. this is indeed the argument for capitalizing Black in reference to african-americans: you're not describing a generic attribute in this context, you're referring to a culture, some members of which do not even have especially dark skin.

i think i do prefer not capitalizing species names in SF, but i think it works best when you're also making sure pure not doing the pulpy/retro "the aliens from Android are Andorians" thing. if you aren't, then you can also make a linguistic distinction more easily between (say) an asari born and raised on Earth--an Earthling for sure, though not a human--and a human born and raised on Thessia.

but i don't know of any sf setting that does much with this distinction. in the newer star trek streaming series the populations of planets like Earth and Bajor and Vulcan/Niivar have become sufficiently mixed that this is actually something that could be linguistically meaningful. a Niivaran can be a Vulcan or a Romulan (and Romulus doesn't even exist anymore!), there are members of the United Earth military in DIS that are definitely *not* human, etc. but i don't think the writers of those shows have been attentive enough to the potential to explore the different social texture of the 32nd century or w/e to explore that, which is a little bit of a bummer.

doctorpotatomd

yea I much prefer the uncapitalized names for scifi species, but it's tricky because most scifi uses planets and species as analogues for countries/empires/polities and the inhabitants thereof. I don't think that it's necessarily about mixed-species planets, though, since that doesn't always play nicely with scifi settings; I think a better way to go about it is to flesh out the internals of each species to the point where there are multiple polities and demographics within each species, rather than having them all be monocultural. or at least where there could be multiple demographics instead of them just being another Planet of Hats. case in point, if you have two humans on the crew then one might be American and the other Chinese; it makes sense if you have two greeblaxes on the crew then one might be Yammar and the other Myingingie, or whatever.

but that's more work and more difficult work to put into worldbuilding! because if you want to do something with that, then instead of the Greeblax being the species, planet, culture, and polity all rolled into one, you start having to work out what the differences between greeblax from Yammar and greeblax from Myinging are, how they feel about each other, what regional quirks they have, languages, cuisine, whatever.

And if you want a space opera setting with half a dozen different species, now you have something like twenty or thirty "sub-species" to make distinct and interesting, without detracting from the original vision for each of those species. and it's a tough balance to hit between doing enough of that to make the setting feel rich and alive, and not getting bogged down in details that will never make it into the final product because the internal politics and culture of the greeblax are mostly just set dressings, they're not the subject of the work.

So I think not doing much with it is often the right call, because instead of having both Yammar greeblax and Myingingie greeblax, you could simply have the greeblax and then another original species which can have a larger and more interesting contrast with the greeblax, which is a big part of this stripe of scifi IMO. Of course, if you've got the knack for it you can often have your cake and eat it too by simply leaving the worldbuilding open-ended w.r.t. each species' subcultures and writing the details as they come up, Schrodinger-style, but that's again not that easy to do.

anyway, the two interesting things I've found to do with uncapitalized species names in my own scifi worldbuilding were, funnily enough, both about capitalizing rather than de-capitalizing: I've got the Melded, a species of pacifist bio-assimilators originally created as a superweapon; they've got no homeworld and no proper polities, Melded is really an adjective referring to a proper-noun event. Then I've got the eidola, a group of human-built, recently-conscious ex-sexbots who got granted "conditional personhood" by the human governments after their uprising and are now diasporic through human space, and the idea is that they're the eidola when you're referring to them as a "species" and the Eidola when you're referring to either the cultural group or the quasi-polity they formed during the uprising and the following negotiations (plus I think they would have a real thing about capitalization or not, because product names tend to be capitalized and trauma from being a literal product is their whole thing). And I think those are interesting because they're not really species-as-country like most scifi races are; and I think them being set among species that have uncapitalized species names and distinct, capitalized names for polities and planets and even cultural groups makes that distinction clearer, y'know?

anyway I don't really know what the point of that ramble was lol. but I think using uncapitalized names for scifi species is a good thing and more writers should do it!

liskantope

I think I've run across a good writer who thinks on my wavelength in terms of the "gentrification of mental illness / neurodivergence", and he wrote an excellent essay criticizing a recent book of Devon Price (a blogger/writer/activist I've run across and felt critical of for years; once known as "E. Price", they wrote that famous "Laziness Does Not Exist" post which I made an effortpost about way back in my days of Wordpress blogging and going on about low-agency vs. high-agency goggles). To be fair, I should say, Jon Machnee's post is an excellent review of Price's book modulo the fact that I haven't read Price's book.

Here is a passage I find particularly striking, even if it's purely anecdotal:

Recently, I attended a BBQ at my sister’s house. She knew I had nothing on that weekend and wanted me to work the grill so her and her friends could hang out in peace. I obliged, as any good brother would, and was surprised to learn that her whole friend group had autism. I have spent the better part of 12 years talking with, studying, and researching autism, and while I know you can’t diagnose or undiagnose someone at a party whilst also grilling hotdogs, I would bet my entire life savings that not a single one of them had an actual autism diagnosis or would get one if they were assessed. At one point, they told me that my sister, who does not have autism but does have ADHD, was the most autistic of the group. One of them even asked me what I thought of Price’s book and expressed how much it meant to them. This is particularly funny in hindsight because a few month later my sister reported that not only did they not have autism, but when they went to talk to a professional about it, they became distraught upon learning that they weren’t even remotely close to meeting any of the criteria. Apparently after the BBQ, some of my sister’s allegedly autistic friends asked her what was wrong with me, and she had to inform them, and I quote, “Oh, he has, like, real autism.”

morlock-holmes

Reading this review made me realize that apparently I have completely misunderstood what people mean by "masking". Or maybe everybody but me has misunderstood.

I was having trouble putting my finger on what exactly seemed off until I got to this part:

Most “masked” autistics still show obvious, visible signs of autism that are either just slightly muted or channelled into a less obvious and more socially acceptable form. I could be accurately described as a high-masking autistic, but anyone who knows what autism looks like will immediately clock me.

And I thought,

"Wait, why would you think that masking would make it harder to detect autism?"

What I had assumed the term meant was...

Okay I keep trying to come up with the perfect analogy because I find that allistic people have an incredible amount of difficulty reasoning about what it would be like to have serious deficits in social understanding, so here's another attempt:

I'm writing in English, so I imagine most of my readers have only the vaguest knowledge of what a Japanese tea ceremony entails beyond "fancy" and "tea". If you do know a ton about tea ceremonies pretend I'm talking about, I don't know, initiation into an undocumented Etruscan mystery religion.

Suppose that suddenly you are informed that you have to attend a tea ceremony tonight.

And suppose that, for whatever reason, attending this ceremony and doing well at it was incredibly important for your career, your social circle, and your romantic prospects. Your success in all those realms depends heavily on how well you do at the tea ceremony tonight.

So you ask the friend who brought you the invitation what you do at a tea ceremony, and he says,

"Uh, it's not like there's some script that you follow, it's just etiquette and politeness."

But he does tell you that asking direct questions of your host about what you should do is offputting and inappropriate.

What would you do in a situation like that?

Well, if there are a lot of people you might stay towards the back out of sight of the host.

You might watch what other people did and copy them as closely as you could.

You might try to make sure that any specific tasks for guests were assigned to somebody else rather than you.

And I don't think you would adopt those strategies because they would make you look like an expert in tea ceremonies;

I think you would adopt strategies along those lines because what the fuck else could you possibly do in that situation?

Until now I have assumed that this is what people meant by "masking"; strategies such as avoidance, ceding decision making to other people, and rote copying are things that I adopted quite early on in life, not out of some attempt to stop people from noticing I had autism, but from a desire to minimize negative attention.

I had thought that the analogy was like, If I draw a crude smiley-face in crayon on a paper plate and wear it as a mask, maybe I'm not trying to fool you into thinking that it's my real face, maybe I'm just trying to keep you from seeing what my real face looks like.

To go back to the tea ceremony analogy, maybe another person there was raised by a master of the tea ceremony, knows all the subtle ins and outs, but just thinks it's morally stupid that so much success depends on this arbitrary ceremony. If it was important to success he might go along with the tea ceremony anyway, and you could also, I suppose, call this "masking" as well, but it seems to me that it is only similar to the coping strategies I outlined above in a very broad way.

Yes, both you and he are in some sense attempting to come off as ordinary participants in the tea ceremony and hide the fact that, deep down, you'd prefer not to be, but I think the psychological effects of these strategies on both the self and others are so different that it's worth drawing a distinction.

waystatus

Without attempting to defend the essay, which I don't like very much at all:

1. Rote copying is definitely masking, in fact it's arguably the archetypal masking behavior. I don't think avoidance is a masking behavior so much as a behavior to avoid having to mask, but wouldn't be that surprised if someone disagreed.

2. Obviously you are trying to cover up the fact that you are autistic/don't know how to perform a tea ceremony. Compare to the unmasked behavior: someone who starts in the same place but who doesn't particularly care about seeming like they already know what they're doing would just ask "I have never done this before, what are you doing and why?" Or maybe they would do something so obviously un-tea-ceremony-like that nobody would think they are trying to perform a tea ceremony.

Like, obviously the goal here is to pass as "normal", right? You're trying to pretend that you do in fact know the etiquette of the situation even though you don't.

morlock-holmes

My point is that I don't understand the idea that these strategies would make it difficult to clock you if somebody wanted to.

They are strategies born more or less out of desperation, and it's peculiar to me to begin with the assumption that they are, or ought to be, extremely effective.

waystatus

Ah I see the issue.

Of course they wouldn't convince a detective whose purpose is to root out autistic people. But that person doesn't exist IRL, and these techniques should be pretty effective against random people who aren't looking for you specifically.

morlock-holmes

I mean, the thing is that, at base, you're trying to deflect attention away from the fact that you don't really know what you're doing, but because the thing you don't know how to do is "ordinary, expected social behavior" a lot of the social strategies that people usually use to deflect people from the things they don't understand aren't available.

Extreme deference, withdrawal, and mirroring of others are, in many contexts, socially unusual traits which will make you stand out as different from your peers.

doctorpotatomd

I think that's true, that those behaviours will make you stand out from your peers, but not necessarily as autistic; there are plenty of other reasons why somebody wouldn't know how to do the tea ceremony, to continue your metaphor. And I don't think the average neurotypical person would care to clock someone as autistic or not, so by employing those strategies you're more marking yourself as somebody who doesn't know how to do the tea ceremony than as an autistic person specifically? I don't know, when I clock an autistic person the things I'm looking at are more subtle and vague than that; tone of voice, turns of phrase, speaking rhythm and volume, posture and body language and where their eyes are pointed, engagement and disengagement with various topics of conversation, that kind of thing.

I think the other thing is... the tea ceremony analogy doesn't fully hold up for me, because while I don't know anything about Japanese tea ceremony, I've been in enough social situations of various formalities and cultural sources to see about what shape it will probably take, and that gives me the confidence that if I pay attention to the room and to what the person next to me is doing, I'll probably do alright. Like, a formal Western dinner has specific cutlery and plates and glassware for different things, right? And drinking champagne from a red wine glass or using a dessert fork on the main course is a mild faux pas. But the table setting is laid out in a way that makes it easy to get it right (for cutlery you start from the outermost set and move in, with the dessert cutlery being horizontally above the plate for last, and for glassware you start from closest to your right hand and move outwards, water->white wine->red wine). And because people and their little rituals and ceremonies are broadly similar everywhere, I'll expect a Japanese tea ceremony to be broadly similar to a formal Western dinner, and so I'll have some amount of confidence that if go in treating it the same way and watch what everyone else does I'll probably be fine. Plus I know from experience that with formal and ceremonial things like this, honestly giving it a go is often better received than extreme avoidance, so rather than pretending I know what I'm doing w.r.t. the tea ceremony I'm going to aim for the hosts thinking "he gave it an honest go, good on him".

But of course that longass paragraph pretty much says "I have confidence in my social intuition even in situations as unfamiliar to me as Japanese tea ceremony", hence the analogy falling apart for me a bit because it was an analogy for social intuition in the first place.

All that said I think that the word "masking" is describing two separate but adjacent things ITT (and elsewhere). There's masking as in "I learned all the rules of the tea ceremony and can now execute it just as well as the tea master's child", and there's masking as in "I don't know any of the rules of the tea ceremony and am going to do my best to pretend that I do while avoiding situations where I might break one of those unknown rules". Like you said, the second type is one where you're openly wearing a mask to hide your real face, and the first type is one where you're hiding that you're wearing a mask at all. And like many things, people unfortunately use the same word to refer to either or both types without clarifying which one they mean.

homunculus-argument

if exercise is making you feel that bad, your probably doing too much of it in a session

to maximize results, you work out just until it starts to ache or hurt a little bit, do one more set after that, then stop

for people who dont exercise regularly, this typically looks like 5-10 minutes at first. its mostly stretches and small bursts of activity, done regularly. the habit of doing it is more important than the length of time spent doing it, or the specific goals hit during it. five minutes of lifting a 2 lb weight done consistently for a week does more for you than pushing yourself to walk an hour on a treadmill

the body enjoys being used and enjoys motion. exercise is not meant to feel that awful. thats a sign of pushing far beyond your muscles current capacity, past growth into work and exhaustion. exercise causes small tears in the muscle fibers, which then heal and recover which causes a slow increase in bulk, and a reduction in inflammation, pain, and exhaustion. as your muscles get used to being used, theyll inflame less, hurt less, and experience less exhaustion with activity

its highly likely your idea of exercise exceeds your muscles capacity to meet it, resulting in a miserable experience. consistency will give you more results, and consistency is easier to achieve if you reduce your goals to something more managable. you *can* see results with 5 minute exercise and stretching habits

look into bedbound exercise, arthitis exercises, and exercise options for the elderly. these are all designed for low mobility/mostly sedentary lifestyles like at home office work, with the intent baked in that highly strenuous, longterm activity will be miserable and painful and thus avoided. those should give you low time cost exercises able to be easily done repeatedly without having to rely on good cardio (which is somethin youd build up to here).

generally if you cant manage an hour of exercise you shouldnt be trying to force an hour of exercise. its more efficient to work your way up over time, till eventually the hour of exercise barely feels like a task at all

What if the issue is that it doesn't start to hurt while I'm doing it, only afterwards? Like I'll feel fine the whole time and not like I've even done a workout of any kind, and then it hits me like a truck all at once when I'm already at home. How do I know when it starts to hurt when the hurt only starts an hour after I'm done?

doctorpotatomd

unfortunately the answer is practice: getting used to how your body reacts to exercise, and learning to calibrate the intensity and duration of your exercise based on that and on how you feel during the session. and also other boring stuff like ensuring adequate hydration and nutrition, proper cool-downs, and stretching/mobility work help mitigate it.

and of course starting small and slow: with running, for example, the pace most beginners intuitively select is like twice as fast as they should be going, so they work their guts out and feel great and then crash hard and are too sore and achy and crappy-feeling to do their next day's session. because a rank beginner's slow pace should be slow enough that it barely feels like exercise; "slow enough that you could hold a conversation with someone running with you without running out of breath" is the benchmark. running is a particularly clear example because a) doing large volumes of very slow runs is the most important part of any runner's training program, and b) everyone knows how to run (more or less) but most people don't know how to run for exercise in a sustainable way. but pretty much every type of exercise works like that.

but yeah, mostly getting better at exercising and listening to your body, and eventually you'll learn to recognize the point where you'll feel like death in a couple hours if you don't ease up now.

cheaphalloweencostume

i started drawing a comic of how i imagine my shoulder angel who tells me to be good and its already making me laugh.. can YOU tell which dead comedian this is

cheaphalloweencostume

how bout from this side

doctorpotatomd

right?

homunculus-argument

Since you seem to be struggling with exercising the same way I do. I’ve started checking out workout apps that focus on 7min workouts because that’s about what I can force myself to do. Maybe something like that would work okay for you too?

I've found that in life, if you've got a problem that only has one obvious solution and you're not doing it, your problem isn't the problem that has a solution, your problem is figuring out why you're not doing it.

I think my biggest issue with exercise is that it's not voluntary. It's like a goddamn saw trap. You either hurt yourself or your body hurts you. It doesn't feel voluntary if someone walked up to you and put a gun to your head like "hey stab yourself in the leg or I will stab you in the leg! :)" and then stabbing yourself in the leg takes like 20-40 minutes out of your day every goddamn day forever until you die.

You have to pour time down the drain to do bullshit you don't want to do every day forever. And I don't know how to brainwash myself into believing that forcing myself to do it is voluntary.

nickikisu-reblogs

I think you just haven't found the exercise for you. for example I rrly like dance :D but only realized it recently

homunculus-argument

Does anyone have ideas of where to start? How do you make exercise fun and enjoyable when no part of having a body is voluntary or fun or enjoyable?

cloudselkie

I'm the same way. I hate exercise for the sake of exercise. It's boring and it sucks. The only way I've been able to force myself to enjoy it was when I was learning a skill and exercise was not the main goal. I suggest martial arts. Taekwondo worked wonders for me.

homunculus-argument

I've tried a few. I made it to yellow belt in karate as a kid, I signed up to a muay thai kickboxing class as an adult, in both cases I kept telling myself that it would stop being boring and start being fun eventually, but I gave up after that spot just never came. I don't know what I should have done differently. How do you make martial arts not be a frustratingly boring chore?

doctorpotatomd

BJJ might be worth a try? It's very technical and you typically do more sparring (or rolling, as they call it) from your very first day. I find it a lot more engaging than your typical "hit the pads 20 times then do 10 pushups" martial art. But you also have to be comfortable being in close sweaty contact with strangers, as well as being put in chokes and joint locks and what have you.

What non-exercise hobbies do you enjoy, OP? *scrolls your blog a bit* Artwork, huh? Maybe something creative, then. Pottery, sculpture? Weird mixed-media art projects where you've gotta be climbing around to reach all the bits? Playing a musical instrument? None of those are things people would normally consider to be "exercise", but I think each of them has you moving enough to tick the "stay active for your health" box.

nostalgebraist

my strongest claudes would kill you, traveler

doctorpotatomd

Claude Seller! Enough of these games! I'm going into battle and I need your strongest Claudes.

i-am-a-fish

every time you make art of any kind, a stat that is not visible to the player goes up. also, this is the most important stat in the game

ledogeishere

does singing in the shower count as art

i-am-a-fish

does a strong as fuck ice mummy have ice powers

the-quietestmela

does writing fanfiction count as art

i-am-a-fish

don't make me say the mummy thing again

doctorpotatomd

the discourse around gender segregation in sports drives me nuts

"actually, most sports became segregated because a woman beat a man and the men got mad" cool, do you have a source or are you just regurgitating an anecdote you heard because it makes you feel validated?

"there's no biological or physiological basis for men to perform better than women in any sports" cool, have you ever been seriously involved in any sport of any type? have you ever experienced, say, walking into the gym and outbenching a serious female lifter of the same height and weight on your first day? have you ever experienced wrestling with a woman of a similar height and weight and experience and realising how much *easier* it is to overpower her than it would be one of the guys in your class? Because I've experienced both of those and things like them, many times.

"oh, at school there was this one girl who could beat all the boys with her hands tied behind her back" cool, do you think that a random collection of highschool kids is a representative sample without any outliers? do you understand what an anecdote is?

"oh, but women are taught to eat less and exercise less and stay small and quiet" cool, there's probably some truth in that, broadly speaking. do you think that possibly applies at all to serious athletes, many of whom were scouted when they were knee high to a grasshopper and put into serious training programs designed to maximise their chances of being a competitor?

"they should just segregate by height/weight/ability/etc." cool, do you understand that they already do this? do you realise that women have more essential visceral fat, and a female athlete in peak condition has something like 15-20% bodyfat compared to a male athlete's 8-12%, putting a female athlete at an objective disadvantage compared to a male athlete of equal height and weight? do you understand that the muscles of the upper body are much more testosterone-dependent than the muscles of the lower body? do you understand that no woman has ever been able to perform the iron cross in gymnastics, despite it being a "B-grade" skill in mens gymnastics?

"women only don't win because they're not allowed to compete with the men" cool, do you realise how completely divorced from reality this is? Most sports have the figures as a matter of public record, for christ's sake, you can very easily look at the records and say "hmm, 20 is lower than 22". And if you desegregate sports and force the women to compete with the men, the women who were previously winning their divisions—even world champions!—just start losing, and quit their sport because they'll never be competitive, and then young girls don't get inspired to get into sports and nobody wants to foster their talents, and now you just have no women in sports at all!

idk it just really bugs me. it's not un-feminist to acknowledge these well-documented physical differences, and even if you do take the (absurd) stance that they're entirely due to social factors, desegregating sports would be just about the worst thing that you could do for women in sports.

isaacsapphire

It’s kinda nuts how apparently nobody can remember that Title IX was a feminist movement win.

doctorpotatomd

responding to prev tags:

with sports like this, it's still often desirable to segregate, depending on the gender demographics of the sport in question. you want the less-represented gender to have its own league, because that league will be easier on account of it having less competition, which will help attract more competitors of that gender to the sport. note that this should be women's and open (or theoretically men's and open, for a female-dominated sport), not men's and women's; the larger and more competitive league should be open to competitors of all genders.

chess is the best example: there have only been about three women ranked in the worldwide top 100 chess players ever, despite there being no physiological basis for disparate performance between genders. why? sociological and cultural reasons; the female talent pool for chess is tragically small because girls don't get interested in the game and parents/teachers/etc. are less likely to notice and foster female talent. so by having women's leagues, not only do we show women that they can play chess and provide an incentive for mentors to look for female talent, we also create a nicer and more welcoming competitive environment for girls, especially young girls (going to a competition is scary enough even before you take into account the specific type of male personality that chess seems to attract); and we also allow the best female players to win titles, recognition, accolades, visibility instead of simply being someone in the top 100 or top 1000; and the women's chess world champion can become a hero for little girls who might never have thought about playing chess otherwise.

that said, from a brief google target shooting seems like it could be a model case for full desegregation in sports (something like a 60/40 split in gender representation favouring men, and a 45/55 split in world record holders favouring women, according to the ISSF website). I know fuckall about target shooting and the culture thereof so I don't want to make any strong claims about it, but if there's any sport that could be desegregated without harming female competitors, it would be something with stats like that.

captain-price-returns

A real page on the White House website

morlock-holmes

There's no reality outside of posting. The TMZ story and this response are far, far more real to the White House than the actual men involved and whatever actions they took.

The point of the ICE raids, I believe, is to generate cool posts about badasses finally stopping the scum from getting away with it.

doctorpotatomd

"there's no reality outside of posting" really sums up the current political climate, huh. incisive and pithy.

prokopetz

Inadvisable tabletop RPG jam premise #137: Game jam where each entry consists solely of paratextual discussion of the mechanics of a hypothetical or invented RPG; examples include an errata document, a developer Q&A, or a forum thread debating the correct interpretation of a particular rule.

prokopetz

@shoutyourporpoise replied:

I could SWEAR you’ve made this post before, or perhaps this is such a characteristically “you” concept that I already imagined a world in which you had

I don't think so, no. I did once (unintentionally) curate a game jam about writing supplements for invented or hypothetical games, the product of which you can find here, but this is a different thing.

prokopetz

(If anyone really wants this one to be a thing, though, feel free to toss your entry into the reblogs. I'm not going to do a proper game jam on itch.io or whatever because its UI really wants you to have cover art and a promotional blurb and such, and this doesn't feel like it warrants it!)

doctorpotatomd

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[21:09] * Topic is 'Loadouts: reactor choice | hydraulics vs. pneumatics | Balance: sprocket expert cost | you have to CRANK it | RDHA general discussion'

[21:09] * Set by cennostar on Thu April 17th 1998

[21:09] <Varilyth> yea

[21:10] <Varilyth> wrenchy knows more about it then me but

[21:10] <taNDy> hey guys

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[21:10] <Sulfur> Welcome!

[21:10] <cennostar> hey tandy

[21:10] <Zalubrio> welcome!

[21:10] <sweetums|AFK> Welcome!

[21:10] <Varilyth> you can make some DISGUSTING fixes when you can ignore chirality like that

[21:11] <Varilyth> like it should be an 8 pt ability at least

[21:11] <Varilyth> hi

[21:11] * Sulfur nods sagely.

[21:13] <Sulfur> Fair enough. I might talk to my group about house-ruling it for our next run. Nobody had any fun this session. Except the wrenchman, that is.

[21:13] <wrenchy|AFK> i had so much fun

[21:13] <Varilyth> right

[21:14] * sweetums|AFK is now known as sweetums

[21:14] <Sulfur> Not you, Wrenchy.

[21:14] <wrenchy|AFK> :'-(

[21:15] <taNDy> hey guys

[21:15] <taNDy> can I ask a rules question?

[21:16] * sweetums rolls eyes

[21:16] <sweetums> oh here we go

[21:16] * cennostar slaps sweetums upside the head with a large trout!

[21:16] <cennostar> be nice!!

[21:16] <cennostar> go ahead tandy

[21:17] <cennostar> ask away

[21:17] <taNDy> thx

[21:19] <taNDy> so im a noob and have only played one session but ive been reading the rules for playing as the chief and

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[21:20] <Sulfur> Sure.

[21:20] <taNDy> and i wanted to ask what happens when the reactor goes critical *during a jump*?

[21:20] <sweetums> lol

[21:21] <taNDy> like it says I can work any system at -1 and do any repair at -5

[21:21] <taNDy> attempt* any repair

[21:22] <Sulfur> Depends on how much of a sadist the captain is.

[21:22] <taNDy> but it also says i can only repair the system im working on right now

[21:22] <sweetums> my first run ended like that

[21:23] <taNDy> so if im working the jump drive and the reactor starts playing up i have to choose between either doing the jump and stabilizing it after, or aborting and stabilizing now, right?

[21:23] <sweetums> reactor go boom-boom, need jump and go buy new core

[21:23] <sweetums> we try jump, captain rolls, captain laughs

[21:23] <sweetums> ship got folded

[21:24] <taNDy> folded??

[21:24] <Sulfur> Folded.

[21:24] <Varilyth> lmao get folded

[21:24] <Varilyth> pwned

[21:25] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:25] <Zalubrio> tandy read tha jumps chapter in tha captain's book and ull get it

[21:26] <Varilyth> or don't

[21:26] <Varilyth> and experience the game the way it was meant to be played :-)

[21:26] <taNDy> oh

[21:26] <sweetums> yea

[21:27] <Sulfur> Seconded.

[21:27] <Sulfur> Or thirded, rather.

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[21:28] <Extronaut> fffffffffffucking dial-up

[21:28] <Extronaut> Hey guys

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[21:28] <Sulfur> Hey Naut. Hey Mrs. Naut.

[21:28] <Varilyth> lmao

[21:29] <Sulfur> :(

[21:30] * Sulfur stares melancholily out of the closest viewport.

[21:30] <sweetums> melancholily isnt a word

[21:31] <Sulfur> Buy a dictionary, sweetums.

[21:31] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:31] <Zalubrio> but yea tandy

[21:32] <Zalubrio> tha good news is that if ur reactor goes critical during a jump

[21:32] <Zalubrio> ur captain is *trying* 2 TPK u already

[21:33] <Zalubrio> so ure dead newai

[21:33] <sweetums> dead n folded

[21:34] <Zalubrio> unless it was obv precrit before tha jump

[21:34] <Zalubrio> like sweetums group

[21:35] <Zalubrio> so dont worry about it

[21:35] <taNDy> oh ok

[21:36] <Zalubrio> besides u shuld have a fields engi on tha reactor n nav on jumps newai

[21:36] <Zalubrio> most important roles 4 shure

[21:37] <Varilyth> yeah forget the reactor and the jump drive, you're forgetting about the chief's most important ability

[21:37] <cennostar> lol

[21:37] <Varilyth> +3 on the best action in the game

[21:38] <Sulfur> Uh oh.

[21:38] <taNDy> ???

[21:38] <Varilyth> hand. cranking. machinery.

[21:38] * Varilyth CRANKS it!

[21:38] * sweetums CRANKS it!

[21:39] * wrenchy|AFK CRANKS it1!

[21:39] * cennostar CRANKS it!

[21:39] * Zalubrio cRANKS IT!!

[21:39] <sweetums> llmmmaaaooooooo

[21:40] * Sulfur doesn't crank anything.

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doctorpotatomd

prokopetz

@shoutyourporpoise replied:

I could SWEAR you’ve made this post before, or perhaps this is such a characteristically “you” concept that I already imagined a world in which you had

prokopetz

doctorpotatomd

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[21:09] * Now talking in #re-dis-hyperassembly

[21:09] * Topic is 'Loadouts: reactor choice | hydraulics vs. pneumatics | Balance: sprocket expert cost | you have to CRANK it | RDHA general discussion'

[21:09] * Set by cennostar on Thu April 17th 1998

[21:09] <Varilyth> yea

[21:10] <Varilyth> wrenchy knows more about it then me but

[21:10] <taNDy> hey guys

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[21:10] <Sulfur> Welcome!

[21:10] <cennostar> hey tandy

[21:10] <Zalubrio> welcome!

[21:10] <sweetums|AFK> Welcome!

[21:10] <Varilyth> you can make some DISGUSTING fixes when you can ignore chirality like that

[21:11] <Varilyth> like it should be an 8 pt ability at least

[21:11] <Varilyth> hi

[21:11] * Sulfur nods sagely.

[21:13] <Sulfur> Fair enough. I might talk to my group about house-ruling it for our next run. Nobody had any fun this session. Except the wrenchman, that is.

[21:13] <wrenchy|AFK> i had so much fun

[21:13] <Varilyth> right

[21:14] * sweetums|AFK is now known as sweetums

[21:14] <Sulfur> Not you, Wrenchy.

[21:14] <wrenchy|AFK> :'-(

[21:15] <taNDy> hey guys

[21:15] <taNDy> can I ask a rules question?

[21:16] * sweetums rolls eyes

[21:16] <sweetums> oh here we go

[21:16] * cennostar slaps sweetums upside the head with a large trout!

[21:16] <cennostar> be nice!!

[21:16] <cennostar> go ahead tandy

[21:17] <cennostar> ask away

[21:17] <taNDy> thx

[21:19] <taNDy> so im a noob and have only played one session but ive been reading the rules for playing as the chief and

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[21:20] <Sulfur> Sure.

[21:20] <taNDy> and i wanted to ask what happens when the reactor goes critical *during a jump*?

[21:20] <sweetums> lol

[21:21] <taNDy> like it says I can work any system at -1 and do any repair at -5

[21:21] <taNDy> attempt* any repair

[21:22] <Sulfur> Depends on how much of a sadist the captain is.

[21:22] <taNDy> but it also says i can only repair the system im working on right now

[21:22] <sweetums> my first run ended like that

[21:23] <taNDy> so if im working the jump drive and the reactor starts playing up i have to choose between either doing the jump and stabilizing it after, or aborting and stabilizing now, right?

[21:23] <sweetums> reactor go boom-boom, need jump and go buy new core

[21:23] <sweetums> we try jump, captain rolls, captain laughs

[21:23] <sweetums> ship got folded

[21:24] <taNDy> folded??

[21:24] <Sulfur> Folded.

[21:24] <Varilyth> lmao get folded

[21:24] <Varilyth> pwned

[21:25] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:25] <Zalubrio> tandy read tha jumps chapter in tha captain's book and ull get it

[21:26] <Varilyth> or don't

[21:26] <Varilyth> and experience the game the way it was meant to be played :-)

[21:26] <taNDy> oh

[21:26] <sweetums> yea

[21:27] <Sulfur> Seconded.

[21:27] <Sulfur> Or thirded, rather.

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[21:28] <Extronaut> fffffffffffucking dial-up

[21:28] <Extronaut> Hey guys

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[21:28] <Sulfur> Hey Naut. Hey Mrs. Naut.

[21:28] <Varilyth> lmao

[21:29] <Sulfur> :(

[21:30] * Sulfur stares melancholily out of the closest viewport.

[21:30] <sweetums> melancholily isnt a word

[21:31] <Sulfur> Buy a dictionary, sweetums.

[21:31] <Zalubrio> lol

[21:31] <Zalubrio> but yea tandy

[21:32] <Zalubrio> tha good news is that if ur reactor goes critical during a jump

[21:32] <Zalubrio> ur captain is *trying* 2 TPK u already

[21:33] <Zalubrio> so ure dead newai

[21:33] <sweetums> dead n folded

[21:34] <Zalubrio> unless it was obv precrit before tha jump

[21:34] <Zalubrio> like sweetums group

[21:35] <Zalubrio> so dont worry about it

[21:35] <taNDy> oh ok

[21:36] <Zalubrio> besides u shuld have a fields engi on tha reactor n nav on jumps newai

[21:36] <Zalubrio> most important roles 4 shure

[21:37] <Varilyth> yeah forget the reactor and the jump drive, you're forgetting about the chief's most important ability

[21:37] <cennostar> lol

[21:37] <Varilyth> +3 on the best action in the game

[21:38] <Sulfur> Uh oh.

[21:38] <taNDy> ???

[21:38] <Varilyth> hand. cranking. machinery.

[21:38] * Varilyth CRANKS it!

[21:38] * sweetums CRANKS it!

[21:39] * wrenchy|AFK CRANKS it1!

[21:39] * cennostar CRANKS it!

[21:39] * Zalubrio cRANKS IT!!

[21:39] <sweetums> llmmmaaaooooooo

[21:40] * Sulfur doesn't crank anything.

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transgenderer

aiui both the trumpet and bagpipe were originally used just to make a loud noise (for war etc) and later became musical instruments in the full sense. but a modern trumpet makes yknow, music, and bagpipes sound like bagpipes. a failure in technological development? surely we could MAKE a bagpipe that sounds good. blind preservationism? idgi, maybe its like spicy food and you get a taste for it?

vriskakinnieaynrand

we could also make water that's wet and a sky that's blue

cobstraverse

Bagpipes are just the most popular survivor of a long tradition. Uilleann pipes sound lovely for example since they're less optimised to play on battlefields.

doctorpotatomd

This is a really good point: the modern trumpet has gone through a few centuries of optimization for use in the concert hall as part of the orchestra and various military bands, but highland bagpipes were never a part of the orchestra for several reasons (one being that it's basically impossible to play them quietly). So they never had any reason to come indoors and develop in that direction. They sound great in a wide open space, though.

And the modern trumpet is still fully capable of making an unimaginably loud and *nasty* sound like its military predecessors, it's just that they... don't do that because it wouldn't sound very nice. Unless you specifically ask them to, I'm pretty sure some of Mahler's symphonies have ffff (quadruple-loud) markings for trumpet and the other brass, which I'm told brass players understand to mean "do not even try to have a nice, blended orchestral tone; punish the audience with the wall of sound that is your birthright".

(prev: any recs for uilleann pipe music?)

phaeton-flier

So the thing about music is that it's a wonderful part of life. But it's also like books or films in that while there are examples of the work which are Deep and have much to chew on, most of them are just going to be entertainment and you need to accept it for what it is.

Can you imagine if people identified with like, Noir as a subculture as representing "Cool" and "Free"

doctorpotatomd

I don't know, I feel like this is a false equivalence because subcultures can and do form around music, specifically live music, in a way that they don't tend to around film and literature. Like, the punk subculture originated around punk rock, but the music itself wasn't sufficient for that; the subculture could only form because people were going to punk shows and meeting other people who liked going to punk shows. The values of the subculture reflect the values of the music and vice versa, perhaps, but the established subculture is capable of standing alone without the music—c.f. goth subculture, which I would say is now largely independent of gothic rock or any particular genre of music.

I'd also say that being Deep is not necessary or even particularly relevant to the formation of a subculture. I'd say that punk rock is not particularly deep or complex, in general, in fact I think that simplicity is a core part of its musical identity—growing as it did out of the great democratization of music that the electric guitar brought about—and that it values genuineness over depth.

So, I don't know, I think what I'm trying to say is that the punk subculture is a real thing that exists and it's valid for people to identify with it (even if they're often annoying about it), but identifying with a noir subculture wouldn't make sense because it doesn't exist. Whether or not the music itself has something to say is almost irrelevant.

the-pyxis-nautica

orchestra people of tumblr. i come to you humbly asking you send me your favorite orchestra songs. please. i just discovered something about myself and its that i really enjoy orchestra/classical music

so. uh yeah if you happen to really like orchestra or perhaps just a really specific song please yap at me. my inbox is there.

i’m listening to a playlist of apparently popular orchestra songs and this one is my favorite so far if you want to send similar ones it reminds me of a sunny day

tagging this with a bunch of shit so the right people find it

p.s. i’m very sleep deprived sorry if this post was nonsensical idk i just like music

doctorpotatomd

Haydn:

Symphony no 101 in D, "The Clock", all movements are good but I especially love the first movement (this album also has another of his symphonies, but I haven't listened to that one)

Trumpet Concerto in Eb, especially the first movement

Mozart:

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik first movement (you know this one, overplayed but great)

Symphony no 40 in G minor, another classic

Clarinet quintet in A, I only discovered this the other day and haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but the first movement was so good it made me kinda mad (?)

Schubert:

Unfinished Symphony, the second movement is absolutely gorgeous

Strauss II:

Blue Danube Waltz, cheesy and overplayed, but my personal favourite piece of music of all time

Kaiser Waltz, another great one

Waldteufel:

Les Patineurs (Skater's Waltz), I play timpani and there's a bit towards the end where the music stops and the timps go BONG which is one of my favourite things to do on timps (also can you tell I'm a waltz guy yet)

Grieg:

Peer Gynt Suite no 1, you'll recognize the first and fourth movements (Morning Mood and the Hall of the Mountain King, respectively), but the second and third movements are lovely too. Morning Mood definitely fits your "sounds like a sunny day" thing the most out of anything on this list.a

Liszt:

Un Sospiro, first piece of solo piano music on this list (I recommend watching a youtube video, the spectacle of the hand crossings is part of the fun of this piece)

Brahms:

Hungarian Dance no 5, what a banger

Chopin:

Nocturne no 2 in Eb, maybe the second-most famous piece of piano music ever written, you'll know this one

Nocturne no 20 in C# minor, this has some history; it wasn't published during his lifetime, but gained wide recognition when a Jewish-Polish pianist's live radio performance of this piece was interrupted by the Nazi bombing of Warsaw (Chopin's hometown) in 1939

Grande Valse Brillante, what a bop

Gounod:

Funeral March of a Marionette, I just think it's really fun

Leroy Anderson:

The Typewriter, it's just so incredibly fun (and it quite literally uses a typewriter as an instrument)

Debussy:

Claire de Lune, possibly the third-most famous piece of piano music ever written and absolutely gorgeous

Beethoven:

Piano sonata no 14 in C#m, "Moonlight", the second movement is forgettable on its own but it's a perfect palette cleanser between the first and third movements (this album also has his Pathetique and Appassionata sonatas, which I hear are incredible, but I specifically haven't listened to them yet because I know if I hear them I'll get obsessed with learning them and I'm not that good yet lol)

Symphony no 5 in Cm, you'll recognize the opening of the first movement immediately, but the rest of it completely holds up too. (Most people would recommend Beethoven's 9th symphony over his 5th, but I'd only recommend the 9th if you're going to see it in concert, so much of the effect is lost when you're not in the room. Plus it's really, really long, like over an hour in total IIRC).

Tchaikovsky:

Waltz from Sleeping Beauty, a beautiful piece of music that got arranged as Once Upon a Dream for the Disney film

Saint-Saens:

Carnival of the Animals, it's just so fun. Don't be intimidated by the fact that there's 24 movements, they're mostly really short. Highlights: Introduction, The Elephant, Aquarium, Fossils, The Swan, Finale

Poulenc:

Flute Sonata, I discovered this by asking our principal flautist who I should study to compose music that flutes love to play, the first movement especially is really great

Holst:

The Planets, especially Mars and Venus but all of them. Sounds like Star Wars (because John Williams was directly cribbing off Holst when composing the Star Wars OST, at Lucas's request, apparently he originally just wanted to use The Planets as the soundtrack)

#music #classical music #orchestra

argumate

this falls over for the obvious reason that even the smartest people aren't smart enough to be able to reliably override their own short-term self interest! consider doctors, who are presumably smart and rational given the barriers to becoming a doctor, and yet regularly advocate on behalf of their own interests in ways that harm others, and not just because they're forced to share a civilisation with people less smart than they are.

we can enumerate similarly smart subgroups of society that struggle to transcend their own interests, whether it's economists ironically or military generals or tech CEOs, who regularly act against each other and their workers and their customers to enrich themselves even as it makes us all poorer.

now this could be equivocation: possibly the most rational people don't exist yet, and when they do they will make everything better, but even they will face the core problem that rational people can still have diverging interests, and a strong incentive to mislead each other as to the importance of those interests, and as a result cooperation for mutual gain challenging to guarantee -- if it were not we would not have cancer, along with many other maladies.

being smart isn't enough! I mean it's good but nowhere near enough.

soundlogic2236

Where is this claim there that smart people are nicer to other people?

A world where everyone understands economics enough to say "no" when doctors selfishly propose those things you brought up is not better because being smart makes the doctors nice. It is a better world because they can't get away with it.

If other people get impressed by nonsense arguments made by someone intelligent such that said intelligent person manages to get laws passed that harm those tricked and me, I'm not wishing people were smarter because I think it will make that person nicer.

I'm wishing it because I don't want the population to drag me down into being hurt by that trick.

argumate

it's not so much about being nice but about the way a 20% boost to yourself is more tangible and easier to evaluate than a 2% boost to everyone, even if the latter brings more overall benefit, so people put more effort into it, and if a rational agent values their relative position over their absolute position then cooperation to raise society as a whole becomes even more difficult.

soundlogic2236

This argument seems dubious. Like, lets take a simple and not that impressive example:

Drunk driving.

Is at least 30% of drunk driving done irrationally or stupidly, rather than a rational and intelligent but selfish decision? This seems likely, it isn't like drunk driving doesn't put the person doing it at risk.

Would there be some equilibrial force such that if that 30% went way 10% or more would come back? There are equilibrial forces, yes, but it seems unlikely that there would be such a potent backfire here.

Would a 20% reduction in drunk driving result in a better world for innocent bystanders?

If you agree to my answers for these, this suggests at least one area where you would expect a world of more rational and intelligent people to be better.

This isn't because I expect the drunk drivers to be doing some careful reasoning about 2% gains to everyone vs 20% gains to themselves.

This is because there is no rule that one's stupid mistakes can't hurt other people who wouldn't make that stupid mistake.

And further, I claim that there are broader cases like that. For example, as I understand farmers and other selfishly benefiting people are taking advantage of people to get crazy water rules passed in California.

Without changing the farmers and such, if not making them nicer, nor even smarter nor more rational, not changing them at all, it seems like the case that if more of the public was like me in certain key ways, they would be unable to get those crazy water rules passed.

Which would be an improvement.

A world where a welfare cliff appearing in a policy gets met with "...you appear to have set the marginal tax rate here to fifty thousand percent. This only makes sense if this is an activity we really hate people doing, but you appear to be applying it to the activity of... having a job while disabled, which I personally don't feel is nearly as bad as murder, and in fact seems positive." by lots of ordinary people is one where it seems unlikely for welfare cliffs to appear.

Here I'm mostly listing negatives that wouldn't appear, because those are easier than trying to figure out what a whole society might invent as positive things, but it seems likely there are various positive things we have missed, the same way as we have missed "not having welfare cliffs".

doctorpotatomd

this falls apart when you realise that intelligence and rationality are not one-dimensional. person A might never drink-drive but vote for crazy water rules, and person B might vote against the crazy water rules but drink-drive regularly. and sure, you can say "well, our rational-topia will only take people who both vote against crazy water rules and never drink-drive", but then what if those people aren't able to identify welfare cliffs in a proposed policy? The list of criteria you would want for your rational-topians would be neverending, and these criteria just aren't as correlated or straightforward as you'd like them to be. And don't forget that you don't know everything, so there's stuff you won't be able to set a good criterion for because you and your fellow rational-topians don't have the requisite knowledge amongst you. (And that's before we even get to the practicality and ethics of actually doing the whole thing...)

Oh, and it looks like person A has a really bad day at work and knocked back a bottle of bourbon before getting behind the wheel and putting their car through a servo, despite never having drink-driven before in their life and being completely against drink-drinking and cognizant of the reasons why it's bad. And then person B flipped on those crazy water rules because their doctor, who they respect as an intelligent authority figure, made an offhand snide remark (that was motivated only by the prospect of their favourite golf course being forced to close, and not considered at all beyond that). Turns out people are messy and complicated, and that it's beyond unrealistic to expect every member of society to 100% understand every detail of every issue and policy.

yes, it would be good if more of the population were better at and more willing to use critical thought. the actual way to achieve this is through better education, more robust anti-lobbying and anti-propaganda laws, and probably stricter rules around political campaigns. And, importantly, 99.99% of people are capable of this type of thinking if they get the chance to develop it; I take issue with the framing of "more like me in certain key ways", it smacks of arrogance to my ear. the people themselves aren't the issue; there's no such thing as an unintelligent person, not really, only people who haven't been lucky enough to he given the tools and education needed to fully realize their intelligence.

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doctorpotatomd