Interesting. Maybe when you get deep into the specifics, the relationship to the higher-level culture issue gets too weak to change what would otherwise be the pattern. It makes sense to me that overall the "both sides" approach would dominate -- the things that everyone agrees on probably generate a very small fraction of the Internet corpus.
The thing with Gemini was particularly egregious, but it's distressing that all the major LLM chatbots have some lefty social engineering guardrails. Early on with ChatGPT I asked it to write an essay supporting the phenomenon of preferred pronouns and an essay critical of it -- it would only produce the one that supported it, but in response to the other option it lectured me for even asking.
I get why they have this as the default, but I don't see why they can't have an option similar to turning off Safe Search that would let these things respond like someone even a little to the right of the median San Francisco liberal.
I am not an inherently organized person, so my tax prep life got rather easier when our town started letting us go to their website to request an email including all our property tax transactions for a selected calendar year.
Some years ago I was listening to Prairie Home Companion, and in the section where Keillor reads the "dedications" submitted by the audience, one was "In gratitude to my wife for 30 years of married bliss, on this our 40th wedding anniversary." It got a big laugh -- it's a good line in general but also it's a "funny because it's true" thing. It's entirely normal to hit difficult times in a relationship, and those can last quite a while; but a lot of people find that if they stick to their commitment and ride out the storms, they're happier on the other side of it. Some non-trivial percentage of people who divorce might have otherwise found that the reward for sticking with it was worth the struggle.
If you're a pure libertarian then of course the idea that the state would legislate against divorce even for good reasons will not be attractive, but if you're an average liberal then you've already embraced the idea that the state can interfere with our freedoms for overall benevolent purposes, even if that harms a minority of people who don't fit the average. At that point it becomes a policy question about the size and shape of the speed bumps to put around divorce based on how we think the numbers shake out, but I don't see why even for a liberal it should be off the table, and not just because of the impact on children (though that's certainly a factor).
Sure, I'm not defending the approach overall, and this is far outside any areas of particular knowledge that I have. OTOH I can see an argument from a more philosophical point of view that the prospective parents were already relating to these embryos as potential children, and so having some of them destroyed outside the normal process of IVF _feels like_ the loss of a child. Was there a less "child"-oriented, more simple negligence course of action they could have pursued against the clinic for this?
Read the act itself -- the action needs to be brought by a parent or legal representative of the minor, and the death has to be caused by wrongful act, omission, or negligence. The decision doesn't inherently end IVF, it just raises the risk of lawsuit. You can argue whether the ruling was correct or incorrect, or whether it's a good or bad outcome, but what some above were saying is not applicable to this particular case.
I think people here didn't really get my point, which I suppose must be my fault. I'm saying that *neither side* has much of a constituency for fiscal responsibility. I agree that the previous GOP has been opportunistic rather than principled in the past, and the MAGA folks don't give a crap.
However, Democrats very clearly don't care either, as evidenced by the widespread support for Biden's ridiculous multi-trillion-dollar spending bills and the heaps of anger directed at Sinema and Manchin for their opposition. It's surely clear by now (and should have been then) that spending a couple trillion dollars in the face of a supply-shocked country just then emerging from the pandemic was economic malpractice, but i haven't seen anyone here or among the Dem party at large express any regrets or lessons learned. Quite the contrary, Dems continue to cheer whenever Biden gets out the federal charge card again for a cause they support.
Y'all trot out this "all we have to do is raise taxes", which is sort of true except that no one is actually willing to do it (except in a figleaf way on "billionaires", which will not put a noticeable dent in our $34 trillion dollar national debt). We're screwed, there are no adults in the room anywhere.
Exactly as I said, you don't even care enough to look, and you're in good company. The important thing is you already know who you'll blame as we're all plummeting.
Oh sorry, my link didn't work and it wasn't obvious that I was changing the topic to the federal debt overall: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/10/6/when-does-federal-debt-reach-unsustainable-levels
Eh, what does it matter anyway. Assuming climate change doesn't kill us all first, we optimistically have 20 years at the current trajectory before default -- but neither party cares at all, nor does the populace. We'll be 10 feet from the edge of the cliff and going 80MPH before anyone thinks to try to brake or swerve.
Well it's true that MV is eligible, but not because it's "low-income":
As of January 1, 2023, qualifying property is limited to property placed in service in eligible census tracts. An eligible census tract is a population census tract that is a low-income community as described in section 45D(e) or that is not an urban area.
Yes, I'm not sure what Saul was trying to communicate with his excerpt, but the article is largely about these new more traditional students encountering what's still in some ways a crunchy granola lefty school that lacks a lot of what a typical campus would include.
I thought it was clear from context, but i guess I should have added "Point of information:" to my comment. I'm not interested in joining your game, I was just offering a clarification on a term of art that's often misused.
"tu quoque" as a fallacy applies only when it distracts from the specific topic being debated. That's frequently hard to identify in these fast-moving blog comments, but a common stated or unstated premise here is that Republicans are Bad, at least in comparison to Democrats. For that premise, a suggestion that Democrats do it too is not a tu quoque fallacy.
Ah ok, I got to that point. Each island is pretty small, but now there are multiple problems to be solved and more items in my bag to choose from. I thought I was pretty close to the end when I first posted, but I guess it was more like the halfway point.
Richard Hanania has a tweet thread on "Taylor Swift" Democrats -- the nut of it is this bit:
"Most centrists are simply more positive towards the side that will let them just ignore politics.
It used to be the left that was "that guy," unable to watch a football game without an ideological agenda. Now it's conservatives that lose the just be normal contest."
I started to play this towards the end of having a monthly game subscription - I hadn’t gotten very far before my subscription lapsed, and I didn’t go back to it.
I’ve been playing Return to Monkey Island - pretty fun but definitely designed for nostalgia. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played the old ones. It also follows the model of newer adventure games in that it feels more like a sequence of smaller encapsulated areas rather than one big world - which makes it a lot easier and less satisfying to solve. I guess they’re assuming no one has the attention span to be stumped for more than 15 minutes at a time anymore.
I'm doing an online class on data science and ML in my free time, and a couple of days ago as I was googling various types & aspects of neural nets, the top bit of Chrome did a little animation and brought up an invite to do some coding challenges -- so I figure i'll carve out a bit of the weekend to look at that. I gather that Google uses this as a talent acquisition tool, so maybe I'll get some ideas for enhancing our own interview process out of it.
No it didn't. Peer review is what happens prior to publication -- these were published studies. We should be disturbed that these made it through the process and were only found out by a separate group of people who go hunting for this stuff.
As an analogy, this is like where a person is charged with murder, is found guilty by the jury and put on death row, but then the Innocence Project comes in and shows that the accused was clearly innocent. The right reaction is not "Yay the system worked", it's "Yikes, the system failed -- we're lucky that this other organization found it but we need to figure out how to do better."
I think it's complicated -- to have a chance at winning an R primary, you have to at least not condemn what Trump did, so from an information theory POV, the mere fact that an R candidate supports the Stolen Election claim doesn't mean they would try that themselves. There have been plenty of R losers who supported Trump, and most of them haven't tried the same shenanigans -- is there anyone besides Kari Lake in Arizona?
OTOH it's obviously a possibility that has to be accounted for. There have been losing candidates on both sides have made noises about the idea that their loss was not legitimate, but Trump blasted that door wide open for future losers to actually take it as far as it will go.
I sort of understand what you're saying but am curious, can you specify the characteristic or variable you have in mind that's going in that direction? I'm not ready to agree that's there's an actual trend line, vs just the effects of different parts of the GOP coalition having more or less influence at different points, as well as changes in the coalition.
I probably also disagree about DeSantis vis a vis Trump -- I think Trump is dangerous in a sui generis way, and even an opportunist like DeSantis who adopted some of his tactics would ultimately still follow the rule of law and be preferable.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “A Few Thoughts on Gemini-gate”
Interesting. Maybe when you get deep into the specifics, the relationship to the higher-level culture issue gets too weak to change what would otherwise be the pattern. It makes sense to me that overall the "both sides" approach would dominate -- the things that everyone agrees on probably generate a very small fraction of the Internet corpus.
"
The thing with Gemini was particularly egregious, but it's distressing that all the major LLM chatbots have some lefty social engineering guardrails. Early on with ChatGPT I asked it to write an essay supporting the phenomenon of preferred pronouns and an essay critical of it -- it would only produce the one that supported it, but in response to the other option it lectured me for even asking.
I get why they have this as the default, but I don't see why they can't have an option similar to turning off Safe Search that would let these things respond like someone even a little to the right of the median San Francisco liberal.
On “Weekend Plans Post: One of Two Things You Can Be Sure Of”
I am not an inherently organized person, so my tax prep life got rather easier when our town started letting us go to their website to request an email including all our property tax transactions for a selected calendar year.
On “On Parenting and Divorce”
Some years ago I was listening to Prairie Home Companion, and in the section where Keillor reads the "dedications" submitted by the audience, one was "In gratitude to my wife for 30 years of married bliss, on this our 40th wedding anniversary." It got a big laugh -- it's a good line in general but also it's a "funny because it's true" thing. It's entirely normal to hit difficult times in a relationship, and those can last quite a while; but a lot of people find that if they stick to their commitment and ride out the storms, they're happier on the other side of it. Some non-trivial percentage of people who divorce might have otherwise found that the reward for sticking with it was worth the struggle.
If you're a pure libertarian then of course the idea that the state would legislate against divorce even for good reasons will not be attractive, but if you're an average liberal then you've already embraced the idea that the state can interfere with our freedoms for overall benevolent purposes, even if that harms a minority of people who don't fit the average. At that point it becomes a policy question about the size and shape of the speed bumps to put around divorce based on how we think the numbers shake out, but I don't see why even for a liberal it should be off the table, and not just because of the impact on children (though that's certainly a factor).
On “Alabama Supreme Court IVF Embryos Ruling: Read It For Yourself”
Sure, I'm not defending the approach overall, and this is far outside any areas of particular knowledge that I have. OTOH I can see an argument from a more philosophical point of view that the prospective parents were already relating to these embryos as potential children, and so having some of them destroyed outside the normal process of IVF _feels like_ the loss of a child. Was there a less "child"-oriented, more simple negligence course of action they could have pursued against the clinic for this?
"
" I don’t see any misunderstanding here."
Read the act itself -- the action needs to be brought by a parent or legal representative of the minor, and the death has to be caused by wrongful act, omission, or negligence. The decision doesn't inherently end IVF, it just raises the risk of lawsuit. You can argue whether the ruling was correct or incorrect, or whether it's a good or bad outcome, but what some above were saying is not applicable to this particular case.
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/5/2024”
I think people here didn't really get my point, which I suppose must be my fault. I'm saying that *neither side* has much of a constituency for fiscal responsibility. I agree that the previous GOP has been opportunistic rather than principled in the past, and the MAGA folks don't give a crap.
However, Democrats very clearly don't care either, as evidenced by the widespread support for Biden's ridiculous multi-trillion-dollar spending bills and the heaps of anger directed at Sinema and Manchin for their opposition. It's surely clear by now (and should have been then) that spending a couple trillion dollars in the face of a supply-shocked country just then emerging from the pandemic was economic malpractice, but i haven't seen anyone here or among the Dem party at large express any regrets or lessons learned. Quite the contrary, Dems continue to cheer whenever Biden gets out the federal charge card again for a cause they support.
Y'all trot out this "all we have to do is raise taxes", which is sort of true except that no one is actually willing to do it (except in a figleaf way on "billionaires", which will not put a noticeable dent in our $34 trillion dollar national debt). We're screwed, there are no adults in the room anywhere.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Watching a Zoomer play Fallout New Vegas”
"You’re allowed to dislike reading crappy books"
FTFY
On “Open Mic for the week of 2/5/2024”
Exactly as I said, you don't even care enough to look, and you're in good company. The important thing is you already know who you'll blame as we're all plummeting.
"
Oh sorry, my link didn't work and it wasn't obvious that I was changing the topic to the federal debt overall: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/10/6/when-does-federal-debt-reach-unsustainable-levels
"
Eh, what does it matter anyway. Assuming climate change doesn't kill us all first, we optimistically have 20 years at the current trajectory before default -- but neither party cares at all, nor does the populace. We'll be 10 feet from the edge of the cliff and going 80MPH before anyone thinks to try to brake or swerve.
"
Hey, click at your own risk. But at least it scans better than "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Amazon Workspaces".
"
https://reason.com/video/2018/12/19/remy-its-beginning-to-look-a-lot-like-ch/
"
Well it's true that MV is eligible, but not because it's "low-income":
As of January 1, 2023, qualifying property is limited to property placed in service in eligible census tracts. An eligible census tract is a population census tract that is a low-income community as described in section 45D(e) or that is not an urban area.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024”
Yes, I'm not sure what Saul was trying to communicate with his excerpt, but the article is largely about these new more traditional students encountering what's still in some ways a crunchy granola lefty school that lacks a lot of what a typical campus would include.
On “Disney Lawsuit Against DeSantis Dismissed: Read It For Yourself”
I thought it was clear from context, but i guess I should have added "Point of information:" to my comment. I'm not interested in joining your game, I was just offering a clarification on a term of art that's often misused.
"
"tu quoque" as a fallacy applies only when it distracts from the specific topic being debated. That's frequently hard to identify in these fast-moving blog comments, but a common stated or unstated premise here is that Republicans are Bad, at least in comparison to Democrats. For that premise, a suggestion that Democrats do it too is not a tu quoque fallacy.
On “MAGA versus Taylor Swift”
I think my favorite take so far is this one:
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Invisible Inc.”
Ah ok, I got to that point. Each island is pretty small, but now there are multiple problems to be solved and more items in my bag to choose from. I thought I was pretty close to the end when I first posted, but I guess it was more like the halfway point.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024”
Richard Hanania has a tweet thread on "Taylor Swift" Democrats -- the nut of it is this bit:
"Most centrists are simply more positive towards the side that will let them just ignore politics.
It used to be the left that was "that guy," unable to watch a football game without an ideological agenda. Now it's conservatives that lose the just be normal contest."
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Invisible Inc.”
I started to play this towards the end of having a monthly game subscription - I hadn’t gotten very far before my subscription lapsed, and I didn’t go back to it.
I’ve been playing Return to Monkey Island - pretty fun but definitely designed for nostalgia. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who hasn’t played the old ones. It also follows the model of newer adventure games in that it feels more like a sequence of smaller encapsulated areas rather than one big world - which makes it a lot easier and less satisfying to solve. I guess they’re assuming no one has the attention span to be stumped for more than 15 minutes at a time anymore.
On “Weekend Plans Post: The Royal Rumble”
I'm doing an online class on data science and ML in my free time, and a couple of days ago as I was googling various types & aspects of neural nets, the top bit of Chrome did a little animation and brought up an invite to do some coding challenges -- so I figure i'll carve out a bit of the weekend to look at that. I gather that Google uses this as a talent acquisition tool, so maybe I'll get some ideas for enhancing our own interview process out of it.
On “Open Mic for the week of 1/22/2024”
No it didn't. Peer review is what happens prior to publication -- these were published studies. We should be disturbed that these made it through the process and were only found out by a separate group of people who go hunting for this stuff.
As an analogy, this is like where a person is charged with murder, is found guilty by the jury and put on death row, but then the Innocence Project comes in and shows that the accused was clearly innocent. The right reaction is not "Yay the system worked", it's "Yikes, the system failed -- we're lucky that this other organization found it but we need to figure out how to do better."
On “DeSantis Drops Out”
I think it's complicated -- to have a chance at winning an R primary, you have to at least not condemn what Trump did, so from an information theory POV, the mere fact that an R candidate supports the Stolen Election claim doesn't mean they would try that themselves. There have been plenty of R losers who supported Trump, and most of them haven't tried the same shenanigans -- is there anyone besides Kari Lake in Arizona?
OTOH it's obviously a possibility that has to be accounted for. There have been losing candidates on both sides have made noises about the idea that their loss was not legitimate, but Trump blasted that door wide open for future losers to actually take it as far as it will go.
"
I sort of understand what you're saying but am curious, can you specify the characteristic or variable you have in mind that's going in that direction? I'm not ready to agree that's there's an actual trend line, vs just the effects of different parts of the GOP coalition having more or less influence at different points, as well as changes in the coalition.
I probably also disagree about DeSantis vis a vis Trump -- I think Trump is dangerous in a sui generis way, and even an opportunist like DeSantis who adopted some of his tactics would ultimately still follow the rule of law and be preferable.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.