promethea.incorporated

Rationalists, we need to talk about models

wirehead-wannabe:

h3lldalg0:

Epistemic status: not a professional, but I was the sort of kid who asked for the DMS-IV on her fourteenth birthday.  

This is a rant, I’m not grabbing sources at the moment, I’m just making some observations about things that are starting to bother me. 

I really like the Less Wrong/Rationalist crowd, and I count myself in this group. I can’t shake the feeling, however, that there’s an unfortunate mix of contempt and fascination with the softer sciences.  On the one hand, contempt for the academic system in general and for the value of soft sciences in general.  As though once you see that a field has issues and generates a certain amount of bullshit, it will be trivial for a smart person to fix.  

At the same time, subsets of this group seem to be in love with models like Kegan’s development levels, the MBTI, “amateur sociology,” and other things like that.  To the point that I find myself in conversations where these things are taken as far more universal than I think is epistemically responsible to claim.  Where, when I say something like “Kegan’s development levels might be locally useful, on an individual basis, but I think there’s risk of overfitting if you try to apply them everywhere,” I get the equivalent of “You haven’t done enough reading on this/this isn’t a problem if you’re applying it correctly.”  The second response is nearly verbatim.  It’s from a conversation where I tried to point out that Nonviolent Communication techniques could be the wrong tool to use in some situations.  

I won’t pretend that I’m above this kind of navel-gazing. I like taking personality tests and getting the results, seeing if they match my experience.  I like speculating on sociology, or wondering casually if certain fictional characters are sociopaths.  I’m also not above reading an interesting thing in a pop psych article and trying it out, seeing if it has value for me.  But I think that without large swaths of evidence (we’re supposed to be all about base rates and evidence, right?), value found in ad-hoc models written by random bloggers or psychologists from the 1980s should be locally applied.  Attempts to apply them universally should be treated with skepticism.  

More than that, I see a lot of people ignoring the potential for anchoring.  It seems reasonable to me that if you are attached to certain model, you have an incentive to make all of the evidence fit.  Or rationalize evidence away.  Or ignore people who disagree with your pet theory’s claims.  This seems to be a really dangerous habit for so-called “rationalists” to get into.  A theory or a model is only as useful as its results.  It’s only as empirical as its predictive value. 

So long as we acknowledge the infallibility of sortinghatchats I agree with this.

2 weeks ago · 84 notes · source: h3lldalg0 · .permalink

@lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

Putting up barriers to entry based on skill and knowledge seems like a good way to reduce gun suicides (which probably reduces overall suicides) but not a good way to reduce gun homicides.

Well yes, and considering that gun suicides constitute the vast majority of gun deaths, I think that’s a reasonable goal to pursue while nonetheless not adversely impacting legitimate gun owners the way many other rules would.

(via lisp-case-is-why-it-failed)

2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw · 178,459 notes · source: reginaeinferos · .permalink

wirehead-wannabe:

inferentialdistance:

fierceawakening:

inferentialdistance:

fierceawakening:

lyycernment:

fierceawakening:

here’s the thing

I actually don’t know for sure if gun control will help

It seems to have helped in other places but perhaps the us is different

I honestly in humility must admit I do not know

But it seems to me that trying out incremental measures like background checks and like making it harder to get certain kinds of weapons and seeing whether they work is not by itself tyranny

Tyranny would be OK THATS IT NO GUNS FOR ANYONE EVER BOOM

incremental measures can be tried out and tweaked or reversed if they do not work

I mean I know people are terrified of a slippery slope but you know what? Even if we pass some laws we will still have an nra

they will still be loud

if shit goes south I guarantee you they will say something about it

Where the alternative is doing nothing out of fear of even trying something else at all

And doing nothing is getting us nowhere

The usual argument against incremental change is that anti-guns would push their advantage until guns are totally banned. So pro-guns prefer keeping the current situation as a Schelling fence.

Some examples are given in this SSC subthread : http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/15/open-thread-51-75/#comment-372796

I personally don’t know enough to form an opinion, but they might have a point.

That’s what I’m saying I disagree with.

Or at least think we should test the outer boundaries of to see if it looks likely to actually happen.

It is my understanding that the outer boundaries have, in fact, been tested. For example, the 10-year assault rifle ban. You can also look at other countries, such as the UK, or Australia, and what happened when they passed increased restrictions (including total bans) on guns. On the whole, increased gun control tends to reduce “gun violence” yet leave “total violence” unaffected; if violence was trending up (as it was in UK) it continues trending up in the same manner; if violence was trending down (as it was in Australia), it continues trending down. And I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.

The reason that gun advocates are so testy about gun control laws is because they are law abiding citizens, so they have to put up with the consequences. Not the anti-gun people, who don’t buy them, and not the criminals, who disobey the laws.

I’ll give you that the assault weapons ban was poorly designed. I’ll also give you that humans are pretty violent and that those who would use a gun often would just go for a knife instead. (Though I also see little blurby statistics now and again that suggest that as a whole, violence is actually generally trending down. But that doesn’t really affect this.)

What I won’t give you is this:

“I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.”

I’m pretty sure it is one, because if Omar Mateen had brought a couple knives to Pulse, I doubt anywhere near as many people would be dead.

I do understand that mass shootings are rare in the grand scheme of things. But compared to other countries they happen strikingly often here.

The US has a massively larger population than most countries, and in the developed world has a much larger homicide rate, both of which would result in a substantial increase in mass shootings. For example, The US has around 10 times the population of Canada (320 million to 35 million), and about 2.7 times the homicide rate (3.9 to 1.4). We could then naively expect the US to have 27 times as many mass shootings as Canada. And since the US has 10 times as many people as Canada, there would be 10 times as many people being informed that their country has 27 times as many mass shootings, even if gun laws had no impact on mass shootings.

There may be disproportionately more mass shootings in the US than in other countries, even accounting for things like the large population and higher homicide rate. But I have not seen good evidence that this is so, and non-trivial evidence against.

Is this a consistent finding? Because if so its pretty damning to the left’s claim to actually be informed about expert opinion.

That’s pretty astonishing and it seems actually valid. Checking the numbers for Finland, the death toll for mass shootings in the last 10 years is approximately 0.47/1M annually. Dropping just to the time period they examined gives the results they had. Taking a longer time period to compensate for the difference in population and the excessive variance it causes makes the numbers a bit more moderate: 0.16 for 30 years, approximately 0.1 for 70 years, and of course this is getting ridiculous but it shows that assuming their US numbers are correct then even controlling for rare and anomalous incidents, the US is actually safer nonetheless.

The numbers seem to have an interesting relation to overall homicide rates: (normalized for murders/100 000 population)

Russia 0.001
Italy 0.01
US 0.023
Canada 0.023
Germany 0.025
England 0.027
Belgium 0.071
Netherlands 0.073
Finland 0.083
Austria 0.136
Slovakia 0.168
Czech Rep 0.175
Switzerland 0.284
France 0.298
Norway 3.15

So actually the Anglosphere+Germany seems to have pretty constant rates of mass shootings vs. overall homicides, with a lot of Europe lagging behind. Only Italy is able to solidly beat the US in that area and Russia and Norway are total anomalies and probably not relevant for this. But the main point is: the mass shooting rate in the US is not that exceptional, and actually pretty low when the overall rate of violence is controlled for.

And in light of this the US is just freaking out absurdly and needs to calm the fuck down and stop issuing bulletproof blankets to schoolchildren.

2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #violence cw · 73 notes · source: fierceawakening · .permalink

thetransintransgenic:

socialjusticemunchkin:

ilzolende:

decameter:

thathopeyetlives:

decameter:

Have discovered key advantage of judaism from @ilzolende - they hold their organised religion at a much more civilised time of dfay.

What time is that?

Allegedly 19:30 Fridays, although other sources have disputed this, or at least claimed it’s much more complicated.

19:30 Fridays at the local Temple Beth Reform Judaism.

It was “”“17:30 Fridays”“” (read: 17:50 Fridays) at the local Hillel when that was in session.

And apparently there are some magical synagogues that actually hold Saturday morning services at 10:00 or 10:30 every week.

Is that just the jewish IQ thing in effect or is judaism actually the Objectively Correct Religion because it has figured out the Objectively Correct Time to do religion at? I’m prepared to believe either…

Friends It Has Been Three Days Since Judaism Just Had A Religion Holiday That Was “Cheesecake-Fueled All-Nighter On A Saturday Night”*.

I Do Not Think This Is The Best Time To Be Talking About How Judaism Does Time Management Correctly.

(* Cheesecake depends on local custom. iirc almost all customs are something dairy-based.)

What do you mean “Cheesecake-Fueled All-Nighter On A Saturday Night” isn’t Correct Time Management? Because that totally sounds like Correct Time Management to me. (I mean, assuming the cheesecake is allowed to be vegan…)

(via thetransintransgenic)

2 weeks ago · tagged #shitposting · 45 notes · source: decameter · .permalink

ilzolende:

oh-snap-pro-choice:

reginaeinferos:

therevenantrising:

reginaeinferos:

therevenantrising:

reginaeinferos:

Nothing is going to change. Americans love their guns more than they love people and after Sandy Hook we decided that killing over 20 children was acceptable and not outrageous enough to make reasonable restrictions on guns. This is America, a country that has been around for 200 years, a superpower, a 1st world nation, and one of the wealthiest countries on the planet and we refuse to protect our own people. We respect guns more than we respect the lives of people. 

What specific gun control measures would you propose and how would they directly and effectively make society safer?

• Absolutely get rid of all AR-15′s and the like.
  
• Intense background and criminal background checks and anything violent automatically disqualifies you.
  
• Make getting a gun/gun permit more like getting a driver’s license:
  
• permit to learn
• includes an exam with 18 or more questions on the policies, laws, and etc of guns and gun ownership
• if you get more than 8 questions incorrect you must retake it.
• 30 hours of practical experience at a gun range with a licensed teacher
  
• Must take a 5 hour class on the dangers of guns and how to use them safely which will then yield you a certificate that grants you to take the practical exam and lasts for one year. If you don’t gain the license within the allotted year you must retake the class.
  
• A practical exam with a licensed instructor who will grade you on various skills. If you pass you may be granted a permit on the weapon of your choice, the exams may differ on the type of firearm you want.
  
• Follow the Japanese model where you must have two gun safes in different areas of the house, one to store the gun and one to store the bullets and you must provide the police with information on where those safes are.
  
• No concealed carry and only handguns may be allowed to be out in public.
  
• If transporting a weapon, it must be in the trunk of the vehicle, in a bag or some other case, safety on and unloaded and may not leave the vehicle until you are at the destination.
  
• If you’re a hunter or some other gun hobbyist that requires a functional weapon other than a handgun then the gun must stay on the premises, whether that is a gun range or the Fish and Wildlife facility.
  
• If you live in a rural area where police (and people, for that matter) are few and far between, something akin to a deer hunting rifle should provide plenty of protection from predators and poachers, you still have to follow the aforementioned steps.
  
• This doesn’t cover everything but I think it’s a good place to start.
  

Can you show me evidence that this would directly and effectively create a safer society?

I have never laughed so hard at a gun law post. Like seriously, the evidence is in fucking reality. The proposed restrictions are just fucking logic.

IIRC, gun control is useful for reducing suicides but not that useful for reducing murders?

Also, mass shootings aren’t a good basis for legislation, but if you’re focusing on them anyway, most of this probably wouldn’t help much. I feel like most terrorists could answer questions about how to use guns safely.

• Absolutely get rid of all AR-15′s and the like.

Meaning “semiautomatic long guns” or “scary-looking guns”? The first is debatable, the latter is a terrible basis for laws. But if one wants to “absolutely get rid of”, that sounds like implying taking those guns away from their owners and…yeah, not going to happen in America. Even if it was a good idea (I don’t know whether it would be), it’s not an idea that would ever work.

• Intense background and criminal background checks and anything violent automatically disqualifies you.

Making gun permits depend on being a well-behaved citizen is a good idea. I wouldn’t go as far to disqualify everyone with the slightest background of violence because people fuck up and get better (eg. having lesser crimes make one ineligible for a certain number of years would be satisfactory), but as a general rule yes, let responsible, peaceful, law-abiding (as far as victimful crimes go) people have guns (and make the permits easy to obtain if one is responsible, and easy to lose if one acts irresponsibly later) and just filter out the bad apples.

• Make getting a gun/gun permit more like getting a driver’s license:
  
• permit to learn
• includes an exam with 18 or more questions on the policies, laws, and etc of guns and gun ownership
• if you get more than 8 questions incorrect you must retake it.
• 30 hours of practical experience at a gun range with a licensed teacher
  
• Must take a 5 hour class on the dangers of guns and how to use them safely which will then yield you a certificate that grants you to take the practical exam and lasts for one year. If you don’t gain the license within the allotted year you must retake the class.
  
• A practical exam with a licensed instructor who will grade you on various skills. If you pass you may be granted a permit on the weapon of your choice, the exams may differ on the type of firearm you want.
  

I’d replace the mandatory hours part with just a thorough examination without regard for how those skills were exactly obtained. Such courses tend to become fodder for rentseekers via regulatory capture when the licensed gun teachers start lobbying ever more onerous requirements. Show me that you know how to handle the gun responsibly in both theory and practice, and that you can pass the shooting test (and a health examination on eg. eyesight and some other issues that might pose a risk) and you’re good.

Assuming $20/h for the range and class, the costs would end up being $700 for the mandatory parts and the examination probably won’t be free either. That’s not only incredibly expensive, but also adversarial towards people who have learned their skills from eg. parents (”sure, you could pass the exams anyway, but we’ll make you sit through a whole workweekful of stuff regardless because fuck you that’s why, and oh yes you’ll be paying an arm and leg to politically connected cronies for it too”) and thus fails the basic requirement of “don’t antagonize the people you’re regulating”.

If you want to build regulations that have a sense of legitimacy and thus might not be immediately repealed the instant political winds change, don’t act like you’re putting up arbitrary barriers for the sake of barriers but instead figure out the least burdensome way of getting what you want while also giving the people you’re regulating as much of what they want as well. Treat it as positive-sum cooperation, not a zero-sum game of “let’s get rid of $unpopular_group”.

I know red-blue polarization that turns even ridiculously simple questions into Grand Matters of Principles and Destroying the Hated Outgroup is a time-honored american tradition, but it should seriously be dropped in favor of more productive approaches.

• Follow the Japanese model where you must have two gun safes in different areas of the house, one to store the gun and one to store the bullets and you must provide the police with information on where those safes are.
  

That sounds expensive and would make poor people drop out of the legal gun system to the illegal gun system, an outcome everyone probably regards undesirable.

I think gun laws should start from the assumption that even a poor black guy in the ghetto, or a borderer out in the basically-third-world-appalachia, should be able to abide by the requirements to be a legal gun owner, because let’s face it, those people are going to have guns and having their guns be legal would be far better than having them be illegal.

• No concealed carry and only handguns may be allowed to be out in public.
  

Concealed carry makes it impossible for attackers to reliably know who are packing and provides a slight degree of security through obscurity to anyone. Open carry creeps people out, shows which ones are safe to attack, and I don’t think criminals on their way to do crime would obey carrying restrictions anyway. A gun is like a penis: I don’t mind a person having one as long as they don’t use it to do violence to people because I know many people like having them and using them responsibly, but I’d prefer if people didn’t wave them around in public. So if anything, I’d say yes for concealed carry, but you may only take your gun out in serious circumstances or suitable locations.

Probably the best rule on this would be that local communities may choose whether they allow open carry or not, and then I could live in one where open carry isn’t allowed and others may have their own style.

• If transporting a weapon, it must be in the trunk of the vehicle, in a bag or some other case, safety on and unloaded and may not leave the vehicle until you are at the destination.
  

I don’t feel qualified to comment on this one.

• If you’re a hunter or some other gun hobbyist that requires a functional weapon other than a handgun then the gun must stay on the premises, whether that is a gun range or the Fish and Wildlife facility.
  

This means that the facilities become targets for violent criminals seeking to obtain weapons, especially if illegal gun trade has been reduced. If it’s in a densely populated area effectively supervised by neighbors it’s not that much of an issue, but it’s a lot harder to adequately defend a valuable location with a fuckload of guns out in the wilderness, or some industrial area without that much traffic (especially if it isn’t manned 24/7, and it probably isn’t), than to store the guns in a decentralized manner (ie. in people’s homes) so the mafia doesn’t have a single place to raid profitably and not even be discovered until some time after the fact. (I think some european country tried exactly this and found that it was a very very good way to discreetly distribute lots of weapons to organized crime)

(via ilzolende)

2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw · 178,459 notes · source: reginaeinferos · .permalink

ilzolende:

shieldfoss:

nentuaby:

sinesalvatorem:

shieldfoss:

Principled stances on taxation:

• “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
  
• “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
  

Unprincipled stances on taxation:

• “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
  
• “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
  

Tag yrself I’m a principled consequentialist.

This is… So silly. If the consequentialist position sounds wildly different from the “unprincipled capitalist” position then you really need to choose a completely different word than “theft” in all of the above, because you’re COMPLETELY failing to express what you’re trying to say by it.

There are important differences in the behavior of politicians who believe the one compared to politicians who believe the other.

One approach realizes that when you tax people, you hurt people. When you have the power to impose VAT on food items while children go hungry to bed, you have the power to hurt people. That is a grave responsibility, and should only be exercised when your taxation scheme helps people more than it hurts starving children.

The other approach, which I see too often, goes

Lol I want to signal that I am cultured, let’s fund the Royal Theatre by taxing important goods! Wait, there are starving kids in our country now how did that happen? Let’s tax luxury goods to help the kids. Poor alcoholics can no longer afford homes? Let’s tax cars exorbitantly. People die because they don’t replace old cars that don’t have the newest safety features? Let’s make those mandatory! Poor people can no longer afford to drive at all now? Well sucks to be poor I guess but cars aren’t a necessity.

What, you feel taxes are unjust? They’re the price you pay to live in civilization! Without them we wouldn’t have great things like the Royal Theatre but only the art that people like enough to pay money for without being forced to and that would be terrible.

I realize this isn’t primarily about mandatory art, but nonetheless mandatory art is the worst.

ugh that thing

that exact thing

one politician around here (from the Party Formerly Known as the Communist Party) has written an excellent piece on how “criminal law isn’t a list of facebook likes” and I just want to live somewhere where the government budget isn’t treated as a list of facebook likes either

(via ilzolende)

2 weeks ago · tagged #this is a social democracy hateblog #i'm only angry at the left because i care about the poor · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink

ilzolende:

decameter:

thathopeyetlives:

decameter:

Have discovered key advantage of judaism from @ilzolende - they hold their organised religion at a much more civilised time of dfay.

What time is that?

Allegedly 19:30 Fridays, although other sources have disputed this, or at least claimed it’s much more complicated.

19:30 Fridays at the local Temple Beth Reform Judaism.

It was “”“17:30 Fridays”“” (read: 17:50 Fridays) at the local Hillel when that was in session.

And apparently there are some magical synagogues that actually hold Saturday morning services at 10:00 or 10:30 every week.

Is that just the jewish IQ thing in effect or is judaism actually the Objectively Correct Religion because it has figured out the Objectively Correct Time to do religion at? I’m prepared to believe either…

(via ilzolende)

2 weeks ago · tagged #shitposting · 45 notes · source: decameter · .permalink