DoofusOfDeath

I made my original post as an invitation to discuss my current views (which I admitted weren't settled). I was hoping to find any faults in my views' logic so I could replace them with something more logically consistent and, hopefully, loving.

The fact that you call my initial exposition "despicable" reminds me that HN isn't a good forum for this kind of discussion.

I regret posting a comment that elicited this kind of discussion.

FWIW, I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say. I apologize for my post's confusing wording.

Thanks for that. It sounds like I did a terrible job of expressing my thoughts.

Perhaps one of my mistakes was using HIV as an example. If someone only skimmed my post, they may have pattern-matched on the whole "AIDS is punishment from God" trope, which is 100% not what I was trying to say.

You can flip peoples' tribal affiliations on this topic by changing the disease to COVID. Do red-state antimaskers deserve treatment? Should responsible Americans pay for their reckless lifestyle?

Personally, I'm not sure. As I said above, I'm conflicted on the issue.

Regarding anti-maskers, I think it depends on the particular reason a person is anti-mask.

I'm working on the assumption that a lifelong smoker or someone who intentionally eschews safe-sex practices is generally aware of the risk they're courting. In my mind, this is "privatization of reward, socialization of risk" is similar to what we on HN often complain about regarding corporate bailouts.

In contrast, I could believe that at least some anti-maskers are genuinely misinformed about the risk posted by their behavior. I have less trouble feeling empathy for someone who's working from wrong beliefs, than someone who's knowingly being selfish.

Thanks very much for engaging the content of my post.

I was disheartened to have shared my inner conflict on the issue, only to be downvoted into oblivion.

From a now-dead comment:

He’s a bigoted right-wing conservative who doesn’t want to hear about interesting scientific developments that he views as benefiting people with lifestyles that he condemns.

Perhaps not here, but I think this is a view worth discussing. I'm moderately conservative, and some of that comment's criticism resonates with my own thoughts.

With cases like HIV/AIDS, I find myself pulled between several competing virtues:

One one side there's mercy and compassion; I'd like to minimize the suffering of hurting people. Even if someone is in dire straights because of actions that I view as unwise (extramarital sex, recreational drug use, etc.), I still want to want what's best for that person.

On the other side, there's justice. I live in a society where everyone pays, to some degree, for individuals' unwise behavior. E.g., Medicare/Medicaid for smokers' lung cancer or HIV treatment for persons who chose to indulge in risky behavior. I'm not okay with forcing the community at large to cover the costs of (what I view as) individuals' selfish actions.

I don't know what the right balance to this is. More generally, I'm not sure if there are any good principles for finding the right tradeoff between two virtues. I wish I knew. I want to do good, but the path is often obscure.

Funny coincidence. Around 2000, I worked for a company that coined the term "Norway problem" for a different software problem.

Their product used an MVCC database (I think ObjectStore). One of their customers in Norway had a problem where updates to the database seemed to not show up. IIRC the problem was a bug in this company's software that caused MVCC to show an older version of the database content than expected.

Depending on the processor, it can also be the difference between instructions in a tight loop only needing to be decoded once (because of micro-op caching) vs. decoded each loop iteration.

that is a stupid comment.

It's possible to strongly disagree with a comment without inflammatory language. E.g.: "I really disagree with that comment."

It helps keep the conversation productive.

I don't understand why the identity of the guidelines' author matters.

I would think their suitability is independent of that.

It's awesome how the spring reverb is a sneaky way to somewhat simulate polyphony beyond 3 voices.

Agreed. Hitachi makes a rather famous "muscle relaxer" called the Magic Wand.

IIUC, this particular article deals only with keeping a camera on the ballot box after it's been sealed, and on the subsequent vote-counting.

So I don't think this poses a risk to anonymous voting per se.

Amazon's proposal may be entirely reasonable. But I could easily imagine that it's part of a very sophisticated strategy on Amazon's part to ultimately undermine a legitimate vote.

I have trouble guessing which approach approach is more desirable in this situation.

I don't think that policy is ridiculous at all. It's mine as well, and IIRC it was Billy Graham's.

It minimizes the chances of (a) false accusations of inappropriate behavior, and (b) adultery.

It makes me a little sad for the limits it imposes on my friendships with women, but I consider the tradeoff very worthwhile.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that everyone should adopt my policy. I'm just saying that in my particular life circumstances, and with my particular ranking of concerns/values, it's a tradeoff that I find worthwhile.

Can you give more info on that podcast? I'm finding a bunch with that name.

"Everything is sex." - Robert California

I'm pretty uninformed on this topic. Can some explain why the parent comment would get downvoted?

A submarine.

You make an interesting point. I suspect the post is downvoted only because of the second-to-last sentence.

Once again, brevity is the soul of wit. Well played.

If a man steals a pizza from his neighbor, and then gives 3/4 of it as a tax-deductible "gift" to his favorite causes, shall we call him a hero?

Also this is an oral drug!

Asking as a layman:

Would that be a problem for patients who are unconscious or with breathing tubes?

I've been trying to figure out why this topic in particular triggers exceptionally passionate discussion on HN.

I have some pet theories, but they're really speculative, and I'm not very confident in them.

Again, I'm just trying to understand why my BS detector squeals at evo-psych and not physics.

Regarding an example: I was thinking along the lines of physics models that, in daily use, physicists treat as genuinely true. This includes concepts that are somewhat problematic, like true causality. (E.g., Newtonian mechanics as taught in high-school.)

But after some more thought, I think my real issue is how the two communities vet their theories. My simplistic take on it is:

The physics community has a healthy focus on refutability. IIUC, the community has little tolerance for someone even posing an unrefutable theory, let alone espouse it as likely truth.

The evo-psych community (and I could be mistaken) is much more tolerant of people advancing theories that are (practically speaking) untestable as though they were genuinely true.

This is a useful reminder. It's a reminder that associative thinking can invert causal relationships and turn anything into a symbol for anything else. There is no rational limit to things that can be attacked this way.

I've never heard this stated so clearly and succinctly. Thanks for advancing the conversation.

The sports team thing is really offensive though.

Offensive to whom?

Someone is deciding which groups deserve to be free of offense, and which groups don't.

I'd like to shine a spotlight on them, and their hypocritical abuse of power over others.

I agree with your criticism.

Still, I'm trying to figure out exactly what my issue is with evo-psych claims that I don't have with e.g. physics claims.

There seem to be some commonalities between the two fields: developing models to explain empirical data. And when working with their models, they're willing to assume a certain degree of causality.

I wonder if my issue is that evo-psych is a lot more like history than like physics, in that it's really hard to do repeatable experiments to vet their theories? So when we hear an evo-psych theory stated with confidence, it discredits the speaker?

Not sure if this is the kind of thing you had in mind, but...

`clang-format` saves a non-trivial chunk of time during code reviews, eliding a very banal topic.

I'm not sure what the term for this is; maybe "quorum problem"?

If too few people sustain a boycott, then they suffer without accomplishing their goal, so a net negative.

If enough people sustain a boycott, they'll suffer but will also accomplish their goal, so a net positive.