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[silverspawn]

For this curious,. the solution to this puzzle was:

Play Rook to d1 to take away the last escape route of the King. Next move play Knight d5 checkmate. The beautiful part is that this works with literally any move black plays as a response to Rd1.

[silverspawn]

And I'm pretty sure the solution is unique, too.

[silverspawn]

Alright, yesterday I finished book 1. I think I already got the important part wrt consciousness, but I'm still going to reread the other 5 books.

[silverspawn]

During Yom Kippur, the rabbi is seized by a sudden wave of guilt, and prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” The cantor is likewise seized by guilt, and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” Seeing this, the janitor at the back of the synagogue prostrates himself and cries, “God, I am nothing before you!” And the rabbi nudges the cantor and whispers, “Look who thinks he’s nothing.”

A metaphor for people who think it's virtuous to proclaim their imperfections

[silverspawn]

This short post, the first of Sequence II of Book II, could be the most important post ever written in LW's history. EY says politics is the mind-killer, and henceforth all political discussion on LW is shunned to the point of closely resembling an outright ban, making LW unique among almost everywhere on the internet. The downside is that its benefits don't extend to politics. This may be a particularly bad downside now that politics really does seem  to have reached something of a boiling point.

[silverspawn]

On September 11th, 2001, nineteen Muslim males hijacked four jet airliners in a deliberately suicidal effort to hurt the United States of America. Now why do you suppose they might have done that? Because they saw the USA as a beacon of freedom to the world, but were born with a mutant disposition that made them hate freedom?

Realistically, most people don’t construct their life stories with themselves as the villains. Everyone is the hero of their own story. The Enemy’s story, as seen by the Enemy, is not going to make the Enemy look bad. If you try to construe motivations that would make the Enemy look bad, you’ll end up flat wrong about what actually goes on in the Enemy’s mind.

People who write fiction overwhelmingly don't get this. And a lot of people who get that [people-who-are-from-their-perspective-evil don't see themselves as evil] still don't get that they *also* see themselves as *important*. Instead, if they write from the perspective of a side-character, somehow that side character still considers the main character to be important. But from their perspective, the main character ought to be just one of many side characters.

[silverspawn]

In many universes, the importance of characters is like a universal constant. Some characters are important, and they are treated as important by the plot, indeed fate itself, whereas other characters are unimportant. In the most egregious cases, those characters even treat themselves as unimportant.

[silverspawn]

If an army is crossing the border or a lunatic is coming at you with a knife, the policy alternatives are (a) defend yourself or (b) lie down and die. If you defend yourself, you may have to kill. If you kill someone who could, in another world, have been your friend, that is a tragedy. And it is a tragedy. The other option, lying down and dying, is also a tragedy. Why must there be a non-tragic option? Who says that the best policy available must have no downside? If someone has to die, it may as well be the initiator of force, to discourage future violence and thereby minimize the total sum of death.

[silverspawn]

Unrelated hot take: people in the WDC thread care too much about the status of the person who submitted a card. The reactions are not all invariant under people's names.

[silverspawn]

When the unenlightened ones try to be profound, they draw endless verbal comparisons between this topic, and that topic, which is like this, which is like that; until their graph is fully connected and also totally useless. The remedy is specific knowledge and in-depth study. When you understand things in detail, you can see how they are not alike, and start enthusiastically subtracting edges off your graph.

There is a trivial mapping between a graph and its complement. A fully connected graph, with an edge between every two vertices, conveys the same amount of information as a graph with no edges at all. The important graphs are the ones where some things are not connected to some other things.

This approximately describes the failure mode of my sister's husband's thinking. He draws connections everywhere. It's very exhausting to debate.

[silverspawn]

    Bob Merkelthud slid cautiously through the door of the alien spacecraft, glancing right and then left (or left and then right) to see whether any of the dreaded Space Monsters yet remained. At his side was the only weapon that had been found effective against the Space Monsters, a Space Sword forged of pure titanium with 30% probability, an ordinary iron crowbar with 20% probability, and a shimmering black discus found in the smoking ruins of Stonehenge with 45% probability, the remaining 5% being distributed over too many minor outcomes to list here.

    Merklethud (though there’s a significant chance that Susan Wifflefoofer was there instead) took two steps forward or one step back, when a vast roar split the silence of the black airlock! Or the quiet background hum of the white airlock! Although Amfer and Woofi (1997) argue that Merklethud is devoured at this point, Spacklebackle (2003) points out that—

[silverspawn]

Turns out reading a book full of intellectual content in a day is hard. My brain is too mushy to finish it. Book 2 is longer than book 1.

[silverspawn]

I thought I was done with Netflix runs now that I'm no longer slacking off, but right now I struggle to find anything else to do. my brain feels so mushy that most of the things I like still feel too hard

Alas, although I will likely not get very far

Netflix Run #6

1/n Cowboy Beebop

I can't imagine I'll like this (I know it's a famous anime, which I've also never looked at), but it keeps popping up so let's just get it out the way

[silverspawn]

Really thought this would take place in the past. (Is this canon or did they change it from the anime?) But either way it's a dumb action show.

2/n I am not okay with this

[silverspawn]

A show about teenage drama that, unfathomably, I'm actually enjoying 10 minutes in

[silverspawn]

I can't believe this but I think this show is genuinely good

[faust]

These quotes are all from the same source right?

If an army is crossing the border or a lunatic is coming at you with a knife, the policy alternatives are (a) defend yourself or (b) lie down and die. If you defend yourself, you may have to kill. If you kill someone who could, in another world, have been your friend, that is a tragedy. And it is a tragedy. The other option, lying down and dying, is also a tragedy. Why must there be a non-tragic option? Who says that the best policy available must have no downside? If someone has to die, it may as well be the initiator of force, to discourage future violence and thereby minimize the total sum of death.

This is very reductive. Of course in the face of an invading army you have more than two options. Also if you immediately surrender most likely noone would die (at least not due to the conflict; it may be the intention of the army leaders to inflict harm on your population).

And the second example is "a lunatic comes at you with a knife"... like, is this the same person that wrote

If you try to construe motivations that would make the Enemy look bad, you’ll end up flat wrong about what actually goes on in the Enemy’s mind.

?

[silverspawn]

I don't think I get the idea behind arguing with hypotheticals? If they are not sufficiently spcified, just add the remaining details. The point obviously isn't the specific scenario.

[silverspawn]

And I actually binged the show. It was pretty good.

[faust]

I don't think I get the idea behind arguing with hypotheticals? If they are not sufficiently spcified, just add the remaining details. The point obviously isn't the specific scenario.

My issue is I think that the author attempts to construct scenarios where the only available options are pretty bad, and I assume this is supposed to illustrate that sometimes you need to use policies with serious downsides. But even in those scenarios, there are arguably more options that the author doesn't take into account. If they cannot provide a solid example for a situation where you only have bad options, then the argument that such situations exist pretty much falls apart.

Especially considering that this is more specifically advocating use of violence against others; I don't buy that there are commonplace scenarios where using violence is the best option available.

[silverspawn]

I don't think I get the idea behind arguing with hypotheticals? If they are not sufficiently spcified, just add the remaining details. The point obviously isn't the specific scenario.

My issue is I think that the author attempts to construct scenarios where the only available options are pretty bad, and I assume this is supposed to illustrate that sometimes you need to use policies with serious downsides. But even in those scenarios, there are arguably more options that the author doesn't take into account. If they cannot provide a solid example for a situation where you only have bad options, then the argument that such situations exist pretty much falls apart.

Keep in mind that the parts of the essay that I chose to quote here aren't necessarily the one that best makes the point.

The relevant post here is Policy Debates should not appear one-sided. The thing I quoted was from a later post in the same sequence as sort of a reference. The opening example of the post is this:

Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.

I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?

[silverspawn]

earlier today, I bet against the claim that [a third of the people in California will be forced to evacuate by December 2041]. Am I going to win this bet?

The person betting against me did so because of climate change. I'm not sure if the bet is fully specified though, what if no-one is forced to move but people move because other places are less convenient?

[silverspawn]

Corrected the first 6 exams in my best class and

they performed extremely well, the worst grade is a 2+ (something like a B+ in international terms)

which I guess is great because I thought my teaching style was more effective than most. I doubt that my exam was significantly easier than that of other teachers, though I don't know yet. I will look at other exams.

But it's also a bit weird because they performed much more poorly in the test exam just a week ago and I don't quite understand what changed. The default explanation would be 'they studied' but I don't think they've studied all that much? Maybe they did.

I think the real exam was a bit easier than the test exam, but not that much.

Maybe just writing the test exam was an unusually effective learning experience.

Maybe they tried harder

Maybe they cheated though this should be very difficult to do, and the risk would have been extremely high

[silverspawn]

Going to say 'writing the test exam was very helpful' is the most likely explanation. The test exam was quite similar to the exam, but it also covered everything they have to know how to do, so if that's how they learned, it's not really cheating.

[silverspawn]

anyway my teaching is super effective so double my pay plx thx