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rimiform

50 karma · joined November 29, 2020

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rimiform··on The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)
I think what people need to realize is that the Dunning-Kruger effect is mostly "not real" because, on average, everyone (regardless of competence) overestimates themselves. Saying that incompetent people overestimate themselves doesn't prove Dunning-Kruger is real, because it doesn't negate the fact that competent people also do this.
rimiform··on Pfizer’s Covid-19 Pill is 89% Effective in Phase 2/3 Study
I suspect the worry is that it will be similar for the pill. Highly effective now, but less effective for future variants.
rimiform··on Bottles: GUI front end to run Windows software on Linux
I think you're looking for this behaviour? Try using * instead of _ and that's what you'll get. Use two for bold, if you want.
rimiform··on John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
The person you're disagreeing with agrees with this idea about morality: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person-affecting_view). You, on the other hand, (I think) believe something can be bad even if it is not actually bad for anyone.

Case in point: the people who've actually died in said genocide cannot have any feelings about what we do about them, so to consider those feelings would be nonsense (according to the person-affecting view).

Of course, if someone living (such as yourself) cares about this, then it would still make sense to care about it, since the feelings of an actually living person are concerned.

rimiform··on John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
Well, burials only matter if others care about it. Other values, such as "do not harm others", etc., matter even if others don't care about them, because they concern actual suffering of living people.

If you follow Parfit, you choose that the latter kind is the only kind to care about, and so caring about burials for the sake of the one buried would be nonsensical to you.

rimiform··on John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
Don't think they had much choice in the matter, seeing as there was a punishment for defection.
rimiform··on John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
I reserve all rights to the atoms that make up my body ad infinitum, which means my estate will be able to claim copyright on your descendents for selling work that contains said atoms!
rimiform··on John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
> That’s mostly because you live in a society which doesn’t value burials or the afterlife and which worships information, which must be acquired at any cost.

Even if I was, I'd be dead when it actually came about. The implication of time-travelling morality is an interesting but problematic one. There's no one actually suffering from the act of desecration, since suffering requires one to be alive.

rimiform··on John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
Exactly, and that's why we must do absolutely nothing.

Wait, no, that's exactly what it takes for evil to prevail! Rats, I suppose there's nothing we can do, then.

rimiform··on John Steinbeck’s estate urged to let the world read his shunned werewolf novel
There might be the confounding factor of being unlikely to buy a novel you don't know exists. If Rowling releases something under her own name, I'm sure to hear about it, which will surely boost sales.

Although perhaps this was exactly what you meant.

rimiform··on WhatsApp CEO on the controversy surrounding proposed German communications laws
>DER SPIEGEL: But you do save data about your users like the device ID, the phone model, the WhatsApp user name, the phone book and thereby also the numbers of all their contacts, right?

>Cathcart: It’s true that we do have some information about how people use WhatsApp and that we do know, for example, the device ID. We collect this only to secure our services and protect from attacks. When you use WhatsApp and allow access to your phone book, we only see the phone numbers, not the name.

In particular, they have (meta)data regarding specific messages being sent, as evidenced by their approach to curtailing misinformation:

>Cathcart: Messages that are highly forwarded can only be forwarded to one chat since last spring. That led to a drop in 70 percent of these messages. More recently, we are additionally showing you a link to the Google search on those messages, to let you check the facts directly.

I'm not sure how easy it is to figure out whether those 'highly forwarded messages' are all the same, or somehow link them without knowing anything about their content or linking them to information you already know about people. Maybe it's easy and I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, I don't know.

rimiform··on Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding
70k? In San Francisco? Big oof.
rimiform··on We created a fake language to root out resume liars
If you fired everyone who ever lied you'd have nobody in your company.
rimiform··on WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)
The ESDX 'diamond' would be nightmare to use on an ortholinear keyboard.
rimiform··on We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US
More people than that are overweight. The total amount of food might be enough, but simply ill-distributed.
rimiform··on We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US
Kids might make your life better, but they probably would have been better off had you stuck to your plan of not having them.
rimiform··on We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US
That's a very sensible perspective. Unfortunately, you will probably, as most people do, change your mind about this and decide to have children anyway.
rimiform··on We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US
Makes you wonder whether you ever thought not having a baby might be a sensible option.
rimiform··on ICANN Refuses to Accredit Pirate Bay Founder Peter Sunde Due to His ‘Background’
I think that's precisely what ICANN was going for. Reacting to it, in the eyes of some people, implies there's at least some truth to what the other party said.
rimiform··on Imaginary Numbers May Be Essential for Describing Reality
That's great, but my intuition fails me when I try to consider what it would mean for the answer to some question to be a complex number. It's even worse for quaternions, because I can't even use the spatial analogue there.
rimiform··on WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
And yet look at the demographics of any service/app that has a slightly more complicated sign-up process.
rimiform··on WhatsApp and most alternatives share the same problem
Signal has a desktop client, though? Not sure where that issue came from.
rimiform··on Draw an iceberg and see how it would float in water
You can create icebergs with 'holes' in them, which have very interesting floating behaviour [0]. It doesn't work every time, though. Not sure why.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/0lcW8xT

rimiform··on Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power
What's even more interesting is that Lippman proposed a separate entity which was meant to inform the media!
rimiform··on Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power
I don't think that idea even works in theory, let alone in practice. In lieu of making a longpost about why this doesn't seem like a good idea to me, I'm just going to defer to the story of the Tower of Babel. You could also see Lippman's 'Public Opinion' on the problem.
rimiform··on Journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power
I think you are absolutely right. I can see the fallibility of 'Old World' media as well, but I think those who (actively) try to discredit them are playing with fire.
rimiform··on Toxic positivity does more harm than good
Johnson sounds like he just finished reading Deleuze and Guattari.
rimiform··on Toxic positivity does more harm than good
"At least you still have a job (even if it sucks)"
rimiform··on Toxic positivity does more harm than good
Per the article: "Even the oppressive insistence that we should love our body, no matter what, can tip into upbeat intolerance by implying that it’s not OK to want to work on tummy folds or laugh lines."

It's certainly related.

rimiform··on Misinformation: The First Digital Drug
> Most of the higher-quality longitudinal evidence I've seen does not show that there is an increase in believing in conspiracy theories or misinformation (or, as we used to call it, people simply being incorrect).

Do you have a source for that? Not trying to dispute your claim, just curious.

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