vishho's comments

I feel like I am going insane. Pure psychopathy or scientism to want randomized controls for studying infection of a deadly virus. Absolutely disgusted. No wonder we had a lab-leak...

We cannot do the science, because such a randomized test would be deeply unethical. Compare to having pregnant women smoke cigarettes to study effect on the fetus. You do this only afterwards with observational data.

Next to politization there is also public health, which is more of a management science than an emperical science. And economic concerns.

From all the data worldwide, you only reduce risk of hospitalization and death, not for spreading to your grandmother or catching it from a bypasser sneezing in your face. To act like there is no risk for the leaky vaccinated, is to actually increase your risk. Data shows that asymptomatic breakthrough infections are able to cause long-COVID. Now you did not even feel sick and gave your body and immune system rest to clear the virus. Very risky!

Right-wing cancelation happens, but it is usually reported as a campaign of harassment.

Instead of calling your advertisers to complain about perceived racism, think unsavory stuff like spam and GamerGate threats.

Right canceling grew out of troll and gamer culture. Left canceling SJW grew out of decades-old activism.

It is of similar type: ganging up on someone your group picked as the next victim, robbing them of their safety or speech without a formal and fair judgment.

But left-wing canceling (say, leaving 100 bad reviews on Yelp for a family business of someone going viral for a 10 second out of context clip on Twitter) is way more advanced and sophisticated. 4chan lost gamergate the moment the press focused on the death threats of a few incapable of expressing their autistic rage in an argument.

The left is more savvy. It knows that a single newspaper photo of 3 activists has similar value to a hundred uncovered protests. They know how to wield the taboo of racism as a weapon to avoid critique. They make you remember why their victim deserved it.

Correct. A canceling is social/mob justice, never settled in a court of law.

To conflate the two is playing into the pitchforks of the cancel crowd. These label legal acts or free speech as illegal racism or hate speech, and we should not go along with that madness.

Cancel tactics are precisely the way they are, because they were designed to function without playing by societies formal rules, or the reasonable defense of choosing not to listen to someone you deeply despise, yet leave their speech and platform alone (they do not care about Alex Jones, but care about the views of those who like to listen to him).

Your absolutely valid point was downvoted/cancelled in a similar manner: projected to be factually incorrect due to political bias against Thiel.

I think it is ironically relevant.

People complain about the target selection and first-mover advantage of Von Neumann, in the same thread which seems to be taken over by collateral damage of polarizing identity politics propaganda, set to target social cohesion of American civilians (which leaks into Western culture) done by the very same adversaries targeted decades back by Von Neumann.

Game Theory eventually settled on Mutually Assured Destruction. MAD can be seen as the tit-for-tat strategy in an iterated PD with multiple level thinking (If we have crazy von Neumann, do they have similar consultants? Do they know that we think Neumann is a lunatic? etc.) and super rationality (we are all players on the same board, damaging other players reduces our own chances to grow, we should be competing against those urging for war, on either side).

Von Neumann was consultant on game theory, not on geopolitical diplomatic strategy. War generals wanted to talk about future conflicts. Von Neumann reminded them that all talk of winning future conflicts could be made moot by a single move. And he reasoned that intelligent analysts on the other side would inform their generals similarly. Both did a good job, and the generals are commended for taking things outside pure maths into consideration.

What is our solution for when Russia joins the game and gets access to its own nukes?

The Spockian rational answer is: make this question irrelevant and increase our power on the board, by making sure Russia cannot even join the game we are currently winning.

To make good decisions you need diverse expert input like this. All in all, I think von Neumann's work helped keep the nuclear war on paper, instead of reality. His input of a first strike evolved into MAD and allowed us to reach an equilibrium.

A first strike is not lunacy. It is a rational decision, if the nuclear arms race is viewed under game theory.

He was a consultant, not had his hand on the button. The people with the hand on the button were talking about the rising threat and how to deal with it in the future. Neumann rightly reasoned that if there ever came a conflict, the winning move would have been an early first strike.

If you look at his statements, these are statements of mathematical fact, not political strategy.

If anything, he showed the hypocracy of target selection and its justifications for war. You want to play to win, or worry about rules and perceptions, unsure of if your opponent employs similarly intelligent analysts and game theorists?

Look at the target selection of American adversaries in their information warfare. Made by lunatics? Or made to win a shadow war and damage American culture and politics without regard to military status?

There is no logical reason. The emotional reason, of course, is that one targets men and the other targets women. Most activism these days is retalitory, not consolidatory. So you are allowed to attack white men, because they are always in a position of power.

But both outlets are owned by Bezos, so maybe both outlets are just toxic. The fish rots from the head.

Zoom has attention tracking, which when enabled silently, shows an admin if the screen is maximized or if the user is focused on other applications. They don't yet tell admins what other apps the user is active in, just whether the user is active.

Another angle for Zoom to do that, is that it is a massive Chinese spyware application, which can target users by meta data or IP, like it did by messing with the calls of activists. A bit like how anti-virus companies are sometimes charged with exfiltrating secret documents.