We are ACLU lawyers and Nick Merrill of Calyx Institute. We’re here to talk about National Security Letters and warrant canaries, because Reddit can’t. AUA.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-04-04T23:56:20+00:00

In general, is there any real precedent or legal principle whatsoever for the us gov't to be able to force someone to keep a canary up or otherwise force someone into speaking a false thing. Not merely a gag order, but forcing false speech?

(ie, based on how things are right now, is it plausible that in the near future a court would force someone to keep posting a canary falsely?)

Psy-Kosh · 2016-04-04T01:45:06+00:00

Thank you.

I think.

Is there some actual justification for the system being as convoluted as this, or is it as nutty as it seems?

Psy-Kosh · 2016-04-04T01:28:34+00:00

I don't really feel like watching a vid now, but I can tell you why I both agree and disagree:

"Who made god?" Is not a counterargument to theism itself.

"Who made god?" is a counterargument to arguments of the form of "the universe couldn't just happen to exist, something had to cause it to exist, therefore god."

ie, it simply says "hey, that argument you just used for god, that very same argument could be turned against god as well. In other words, hypothesizing god doesn't seem to actually help regarding that matter, since the exact same problem remains."

The commenter that you were responding to seemed to intend it in that way. Specifically, OP said that the thing that makes them speculate on the existence of a higher power is the mystery of the fact that anything exists at all.

The comment you were responding to was basically concisely saying "well... even with a higher power, wouldn't the mystery remain why a higher power exists instead of nothing?"

It's not a refutation of theism, it's a refutation of a particular type of argument/justification for theism.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-04-04T01:24:18+00:00

Good question. Maybe something like Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble is part of the answer, but that would still seem to be incomplete.

For now, best I can say is I don't fully know. And a "higher power" doesn't help answer the question at all, because then "why is there a higher power, instead of nothing?"

At some point, on some level, one has to face that question directly in a way that gods and such simply don't help with.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-04-03T19:57:36+00:00

Ah, thank you. So the same initial Caucus results are used for both the pledged delegates and to set up stage 2 of the county caucuses?

I think I get it now, and thank you.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-04-03T06:46:10+00:00

Wait, if the round 1 caucusing sets in motion things for the county delegates, how'd the pledged delegates get pledged? Is that separate from the caucusing that decide how many go to the county convention?

Psy-Kosh · 2016-04-01T19:05:22+00:00

Murph MUST be 5'nothing

More importantly, Murphy must be a strong character. The way they characterized Murphy in the tv series was kind of embarrassing. They made her out to be way weaker in every way.

While having an appropriately short actor play her would be nice, I'd treat that as secondary.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-28T01:33:57+00:00

Er... you pointed that out to me three weeks ago directly in response to the same comment that you're responding to now.

(Did reddit misbehave and claim that I reposted my comment or something?)

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-17T21:22:50+00:00

Rename it from that to Cranium Curse? (You know, "Curses, foiled again!")

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-17T18:15:56+00:00

No no, no, that is for witches. "Fornicator", from "Four Nigator" or "Four Gator" must be weighed against four alligators. If they are the same, then they are clearly a fornicator.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-15T18:58:28+00:00

Solution I came up with that guarantees all but two saved even in the case where the prisoners ahead are not told whether the prisoners behind got the answer right or wrong:

The prisoner in the back bitwise xors together all the numbers they can see. Then the next prisoner xors that with their xor of all the prisoners ahead of them to get the value of their own hat. This proceeds with each prisoner xoring together all the values they hear said behind them with all the values they see ahead of them. The two prisoners that might not survive are the first prisoner and a prisoner who has a hat that happens to match what the initial xor value stated by the first prisoner was.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-13T05:21:35+00:00

Justification of Occam's Razor: The more things that have to be "just so" for a hypothesis to be true, the more ways it could turn out to be false.

Therefore the greater amount of evidence/justification needed for a high complexity hypothesis. If you're trying to focus on some particular high complexity hypothesis (that is, hypothesis with high complexity assumptions. (That is, hypothesis that requires a whole lot of things to have to be "just so")) then you need to justify focusing in on that particular thing via more evidence and reason. (ie, to narrow down the hypothesis space to the point that the hypothesis in question has at least some reasonable chance of being true)

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-08T06:37:51+00:00

Well, conditional on god existing, there doesn't seem to be any contradiction in the idea that my morality is superior to his.

This wouldn't even be a claim of "my understanding of morality is superior" but "I am, in fact, superior in the sense that I actually care about morality, and god cares about this other stuff that probably should be given a different name."

Hrm... maybe I should explain this a different way:

Imagine in the distant future humanity has advanced, started spreading through the galaxy, enhanced themselves too, etc etc..

Eventually they encounter some sort of alien beings. Let's call them the Clippers for reasons that will become apparent.

One could imagine the notional hypothetical conversation like this:

Clippers: "We wish to take your mass and convert you into paperclips and paperclip factories and paperclip factory factories, in ratios we calculate are optimal for maximizing ultimate expected amount of paperclips"

Humans: "How about NO, see... killing us (by taking the matter that us, our ship, our worlds, etc) are composed of for the mere purpose of making paperclips is BAD. See, we call this sort of thing evil..."

Bit of time passes as both sides scan each other, analyze, etc etc.

Clippers: "Having studied you, your values, what sort of concepts you actually mean by 'morality', we have concluded that our intent is, in fact, evil."

So, time to celebrate? All is resolved? Nope, not quite.

Clippers: "However... we do not care what is good or evil, merely what is clippish."

And there you have it. Humans understand what the Clippers care about, the Clippers understand what the humans care about...

But the humans don't care about maximizing paperclip production in any fundamental way. This does not move humans the same way as things like consciousness, joy, love, compassion, self determination, discovery, growth, etc etc etc...

It's not that humans and clippers disagree on any fact. It's not that they even disagree here on any questions of morality. It's merely that the Clippers don't care about morality. And humans don't care about Clippishness.

And humans are objectively better in this, for clippishness isn't moral. And by "better", I mean "more moral"

In this same sense, even assuming a hypothetical all knowing god wouldn't automatically mean that the god in question is good.

To super summarize, I claim that right and wrong is an objective(ish) standard, and that a hypothetical god would more or less be like the Clippers. Potentially understanding morality, but valuing something a bit different than it.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-08T01:11:13+00:00

Ah, interesting.

And some of the Condorcet methods aren't too bad. But yeah, the complexity of most ranked methods automatically makes them, well...

Imagine the 2000 election. Now imagine a hand recount and computation of Condorcet ballots.

*shudder*

:p

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-08T00:59:21+00:00

As near as I can tell, you simply restated rather than made an argument for the position?

ie, my view is more along the lines of "the fundamentals of right and wrong is right and wrong regardless of the existence or will of a hypothetical cosmic engineer."

ie, if god, say, decides it's okay to torture people for eternity because they, I dunno, blasphemed one too many times or whatever... I would NOT say that it is, in fact, moral in that case. I'd say "Therefore god values something other than 'that-which-I-call-morality'."

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-07T19:14:43+00:00

Morality can only be objective IF there is a God that says that certain moral codes are right.

Justify that statement please?

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-03T18:30:02+00:00

Doesn't score/range voting decay into approval under tactical voting?

But yes, I agree, the gains from those vs their relative simplicity makes them my preferred methods. (I personally lean particularly into the Approval Vote side of things. It's a stupidly simple change to the system, it's the obvious low hanging fruit.)

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-03T18:18:14+00:00

There are so many alternative voting systems, I don't know why everyone latches on to IRV.

I don't think Instant Runoff voting is a good idea anywhere, really. It's not so much a matter of political climate as much as the fundamental issue with IRV: non monotonicity.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-03T18:12:50+00:00

The Simple Truth

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-02T21:18:19+00:00

Arguing "by definition" is bad. Even if we suppose that there exists a unique being that is omniscient and omnipotent, that doesn't magically make them benevolent.

It's possible to be all knowing and evil. Not as in "not knowing what morality is" but as in "not valuing that-which-I-call-morality"

It is a fact about me that I care about certain things. To the extent that a hypothetical god doesn't, well... I reject that god's values.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-02T21:03:59+00:00

Hence why voting in the primaries is really important. You effectively have way more choice in the outcome than just voting in the final election.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-02T21:01:27+00:00

Runoff fails the monotonicity criterion. It can produce outcomes that're even more insane than the present system.

Personally, I prefer Approval voting. Another family of options, if you specifically want a ranked style ballot, would be one of the various Condorcet methods.

But let's skip Instant Runoff voting, it's messed up.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-03-01T17:23:53+00:00

I plan on being at Penguicon, so I might be up for it.

Psy-Kosh · 2016-02-28T02:48:11+00:00

You have some goal. You expect that, on average, in the pursuit of that goal, your methods will lead to X innocent civilians will be killed, and you've deemed that acceptable.

Alternate version: in the pursuit of your goal, you deliberately kill X innocent civilians.

These two scenarios are different as far as the particular causal diagram that one would draw... but is it different morally? (Note, I am not talking about cases where you expect a far lower amount of collateral damage, and are surprised and saddened that your actions resulted in X innocent civilians being killed. I'm talking about that result being in advance a predictable consequence of your actions.)

Psy-Kosh · 2016-02-19T16:26:49+00:00

Yes, basically. If you read the supplementary material on his website for the Orthogonal Trilogy, he basically wrote an entire physics textbook for the alternate universe of Orthogonal.

(The basic idea of the Orthogonal trilogy (The Clockwork Rocket, The Eternal Flame, The Arrows of Time) is an alternate universe with physics similar to our own except that time is fully symmetric with space. (basically amounts to taking our version of relativity and changing a certain - to a +.)

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