A search engine that gives results like Google but before everything turned to sludge.
RamblinDash
Karma: 691
The thought would be that it would be the same car, but with some kind of software/hardware limit that prevents it from continuing to speed up once it reached some set speed, like 85 or 90. Not to limit the power train.
Based on the title, I thought you were going to go another direction. But isn’t it insane that a typical consumer car is capable of driving significantly over 100mph? In large parts of the country, there’s nowhere that it’s legal to drive anywhere near that fast, and an ordinary driver will never have a legitimate reason to drive that speed. I understand why this hasn’t happened, but wouldn’t it also be better if normal cars just weren’t capable of going over, say, 90mph?
I would say that the existence of superheroes/villains, wizards, etc would be the kind of crazy things I’m talking about. I would posit that a pretty high percent of video games (aka low-fidelity simulations) have a player who can do things easily that even the most elite athletes can’t approach in real life. I’m talking about having physical abilities like 100x or 1000x average, or abilities different in kind such as the ability to fly unaided, shoot lasers from their eyes, breathe water, throw fireballs, survive dozens of gunshots, etc. That would be essentially “Spider-Man” in my analogy. But you don’t see that.
Untrained men’s average bench press doesn’t have super reliable sources but one source I saw put it at 110 lbs. I think that’s a little high, so let’s call it more like 75lb. That puts the world record (unaided) bench press at 10x average—not Spider-Man/Superman/Hulk/etc territory. Similarly, average running speed is (conservatively) 5mph. Top sprint speed ever recorded is 28mph—much faster but less than 6x, not The Flash territory.
In short, there are elite athletes but no superheroes or wizards.
I...am honestly not sure. Probably mix of all? But i see the “probably not a dealbreaker” category as in the nature of “we all sometimes hurt each other, this hurts a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily outweigh all the good years and forgiveness is possible”—not like it doesn’t matter
Lack of Spider-Man is evidence against the simulation hypothesis
Speaking only for myself, yes that’s basically right. Non-monogamous behavior is evidence in favor of several bad hypotheses, but only some of which would make me mad or want to break up. Split and Commit. Things that it would be evidence of:
Dealbreaker:
She doesn’t want to be committed to me any more
Mad but not necessarily a dealbreaker over a long marriage if we can work it out:
She wants to remain committed to me but is having some problem with our sex life and is too scared/embarrassed/confused to talk to me about it
She wants to remain committed to me but has developed serious issues estimating and/or controlling her voluntary alcohol (or other drug) use
We had a serious miscommunication and she honestly but unreasonably thought I had told her I was OK with whatever she did
Not mad:
She’s suffering from some kind of medical condition that causes her to act uncharacteristically or be otherwise unable to control her behavior
She was the victim of some severe psychological or chemical manipulation
She was suffering from physical duress/threat
We had a serious miscommunication and, on reflection, I think it’s my fault—the most reasonable interpretation of my words/acts in retrospect was that I had told her I was OK with whatever she did, even though that’s not what I meant
She didn’t actually cheat at all but circumstances conspired to nonetheless lead to strong appearances in favor of a cheat hypothesis
So if I were to get some strong evidence that my wife cheated, I would want to try to collect some more evidence that would differentiate which of these nine realms (or are there others?) that we are in.
Yeah, it would be alarming! It might lead you to wonder, in addition to “should we break up”, additional things like “does she have an undiagnosed brain tumor or hormone disorder”, “did someone drug her”, etc. I think I ultimately agree with you that it would be highly uncharacteristic behavior, and in some ways the fact that it’s highly uncharacteristic is the ultimate metric we are shooting for, and the actual behavior is just an imperfect proxy for that. And then you would have to figure out what the cause of the highly uncharacteristic behavior was.
I realized I might not have been clear above, by “state” I meant “one of the fifty United States”, not “the set of all stored information that influences an an Agent’s actions, when combined with the environment”. I think that is absurd. I agree it hasn’t been shown that the other meaning of “state” is an absurd definition.
If that happened once, then my desired type of partner would want to avoid that in the future, and would avoid drinking any alcohol at future parties, and would learn to cut off interaction—rudely if necessary—if someone is making serious progress at seducing her; and if that was her response, then I’d be fine staying with her. If she didn’t change her behavior and acted like that event was fine and she wouldn’t mind if it recurred, then I wouldn’t want to be with her anymore.
I know that @ymeskhout disagreed with this, but it seems basically right to me. For a marriage of (hopefully) many decades, I don’t necessarily expect perfection at all times, but I expect significant and honest commitment. So, I wouldn’t consider one mistake in several decades to be a dealbreaker, if all parties agreed it was a mistake and made active attempts to do better. IDK how long @ymeskhout has been with their partner—maybe their perspective could change over time? I have been (monogamously) married for 11 years FWIW.
I did ask one pretty-rational monogamous person where she drew the line in terms of what forms of touch counted as cheating, and it was from her that I got the “If you’re asking this question then we’re not compatible”
I think this is evidence in favor of the hypothesis that she wanted someone who was conceptually committed to monogamy, not just committed to monogamous behavior. For such a person, that question sounds like “I want to be as non-monogamous as possible up to some arbitrary line, and then stop, so as to avoid breaking my commitment to you. Please tell me where that line is.” I think if you imagine all potentially non-monogamous-ish behaviors on a one-dimensional X axis, with some kind of intimacy-weighted frequency on the Y axis, then this question implies that your frequency graph might be flat or even increasing up until the “policy line”, and then down to (hopefully) zero.
I would submit that the behavior of an actually-monogamous person would look more like exponential decay as you move right on the X-axis, and that you may not want or need a “policy line” except that, because the Y-axis is intimacy-weighted, you likely reach a point where it’s not possible to engage in more than zero of that behavior while continuing the exponential decay curve.
This comment has many good questions. More generally, I suspect that for any given membrane definition, it would be relatively easy to do either or both:
A—specify multiple easily-stated ways to torture or destroy the agent without piercing the membrane; and/or
B—show that the membrane definition is totally unworkable and inconsistent with other similarly-situated agents having similar membranes.
B is there because you could get around A by saying absurd things like ‘well my membrane is my entire state, if nobody pierces that then I will be safe.’ If you do, then people will of course need to pierce that membrane all the time, many agents’ membranes will constantly be overlapping, and the ‘membrane’ framework just reduces to some kind of ‘implied consent’ framework, at which point the ‘membrane’ isn’t doing any work.
I suspect it’s not a coincidence that this post focuses on ‘membranes’ in the abstract rather than committing to any particular conception of what a membrane is and what it means to pierce it. I claim this is because there cannot actually exist any even reasonably precise definition of a ‘membrane’ that both (a) does any useful analytical work; and (b) could come anywhere close to guaranteeing safety.
I think this misses what people find so attractive about monogamous marriage. The act of constantly comparing what one has to what one could have imposes a lot of psychic costs. Choices are Bad. Comparison is the Thief of Joy.
Better to have both parties make a socially “enforceable” commitment to stop dithering and choose. Of course you are, in a sense, actively choosing to continue to be together every day (because you could still leave), and there’s a way in which that’s beautiful too. But the lived experience of monogamy, for me, includes being free from the burden of choice. This is what people mean by “building a life together” that you are missing.
...doesn’t that mean that this bet is only favored if you think there’s at least a 40% chance of this merger going through? I wouldn’t take that bet.
Thanks for the research! I’m guessing that there’s probably a lot of nuance here, such as if, e.g. the President falsely accuses someone, then the false accusation is independently newsworthy and that might be protective of the media outlet who repeated it while saying that it doesn’t believe the President’s accusation. But I’ve updated my view on the core question and disendorsed my initial comment.
You could be right. I don’t practice in this area and thus don’t claim to have greater knowledge than you on this. I still disagree, but people should understand this is a sorta equal epistemic status disagreement.
Whether he preceded it with “Alice says” makes little difference in terms of either moral or legal responsibility.
Morally, I agree with you. Legally, I think you are not correct at least as pertains to US law, which has much higher standards to meet for defamation claims than most European countries. In the US, the truth of the statement is generally an absolute defense to liability. If I publish a story of the form “A says B committed a crime; B denies/disputes it”, then in general I would not have liability if A in fact said that, because my statement was true (though A might have liability, of course).
This is part of what I’m getting at, but you seem very focused on the outside perceptions of the married people in that situation. I’m saying that the subjective experience of being one of the married people in that situation is different and, imo, usually better and more comfortable. Including in situations like a party where single people might be open to sexual attention.
I feel like, for certain coed social spaces, the cultural expectation of universal monogamy actually does (did?) a lot of work. If I (married man) am hanging out with some other married woman, we have Common Knowledge of each other’s unavailability. In my subjective experience, it breaks the attraction->desire link. And it’s desire that seems to add all the social tension, not attraction per se.
And specifically, the risk they hedge against is usually some major risk to themselves. So insurance is similar to a social safety net in some sense. If there’s a (totally made up) 1⁄100 lifetime chance of each person being severely injured in a car crash, and such an injury would both cost me a lot of money and a lot of earning power, then of course I’d want to insure against it. Even though the insurance company takes a cut, I’d much rather lose money on this insurance contract than collect on it. And we hope that market competition prevents the insurers from taking too big of a cut, because the insurers compete on rates. Prediction markets just don’t serve this function at all.
People in this thread are focusing too much, I think, on bespoke kinds of insurance (which is most kinds of insurance), and not enough on normal everyday insurance (which is most actual insurance contracts).