I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I've known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.

Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don't know how that factors in expected value return.

Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.

Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I'll say some outrageous hypothesis: Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen. Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god. There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.

In a recent conflict with someone (who seemed to be mad at me for no reason I could agree to), I've tried two strategies consecutively: reasonable discussion & mediation techniques, and rage fits (I've basically faked being really mad and upset at them to see what would happen; I'm sorry, I know, I was being a manipulative bastard). My faith in humanity took a hit (even though it shouldn't have) after seeing that this particular person was basically immune to logos but very readily respondent to pathos.

So just a little reminder that may or may not be redundant among here: don't do this. Don't give more of a chance to the person who screams and acts crazy than to the person who tries to work things out with you the calm, mature way. It's exactly the wrong way to respond if you want to incentivize rational behavior on the part of the other party. The message is basically "I won't listen to any attempt at reasonable discussion, but try going hysterical on me, that one has good odds of success", thereby earning yourself more hissy fits in the future. And especially don't do this as parents, to your kids.

(I don't know why I'm saying this here, it may go without saying for a smart bunch of people like you. Perhaps I'm temporarily under the impression that it is not obvious to everybody how astonishingly stupid it is to be more convinced by pathos than by logos, just because it wasn't obvious to my IQ<95 acquaintance.)

Or even if the AI experienced an intelligence explosion the danger is that it would not believe it had really become so important because the prior odds of you being the most important thing that will probably ever exist is so low.

Edit: The AI could note that it uses a lot more computing power than any other sentient and so give itself an anothropic weight much greater than 1.

Intelligence is correlated with height.

Who is in the clown suit, then?

Serious Marxian and feminist theory, in any sphere. Not that someone's been seriously trying to post about those on LW and met with hostility, oh no - LW in general just can't bridge the inferential distance to those schools of thought, so what we're getting here is a strawman in a clown suit. We aren't so much failing to extract value from those traditions, we aren't even trying - because it's much easier and more fun to mock it all as self-absorbed non-truth-tracking ivory-tower nonsense.

I've been reading lots of good stuff on both fronts lately, and attempting to mark what's appropriate and good for LW (analysis of systemic behavior, self-perpetuating structures of power, etc), so that I can at least provide some good links eventually. Translating any serious insights into LW-speak by myself is a bit of a daunting task; again, a lot of Marxist/feminist context as seriously studied by those schools of thought is nothing like the strawman version that many people have likely absorbed through pop culture.

But at least I can say that, while the inferential gap between the transhumanist/geek discourse of LW and the discourse of left-wing academia that tech geeks love to deride is great, there is a lot to be gained on the other side. We are ignoring some vast intellectual currents here.

Some possibilities: it jets out in one direction, little droplets radiate outwards from all over, there are a bunch of miniature streams going in all directions, there are sorts of sheets of water radiating outward that split into droplets, it does any of these things at a rapid or very slow rate, the water doesn't leave at all

Reasoning: when I wring out a towel it usually all leaves in one big thing, then drips from all over. Does it all leave through one "faucet" because that's where the pressure is or because it's the lowest point? I've never paid too close attention to it, but I think it typically leaves from the bottom, which would imply that gravity's doing the work of choosing that one exit point. With the dripping off it's unclear whether the drops would just cling to the towel in the absence of gravity. It may be that the whole thing depends on the extra oomph of gravity; if when I wring out my towel it all leaves from the lowest spot (although again, I'm not sure of that,) then presumably the pressure prior to its getting there isn't enough to make it exit. All of this leans towards less water exiting than otherwise, and maybe not from all the same place, and (of course) slower than before. So my guess would be something like little droplets slowly radiating out from all over but not as much water leaving as before, unless it gets wrung really tight.

Meta reasoning: you were much more likely to post this if it was cool and/or surprising. The most intuitively cool and/or surprising things (that are still plausible according to the above thinking) would be if it all left as a sort of sheet or bubble of if none (or at least very little) left, or maybe if the sheet or bubble arrived but only after a lot of wringing. On the second thought, towels are pretty irregular surfaces, so I wouldn't expect a smooth sheet to radiate out from it. So my official guess is that very little will leave from it until it has been wrung very tightly, and then a bunch will surprisingly burst out.

~~~WATCHING THE VIDEO~~~

Hey, that was cool! I guess I was sort of right - water mostly didn't exit the towel, but I didn't predict (correctly, in my head, or explicitly, in the post above) what it would look like as it was not exiting the towel, and I was more dramatically incorrect about it all bursting out. The features I hadn't thought about were the clumpiness of the water and the way water looks like when it's about to fall from a towel but is still clinging - visibly on the surface, not hiding within the folds. I also think that if I had correctly predicted what it would look like I wouldn't have predicted the burst from the meta-reasoning, because the towel being shrunk in within the water was already cool-looking. When I predicted that something cool would happen, I suspect I should have thought through my reasoning earlier and seen at what points there was an opportunity for something cool to occur - which is a point that might be more broadly applicable. To remember the surface tension stuff I should have tried to remember mechanical features of water in general, like why droplets form in the first place and so on, rather than jumping into directly imagining how wringing out a towel looks like and reasoning from there. Broader lesson there, obviously not a new one, but perhaps one I should be better about keeping in mind: appeals to first principles are relatively more important when dealing with novel situations.

In case it wasn't clear, I think people who think "Slavery wasn't so bad" are widely under-weighing the suffering caused by the violent enforcement of the status quo. Slaves tried to escape all the time, and fugitive slave enforcement was incredibly violent - and the violence was state-sanctioned.

I was asking to try to understand how the statement imputed to Bill addressed that issue - because without addressing the violence of fugitive slave enforcement, the statement did not even seem plausible to me.

The central premise of Time on the Cross - that slavery was economically profitable and unlikely "wither away", and this had some positive effect on the treatment of the slaves, seems quite plausible to me. (That said, I believe this is only true after the invention of the cotton gin).

But I find it implausible that this benefit outweighed the negatives of the fugitive slave enforcement in the US.

Bill doesn't think that the end of slavery was all that good for "the blacks,"

I'm not sure what reasonable position is being gestured towards by Bill's statement. Are you willing to cash it out a little? (Other than the quoted statement and the "Holocaust as reaction to Jews," I agree that Bill's positions are arguable - although I don't agree with many of them).

The avoidability of the war is a more subtle question.

On a totally separate topic, I think the International Relation Realists have the better of the argument. WWII was inevitable in the same way that the wars of Louis XIV, Napoleon, and WWI were inevitable. It just seems to be a property of multi-power regions that a power with a plausible chance of dominating the region will try to dominate the region by military force - in the absence of outside intervention (like the US military presence in Germany since essentially the beginning of the Cold War to today).

And after the Communist regime fell, in only a few years Russia has become about as publicly religious as the US.

... which is significantly lower than before it was outlawed.

I would say that the important thing is more humility of presentation than humility of willingness to speak at all.

I agree, it's OK to ask what you think could be a stupid question. It's better than not asking, as you lose a chance to learn. It's not OK to insist that you are right and she is wrong once an explanation has been given, even if it does not make sense to you. Though, given the usual inferential distance problems, it's perfectly fine to ask for clarification.

From my experience, I think that your estimate of the odds of encountering a comment "which blows apart their argument" as about 1% is overly optimistic. Maybe in some other fields it's different. At best you can expect a minor correction or a qualification. If the expert is any good, they probably have heard it all before, and if they aren't, their ego would likely prevent them from admitting that they are wrong, anyway.