How could this possibly be a good political strategy? Well the voters know that he’s a liar but paradoxically that may make them more likely to vote for him. This is because voters are irrational. Many voters with may believe the Brazen Liar Politician may ultimately favor their special interest, their pet issue while throwing other voter blocs (suckers!) under the bus—after the election.

I don't think its just voters, this strategy also worked well for Lyndon Johnson in closed doors with party elites. He would tell everyone he was on their side, and they would largely believe him, and know also that he was telling everyone else he was on their side too (he'd make it very obvious to eg those listening in on his calls that he was lying or manipulating the other party).

For Lyndon, this often set him up as a good compromise candidate. It was very difficult to find anyone who was remotely acceptable to both northern and southern democrats at the same time. The south trusted him fully (ultimately incorrectly, but for good reason), and the north would tolerate him.

Maybe there's a rational agent model here, where if Alice prefers outcome A and Bob prefers outcome B, and they must choose a lottery in $\{pA+(1-p)B|p\in [0,1\left]\right\}$ so that $U_A(pA+(1-p\left)B\right)=p$ and $U_B(pA+(1-p\left)B\right)=1-p$, and if they fail to choose then they get $u_A,u_B<0$ utility respectively. If each lottery is a candidate, with lottery $1A+0B$ the candidate honest in their support for $A$ and $0A+1B$ the candidate honest in their support for B, and $pA+(1-p)B$ for $p\in (0,1)$ a dishonest candidate with a $p$ probability of actually being pro-A, the Nash bargaining solution here will always support a dishonest candidate.

Note that you get a brazen liar (rather than just an undecided but known to be honest candidate) here because you can be more confident the brazen liar isn't making secret deals. Or rather, you can be confident they are making secret deals, because they've made secret deals with you and you know they're making secret deals with everyone else too, so you can be confident few if any people have some usefully secret information about their position.

I think the justifications here come from people attempting to resign themselves to an inadequate world by trying hard to think of reasons why the world actually isn't inadequate, eg the same sort of psychological bias which causes deathism.

Therefore I also expect that its mostly people on the receiving end of signals who try to justify their behavior, and not people sending the signals.

I'd guess that people trying to send the signals don't so much try to (intellectually) justify their behavior, but instead just feel put off and annoyed you didn't pick up on the signal.

This and the different distribution of ratings (https://shorturl.at/EZJ7L ) implies that the requirements are not absolute, but relative: majority of women aim for a top subsection (probably top decile?) male partner. Hence if all American males magically become one feet taller, likely this filter would increase to ~7 feet.

This is an absurd inference to make on the basis of the linked data. Also, please use the actual url and not a shortened version.

This data is not relevant to my point. What would be relevant is the delta between male and female average height in the two countries.

Basically yes. His staff likely coulda predicted this (eg there were a few circumstances where out of anger he did some small civil rights stuff, then backed off when he cooled down & looked at the political repercussions), and possibly Lady Bird, but no other senator or member of the public had any reliable way to predict this for the reasons you state.

It seems extremely net-positive for civil rights, but mainly through the mechanism of it making Lyndon Johnson a viable candidate for president while maintaining his stature with the southern democrats, leading ultimately to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This can be seen as a generalizable lesson only insofar as you think weak bills like that are typically passed by Lyndon Johnson-like figures playing 4d political chess ultimately for altruistic reasons. Without that effect, it mostly seemed bad, it likely actually decreased the number of black voters, and did not decrease the south's ability to filibuster the senate against civil rights (which was the main mechanism by which civil rights bills were unable to pass), eg they filibustered away another civil rights bill in 1959 or something. Plus, if not for Lyndon Johnson ultimately being pro-civil rights, it would have put someone decidedly anti-civil-rights into the presidency.

Tallness is zero sum

Why is tallness zero sum? Tallness is part of male beauty standards, so if guys were taller that'd be great for everyone.

Also, I don't really know why people think the ANEC or something similar has to be true.

My impression is that its because if it is violated, you get a bunch of crazy shit, like warp drives and perpetual motion (without breaking energy conservation). Plus, it makes the math a lot easier. You need some boundary condition to apply the field equations, and that's an extremely reasonable one.

Insofar Albert is a sociopath, or is in one of those moods where he really does want to screw over someone else... I would usually say "Look man, I want you to pursue your best life and fulfill your values, so I wish you luck. But also I'm going to try to stop you, because I want the same for other people too, and I want higher-order nice things like high trust communities.". One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes.

This seems incoherent to me? I'd like it if all the sociopaths are duped by society into not pursuing their values, that's great for my values, and because they're evil I'd rather them not pursue their best life. However I still support distinguishing between goodness and human values for the same general-purpose reasons why often, even if its possible in principle to use some piece of information for evil, its still often better to spread & talk about that information than not.

More generally I think people are too quick to use the phrase "One does not argue against the utility function, as the saying goes." Yes, you can't argue against the utility function, but if someone has a bad utility function and is unaware what that utility function is, I'm not going to dissuade them from that (unless I think they'll be happy to cooperate with me on bettering both our goals if I do, but sociopaths are not known for such behavior). That's part of stopping them.

There’s a simpler way to get FTL in your sci-fi books, and that’s to assume the existence of negative mass and create an Alcubierre drive, which is indeed a well-known and correct solution to Einstein’s equations (if only you grant negative mass).

The reason not to expect negative mass to exist is much weaker than reasons not to expect relativity to generalize, mainly being that it violates a typical assumption of general relativity, effectively that energy density is nowhere negative. However such assumptions have been violated before, eg due to dark energy, and in my understanding, it’s not fundamental to the Einstein field equations themselves.