All of kephasp's Comments + Replies

Not every attempt to overcome irrationality is necessarily rational. People love to "revert stupidity". It is easier than doing their own research. Even for a good cause, people are likely to exaggerate, because it signals their loyalty to the group. So if the society, for whatever reasons, believes that two plus two equals five, and someone says "actually, it's four" and they become popular for saying so, immediately someone else with cry "actually, it's three" and a lot of people will join them because they only see the pattern that the smaller number is considered more cool. Soon, someone will say "it's zero", and someone else will say "minus infinity", and then perhaps the popular opinion will conclude that the minus infinity is too extreme, but the zero is probably just right. Also there is this "motte and bailey" strategy, where among the more critically thinking people the defended version is "two plus two is less than five" -- which mathematicians will admit is true, -- but among their own the battle cry is "zero! zero! zero!". Backpedalling to "less then five" whenever necessary. (Something like people saying "feminism is simply the belief that woman are also people", and then posting "#killallmen" on Twitter.) Maybe you have experience with other people, but the SJ*s I have seen or read about, usually: * demand the disagreeing information to be suppressed; * believe they are "on the right side of history", so even when they are technically wrong, they are still "right" in larger context and that's all that matters; * have no sense of proportion and react disproportionally on every microaggression (however their own aggressions are perfectly okay; for example using a wrong pronoun or refusing to have sex with a trans person is a horrible bigotry, but having a person fired from their job because of something they said on twitter is fun); * require their members to toe the line and call out any deviance from the group norms; * insists that their vari

For which value of the word "rational"? Nope. Reallocating power between social groups is a strong goal in SJ. Egalitarianism is not the same thing as overcoming bias. Besides, by "bias" LW means things like bugs in mental processing and SJ means things like harmful stereotypes. They are not at all the same. That's the same mass of morons that everyone faces, right? Ah, good old doublethink. "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength".

"We have a pretty stupid banking system if you can..." Yes, we do. It's a complicated system that developed slowly, piece by piece, influenced by legislation, commercial pressures, other (contradictory) commercial pressures, and customers' needs. The need for backwards compatibility makes it impossible to rip up the old system and start again, and no one person is in charge of designing it. Naturally it's messed up and has inconsistencies. ---Meta comment: At first I was writing this with the intention of saying, basically: "Duh! isn't that obvious?". Now I realize that that's really unkind and unfair. You've encountered something that you hadn't known before, and you "noticed you were surprised". That's a good thing, and it's good that you expressed it so that other people can realize the same thing.

I am not an American, and the American ways of transferring money are mysterious to me. When I want to send money from point A to point B, I log into a web page, fill in the required data, confirm the data, and in a day or two the money is there. If I understand it correctly, the American way to do this is to personally go to the bank, take a paper form, write the data on the paper, deliver the paper to the target, and the target must take the paper to their bank. It was a huge surprise to learn this, because I automatically assumed that the American ways of dealing with money must be more advanced and more convenient, just because of having more experience with internet and capitalism in general. But now I guess that the American system is simply a victim of its own inertia: these methods were invented and became a norm before the internet, and now people are resistent to the change, because no one wants to experiment with the new methods when their own money is involved. Still, I agree that the second transaction should be cancellable after the first transaction was cancelled. Not sure what is the trick here. Maybe the scammer wants the part of their money returned using a different method (one that does not allow cancelling, or has shorter deadlines). Maybe the plan is that most people will not notice the cancelling of the first transaction, or be busy enough that they miss the deadline for cancelling the second one. Maybe there is some psychological trick preventing the victim from cancelling. Really, I don't know (and not being familiar with the American system, even if I read an explanation, there is a chance I would misunderstand it).