All of Lucas2000's Comments + Replies

I tell people that their arguments are not persuading to third parties when they insult me, because I genuinely hope that they will change the way they argue, and also because I think it's generally true that insulting anyone does not tend to convince them. I'm personally not interested in being insulted, but I am interested in people arguing for their positions well, since if they are right, I'm interested in being persuaded.

I asked ChatGPT if it could pass the touring test, and it said it couldn't. It was clearly lying.

I've never seen anyone argue for that position. I'm sure there are people who think that, but they must be a small minority. I'm willing to be convinced that I'm wrong, though.

we should target our arguments according to the circles we find ourselves in

That's true, but I would also suggest that some arguments just don't need to be had. For example:

rather than jumping into extremely serious surgery blindly

I suspect this might be hyperbolic, but even so, this is not a position any actual person holds. Nobody who is in favor of transgender rights thinks that people should just "jump into extremely serious surgeries blindly." Repeating this framing of the problem in this way plays into the hands of people who are intentionally misrep... (read more)

Not sure what the answer to the specific question is, but there is solid evidence that cleaning your hands prevents the spread of HFMD, Adoneviruses, E. Coli, Salmonella, and many other germs. Independent of the evidence for Covid in particular, regularly cleaning your hands is a great idea.

Doesn't your Maori massaclre example disprove the validity of virtue ethics?

"No, obviously. That would be monstrous."

This feels like begging the question. Why is it obvious that a doctor shouldn't kill one patient to save five? It seems like it is obvious because we have an overwhelmingly strong intuition that it is wrong. Given that there are many people who have an overwhelmingly strong intuition that being gay is wrong, I'm unsure if it's a good idea to just rely on that intuition, and leave it there.

Database normalization is just about avoiding duplication, right?

I think the thing here is that people who get database design can't really understand how it is possible to not get it, but there are a lot of people for whom it is extremely difficult to understand this topic. I sat through years of lectures wondering why we were taught things that were completely self-evident. Then I looked at a lot of other people's code, and it became clear that it wasn't self-evident at all.

"stripping away intellectual property protections without any compensation"

Isn't the AstraZeneca vaccine almost entirely financed with government funding? Even the ostensibly privately funded vaccines depend heavily on funding provided by taxpayers.

So as a taxpayer, not only am I funding the development of these vaccines, I'm also then funding government force to protect private monopolies on these vaccines. Regardless of the short-term implications of IP waivers, it seems clear to me that this is not a sound system, and that the incentives for creating th... (read more)

I have two different thoughts on this:

1. I don't think ads are inherently bad. It's true that ads are a way of financing things that either would otherwise not be financed, or would be financed by (and thus exclusively available to) relatively rich people. However, I'm pretty sure that online ads actually devalue ads in general, and make it more difficult to provide these services. An ad that runs in a newspaper is much, much more valuable than an online ad on that same newspaper's website, even if the website reaches many more people. This effectively means

I have two thoughts on this:

1. It seems to me that a winner-take-all election for an immensely powerful head of the executive branch of the government necessarily creates a two-party system (or something similar to a two-party system, as has happened in Germany), even if you ignore all other issues. Since there is no general feeling that having a powerful president is inherently problematic, there will not be a strong third party.
2. It's not entirely clear to me what concrete positions a hypothetical center party would take. The two parties aren't that far apart

I find it highly unlikely that we live in a simulation. Anyone who has implemented any kind of simulation has found out that they are hugely wasteful. It requires a huge amount of complexity to simulate even a tiny, low-complexity world. Therefore, all simulations will try to optimize as much as possible. However, we clearly don't live in a tiny, low-complexity, optimized world. Our everyday experiences could be implemented with a much, much lower-complexity world that doesn't have stuff like  relativity and quantum gravity and dark energy and muons.

T... (read more)

I can only speak for myself, but the simple fact is that we need to be about 70% of the population to be immune in order for anything resembling normalcy to return. With a 90% protection rate for new vaccines, this means about 80% of people need to either get sick or get the vaccine. Given how few people already have antibodies in many places, this means that pretty much everybody who isn't a vaccine denier needs to get vaccinated. That's why I will get vaccinated as soon as I am able to.

One nice thing about Switzerland is that there is no president, no single leader of the executive branch, but instead a federal council consisting of seven people who decide by majority, and where every member will stand behind the majority decision (there is technically a leader of the council, but he's first amongst equals, and has no special powers). Not having a single president means there's no winner-take-all outcome, which means you don't end up with a two-party system.

We should also consider whether we really want billionaires to make unilateral, wide-ranging public health/policy decisions without any real governmental oversight. We have a government for a reason, so that we can actually elect people to make these decisions, and have some accountabilities for the outcomes. I get that this sounds almost ridiculous at the moment, given how dysfunctional particularly the American government has become, but I'd still rather have some control than no control at all.

Rather than have billionaires take over governmental responsibilities, a better approach would probably be to tax them at a higher rate.

Is there actual evidence that a minimum wage decreases total consumption? I've never heard that, or seen any study on it, and I'd like to learn more.

(Intuitively, it doesn't seem highly plausible to me, since my assumption would be that it transfers wealth from rich people to poor people, which should increase total consumption, because there's more room for consumption growth for poorer people, but I'm also not sure if that is true.)

(Edit: after a cursory search of current research on the topic, it seems that the consensus is rather that a minimum wage has a small positive effect on consumption, which is what I would have naively expected.)

There are some additional it's/its mistakes on your text, e.g. here:

I run a denial of service attack on it’s server, cutting it off from the web before it can get it’s copies running.

I used to work as a software engineer. As the company I work for has grown a lot, I now no longer write code, but do software design, and hire new team members in different positions, inluding PMs, visual design, usability design, backend programming, and frontend programming.

It is extremely difficult to find good programmers, especially frontend programmers.

I'm pretty sure that the reason here is not that it is difficult to become a good programmer, but that a lot of people choose not do, for a number of reasons.

Two reasons that I have personally enc... (read more)