psi's recent activity

  1. Comment on US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to end all monkey research in ~science

    psi
    Link
    The New Yorker recently published a long-form piece on this topic. It's worth a read if you're interested in why MAGA/MAHA Republicans have suddenly become so interested in animal testing. "The...

    The New Yorker recently published a long-form piece on this topic. It's worth a read if you're interested in why MAGA/MAHA Republicans have suddenly become so interested in animal testing.

    Some context on the White Coat Waste Project (the advocacy group mentioned in the article)

    White Coat Waste was founded in 2011 by Anthony Bellotti, a Republican consultant who, while campaigning to defund the Affordable Care Act and Planned Parenthood, discovered that he could reframe the issue of animal experimentation as yet another example of federal misspending. His group eschews associations with “animal rights,” describing itself instead as a government-watchdog organization “uniting liberty-lovers and animal-lovers.” When the pandemic arrived, Bellotti and Goodman recognized that the growing constituency of people who’d come to hate scientists could also, with the right messaging, be made to hate the fact that scientists experimented on animals. Unlike other groups that oppose animal research, White Coat Waste does not concern itself with what people eat, wear, or hunt. “We’re a fanatically single-issue coalition,” Goodman said, “and that’s how we’ve been able to broaden the tent.”

    Before joining White Coat Waste, in 2016, Goodman worked for nearly a decade at PETA, where he gradually came to feel that its “establishment approach”— a phrase that might raise eyebrows, given that the group is best known for its anti-fur advertisements featuring nude celebrities—was futile. “We would claim victory when one lab finally got shut down, but another five would just pop up in its place, because the money was still available,” Goodman told me. “That’s why wiping out taxpayer funding for animal testing is the most efficient way to save the most animals.” (When I asked Chandna, from PETA, about these remarks, she said, “We’ve pointed out the federal boondoggle from the start. White Coat Waste has young-male-testosterone energy, and it seems like they attack all the other groups for fund-raising purposes.”)

    From Goodman’s perspective, Trump’s second term has been a roaring success. Along with ending grants for thousands of N.I.H.-funded studies on topics that the Administration has deemed unworthy—H.I.V. prevention, maternal-health disparities, vaccine hesitancy—DOGE terminated millions of dollars in grants for animal experiments, including specific line items that White Coat Waste said it had flagged: a $299,240 grant to create “transgender mice,” $1.1 million to use rats to study the party drug GHB. This spring, the N.I.H., the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration each announced significant plans to deprioritize the use of lab animals. The N.I.H. will require grant-review staff to undergo training to address “possible bias towards animal studies”; the E.P.A. has urged employees to adopt zebra fish and rats that it is retiring from research; and the F.D.A., in a bid to lower drug pricing, intends for testing on animals to be the exception rather than the norm within five years. “God did not make animals on planet Earth for us to abuse and torture,” Marty Makary, the commissioner of the F.D.A., told regulators and scientists in July.

    That month, Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and preternaturally gifted Trump whisperer with no official role in the Administration, posted on X that the Department of Defense “just exclusively told me this morning that they have made the decision to end all of the cruel dog and cat testing contracts exposed by White Coat Waste.” Goodman had brought these contracts, worth fifty-seven million dollars, to Loomer’s attention, after he appeared on her show in April. The two have been working together ever since, Loomer told me. “We’re the party who is actually cracking down on animal abusers,” she said. “We’re the party that stood up for the dogs and cats of Ohio that were being eaten by Haitian illegals.”

    Whenever I asked Goodman if he worried that his cause was being used as a fig leaf for the Trump Administration’s campaign against science and academic research more broadly, he shrugged off the question. “I will work with anyone who has the power or political will to get animals out of labs,” he said. Recently, I brought up an executive order that Trump issued in May which grants political appointees the power to “correct scientific information,” control the way it is communicated to the public, and initiate “discipline” against anyone who fails to parrot the MAHA line—a move that may effectively end scientific independence. “My goal is to save animals, not science,” Goodman replied. “I could care less about scientific institutions and whether they burn.”

    4 votes

  2. Comment on Some people can't see mental images. The consequences are profound. in ~health.mental

  3. Comment on AGI and Fermi's Paradox in ~science

    psi
    (edited )
    Link
    Is this solution likely correct? Well, probably not, but we could say that almost irrespective of whatever you had proposed. There's a reason the Fermi paradox is a longstanding puzzle! The issue...

    Is this solution likely correct? Well, probably not, but we could say that almost irrespective of whatever you had proposed. There's a reason the Fermi paradox is a longstanding puzzle!

    The issue with a 19 point solution is that, even if there's a 95% chance that each individual proposition is correct, when you stack all these probabilities together the total probability reduces to (95%)^19 ≈ 38%. And I would estimate that some of these propositions have less than a 95% chance of being true (e.g., "3. An artificial general intelligence (AGI) will have an indefinite lifespan" -- we don't even know if AGI is possible, let alone likely to happen, let alone immortal).

    It's similar to the issue of compounding errors in Fermi estimates. The more assumptions you make, the larger your uncertainty will grow.

    4 votes

  4. Comment on Request for info: Is "Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro" respectful of it's child characters? in ~anime

    psi
    Link Parent
    I think the issues with Nagatoro have been covered, so let me suggest something else. I'm not sure how familiar you are with manga in general, but I suspect you might find either Josei manga...

    I think the issues with Nagatoro have been covered, so let me suggest something else. I'm not sure how familiar you are with manga in general, but I suspect you might find either Josei manga (marketed for adult women) or Shoujo manga (marketed for younger women) more to your liking. In addition, I'd suggest subscribing to either Manga Plus or Viz Manga for a month. Both are basically Netflix-style manga libraries, so between myanimelist/anidb recommendations and one of those apps, you should be able to find something that you like.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on The shutdown of USAID has already killed hundreds of thousands in ~society

    psi
    Link
    Related: "Trump Aid Cuts Kill More Christians Than Jihadists Do." The New York Times. (Despite the framing, the article is more generally about religious persecution, not just that against...

    Related:

    (Despite the framing, the article is more generally about religious persecution, not just that against Christians.)

    6 votes

  6. Comment on People with a very good memory: does that make it harder to forgive? in ~talk

    psi
    Link
    Somewhat tangetial, but a recent article in The New Yorker describes that one consequence of aphantasia -- the inability to form mental images -- is that those afflicted with the condition tend to...

    Somewhat tangetial, but a recent article in The New Yorker describes that one consequence of aphantasia -- the inability to form mental images -- is that those afflicted with the condition tend to form hazier memories and also "suffer less from regret, or shame, or resentment". From an interview with an aphantasic:

    L.: I can easily move on, forget, not hold grudges, no living in the past, and no dreaming of the future. This is it! I can live in the NOW.

    S.C.: I work for the emergency services, and I’ve spoken with my workmates about what they think the hardest part of the job is. They all said it is definitely reliving traumatic things they have seen. . . . It is for this reason that I am glad I can’t visualize. When I go home, after having someone die in front of me, I go to bed, close my eyes, and see nothing but black for a minute. Then, I’m off in my dream world.

    7 votes

  7. Comment on What's a quantum computer? in ~tech

    psi
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I like your explanation about computation and qubits, but there is one part that's a bit misleading. This is technically true, but it's also not how quantum computers work. (The misconception is...

    I like your explanation about computation and qubits, but there is one part that's a bit misleading.

    Because of how quantum mechanics works, hypothetically, you could encode the input as a superposition of every possible input, run the calculation, and then you have every possible output.

    This is technically true, but it's also not how quantum computers work. (The misconception is common enough that Scott Aaronson has a permanent banner on his blog imploring, "If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel.") The issue is that, although a quantum computer can simultaneously simulate all possible solutions, you only get one of those results when you actually make the measurement ("collapse the wave function", so to speak). On average, this approach will do no better than a classical algorithm.

    Rather, quantum algorithms exploit another property of quantum mechanics: entanglement. For some particular problems, it is possible to design a circuit such that the wrong solutions destructively interfere with each other (like two waves annihilating each other), which consequently makes it more likely that you measure the correct solution. However, quantum algorithms do not generally (ever?) guarantee that a solution is correct, only that it is correct with some probability. This probability can be increased by tuning the circuit or rerunning it multiple times.

    20 votes

  8. Comment on How can I combine several ranked lists into one mega list? in ~comp

    psi
    (edited )
    Link
    This is a more subtle question than you might expect. It's equivalent to asking the "best" way to rank candidates in an election, but Arrow's impossibility theorem shows that there really is no...
    • Exemplary

    This is a more subtle question than you might expect. It's equivalent to asking the "best" way to rank candidates in an election, but Arrow's impossibility theorem shows that there really is no "best" way to do this (more precisely, it is impossible to prevent irrelevant candidates from spoiling the results).

    So the best we can do is acknowledge the drawbacks of whatever algorithm we decide to use.

    The most straightforward approach would be to use the Borda method. In this approach, we first tabulate the N unique candidates from all the ballots (lists). Then for each ballot, we compute a Borda score for each candidate in that ballot, where the Borda score is given by

    Borda score = N - rank

    If a candidate is unranked in a given ballot, then its rank is assumed to be N.

    For example, given two ballots, we would have the following Borda scores

    list 1 BS 1 list 2 BS 2
    A 4 B 4
    B 3 A 3
    D 2 C 2
    D 1
    E 0

    which would produce the following ranked list (by summing the Borda scores for each candidate)

    rank BS total
    A 7
    B 7
    D 3
    C 2
    E 0

    Unfortunately, the Borda method gives poorer predictions when some ballots don't rank every candidate, as a ballot can spoil the final result by ranking their favorite candidate first and leaving the other candidates unranked. For example, imagine you want to combine two video game lists. One list was compiled by an IGN critic who meticulously tabulated their hundred favorite games on the Nintendo DS. The other ballot was written by a 7-year-old and contains only My Little Pony: Pinkie Pie's Party. Then the Borda method would rank My Little Pony: Pinkie Pie's Party above every game in the critic's list except the critic's top game, which would be rated equal.

    Since lists of favorite media are unlikely to have complete overlap, you find yourself vulnerable to this shortcoming. However, we can attempt to correct for this failure mode! In this paper, the authors consider some other formulations of the Borda method. The simplest alternative to implement would be the average Borda count method.

    The average Borda count method is equivalent to the Borda method except when a ballot contains unranked candidates. In this case, the unranked candidates on the Ballot receive a score equal to the average of the unused points that the ballot could have allotted. With a little bit of algebra, you can show that the average Borda count is given by

    ABC = (N - K - 1) / 2

    where K is the number of items on a given ballot. For the example from before, all but one point was allotted, so the average Borda count for the first list would be (5-3-1)/2=0.5 whereas the second list would not have an average Borda count since all the candidates are ranked. Now we have

    list 1 BS 1 list 2 BS 2
    A 4 B 4
    B 3 A 3
    D 2 C 2
    C 0.5 D 1
    E 0.5 E 0

    which becomes

    rank BS total
    A 7
    B 7
    D 3
    C 2.5
    E 0.5

    In this case, there is no change in the final ordering. But in the critic vs 7-year-old example, MLP would be ranked in the middle of the list instead of at the front (for better or worse).

    There are a few tools available online to compute the Borda scores for you. Here is one such calculator, though it only allows for five candidates (almost certainly too few for your use case). A few people have also written python scripts, for example here. Unfortunately, neither of these implementations correct for the average Borda count, so you would have to do that yourself.

    35 votes

  9. Comment on A quarter of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is gone in ~society

    psi
    Link Parent
    It's worth bearing in mind that when the US Constitution was ratified, there really was nothing like it. It was this strange, syncretic mixture of English common law and ancient Greek and Roman...

    It's worth bearing in mind that when the US Constitution was ratified, there really was nothing like it. It was this strange, syncretic mixture of English common law and ancient Greek and Roman traditions, relying on the Founders' (probably not wholly accurate) understandings of forms of government that hadn't existed for thousands of years. The Founders expected Congress to reign supreme (as Congress had the most direct connection to the people), not the Judiciary (whose role was not even fully realized until almost 30 years later with Marbury v. Madison) nor the Executive (a King! Yikes!). Certainly they did not have as a reference point, for example, the spectacular failure of the Weimar Republic.

    To your point, the Founders expected power struggles between the different branches but did not foresee the emergence of political parties. I wonder what they would have done if they had? Maybe they would have restructured the Constitution around maintaining balance between the contemporary political factions. Maybe the rights of Federalists and Anti-Federalists would have been enshrined directly in the document, and we'd still be Federalists and Anti-Federalists today; and instead of quibbling about whether political gerrymandering is Constitutional, we'd be quibbling about whether today's Federalists are really Federalists or some third party with no rights guaranteed by law.

    8 votes

  10. Comment on What it takes to be a revolutionary war enactor in ~humanities.history

    psi
    Link
    This article is informative but also, like, really funny. It literally had me laughing out loud at times. For those unconvinced, I'd recommend reading at least until the bit with Cam's boots (only...

    This article is informative but also, like, really funny. It literally had me laughing out loud at times.

    For those unconvinced, I'd recommend reading at least until the bit with Cam's boots (only a handful of paragraphs in).

    3 votes

  11. Comment on JK Rowling dismisses Emma Watson as 'ignorant' over trans rights row in ~lgbt

    psi
    Link Parent
    It is really quite ironic for billionaire JK Rowlings to cast aspersions about Emma Watson being sheltered and privileged.

    It is really quite ironic for billionaire JK Rowlings to cast aspersions about Emma Watson being sheltered and privileged.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on US Supreme Court upended the constitutional separation of powers on Friday afternoon with a brief order allowing Donald Trump to unilaterally cancel $4 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress in ~society

    psi
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    The issue with staying the preliminary injunction is that it is, in fact, the final word on the matter of this $4 billion in aid (Kagan elaborates in her dissent). The deadline to spend the monies...

    The issue with staying the preliminary injunction is that it is, in fact, the final word on the matter of this $4 billion in aid (Kagan elaborates in her dissent). The deadline to spend the monies is today (Sept 30), so when the Justices released this order on Sept 26, they certainly would have known that it would be impossible for the case to be briefed, argued, and decided before the Sept 30 deadline.

    Which only makes this order that much worst. The justices have, in effect, made a final decision on the matter without even bothering to explain their reasoning. It begets the question of whether they even have a principled consensus on why the President can do this, or whether the Justices simply like the result and are still trying to backwards-formulate the justification.

    17 votes

  13. Comment on Horror games to play during October in ~games

    psi
    Link
    I am quite fond of the vibes in Withering rooms. I bought it on a whim during last year's spooky season and it definitely hit the mark. To quote myself:

    I am quite fond of the vibes in Withering rooms. I bought it on a whim during last year's spooky season and it definitely hit the mark. To quote myself:

    Withering Rooms is technically a side-scroller horror roguelite, but I think roguelite might be a misleading description. Roguelites tend to be grindy affairs that relegate the story to the background. In Withering Rooms, however, the story is the hook: you are trapped in a dream, set in the grounds of a Victorian manor. The dream is based on the real world, yet magic and monsters run amok -- why? In atmosphere, characters, and quests the game drips aesthetic.

    Beyond the first five or so hours, the game isn't that difficult, which is why I again resist labeling Withering Rooms a roguelite despite it technically being one. Instead, it quickly evolves into a sort of power fantasy, allowing you to equip spells and guns that will make short work of most enemies and bosses. Moreover, most items tend to be unique rather than mere stat upgrades (in the spirit of Dark Souls), which makes exploration feel meaningful. And there is a great deal to explore, with new areas of the manor grounds revealing themselves in each new chapter.

    Unfortunately first impressions are probably the worse, as you start rather squishy and have to hide from most enemies, making the game feel much slower and grinder than it ends up being. But on the flip side, this means that once you've cleared the first chapter, the game only gets better.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on US President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 labels common beliefs as terrorism “indicators” in ~society

    psi
    Link Parent
    Well, this is why I wrote that the memo is meant to "establish pretext". I think it's pretty obvious that this administration wants to delegitimize and defund its ideological opponents, which...
    • Exemplary

    Well, this is why I wrote that the memo is meant to "establish pretext". I think it's pretty obvious that this administration wants to delegitimize and defund its ideological opponents, which would include much everybody left of Trump (so both mainstream Democrats and also Trump-skeptical Republicans). But it's not like Trump can just announce on Truth Social one day that all his enemies in Congress are terrorists and then have his goons corral them into a gulag. Maybe one day, but not today.

    As for an overall strategy, I would guess this administration is still figuring out the specifics (we're still in the early stages of shuttering opposition). Nevertheless, I assume it goes vaguely like this:

    1. establish a pretext for investigating Democratic organizations;
    2. begin fishing expeditions, looking for any sort of criminal connections (which they will inevitably find);
    3. freeze the organization's bank accounts and indict the organization's leadership; and finally,
    4. capitalize on the chaos to sweep the midterms.

    In particular, its worth keeping the midterms in mind. If Democrats take back either chamber of Congress, the Trump administration will be subject to an endless amount of investigations (and, if Democrats take back the House, impeach proceedings). It's not like Democrats will have to look hard to find damning evidence of misconduct. A possible future Democratic Congress remains the only existential threat to the Trump administration, so from Trump's perspective, it must be prevented by any means possible.

    32 votes

  15. Comment on US President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 labels common beliefs as terrorism “indicators” in ~society

    psi
    Link Parent
    I don't think this move is meant to target particular individuals. Rather, it helps establish a legal pretext for opening investigations into ActBlue and other democratic funding apparatuses.

    I don't think this move is meant to target particular individuals. Rather, it helps establish a legal pretext for opening investigations into ActBlue and other democratic funding apparatuses.

    24 votes

  16. Comment on The video-game industry has a problem: there are too many games in ~games

    psi
    Link Parent
    For those who aren't aware, Steam's Interactive Recommender is a useful albeit hidden tool for discovering games. I would suggest moving the slider to "niche" and sorting from there.

    For those who aren't aware, Steam's Interactive Recommender is a useful albeit hidden tool for discovering games.

    I would suggest moving the slider to "niche" and sorting from there.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Flight fares surge after US President Donald Trump's surprising H-1B visa move; ‘Extremely bad situation’ in ~society

    psi
    Link Parent
    Probably relevant: "America’s Future Is Hungary." The Atlantic. It might difficult to build a business off of an exception, but it's definitely feasible to build a business based off this...

    Probably relevant:

    Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. In Budapest, these oligarchs are sometimes called NER, or NER-people, or NERistan—nicknames that come from Nemzeti Együttműködés Rendszere or System of National Cooperation, the Orwellian name that Orbán gave to his political system—and they benefit directly from their proximity to the leader. Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. The EU eventually looked into 35 contracts and found serious irregularities in many of them, as well as evidence of a conflict of interest. (In a 2018 statement, Elios said that it had followed legal regulations, which is no doubt true; the whole point of this system is that it is legal.)

    That story is just one of many that Hungarians recount to one another, just not in public. The Dynasty also describes the Kisfaludy Tourism Development Programme, which distributed 316 billion Hungarian forints ($860 million) in grants. Two-thirds of those grants went to 0.5 percent of the applicants; almost one-fifth of them went to projects that were, or later became, connected to Tiborcz. Not that Tiborcz is the only recipient of government largesse. Lőrinc Mészáros, at one time the richest man in Hungary, a gas fitter turned entrepreneur who is an old friend of the prime minister’s, once attributed his fortune to “God, luck, and Viktor Orbán.” Other beneficiaries come and go, depending on Orbán’s whim. One Hungarian businessman told me that “you can tell who is in, who is out by seeing whose companies begin growing. If you are in, then your company is growing. If you’re out, your company goes from this big to this small. You see it in a year or two.”

    It might difficult to build a business off of an exception, but it's definitely feasible to build a business based off this administration bending the rules in your favor.

    10 votes

  18. Comment on The rise of 'conspiracy physics' in ~science

    psi
    (edited )
    Link
    I would recommend visiting Peter Woit's blog Not Even Wrong for another discussion of this article. Not because I agree with Peter -- I think Peter missed the point of the essay -- but because (1)...

    I would recommend visiting Peter Woit's blog Not Even Wrong for another discussion of this article. Not because I agree with Peter -- I think Peter missed the point of the essay -- but because (1) none other than the writer of the piece (Dan Kagan-Kans) shows ups to defend himself and (2) there is a rather ironic twist as the thread develops, which speaks to an even larger epistemic failure.

    A hint

    Note that Daniel Kagan Kans is not Dan Kagan-Kans.

    2 votes

  19. Comment on Conservative activist Charlie Kirk shot and killed at Utah college event in ~society

    psi
    (edited )
    Link
    I can't help but see the parallels to the October 7 attacks. On that day, Hamas carried out a monstrous act of violence against civilians. It was terrorism in its most brutal, unforgivable form....
    • Exemplary

    I can't help but see the parallels to the October 7 attacks. On that day, Hamas carried out a monstrous act of violence against civilians. It was terrorism in its most brutal, unforgivable form. Yet it was also the inevitable consequence of Israel's inability to address the Palestinian people in any meaningful way.

    Kirk's murder is a smaller scale version of the same underlying dynamics. Murder is wrong. It is unjustifiable except in the most extreme circumstances, and being a right-wing provocateur certainly does not meet that threshold, as much as I thought Kirk a net drain on society. Certainly his children, reportedly also in attendance, do not deserve the lifetime of trauma.

    Yet we cannot understand this moment without understanding how we arrived here, an era in which the legitimacy of our political opponents is routinely questioned (in both directions). With each election, our polarization has only become worst. Now at the helm we have our commander-in-chief who regularly dumps jet fuel on the flames. To temper his worse impulses, we have the Supreme Court, which has succumbed to the temptation of an unassailable conservative offensive, allowing for an unprecedented expansion of executive power that would have been unimaginable under any Democratic administration. Meanwhile, Congress shrugs. It's difficult to understand these moves as anything other than a pure political power grab. So if the opposition has no legitimate way to express their grievances, how else can they respond but violently? It is not right. It is not justifiable. Yet it is the inevitable consequence of refusing to acknowledge your political opposition.

    In principle we know what we need to do, or at least we know in which direction we need the rhetorical landscape to shift. We need to defuse and de-escalate. We need to be willing to compromise, or at the very least we need to make an earnest attempt to listen to our political rivals. This is, admittedly, much easier said than done.

    Unfortunately, this administration's response so far has been to double-down, promising to investigate all liberal "organizations that fund [...] and support [violence]." In blaming democrats for Kirk's murder, Trump cited the attempt on his life as well as the attempted assassination of Republican Representative Steve Scalise in 2017. Yet he didn't mention Melissa Hortman, the former Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives murdered in June, nor Nancy Pelosi, whose husband was hospitalized by an act of political violence in 2022. That is, this administration does not see political violence as a bipartisan issue. They see it as a cudgel to further disempower the left.

    In the universe of all possible responses to this tragedy, Trump's response is among the worst, as it will do nothing but exacerbate tensions. And until our government is willing to face the reality that political violence is a bipartisan issue, tragedies like this will only become more common.

    51 votes

  20. Comment on Pentagon authorizes up to 600 US military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges in ~society

    psi
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, being employees of the Department of Justice and appointed by the Attorney General. That's not to excuse this action but to emphasize that...

    Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, being employees of the Department of Justice and appointed by the Attorney General. That's not to excuse this action but to emphasize that regular immigration judges are already subject to similarly perverse incentives.

    If you haven't read it yet, I strongly encourage you to read this article on the dual state model, which is (unfortunately) perpetually relevant when discussing immigration courts:

    9 votes