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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • I have a direct example of this:

    I was at the UFO museum in Roswell, NM and the guy that was giving a talk was a self-described Ufologist and this was after the government released the UFO footage. He talked the whole time about government coverup of past UFO crashes, etc.

    In the Q&A, someone asked if the recent footage gave him hope that we’ll begin to learn more about UFOs now that the government seems more forthright with the information… And he got pissed at them for even asking. It was as if his whole retirement activity of uncovering conspiracies was challenged and his brain couldn’t handle it except by getting angry at an honest question.

    His conspiracy seemed to be more boring than he thought (and spent decades “researching”) so he wouldn’t allow the truth to shatter it. It was fascinating to see in real-time.





  • Focus groups aren’t meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the “why” behind opinions and behaviors.

    If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you’re going to need a large sample size. It’s statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.

    For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you’ll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves “independents” before the debate.

    That’s not to say this tells us nothing, but it’s by no means a predictive study.

    *edit: I actually would say it’s harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it’s not.



  • I’m not surprised. Alito is straight up huffing Newsmax like it’s paint but trying to hide it, Clarence Thomas is outwardly corrupt and unabashedly fascist, and the other conservatives are, weirdly, not as extreme and still attempt to maintain this air of professionalism and integrity in their profession. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t actually and in them we have a religious nut, an idiot frat boy, an egoist, and at the head, a conniving political operator. All of which are driving us closer to fascism in their own style.

    But I get the feeling like John Roberts is embarrassed by Clarence Thomas and his clinically insane QAnon conspiracy wife or Alito and his “election was stolen” flag antics. So they’re going to see things differently.




  • Hahaha, as someone that works in AI research, good luck to them. The first is a very hard problem that won’t just be prompt engineering with your OpenAI account (why not just use 3D blueprints for weapons that already exist?) and the second is certifiably stupid. There are plenty of ways to make bombs already that don’t involve training a model that’s an expert in chemistry. A bunch of amateur 8chan half-brains probably couldn’t follow a Medium article, let alone do ground breaking research.

    But like you said, if they want to test the viability of those bombs, I say go for it! Make it in the garage!







  • I agree with him. You have to take measures to protect the populace, like with traffic laws. If people can’t abide by those rules and the science is sound (which it is in this case and in the case of traffic laws), then measures have to be taken to protect the community from those that refuse to abide by the verifiably safer option without due cause.

    What those measures are can be deliberated amongst the community. Could be fines, could be jail time. I don’t know what would compel someone to get a vaccine, but that could be determined over time.