Elliot's Microblogging

I agree I think the US has these.

Yeah sure, I agree.

Right, yes I can see that that’s different to my law.

No I think the US does have laws like these, and I can’t see more things that micarchism requires. And I don’t think that most of the time that companies are getting away with doing bad but legal things. So I find it convincing.

I don’t think enforcement of fraud laws necessarily implies more regulation. I was thinking of possibilities where they could come packaged. For example, a center-left president is particularly anti-fraud. That president could actually be helping capitalism now and even more for the future without realizing it.

I think watermarking AI content is a really important idea that could make a really big difference in the world.

I don’t know if it’s technically feasible (if anyone knows a lot about that, please share!). This article claims the technology is good enough and that Google is doing it, but that other AI companies refuse to use effective watermarking because they don’t want to watermark (they’d rather help cheating students, spammers, botters, deep fakers, etc., who are a lot of their customers).

I like this song. It’s a poem from 2020 attacking Elon Musk and silicon valley.

I wrote a YouTube comment:

Another theoretical solution besides deterrence is spreading classical liberal ideas including specifically about the harmony of men’s interests. If most people are persuaded of the right mindset – in particular that everyone including them personally can gain much more through peace and voluntary cooperation than through war or other force, crime, right’s violations, etc. – then that would make a huge difference. This does not provide any sort of practical short term solution, only a potential long term approach.

Update on the YouTube discussion:

I got one more reply from @johnsinclair4621:

@curi42 You are like a vulgar marxist in your defensive relationship with the sacred texts.

Who cares what the texts say? I read the Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Locke’s discourses in a marxist oriented reading group and we all agreed that especially Smith’s is a pretty good book. Now what?

The thing is that politics are never the realisation of some ideas expressed in a book. People have their own agendas and maybe use this or that theorem to justify them. People claiming to realise Smith or Locke spearheaded a lot of changes and reforms that were pretty disadvantageous for a lot of other people. Therefore they have a pretty bad reputation especially in regions fucked over by their champions.

Does this mean that classical liberal ideas are therefore wrong? No, that does not follow. But like, being „right“ doesn’t mean much in the realm of politics and the simple act of „spreading“ liberal ideas leads nowhere. The Russian state doesn’t engage in war because they don’t know the truth. They do it because it serves their perceived interests.

Among other things, I read him as declining my discussion offer (he neither requested discussion nor tried to meet the criterion I brought up for further discussion). I didn’t reply.

? All I have to go off of is the screenshot you posted, but that seems like quite an intense statement for just asking for errors in classical liberal books.

I have no economic knowledge but is that really as problematic as he makes it seem? I remember reading some free-market type stuff that said that Smith and Locke could be compatible with Marx. I don’t know if thats true, but if it is. It seems like hes unaware.

Hmm. Seems like he’s confusing ideas with their advocates too? Also it feels like he doesn’t think ideas have much to do with reality at all.

I think I get this view in a way. It’s similar to the view that goes, “When it comes to someone’s feelings, facts and logic don’t mean a thing.” I don’t know how to argue against both views, cuz I see some truth to them. Like if a person doesn’t see how a solution works for their problem then it doesn’t matter if the solution actually solves their problem or not.

Yeah it was too much. He seemed tilted, triggered, insecure, reactive, low status, high effort, bothered, wanting control over me, etc.

Using Duolingo can provide a good example of practicing something. It’s very practice based. It’s not perfect. It barely explains anything and mostly just makes you practice and figure out some patterns and concepts yourself. Each practice problem is designed to be short and easy. One of their goals is you do a bunch of small, easy steps and then after a while you actually made some progress without it ever being hard. I don’t think it’s ideal but it’s pretty decent. It can be a good resource by itself to start with and if you get more advanced it can be good paired with some other resources.

A lot of other language learning apps are too hard, at least at the beginning. They give you less repetition and introduce more words and concepts faster. There’s something good about how easy Duo tries to be and the emphasis on high volume practice.

If you do Duolingo for a month it could give you some perspective on philosophy practice. It has you do way way more practice problems than I’ve ever seen anyone do for philosophy (or grammar). And it keeps the problems way shorter, faster and easier than I see people do for philosophy. And doing lots like that actually does work – do it for a while and you will know more than when you started.

Language (and math and some other topics) is good for auto-generated practice problems with answer keys. It’s hard to do so much practice in philosophy without answer keys. Still, one could try and get closer. Doing a larger number of easier problems would have some benefits even without answer keys – you just have to avoid repeating the same errors many, many times and never catching on (which is something that shouldn’t be too common when sticking to easy enough problems, and which other forum members or a tutor might spot just from skimming some answers without checking them all).

@Eternity @LMD I’d recommend you both do 15min/day of duolingo for a month to get more experience doing a larger number of easier practice problems. Any language you want is fine (though the courses are worse quality for some languages, especially more obscure ones. I don’t know all the details. The non-English courses they’ve put the most work into are Spanish and French). The languages I’ve done a bit of are Spanish and Japanese. Any language where you don’t have to learn a new alphabet is easier, so if you don’t care much, I’d recommend against dealing with a new alphabet. Also big alphabets are a problem. In the short term, learning a small new alphabet makes things harder, but you’ll get used to it eventually. But learning 2000+ Kanji is both a short and long term difficulty. Japanese also has significantly different sentence structure compared to English or Spanish (which are similar to each other), which is interesting but also harder.

A whole lesson in Duo can be like 20 practice problems and take 3 minutes. You could easily do 100 problems per day and over 3000 problems in a month.

PS You can force quit and reopen the app to skip ads.

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What are your opinions on comprehensible input/immersion vs traditional methods?

I noticed comprehensible input could be motivated by empiricism and traditional grammar and translation methods could be motivated by rationalism. I’ve never seen someone argue for their methods with empiricism or rationalism, but the philosophies and methods seem to match.

After reading this I started learning Spanish on Duolingo three days ago. I’ve done over an hour of exercises so far. I’ve found it fun, and haven’t found it hard. So far, I’m planning to continue doing it at least for a month and then will see.

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