Claims to reason and political compromise while insisting on unsupported opinions and admiration for fascists. Fairly easy decision.

I think you're technically right about the probability but so much the worse for the way we are supposed to talk about probability. The rest we're all solidly on the same page now I reckon.

Either you were given X and the other envelope contains X/2, xor you were given X and the other envelope contains 2X. Those are separate cases. If you were given X and the other envelope contains X/2, you'd lose X/2. If you were given X/2 and the other envelope contains X, you'd gain X/2. In the second case, if you were given X and the other envelope contains 2X, you'd gain X, if you were given 2X and the other envelope contains X, you'd lose X. If you're in the first case, the expected gain of switching is 0, if you're in the second case, the expected gain of switching is 0, both cases are equally likely, so the expected gain of switching is 0. — fdrake

Said pretty much the same thing five years ago. I think Michael has at least partially come round.

Whether you benefit by switching or not is dependent on what envelope you just chose, which must be Envelope X or Envelope 2X where X is a given sum of money. So, switching can only ever take you from Envelope X to Envelope 2X (+X) or from Envelope 2X to X (-X). — Baden

So, you have 10. But only one scenario applies to your choice, either the one where you lose by switching in which case X is five and 2X is 10, or you gain by switching in which X is 10 and 2X is 20. You can't be in both scenarios at the same time and X has a different value in both — Baden

We know the chosen envelope has £10 in your scenario and we also know that one of the envelopes contained an amount X and one of the envelopes contained an amount 2X, and therefore we know we can only move from X to 2X or from 2X to X by switching. Therefore we know we have a 50% chance of gaining X by switching and a 50% chance of losing X by switching and that therefore there is no point in switching.

You're using X to refer to both the X in the scenario where switching gets you less and in the scenario where switching gets you more. But given any given amount you see in front of you after already choosing an envelope, those are not the same X. — Baden

If you repress Trump, he'll go deeper because people will associate him even more with their own socially repressed selves. If you do the opposite and give him air, he'll go wider. If you confusedly oscillate between the two, he'll go deeper and wider, which seems to be what's been happening and what's got him where he is. The only way to ever have combated Trump would probably have been to deal with him perfectly neutrally, like reporters presenting the news, but because this is the last thing you would ever consider doing in a commercial media format, you constantly inflate the balloon so that it becomes bigger than any fact that you can throw at it and its existence as much testament to your lie (pretending to be a news organisation) as any of his. In a way Trump is just the escaped reality of the lie that is news media, presenting to it its own face. Ditto for social reality. It's natural to hate the guy and want him to go away but what he represents isn't going away.

"Should we give Trump a platform?": is the wrong question. "Why is a reactionary fuck like Trump so successful?", should be the question. — Benkei

Yes, I think that's more or less the way we ought to look at things. The first question is just to take on the establishment's voice and they don't really need (or deserve) any help.

Possible answer: because the material conditions for US citizens are conducive to him getting a platform. — Benkei

Yeah, I would say that the problem is the dynamic whereby neither side has anything real to offer, where the debate is over whoever has the better table manners while throwing scraps to the plebs barking underneath.

If you've already passed through the digestive system of capitalism, Trump's bowels are no great stretch. Networks will do whatever's profitable.

Let's say that I wanted to bet on a coin toss. I bet £100 that it will be tails. To increase the odds that it's tails, I ask you to put me to sleep, wake me up, but me back to sleep, wake me up, put me back to sleep, wake me up, and so on. Does that make any sense? — Michael

Nicely put.

I don't know but close enough e. g. "The Stranger" by Camus, "Death in Venice" by Mann, "The Trial" by Kafka. + Pretty much everything by Orwell.

:grin: But really I'm not sure if it's a boon or a curse that I can't seem to finish a book unless it's nigh on perfect.

I read the first bit of Perdido St. Station and it inspired me to write a few paragraphs in that style. The insectuous relationship didn't do it for me though and so I dropped it.

Maybe another way way to put it is "the conditions under which such a decision can be made negate any possible distribution that can be profitably exploited by switching". This avoids using the word "probability".

Given that there's £10 in my envelope, the probability that the other envelope contains £5 is equal to the probability that the other envelope contains £20; that probability being 1/2.

As an analogy, if I flip a coin and hide it from you, it is correct for you to say that the probability that it landed heads is equal to the probability that it landed tails; that probability being 1/2. — Michael

This seems confused though with you conflating non-overlapping scenarios and adding a poor analogy. If you want to use ordinary language, just say what I said. Your maths is on the ball though.

It seems to amount to us saying the same thing. We must either be, in your example, in a 10/5 world or a 10/20 world. In neither possible world is switching a rational strategy. (I think we've discussed this one before btw.) But maybe your way of expressing the issue is more accurate technically.

Yes, there's no possible world in which the fiver is both the larger and the smaller amount at the same time. So there's no possible world in which the other envelope may with equal probability contain either two fifty or a tenner, which is the only way to make a profit by switching.

CLAIM: "I grab 'em by the pussy"
REALITY: He grabs them by the pussy.
CULT MEMBERS: "WITCH HUNT!"

According to predictit.org, his chances of winning the presidency are only down 1% on the day. Sad.

Yes, they're well-lit public places usually with frequent visitors. Obviously not ideal territory for sexual predators. But suppose there was no one else around, and there was an opportunity, why would it have to be a trans person going in to the bathroom to do it? Why couldn't e. g. a cis man just follow his victim in? The fear is kind of bonkers and is actually likely to lead to anti-trans violence of the type highlighted, making it not just irrational, but dangerous.

Neither I nor anyone else would require any qualification to make the rather prosaic observation in the quote.

If there are Russian influencers on this forum — Christoffer

Might be but it'd be virtually impossible to distinguish an effective Russian influencer from a genuine forum member as appearing genuine is what would make them effective. Same would go for the other side, incidentally. So this is probably not going anywhere and can be dropped, I think.

That was a warning not an assurance it was about to happen. The warning if heeded assures it won't happen. But leaving that aside, your passive aggressive "contributions" aren't helpful or welcome.

Except that didn't happen.

No, don't say fuck us, just come up with some reasonable arguments instead of ranting. You've done that bit already.

Might work on Twitter. Will fail here.

I don't think your outrage has or is going to convince anyone here, do you?

You're not a spokesperson for women on trans rights though, nor is anyone as unsurprisingly their opinions on this and other things vary. Which makes all of that rather patronising, no?

To elaborate a little, where I sympathise with conservatives is that "trans rights" is not just some isolated ethical atom that they are obligated to unconditionally accept to maintain the rights / responsibilities balance of a free and open society and so consistently justify their own place in it, but a kind of valence whose pull reshapes the contours of social life and it's these somewhat unpredictably reshaped contours they are being asked to assent to.

It's never going to be squeaky clean in here but we'll come round with a brush and pan now and then..

But that would be a violation of the first amendment. I don't think any government agencies are actually advising people to become trans, are they? — frank

No, but I think that conservatives think that the line between protecting trans rights and promoting trans lifestyles is blurred. Of course their unofficial spokespeople rarely manage to say anything about the subject without sounding like a-holes.

Strawman again... seriously, get your medicine or whatever. — Christoffer

Calm down. You're crossing a line here.

Affirming your right to be a Muslim is tantamount to forcing people to be Muslims? — frank

A more accurate analogy might be that for the U.S. establishment to publically espouse the virtues of Islam, including in media, schools, and society generally would virtually guarantee more converts to Islam. Someone who wants less Muslims in society might justifiably be accused of Islamophobia but someone who resists the ethical injunction to want more is of a different category. To not want diversity for the sake of diversity or change for the sake of change is just part of the conservative mindset. Liberals sometimes neglect to recognize their own ideological commitments here in order to paint opposition to them as bigotry.

I guess that's why I favor state patient advocates and psychologists. Let them figure it out. — frank

Yes... but let's recognize they don't operate in an ideological vacuum. (Let me emphasise again, I'm being devil's advocate here to a degree.)

On the specific point of suicide and mental illness, they might claim utilitarian grounds that overall these tendencies may increase with availability of treatment according to a relative rather than absolute sense of deprivation.

Excuse multiple posts.

Another way to state their case is that there is a kind of ethical retrojection going on here. Liberals are fostering the grounds for a problem for which the solution is its own problem from a conservative point of view.

Ok, to steel man this, I think a conservative would say that opening up more space for what anyone can be can't be separated from enforcing what some people will be.

(Active social engineering dressed up as passive social accommodation.)

Not to mention the amusing impotency of such injunctions since, considering the ubiquity of the internet, most kids have probably seen porn before they hit their teens. But no! Not a public talk by a Tranny! The horror!

I think what conservatives fear is some kind of cultural shift that becomes self-fulfilling in that it leads rather than follows science. I don't think that fear is completely irrational though in some cases expressed concern for children might be just a cover for bigotry.

Seems to me there's a legitimate debate over what to do with minors, if anything, to best help them navigate their sexual identity. The rest just seems like various ways of expressing disgust and contempt for trans people.

Oh, that was just for Hanover, sorry.