I posted about Force and Charity:

http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2010/02/20/force-and-charity/

In Quicktime Player 7, under Snow Leopard with Perian, if you open the A/V controls (cmd-K), it has a playback speed slider which you can set from 0.5 to 3.

I like playing videos faster to save time. I noticed that if you play the same video on double speed in Quicktime 7 and in VLC, the audio sounds faster and harder to follow in VLC. At first I thought Quicktime was doing a better job speeding up the sound.

But then I timed it with the stopwatch on my iPod touch.

VLC and the new Quicktime Player (version 10.0 in the about window) both play one minute of video in 30 seconds on my stopwatch. They correctly play at double speed.

But with quicktime 7:

When the slider is set to 1.5 playback speed, it goes at 1.25 speed.

When the slider is set to 2 playback speed, it goes at 1.5 speed.

When the slider is set to 2.5 playback speed, it goes at 2 speed.

When the slider is set to 3 playback speed, it goes at the full 3 speed.

At .5, .75, and 1 speed on the slider, it plays at the correct speed.

Isn't that bizarre? And disturbing. It lied to me! And the slider doesn't even have a linear effect on playback speed.

There is a new critical rationalism blog. I wrote a post for it about liberalism.

I updated Fallible Ideas to work well on iPhone and iPod Touch.

EDIT: I am not associated with the CR blog because the owner misquoted me and refused to change it.

I have written a new philosophy website:

Fallible Ideas

It's like the stuff here, except better. Go read it!

This blog post was made in Keynote. You can view it in your web browser, just click here:

Philosophy: What For?

To advance, you can click the right arrow or the image itself.

http://www.fns.usda.gov/FSP/

the food stamp people think thrifty eating is $150 per person per month. actually $200 for the first person, then it scales down to 150 for additional people as family size increases.

a family of 4's thrifty food budget is $668/month. jeez that's so much to be giving out as the minimum standard of living for people who supposedly can't feed themselves.

however, to get food stamps, you have to have $2000 or less in your bank account and they'll count most other assets you have. so basically they will give you a ton of money every month, but only if you make sure to never save any money and become financially stable. you have to live paycheck or paycheck or they won't help you. why are they encouraging poor families to live paycheck to paycheck!?

you also have to have a low income, and they give you less money depending on your income. for example, a family of 4 with $800 rent making $2000/month will be given $256/month rather than the full 668. they are deemed able to pay the difference.

if they take their income after rent, and save/invest half of it each month ($600), then after 3.3 months they'll be disqualified from foodstamps for being too frugal and trying to improve their financial situation. if they save/invest a more modest 1/6 then they'll be getting kicked off in 10 months.

the food stamp program is proud to have 35 million people whose lives it touches. IMO they should be proud when they figure out how to get that figure under one million who need them.

if we assume 2k income, 800 rent, family of 4 is the avg case, then they spend 768 per person on average per year. so the foodstamp program costs tax payers:

$26,880,000,000 per year

Yeah, that's 27 billion a year. And that's before any overhead. It's a government program, so maybe they need 10% overhead costs to run it. That gets it to around 29.5 billion.

Some proportion of the people on food stamps are not unfortunate or unlucky, but just never chose to learn more lucrative job skills which they could have learned if they'd wanted to enough. I wonder what that proportion is. Subsidizing their bad choices is bad. What would make more sense for people like that is subsidizing a job training program if they want to attend one. Or just ignore them and let in a bunch of Mexican immigrants who have work ethics.

Of course, we can't let in too many Mexican immigrants because it'd cost us billions of dollars per year in food stamps because many of them would qualify even though they had become richer and more well fed than they were in Mexico. And it'd cost billions of dollars in other wellfare programs. That's right, wellfare makes us reduce immigration quotas harming Mexicans. Wellfare has a nationalist prejudice. (Well of course it does. It consists of giving money to people if and only if they are Americans. I don't think poor Americans are more worthy of wellfare than poor Mexicans. And in fact I'm quite confident there are people in the world who could be helped a lot more, for a lot less money, than an American family of 4 making 24,000/year).

Also food stamps are inefficient. You should give people real money, not restricted money. They will then spend the money on whatever they need most. Anytime they would have spent the money on something other than food, if allowed, they deemed that to be more important. By not allowing that, the food stamp program is forcing them to make spending decisions they consider inefficient. Taking a bunch of poor people (on average, not so good at managing money) and then giving them money but only to spend in ways they consider inefficient, is a bit insane. That or it's authoritarian: the Government thinks they know the details of these people's lives well enough to second guess their spending decisions. But that's a bit insane too: is someone who doesn't want to spend more money on food really going hungry or in need of more food? How can you judge on general principles that what poor people who want to spend money on non-food items need is more food?

UPDATE:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp

Food stamps budget for 2010 is 68.7 billion. Proposed 2011 budget is 80.1 billion.

Negs are ambiguous semi-insults invented to get the attention of hot girls, particularly at bars, clubs and parties. They function in part by making the girl a little insecure so she wants to gain your approval. They also show a lack of respect for her, which sets you apart from the people who drool over her; they show her that you are your own person and not trying to please her.

The hotter the girl, the more negs should be used. But you have to be very careful. If you use several on a girl who doesn't have an inflated ego, she will be crushed. And even the most stuck up, pretty girls are fragile and vulnerable underneath their exterior behaviors, so negs must be used sparringly.

If one wants to manipulate girls into having sex with you or dating you, and one intends to meet a fairly large number of girls, and wants to maximize how many of them he attracts, then negs are definitely an effective approach.

What if one wants to attract people who are not shallow into becoming one's friends? Then there is no particular reason to target the hottest girls (or people with status for another reason, e.g. from an old money family). And for people who aren't stuck up or otherwise being highly selective about who they pay attention to, negs aren't needed to gain some attention. Since there is no reason to expect the really hot girls to be smart, just leave them alone (in fact there are reasons to expect them to be dumb: they can go through life gaining approval and money without being smart, so have lessened incentive, and since most people consider thinking hard they won't do it a whole lot without incentive).

But what about people who have status for some substantial reason? Take Richard Dawkins as an example of someone who has achived some fame -- too much to be approachable by just anyone -- but he has achived it by being intelligent and one might want to befriend him due to his intelligence.

So, should one neg Dawkins, or similar other people? This assumes you are very smart and have good reason to believe they would like you, and be glad to know you, once you got to talking much.

Argument in favor of negging Dawkins:

It's an effective way to get attention very quickly, even in what would otherwise be a 60 second encounter (then one gains enough time to bring up intellectual stuff)

Cons:

- it's manipulative

- it does bypass a some error correction -- it's taking Dawkins' attention without saying something that he would judge intellectually and might or might not actually find worthy

- the person might recognize it as a neg, or as manipulative, and dislike you (without ever hearing you say anything you consider intelligent -- so supposing he *would* want to talk with you if he heard some of your ideas, now you've both missed out)

- where is your optimism? don't you think there are thoroughly good ways to interact with people?

Further arguments in favor:

There exist social customs, like ice breakers, and just because someone is intelligent doesn't mean strangers can just ignore all custom and they won't mind. But if you obey the customs they use up time and give Dawkins no reason to stay longer. (I have no idea how conventionally minded Dawkins is, but no doubt there are some smart people who are.)

The optimism argument is mistaken. Of course it's possible to find a way to say something substantive while obeying all the customs and being extremely charming. But that's hard. It's much harder than negging. Why should one expend a huge amount of effort when negging is effective? There are plenty of good things to do in life; using time solving a problem that already has an effective solution comes at the cost of less effort towards unsolved problems. It could easily be the case that the amount of effort it would take to be both charming and substantive is so much, compared to the benefit of becoming frineds with Dawkins, that one doesn't consider it a worthwhile project to undertake.

Final status:

It reduces error correction but it's effective and saves human effort which is important. Error correction is worth the effort in general, but there's no direct, efficient way to achieve it here, and error correction will still take place just delayed some.

Therefore, it's good to neg Richard Dawkins and others if one has a good enough reason to want their attention. (Yeah, I know this is one of those things where everyone will thoughtlessly think their reason is good enough when it isn't. But the prevelance of that mistake doesn't change the correct conclusion.)

If you're still skeptical, consider this: if he understood these issues, and wanted to be available in more substantive ways so no one would have any reason to neg him, he could do something about it. He could put creativity into creating ways for worthwhile ideas to contact him (and communicating to people that they exist and are genuinely different than the ineffective contact options some famous people use). He hasn't done that.

"How can I attract Jill, so she'll agree to be with me?" is a bad question. It assumes it would be good for Jill to be with me. But how do I know that? I don't know her preferences in detail. Maybe I'm wrong for her. And I don't know her in detail. Maybe she's wrong for me.

"Who should I be with?" is a bad question too. It's just like, "Who should rule?" It focusses on making things a particular way and puts all the attention on figuring out which way to choose. Once made that way, the intent is that things stay that way.

A rational question is, "How should we set up a system of Government to best detect and correct mistakes, efficiently and non-violently?" And a rational question is, "How can I organize my personal relationships to best detect and correct mistakes?"

"Should I date John or Harry?" is a who should rule question. It's asking a question with long-lasting consequences, and trying to find the right answer once and for all. A rational approach is accept that we are fallible, and we make mistakes, and look for a way to proceed so that being mistaken won't do harm, or will do minimal harm, and a way forward so that mistakes can be corrected.

"Will you marry me" is a who should rule question. It's asking to permanently entrench a certain lifestyle. It's about committing to something for better or worse, not committing to seek the truth and correct mistakes whatever they may be. Marriage tries to put some things out of the reach of criticism and reason.

One theme of relationships is that they are on or off. People are dating or broken up. There isn't much middle ground. That conflicts with the gradual creation of relationships. Gradualness is important in all fields because it is best suited to detecting and correcting errors. By going one step at a time, and understanding what you're in for next, one can get a better idea of if the next step is indeed wise.

Another theme of relationships is to hide one's feelings until one is sure and has reached a final decision. Reasons are given for this such as fear of rejection. Whatever the reason, it has harmful effects. Hiding feelings means hiding them from criticism which could expose mistakes in them. Hiding feelings means hiding them from discussion by which one might learn something. Hiding feelings hides information that one's partner would find useful to know. And trying to reach a final decision is irrational because decisions shouldn't have finality; instead we should look to live in a way compatible with error detection and correction.