BahRamYou
3d ago
There's also the Mathew Effect, where people give credit to the most famous scientist just because it adds prestige. But can sometimes lead to people like Einstein getting solo credit for things he just briefly mentioned.
BahRamYou
3d ago
See i see anecdotes like that, and I think "cool, what did he say that's so smart it made a highly respected professor feel awe? Can i see it too? Maybe I can't understand it but Id like to try. "
With Einstein, there's tons of famous quotes from him, and a ton of pop science designed to help regular people understand his work. Because he did interesting work that we want to understand. Scott Aaronson has a nifty blog helping regular people understand his own work in quantum computing. Ive never seen anyone try to do that for Terence Tao. It just seems like hyper abstract academic stuff that only mathematicians would care about.
BahRamYou
4d ago
This may be low-effort but... why do so many people glaze Terrance Tao...!?
OK, he won a fields medal. Neat. Someone wins one every year.
OK, he won it at a super young age. Neat. There are tons of super-young math prodigies. I went to school with several, they all burned out.
OK, he's published lots of famous math papers. Like... uh... what....? Can you name them? Can you understand them, even a little? Even describe which field of math they were in? (no googling please)
I mean cmon, Einstein was famous too but at least people understood his work a little. Same with Stephen Hawking.
Terry Tao just seems to be a case where the nerd/math world needed a celebreity and they all descended on this one guy for arbitrary reasons.
BahRamYou
11d ago
I feel like I can do that, provided that she's sufficiently motivated to get off her butt and go out into the real world to meet people in meat-space. I also like to play with my phone when I'm sitting at the bar, but I'll put at away as soon as I meet anyone interesting to talk to. The real challenge is the women staying at home, using the phone as their sole means of communication... which is most women these days. I went to three bars tonight (fancy cocktail bars in a trendy neighborhood) and there was literally zero women there who weren't there as part of a date.
BahRamYou
12d ago
I also appreciate your posts. Modern "dating" just seems like the mother of all coordination problems. And people have been playing defect for so long that we've forgotten what it's even like for cooperation to be possible. The guys bragging about their success seem like some "fisherman" who's bragging about how he made a bunch of quick cash using dynamite to exterminate an entire lake of fish.
Dating is an extreme act of delayed gratification. Many men do not really enjoy the act of seducing women, which requires enormous investments in time and effort, and generally putting on at least a little bit of act rather than just being comfy and normal. Many men enjoy the thrill and payoff of a successful seduction but that is different from the act itself.
I agree, but I think this is mainly a result of our modern techno-dystopia. No one enjoys swiping right on hundreds of profiles just so we can "take whatever we can get" from the bottom 1% who swipe back at us. No one enjoys being the orbiter/reply-guy on social media. No one enjoys fighting for the attention of the one semi-hot woman at a party/bar/club when she's surrounded by men jockying for her attention, with a 10:1 ratio of men:women. Noone enjoys doing our best to make witty conversation while she just stares into her phone (or even worse, texting her while she takes 48 hours to reply "lol") . Noone enjoys going into some women's space like a yoga class/book club/knitting circle and feeling the suspicious stares and closed-off body language. Noone enjoys awkwardly shaking our butts to shitty hop hop at the generic dance clubs.
What I do enjoy is if I can actually meet a woman IRL and have some sort of real connection. It could be dancing, a good conversation, sharing a meal, anything really, as long as I can tell she's actually focusing her attention on me and feeling something from it. But modern life makes it so damn hard to get even that... one time I was a cocktail bar talking to a woman who was not very conventioanlly attractive, but she was still fun to talk to. I was having fun until she mentioned that she was surprised how many men were trying to talk to her, including much younger men. I was like... "look around, you're the only woman here, and there's so many single men here. Of course we all want to talk to you!" The single women are all at home hiding out on social media and I have to pay them if I want even digital attention.
All that said, I still kinda like paying women to hang out with me and give me attention sometimes, just to have that kind of "great date" experience even if it doesn't lead to seggs. They're just way better at entertaining men than any normal woman. So maybe it makes sense for this to be the modern division of labor.
BahRamYou
20d ago
and consider why she'd be sending you proof that she aborted?
because she's not an idiot, she's also aware of how scammy this seems but she still felt it important to tell me.
Anyway yeah, problem solved I guess. I like this woman but I'm not at all in love with her like how the people here seem to think, just trying to avoid being a total scumbag. But it seems to have all worked out so... hooray!
BahRamYou
20d ago
I'm being curt because for me this isn't just shitposting on the internet or idle speculation about something abstract, and I have to actually figure out what to do about it. Most of the replies I've seen are people like you who just want to tell me what a horrible person I am, or others who just googled "philippines scam" as if I'm not aware of the possibility. Believe it or not, I'm not a complete idiot, although I freely admit that I have many personal problems. But dealing with this situation is just more important to me than sparing the feelings of anonymous strangers who are trying to take a dig at me.
Anyway she sent me photos of her at the hospital today, recovering from the abortion. So it wasn't a scam. (yeah yeah I hear you thinking "but what if the hospital photos were also fake!" she's not some expert photo editor or stage magician). Turns out I actually know more about my personal life than random people on the internet.
It was a mistake for me to post this here, I know. People on this site just want to speculate about abstact issues, not deal with anything real.
BahRamYou
21d ago
It betrays a reductionist, colonialist attitude toward a country with a rich history, a diverse region with a stunning variety of cultural and geographical beauty.
You've clearly never been there. And you misinterpreted a lot of what I said. so whatever. thanks for trying I guess.
BahRamYou
21d ago
alright. yeah, like you said it's personal. thanks for talking to me in this semi-anonymous way.
BahRamYou
21d ago
that seems like a very legal response. Like, yeah, i Know i'm not legally responsable. But I still feel bad. What would you do? not asking for a legal opinion, just your opinion as a bro. let her raise the kid in poverty, give her money forever, or just assume she's a lying bitch?
BahRamYou
21d ago
Right, you're firmly committed to your prior that she's lying about everything and I'm a naive idiot. So in that case the correct choice of course is to give her nothing and walk away.
But since I'm actually in this situation, I have to think about other possibilities so...
BahRamYou
21d ago
I mean, if she's actually pregnant and it's actually mine... what would you do...? I feel kinda guilty just running away.
BahRamYou
21d ago
If there's no baby, great. no problem. I send her enough for the abortion (which is a very cheap there). Maybe she scammed me out of the equivalent of like $20. you can make fun of me for being an idiot.
If it's planned as a a more elaborate scam to get pregnant... you see my problem? or whatever maybe you don't you just want to seem smart and not like those suckers who get conned by a woman into helping her with her kids.
BahRamYou
21d ago
So you think it's literally impossible that a Filipina could get pregnant from unprotected sex with me? I know there are many scams... but there's also real biology.
Also yeah shut up whatever. (I know you're right but...)
Anyway thanks for your insider advice.
BahRamYou
21d ago
i'm not joking, she showed me a pregnancy test and we spent enough time together that it's unlikely (though not impossible) that it's not mine.
BahRamYou
21d ago
For what it's worth, she showed me a pregnancy test. Also the way she talks seems noticably different now.
Of course she could be faking the pregnancy test and the talking. I have no way of knowing for sure. At first I thought it was fake, but right now i'm like 80% sure it's real.
What would you do if you sent a woman money for an abortion and she didn't do it?
BahRamYou
23d ago
wait, how do you actually make that work? Do you just tell people to come knock on your door at any time? Do people actually do that?
I'm not very popular even though I do my best to reach out on social networking. If I didn't have a cellphone I'm pretty sure no one would ever talk to me except my fellow drunks at dive bars.
At some point, it's not a question of amassing evidence. It's a matter of actually analyzing that evidence, putting it into context, and making reasonable judgements about it.
I'm not an expert on the prison system, and I'm guessing no one else here is either. So I have no idea how common it is for prisoners to commit suicide, especially under extreme cases like Epstein. I also have no idea how common it is for cameras to fail or for guards to fall asleep on the job, or any of the other fuckups. It does seem to have been quite the fuckup, but then I'm also guessing that real-life prison is not like the super-prisons shown in hollywood movies- it seems like a really boring job and I could imagine the guards just constantly falling asleep/messing things up while they're sitting around all day watching nothing happen.
for context, i'm currently staying in a building that's supposed to have 24/7 doorman/security guard at the front door. But if you come in at night it's really not hard to find them asleep and just walk past them. Sometimes in the day, too.
I could be convinced otherwise! I'd just like to see a breakdown from an actual expert, showing what normal conditions are like in prison, and how unlikely it was for things to go wrong like this. I don't want to wade through thousands of hours of camera footage myself because I have better things to do. If that makes me a sheep who can't think for myself, so be it.
BahRamYou
29d ago
I've heard from anonymous sources that there's a whole service economy for the ultrarich, based around this sort of thing. The basic idea is that their time is very valuable, so they'll pay astronomical prices to avoid ever having to wait or be distracted by petty bullshit. The extreme example might be having a private jet/helicopter to help them travel faster, but it exists for all sorts of minor things too. So they might have a personal assistant who's job is to cue up just one episode of their favorite TV show, then slowly turn down the lights and help them sleep. or whatever else they want.
Obviously some of that is a privilege that only the very wealthy can afford. But it does seem like, to some extent, we should be able to pay for services that help middle class folks do that too. it's odd that we can't. If anything, it seems to be going the opposite direction, where like, even if you pay for premium, it will still insist on showing us adds and doing that sort of attention-grabbing addictive bullshit. It feels like I'm going to a restaurant and the owner is telling us "yeah I don't care how much you pay, you must sit in the smoking section and smoke at least one cigarette. i'm not letting you enjoy my food without a little nicotine on the side."
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I just watched "Wheel of Time" and it's so, so bad in that regard.
Like, it's a major part of the worldbuilding that the world is fragmented. Every country has its own description and way of speaking. You can easily tell where someone is from. The main character, especially, grew up in a super isolated small town, and everyone looks at him weird because he has red hair. It's very obvious that his mother was an "outlander" as they call it. Big plot hook mystery what happened there.
Meanwhile that same town has two black women and... no one bats an eye? No one asks questions? Huh, OK. And of course they just happen to be the two women with the most power in the town. In fact, their role has been cranked up even larger than it was in the source material, stealing a lot of important scenes away from the main character.
The same pattern seems to repeat endlessly, with every single person of authority made to be a black woman, amping up their power and authority, and no one seems to question how this came to be. It's somehow both a post-racial utopia where noone mentions race, but also one with extremely clear racial boundaries.
It actually makes things pretty confusing. To be fair, it's a long book series with way too many characters, so I can appreciate how they have to cut a lot to make it work for television. But they put so much emphasis on the black characters that the white characters are left kind of pointless, with nothing to do. They just take up space on screen and make it harder to remember everyone's names.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I agree with you about games, and to some extent TV and books- games take so long to play, and there's so many old good ones, that we just don't have time to keep up with all the new released games. Even if you buy them all to test them out, it's only scratching the surface, which really doesn't do them justice.
Movies are a bit different since they really don't take much time or effort to watch. Especially if you just focus on the big mainstream Hollywood movies, you can just see 1 or 2 a month and pretty much keep up with all of them. But admittedly I don't even do that much anymore... it's just so rare to find a new movie that interests me.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Well yeah I wasn't trying to just pick one at random. But I didn't pick the very largest either.
We could also look at wall street as a whole: 198 income against 856 billion last year.
But of course Hollywood has huge propaganda/marketing value that might be hard to measure.
That's my suspicion. Its like people have taken the prestige from the entire field of mathematics and awarded it all to this one guy, because they need a single person to be the face. No one cares about the number 2, even if he's also super smart and successful.
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