MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
No bio...
User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
It’s also a lot harder to make it common if you’re not willing to start small. I think the flexitarians will move the needle toward reduced demand for meat simply by forming the habit of eating less meat. And as more people are choosing to eat meat less and trying out vegetarian and vegan recipes and asking for those options in restaurants, then it’s going to be much more mainstream. And in fact I see it happening n grocery stores alongside keto and gluten free. People trying it out and doing it every once in a while was more than enough to put enough options in grocery stores that even in Missouri, I could easily get the kinds of foods that I want in any one of those diets. As time goes on, I expect that even more people will be willing to try black bean burgers or fake meat nuggets and never look back.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
15d ago
I suspect what’s actually going through Abbot’s mind in the near future is his political future. He’s angling to be seen as a defiant leader something like Desantis is in Florida. I don’t think trans athletes come around often enough that there’s going to be more than one or two in all of Texas. If those few happened to go to private school, there’s no real way for the state to enforce a private school’s policy on trans athletes. If my math is right there are only 12,000 trans people in the entire state, with most being over 18. On that sense the issue would barely even be an issue unless the government were taking very strong sides on it. But it makes great press in the news cycle.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
28d ago
I totally agree. The stuff that grabbed me about Fight Club, and The Martian is just how close Palahniuk and Weir seemed to be able to get the mindset of ordinary working class people stuck in extraordinary circumstances. A lot of sci-fi seems to assume that everyone is PMC and that ships in space or colonies are going to be large and clean and have lots of cool gear. They’re cruise ships built for luxury run by people who cry but rarely experience a real hardship.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I never had a problem with any of the aesthetics of either lab grown or fake meat. In fact, personally I think both are good in the sense that it would convince people to a least give it a go and in a way that doesn’t affect their lifestyle that much.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps). It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.” Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.” But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution. A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.
Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite. We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.
A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away. It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.” But it can’t anticipate side doors. It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is. So you can easily leave.
Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI. We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
23d ago
I think, if schools wanted to, they could absolutely teach people how to actually think and solve problems. Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers could do so with nothing but a bunch of eager students meeting outside in the agora and listening to him talk. We’re actually shockingly bad a thins. I honestly think high school students in the 1950s and 1960s were actually better thinkers than college graduates and in some cases college students in the 21st century.
I have my theory as to why this is. I think the classical model of education worked much better than modern educational methods. I also think that the demand for rigor and precision in thought and the need to actually understand rather than simply memorizing the correct answers to questions is more or less dead. The value we used to place on dispassionate inquiry died long ago and has been replaced by narratives determined by the culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
12d ago
I think honestly, you could probably do well creating something to re-orient gen z people into healthier directions. I’ve personally found a philosophy of Stoicism mixed with secular Buddhism to be helpful for me, and I suspect such a thing mixed with proper socialization and physical activity as a sort of “adult summer camp” experience could not only make you a fair amount of money, but help to make them and by extension the rest of society a bit healthier.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
22d ago
Except that I’ve never ever seen this drive more people to support these causes. In fact, it’s almost always a negative publicity to the point that it would often do the cause better to not protest at all. Your protest blocked a road, now everyone is pissed because they were late to work, or missed a flight, or other activities they needed to get to. Are people talking about the cause as in “does this idea have merit” or in terms of “what a bunch of inconsiderate losers making people late for work and making people miss their flights. It’s negative at least around me. People outright cheered when the people blocking roads in Europe got pushed out of the way by SUVs or were manhandled to the side of the road by outraged drivers. Not one person seeing the souping of the Louvre paintings got curious about the cause, they were upset about the destruction of the art. So on net, it’s more likely to turn people away.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I hadn’t heard this particular story, but it absolutely tracks with the naive way that modern western leaders approach global politics. There’s just a weird thought that all they need to do is “be the good guys” and they win by default. Couple this with the idea that bad actors wouldn’t use subterfuge to get what they want and it’s a system that’s not hard to either work around or subvert. We expected Russia to just collapse when we disconnected them from the global exchange. We sneered at them rushing western stores to get the last goods before they closed. What we never ever seemed to consider is that Russia might well have had contingency plans for the sanctions they knew the west would impose, that they’d already created BRICs and could do just fine without us. We expected a short war tha5 they would lose any day now. Annnnd guess which side is lowering their draft age.
We’re in some sense victims of our own success. We have been so dominant for so long that we don’t think about how vulnerable our systems are or what a determined nation can do.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
17d ago
I think it actually could become a problem in that the far left and far right are in pretty strong agreement on the accusations against the Jews, that they’re manipulating narratives to their own benefit, and that they only care about themselves. The left has absolutely blamed all Jews for the actions of Israel, and they don’t seem to care what Hamas and other Palestinians have done or want to do. There’s barely even a whisper of blame on Hamas for launching the attacks or holding hostages or the crimes committed during the attack. And when you couple that with full support of the intifada, chanting of the slogans that deny Israel’s right to exist,
Personally, I think most of the Gaza situation is on Lakud which isn’t all Israelis and has little to do with Jews who don’t support Lakud or Natanyahu.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
If that were the extent of the advice, I think it would be fine. Put sunscreen on is good advice. Don’t let your kids play outside is batshit insane. In fact, to my mind the benefits to children from playing outside are substantial enough that if I thought talking about sunscreen would keep a kid indoors I’d never tell parents about sunscreen.
The physical benefits are that a kid gets actual exercise, running around, playing. They develop better coordination. A kid who’s playing is basically getting hours of aerobic exercise, building muscles, and so on. A kid stuck inside gets none of that. They sit and stare at screens and get fat.
Then there’s the social benefits. Making actual real life friends improves mental health. It embeds a child in a social network of peers and other adults. It teaches social responsibility and empathy and a whole host of social skills that simply cannot be learned by chatting over a headset.
It teaches good problem solving. Kid wants to get across a stream, he might accidentally learn something in trying to figure out how to do that. He might want to play a different game than the other kids and have to learn to negotiate with the other kids to get that. He might learn how to practice a skill so he can get good enough to play with the other kids.
If children only got one single benefit, I’d still be in favor of having the kids play outside. Even if the only benefit were preventing obesity, it’s an easy trade. Cancer at 70+ is bad, but if caught early is fairly treatable most of the time. Obesity is a chronic disease that often causes heart attacks in fairly young people. Taking 5 years off retirement or 30 years? Easy choice.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
22d ago
I think a lot of this could be somewhat curbed if there were reasonable requirements to get various helps from the government. If you want assistance, it should be assistance and therefore you should have a job. That doesn’t seem controversial to me. And it would work. If having sec 8 housing required having a full time job, then people would be much more likely to find and keep a job. Add in a requirement that nobody living at that house commit a felony and a lot of these sorts of problems get handled.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11d ago
I don’t think it does. You can actually grow your own food. And you can make black bean burgers and so on or cook with chickpeas or something.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
9d ago
Is fuentes encouraging people to move to the country and form a community? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him saying something like that. I wouldn’t have a problem with people advocating that they and people like them form close knit communities in the country and adopt whatever they consider to be the ideal lifestyle. I’d only really object to people imposing that lifestyle on other people.
I’m not even convinced language revivals in such isolated communities is as hard as you think. The issue is getting enough fluency that the next generation is raised speaking that language, rather than speaking the language of the broader culture.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I’m personally of the school of thought that interventions should be minimal until at least the mid teens. Don’t make a fuss about their clothes, their hair, their activities. Give them a nickname if you must, but keep it somewhat gender neutral. At 16 or 18 if the child is still thinking they’re the wrong gender, then and only then is there a subject worth talking about. There are real trans people. They do exist, though I suspect they are much rarer than supposed. But I don’t think we need to go much beyond “don’t be mean to people who look weird or act weird” in a grade school classroom.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
16d ago
I don’t think it’s hard, I think controlling any super intelligent being whether natural or artificial is not possible. In order to control it, you have to understand it and its current and future limitations. But if AI is going to be orders of magnitude smarter than us and have a will that is somewhat free, you have a being who’s thoughts you can’t even begin to understand with desires that you cannot hope to comprehend. It’s like your dog trying to control you. Your desire to play COD makes no sense to your dog. He can’t even understand that you’re controlling what happens on the screen let alone why you want to do that. The dog can’t abstract in a way that makes your decision to do that make sense, nor can he make sense of what you’re doing. AI might not be just 2-3 times smarter and thus better at abstraction, it might eventually be 1000 times smarter. We might be ants trying to understand humans. Nothing you do besides literal eating makes sense to the ant. Yet, we humans arrogantly proclaim that we must fence in and control AI. Our rules for it will keep it from escaping.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
I think it’s a culture change. And it’s not just sex. It’s a weird thing where people no longer simply do things for fun. They have to have a purpose to do them. You don’t read because you like it, you read because it’s good for you and keep track of all the books you read because you have to hit your reading goal of X books a year. You grind all the time to make money, but it doesn’t seem that most people are doing so because they intend to actually spend it, god forbid. Instead, it’s for show. They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real. Even vacations are supposed to be learning experiences and get you to experience a new culture. Partying, relaxing on the beach, sitting around and reading a book, these things aren’t what people think a vacation should be. I’m kinda a duffer of a writer, it’s a hobby, and it seems like the entire culture around this hobby and art in general is about selling your work. I have no objection whatsoever to selling, but it’s a monofocus on publishing, on getting sales, and working on what will actually sell rather than on having fun. Even though getting your stuff out there can be literally free (a pdf and a webpage is good enough) nope, publishing is it, sell it.
To me, the entire experience of life in 2024 is an exercise in optimization. It’s not about enjoyment, fun, or doing things you enjoy doing for the sake of doing them. It’s about trying to optimize the time used to become a better person in whatever sense it is. Almost as if somehow we’ve lost the sense of doing things just because we want to do them, to have a good time doing them. And I think there are several reasons for this.
One is work culture. Everything has metrics and you’ve been judged by metrics since you were a child. Your parents sweat whether or not you’re keeping up with your peers. And sports at least after age 9 is almost all select teams. You live in a make the grade culture. And you will do your best to measure up.
Two is that leisure time is shrinking. People work 60 hours a week instead of 40. And this shrinks your available time to do anything not work or chores. With that shortage of time, every moment counts and therefore you feel pressured to show that you did not waste time.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
Morally speaking, yes it is defamatory. It’s obvious to anyone familiar with the subway incident that the story is in fact a direct reference to that event and that the audience is meant to assume that the background is at least somewhat accurate as well. And as to other stories, I think the same holds true. If I’m very obviously writing a story about George Floyd and then veer off into making my fictional Floyd into a drug dealing, gang-banging pimp, it’s very clear that I intended those accusations to filter down into the real person that my fictional character is a representation of.
And again just from a moral perspective, I think if you’re going to use a “ripped from the headlines” story, you need to change the story and the character enough that it’s not intuitively obvious that I’m talking about this specific person who did this specific thing. A fictional version of the story where the event happened somewhere other than a subway, and perhaps the guy getting choked had a weapon or whatever is probably a big enough change that the average viewer isn’t pointing to the screen with Daniel Perrry’s name on their lips. Then you have a fictional character that you can do whatever you want to do especially in making them hated in some way.
Or son Scott Card had advice about world building that amounted to “don’t use warp drive, everybody knows it’s Star Trek.” And I think in any fictional story, the general advice is good. If I’m creating my own fictional story, it’s bad practice to make it obvious where I’m getting my world building, characters, and events from simply because it tends to pull people out of the experience and in the case of using real events, transfer the fiction onto the real world.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
It’s not a scam it, like solar is overrated for large swaths of the globe simply because the weather and geography often make those solutions impractical. Solar only works in places that have a lot of sunny days. And transmission can only go so far. Wind has a similar problem— if the place isn’t windy enough, there’s no power. Add in the space requirements for either solution, and it’s a minor source of power that people overhype because they want to believe you can get free-ish energy that’s perfectly green and leaves no waste. I think it’s a step backwards simply because for most of the globe nuclear fission is so much more efficient per meter of space used and produces so little waste that anything that stops people from wanting more nuclear energy is a step away from green energy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
The problem comes in the design phase of the game. The developers aim the game at “Bob”s in the customer base and then later add difficulty, usually by tweaking the HP, or maybe the hit boxes. Or they might lower the number of recharging drops. What they don’t do is create a hard game for Alice alongside an easy game for Bob. Alice no longer has a game designed ground up to be challenging in a thoughtful way. She gets the easy version gameplay - one that might well not really require strategic decisions or foresight or grinding. She just has to mash the attack button more often than Bob.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
22d ago
I’ll agree to the decline in quality of entrants. But I think the bigger issue is student loans and the ease with which those institutions can make money by reducing rigor even in high rigor subjects. A butt in the seat of any university makes them 30,000 a year. This is putting enormous pressure on schools to not only admit anyone with a pulse, but to reduce the difficulty of coursework so students don’t fail or drop out. So you basically remove the difficulty from the courses, handhold everyone in the class, and offer more extra credit to shore up flagging grades. Which means students are no longer thinkers, innovators, readers, or otherwise able to do anything beyond regurgitating whatever is in the study guide.
Another issue, which I think has also reduced the usefulness of college is that really, the ability of any program at any school to be held to any sort of account for not actually teaching students to do the things that are a major part of doing that work. As it sits now, what students and employers know about what the program does is what the school says it does. If I’m looking at a program in biology, I honestly have no way to know whether a program I’m looking at is going to teach me to do the labs, or to teach me the fundamentals of biology or statistics used to analyze the results of an experiment. I can use reputation as a proxy, but it isn’t a very good proxy.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1mo ago
The problem of people no longer seeking treatment is to my mind one of the more serious problems with this ratchet. Managed properly, people with even serious mental illness can live somewhat normal lives. But untreated mental illness can easily become a time bomb in which the person muddles until they can’t anymore. And removing guns for mental illness or cars or knives doesn’t help when the people with those mental illnesses decide not to risk losing their guns or their car by talking about their anger issues or depression or bipolar. Then it goes off in an explosion when the person with anger issues takes them out on a room full of people.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
18d ago
I don’t think you can really compartmentalize to that degree with any integrity. In most governments and political parties they have openly stated platforms and they at least intend to make good on those promises. You can’t support only the good without accepting the bad. You can’t have support for a faction that kills gays and support gay rights. You can’t support the political goal without supporting the social goals because if they get their goals of defeating IDF they’ll go right back to running Gaza the way they want to.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
2mo ago
I think this is why people are really using DEI. It’s a great way to deflect attention and criticism from your story or game because any time someone says they don’t like the product, you can always default back to “the fans are just mad about inclusion.” Which means you don’t have to spend time producing something fun or good — which takes time and costs a lot of money — and still get people to buy it and even defend it.
I don’t see why that would be. I find a lot to admire about heredi Jews, the Amish, Mennonites, and other similar groups. I think as a model for forming stronger communities these groups while different share common features that could be easily adapted to creating enclaves of traditional culture for those who wants that. The secret sauce seems to be a strict set of community rules, dress and sometimes language that differs from the mainstream, and a focal point in religious beliefs and practices.
More options
Context Copy link