Pigeon
coo coo
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User ID: 237
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
The fact that death is permanent is very weird for instance and it seems much more parsimonious to say the link between the body and the soul has been severed than that the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.
On the other hand, obviously material things like strokes, lobotomies, head injuries, and drugs appear to have an obvious effect on the qualia of an individual. Why does death - which materially seems to just be an extreme extension of brain injury - suddenly now need an ineffable soul? Or do clots in your brain, or a metal rod through your head, claw at your spirit as well?
Put it another way, we can’t fix the brain once it’s dead right now, as you say, because it is Too Complex and Can’t Be Repaired. Would being able to fix death, in your eyes, be good evidence for the material basis of “consciousness”?
We also often can’t fix computers (or other complex machines) without replacing parts once some parts have degraded enough. Is that not dissimilar to how we cannot fix the brain (except that we can replace parts for other things and less so for a brain)?
I think Monash University, Australian National University, and University of New South Wales in Australia (1958, 1946, and 1949) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (1991) are cases of success in growing a new university even though there were other local universities that were already relatively prestigious.
That said, I’m not sure it’s replicable exactly in all situations. It may be that the market space at the time of these universities’ founding was unsaturated and they could absorb a glut of talented students that the existing institutions would’ve been happy to admit but did not have the capacity for. I think - correct me if I’m wrong - they also tend to be more unbalanced in their subject strengths; Monash is a world leader in pharmacology, ANU is excellent in a bunch of anthropology and humanities-focused subjects as far as I can tell, UNSW in water resources and mineral sciences, HKUST in (surprise!) business and finance.
Maybe a way to grow a new institution’s prestige is to focus really hard on one thing a la UCSF? You could even do it to the point of only offering programs in the field of interest (again, like UCSF). Still wouldn’t be easy, but it’s probably easier than trying to compete in all fields. (I think this was touched on in the OP.)
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
I’ll second the “excellent women programmers” thing; though I am not in tech, I am dating a woman who is as far as I can tell “good” at programming (graduated from Carnegie Mellon roughly in the middle of the CS cohort), and she tells me that there was at least one woman in her cohort who was brilliant enough that her professors described her entering industry as “a great loss to academia”.
That said, she also describes that women were an overwhelming minority, that the entry class was 50/50 M/F but very quickly all the women left, and she’s…well, not happy, but willing, to bang her head against a programming problem for ages without apparently making any progress. (She is quite neurotic, though, and had to really work through that during her undergrad.)
Pigeon
coo coo
3mo ago
One of the schism mods wrote something about being part of a Quaker team at some leftist protest that was a really interesting read, I'll see if I can find it. IIRC it was the "death to terfs" contingent that made her notice something was off.
If you can find it I’d be interested.
Pigeon
coo coo
4mo ago
It's quite funny that the myth cropped up while Einstein was still alive, and Einstein himself was rather confused about why that myth came to be.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Source? I was under the impression that they're actually less likely to be the victims of any crime, although it is a pretty small sample size to draw any significant conclusions either way.
My understanding (sorry no source) is that this is largely due to a greatly disproportionate number of MtF transgender people working in the sex industry.
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
I assume you agree, then, that the progressive push towards showing disproportionately more minorities in media for representation and to combat erasure, etc etc., is similarly ill-argued.
Pigeon
coo coo
1mo ago
I’m guessing this is a reference to the early Ming treasure fleets, in which case this is inaccurate as the treasure fleets were not exploring as much as they were re-establishing relations, and the ships were built for such.
Or this could be a reference to a brief period of theoretical Chinese naval superiority in technology between the Song and the Ming, before the Ming went all sea-ban and lost a lot of knowledge about building seaworthy ships.
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards.
”Rawr.”
How on earth did people raise enough money to publish this sewer dredge?
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
I’m not sure that something being wish-fulfillment and escapism means that men won’t like it. Take practically the entire isekai/isegye genre in light novels and manga; I am under the impression that popadantsy had similar elements to it as well.
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list?
It might have. I’ve had people confront me over saying it in casual conversation a few times, years ago (granted in a very progressive environment), and I’ve seen a lot of “r-word” referring to retard in the last few years.
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
I had always understood “appeal to authority” as one of the “softer” fallacies, where it doesn’t sink the argument but you better make sure that it (and the authority) actually checks out.
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
love of manly stuff like…fan fiction
Wait what? In my perception this was always a girly thing.
And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade.
I hate that that's an actual, real, example, and that it's an even better example of progressive "meme magic" than you seem to have laid out.
Consider the initial, Popperian formulation of the Paradox of Tolerance:
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ... But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. ...
This is a milquetoast, classically liberal statement; tolerance in this sense is to literally tolerate other people, no matter how contrary to good taste (or hateful, or fascist, or communist...) they are. It is to tolerate dissent.
This has been morphed to something like:
A tolerant society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant individuals must not be tolerated.
It does not take any more than a cursory reading to appreciate that Popperian tolerance(1) and progressive tolerance(2) are essentially different words, and that the progressive version of the "paradox" in fact has no paradox in it, merely a word game where tolerance(2) is implicitly equated with tolerance(1).
(Consider:
A tolerant(2) society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant(2) individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant(2) individuals must not be tolerated(1).
If I did not make it clear.)
That the nonsensical lack-of-paradox "paradox" is now the mainstream interpretation is at once disheartening and also an excellent example of successful progressive "meme power" in the Dawkinsean sense of the word.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Bored DMV-esque Employee: Name?
Puyi: Yaozhi
Employee: Former occupation?
Puyi: Uhhh Emperor of the Celestial Kingdom of China
Employee: Haha no seriously though
I mean, this is close enough to real life. In his first day as a street sweeper he got lost:
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate.
I thought it was perfectly clear. I would put the onus on the other party in this case on being unreasonably obtuse.
A man can simply say "I'm sorry you feel that way" and walk away (doing this as a woman is socially impossible)
This would incur pretty serious social sanction in my *own social environment.
but the reality is that the women I'm talking about deploy tears much less frequently on men than women
This I can believe, for a multitude of reasons, though I myself don’t have a good gauge of how much women cry towards each sex.
Edit:a word
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
Now, someone might say "but Stalin and Mao...". Yes, they are popular with tankies but very few wokists go around trying to defend Stalin and Mao. When it comes to the far right and Hitler, on the other hand...
I’m not sure that’s true. Barely anyone even on the far-right defends Hitler.
On the other hand, it’s fairly common to find who excuse, or are apologetics for, the USSR and pre-Deng China — more often for Mao and Lenin, perhaps less often for Stalin, but surely still more than for Hitler!
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
"World ends; women and minorities hit hardest."
It’s not even that much of a joke.
Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
This reminds me of some comments by Nathan Sivin when investigating the differences between the scientific culture of Europe, the Middle East, and China, from his The Rise of Early Modern Science:
One aspect was that there does not seem to have been a systematic connection between all the sciences in the minds of the [Chinese] who did them. They were not integrated under the dominion of philosophy, as schools and universities integrated them in Europe and Islam. They had sciences but no science, no single conception or word for the overarching sum of all of them.
…
The astronomer in the court computing calendars to be issued in the emperor’s name, the doctor curing sick people in whatever part of society he was born into, the alchemist pursuing archaic secrets in mountain haunts of legendary teachers, had no reason to relate their arts to each other.
(A good example of this that I recall is the Chinese acceptance - or lack thereof - of a spherical Earth. Even while Chinese sailors and astronomers were doing calculations under the assumption of a spherical earth, the literati were still debating amongst themselves well into the second millenium about exactly how the Earth was flat.)
In much the same way, I don’t see why people can’t compartmentalise different streams of thought that are sufficiently remote in relation (at least, in their experience) in ways that would be contradictory if you tried to put them together. They’re thoughts that don’t collide, conflicts that don’t even rise to the level of cognitive dissonance. Each separate mode of thinking - political, personal, professional, hobbyist, whatnot - need not have bearing on each other, and each can have something more robust than mere dispositions based on internalized norms yet not rise to the level of universal belief.
What would you call “beliefs” that aren’t just internalization of norms and have genuine thought put into them, yet are, in the mind, local in character?
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
Putting aside that this is obviously a snark against extreme sinophilic (honestly, PRC-philic) history rewriting, this is actually an interesting question that has spawned an entire discipline of historical study. Not really as simple as “lol we better than you”.
(The Great Divergence debate has since expanded to include other polities and regions of the world, but IIRC for decades the majority of ink was spilled on Euro-Chinese comparisons.)
Pigeon
coo coo
2yr ago
What I’ve observed online, women really, really hate other women that put women down in regards to their weight/appearance.
Surely this is contingent on the environment. I think plenty of women diss other women for being fat and ugly (usually behind their back, but sometimes not). Just depends on what gains social cachet in their immediate circle.
I agree that it's hyperbolic, but I do suspect that it is significant enough that most (esp. non-elderly) women find it very difficult to wrap their head around. Like, consider the median woman's understanding of what the male experience is on dating apps, and just generalise it across pretty much all social interaction.
What was it again, "privilege is invisible to those who have it"?
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