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3mo ago
Not very "fun", but a clear example of out-group vs far-group (is that the right term?)
"If you get caught watching an American drama, you can get away with a bribe, but if you watch a Korean drama, you get shot," a North Korean defector told BBC Korean on Thursday.
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4mo ago
it'd be better to let "cancelling" be done by the state, because then people can defend themselves and a court can decide if they're truly guilty of the offense.
It depends on the laws, eh? If memes are illegal, and you posted memes in a private WhatsApp group, then you're going to prison.
From a consequentialist perspective... I would rather have the First Amendment than the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to send anything "grossly offensive" over electronic communications, even if no one actually sees it or is offended by it.
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4mo ago
On war crimes, I feel like people forget that hostage taking is a war crime, and it is undeniable that Hamas has captured hostages. And then you have the complimentary war crimes of Hamas using human shields, and Israel killing "excessive" civilians because of the human shields.
I'm pretty sure Hamas does operate out of hospitals. Here is an article from a few years ago, but I'm just a guy, I can't speak for the veracity.
It wouldn't surprise me if thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Gaza claims 20,000 deaths just from this current war. Even if that's a 10x overestimate, it's still thousands.
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8mo ago
In the UK, a 19 y/o was found guilty of a hate crime for quoting a rap lyric containing the n-word on her instagram page. A while ago, a man was jailed for 20 weeks for posting 10 "grossly offensive" George Floyd memes in a private Whatsapp group. Another man was found guilty of sending an offensive tweet, celebrating the death of Sir Tom Moore, and the tweet was only live for 20 minutes. Recently a man was found guilty of wearing an offensive football shirt (a reference to the Hillsborough disaster over 30 years ago). There are many more examples in kind, these are just from the top of my head.
I think these are all absurd. Anything that offends normie public sensibilities is illegal. I would much prefer the American free speech norms.
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3mo ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/madlads/s/yV09R82gov
I came across this reddit post of a guy who cuts his books in half. I found it funny that this triggered people in the comments. Many people refuse to fold pages or write in their books. I don't see what the big deal is. To me a book is just a tool. I understand taking care to preserve semi-rare books, but these were books you can just walk into any bookstore and buy.
I used to know someone who would even try to avoid creasing the spine. But I've also heard about a guy who would rip pages of shlocky fiction as he read them to keep his place. Where are you on the spectrum?
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4mo ago
New Year's resolutions? Do you make them? Do you keep them?
This year, I am thinking of the following priorities:
- Work hard(er). Get into the habit of hard work.
- Continue to meet new people, and maintain existing relationships
I came across The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, and I agree with all of them but "I wish I hadn't worked so hard." I actually wish I was working harder and really would like to maintain a consistent daily work habit. I managed this a couple of month this year but it dropped off at the start of October. I should probably read Atomic Habits even though I feel like I will know most of it.
I have more ideas floating in my head but I won't set them as goals just yet. I should tidy up and publish a crappy project I have, just to get it out there. I should release more work in general, or build in public. I want to perform in front of an audience. I should figure out how to leverage the internet to make friends online. I should get into climbing. I want to go on a solo trip somewhere. These are more specific and I might pick some of these later to focus on, but I know for sure those two priorities above define the general direction I want to go.
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3mo ago
"If only you knew how different things could be" . My favourite version has a different image with the same quote, but I can't find it. Hope, optimism, imagination are powerful forces and the meme triggers all of these for me.
And unrelated, but I find there's something profound about this meme.
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3mo ago
I also find the dimming and scrolling to close the pop up very annoying. I would rather have a regular pop up I could reflexively close. Instead, I see the dimming, scroll further to close the damn thing, then scroll back up and find my place.
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5mo ago
This is just normie thinking. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, moving the goal posts, generally incoherent. The "reasoning" is a veneer. The conclusions are foregone. Analysis or steelmaning of the object-level is not worthwhile.
MR X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group.
MR Y: But the record of the community chest shows that they give more generously than non-Jews.
MR X: That shows that they are always trying to buy favour and intrude in Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money; that’s why there are so many Jewish bankers.
MR Y: But a recent study shows that the per cent of Jews in banking is proportionally much smaller than the per cent of non-Jews.
MR X: That’s it. They don’t go for respectable businesses. They would rather run nightclubs.
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4mo ago
no we aren’t going to give food away, there is just going to be abundant food that’s so cheap that nobody can’t afford it.
This is already the case, but now everyone complains about food waste. Can't win!
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4mo ago
That first point reminds me of the thesis of this article
For example, much of contemporary feminism actually reads like an attempt to hook the horse of the patriarchy up to the junker of gender egalitarianism. The patriarchy was bad, as the story goes, so we got rid of it and had the sexual revolution instead. Then the sexual revolution turned out to be a catastrophe of abuse, disgrace, and regret. By the time we realized it, however, “consent” was the only language of sexual ethics available to us at all, so these were problems that we largely had no name for.
[...]
Slowly, and probably unconsciously, we took the existing material of gender egalitarianism and cobbled together a jugaad patriarchy that pretends not to be one. The jugaad patriarchy is less efficient, less humane, and less conceptually coherent than the actual patriarchy it replaced. But if it affords us an atmosphere in which men are terrified of the consequences of sleeping with women they’re not married to, perhaps it’s better than nothing.
http://www.thetruthcounts.com/blogtraducciones/2018/11/14/jugaad-ethics/
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9mo ago
The term Lindy comes from Taleb.
Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has been known for the fifty or so years of interpretation by physicists and mathematicians of the heuristic that developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted, say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy Effect.
https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf
There are two classes: perishables and non-perishables. For humans, the older you get, the more likely you are to die. For non-perishables, it is the opposite. The older a building gets, the more likely it is to survive. In 200 years, the pyramids will still be standing, the Eiffel tower will probably still be there, and those newly erected apartment blocks almost certainly not. Same goes for books, ideas, countries, laws, and so on. Shakespeare will live on longer than the latest Hugo Award winner.
That's the Lindy effect. The adjective lindy is used to describe anything that's old, that has stood the test of time, and thus implied that is it true or useful or valuable. Or at the very least, a certain lens worth applying.
Video games? “Not Lindy.”
Nightclubs? “Lindy. In fact, deep Lindy.”
Sleek midcentury modernism? “Anytime you get away from fractal patterns and ornate details, it’s not Lindy.”
How about sex toys? “Lindy,” he said, adding, by way of explanation, “ancient Egypt.”
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal? “Some rich guy going around and doing criminal behavior and abusing people? It’s pretty Lindy!”
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4mo ago
My feeling is that most kids' time is unstructured and not very valuable for learning. So if the choice is between an intensive chess program and the status quo, the chess program is a pareto improvement. If the choice is between an intensive chess program and an intensive Spanish program, then sure, there are trade offs. But most kids would otherwise be watching youtube videos or playing minecraft.
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1yr ago
Scott Aaronson describes a feeling (that I too experienced):
Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.
I was not as bad as Aaronson, but I held a completely unquestioned conviction that no girl must ever know how much I desired her, and that no one must know I had any sexual thoughts at all. I have no idea where it came from, but it seemed as evidently true to me as the fact that the sky is blue.
So, reading this story, I wonder if this innate impulse is actually adaptive for spergs. If you don't understand the social landscape of romance and dating, then indeed your best bet is to opt out and hide. If you try to play without understanding the rules, you end up ostracized or worse.
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4mo ago
I feel you and @f3zinker
I'm single and work remote. But I was actually NEET for a long time and my current situation feels so much better. While NEET I was so embarrassed I would dread meeting people in case they asked what I did for a living, which made the social isolation much worse. Every week as a NEET is a week down the drain. Now my bank account grows at the end of each month, my YoE grows, and I'll eventually get promoted without doing anything in particular.
This year I have made new friends. The more friends you have, the easier it is to meet people. It's an exponential relationship. But an exponential stays pretty flat for a while before it takes off, so you have to bear through the flat stage. I think you just have to pick something and just keep turning up. I go to tech meetups. I've got to know the regulars. There was a nerdy music gig a while ago, I asked a couple of them if they were interested and we went together. It was a success. There's another gig coming up and now more people are interested. At this stage it feels like I've got a growing group of people I know, with shared interests, that I can do certain social things with. At the very least, I know when I go a monthly meet up, I will see some friendly familiar faces and we can catch up. It did take about a year to get here.
I don't meet many women like this, it's true. But it does feel nice to have a semblance of a social life. I have pictures of me doing things for the dating apps, I have things to talk about on dates, and am slowing becoming a more interesting and datable person.
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8mo ago
In the words of Joe Biden, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."
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3mo ago
I am always surprised that people are not more impressed with LLMs. I went out for dinner with a smart friend and he has not used gpt4 and didn't seem to care. We didn't understand part of the menu, so I took a picture and had chatgpt explain. Every time I do this it blows my mind a little. He seemed to take it for granted.
We now literally have intelligent computers that can see and talk, a la Jarvis or HAL 9000, and so many people are surprised I pay $20/month for access.
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8mo ago
I had my red-pill moment in 2015, after reading about these absurd things Trump was saying, deciding to watch the primary source for entertainment. I noticed that the second hand reporting was taking things out of context, or reporting things in the worst possible light.
I wonder, why not have a news source that is just primary sources? Maybe because, Hansonian style, news isn't actually about news, it's about being entertained, or about learning the 'correct' opinion on things. Maybe because the value of news in the in the added context it provides, but journalists are not capable of adding unbiased informed context, thus it's simply a skill issue. Maybe because there's no real market for such a thing, and people want simple articles they can glance at for 30 seconds, or a headline they can retweet.
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5mo ago
A police probe has been opened, as is "normal procedure", but yes, no mention of the offending player.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-67261168
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4mo ago
That's the question, right? Where do the interesting people hang out on the internet?
Your question reminds me of this essay on "refinement culture" that starts by describing the changes that have happened in sports as decisions become more data-driven.
https://medium.com/@lindynewsletter/refinement-culture-51d96726c642
Dan Luu touches on this in a couple of his essays
https://danluu.com/talent/ - on the misidentification of talent in baseball (and elsewhere) by talent scouts trusting their 'gut' over the numbers.
https://danluu.com/bad-decisions/ - on bad decision making in baseball
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