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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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1yr ago
Also, an affinity for making up new terms. Maybe we could call it neologophilia.
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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
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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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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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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1yr ago
What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn? Neither can survive independently and neither has a sense of self. Killing one is like killing another.
There is some fuzzy boundary when a zygote becomes a "person", but I would argue it happens far enough after birth for it not to make a difference here.
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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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1yr ago
This is smart, because he couldn't remember if 1 or 5 was the most severe, so he hedged his bets.
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9mo ago
My guess is physical space + wealth.
When I watch woodworking videos, I am in awe of the size of these guys' garages and workshops. Google suggests the average US house is 3 times larger than the UK's. Plus these guys have the cash to buy the tools and the wood, and a big truck to transport it all. Americans are just richer.
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1yr ago
This is a long shot. I am trying to track down the source of a half-remembered quote I saw on twitter, I believe a screenshot from a book. It went something like this.
Imagine a man who devotes himself to potatoes. He lives his entire life in a room made of potatoes, he sleeps in bed made of potatoes, he eats only potatoes, etc. Now imagine another man who lives a more varied life, who knows a potato, but also knows turnips, onions, cabbage, etc. Which of these men has a greater understanding of the nature of potatoes?
The point being that the first man has no point of reference. Although he has spent far longer with potatoes, he lacks the framing and context that the generalist has. Appreciate any leads on this one!
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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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9mo ago
Peter Thiel complains about the lack of ticker-tape parades, as the West goes from definite optimism to indefinite pessimism about the future. I wonder about the cause and effect. Again, wtf happened in 1971?
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11mo ago
Is it? I personally found the human aspect awkward and embarrassing, and could have done without it. Admittedly I never found therapy useful.
In the VICE article, Dan stays up till 4am talking to it, while Gillian says the words are empty. The Discord users that Koko fooled presumably skew male, so may be a gender thing. I know that my very male approach was "I have a problem that needs to be fixed", not "I need to spend an hour talking to an empathetic human".
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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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8mo ago
Sounds like you and your wife have different thresholds. Your wife has a lower threshold for mess and so gets irritated with even a few dirty dishes, which is well below what you'll put up with. Same for the plane tickets, her threshold for buying tickets "at the last minute" is earlier than yours, so she gets jumpy and can't rest until she's bought them.
In my experience these thresholds don't change. They seem intrinsic to a person's psychology. What you can do is acknowledge them and work with them. So if you job is to do the dishes, be aware that this means you have to do them to meet your wife's smaller threshold for "messy kitchen" so that you're both happy.
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11mo ago
It sounds like an anxiety disorder. Has no one offered to treat it as such (diazepam, CBT, etc)? Almost all your symptoms can be manifestations of anxiety.
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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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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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9mo ago
TPOT just means "this part of twitter". Recently there was the second annual Vibe Camp, a tpot meetup, but I don't think there is much more to it than that. I think a lot of it is excitement when people find others that 'get' them.
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1yr ago
Like others say, women can't literally tell if you're a virgin (how could they?), but they can pick up on your 'vibe'. If you are insecure, it will reveal itself in subtle ways when you interact with women, which they can pick up on. Maybe getting laid would let you overcome the "I'm a virgin!" insecurity, in which case, it would indeed help you be more romantically successful. Not through some metaphysical sex magic, but by changing the way you think about yourself.
Also consider that you might have a fear of intimacy. Maybe you don't make romantic moves because you're afriad of what might happen, and justify this as "wanting to find love" and waiting for the "right time", which is a story you can keep telling yourself for years and years.
Models by Mark Manson is probably the best book on this subject.
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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?
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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