TitaniumButterfly
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Being afraid of water but working in a coastal town is funny, though. And the kind of tough choices you might have to make in the real world: if the best (or only) job you can get is a tourist town by the sea, then that's the one you take.
I wonder sometimes about all the people who got impressed into service aboard naval vessels who couldn't even swim, and what that must have been like. But also, why would you not, at that point, learn to swim‽
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
For some reason I always find them kind of indicting. Like, I knew it was gonna get put up as an example, so probably I had some kind of responsibility to try harder.
But there's a balance. A three-quarters-assed post which actually gets posted is better than a whole-assed post that never does.
Ultimately one never knows what will have value to others and one of the cool things about our system here is that we let the readers decide what mattered to them, plus a sensible layer of admin oversight.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Agreed, but there's also a vast contingent of people who imagine they'd push blue right up until they're actually making the choice, at which point red becomes irresistable.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?
Here is the prompt again, emphasis mine.
Not accusing you of this but a whole lot of people are somehow reading it as 'mentally-competent adults' which is not what it says.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
If everyone commits to pressing red, everyone lives.
This is outside the bounds of the thought experiment (children, mentally infirm, etc.) and so irrelevant.
I think that almost everyone with young children, and who can comprehend the question (can more or less than 50% of human adults even do that?), is pressing blue. I certainly am.
Aside from that though the real interesting part of this, which has mostly gone unexplored afaict, is how the question changes depending upon the group under consideration. If it were just my church, I'd have zero concerns about pressing blue. If it were my whole county I'd still feel pretty good about it.
But 'everyone in the world' forces me to ask some hard questions about the psychology of foreigners and I find myself a lot less certain.
(The other difficult question is which button I coach my older kids to push.)
You would think. Personally I'm regularly horrified by the way most guys seem unbothered by clearly-fake women. Fake tits, fake face, fake hair.
If a woman isn't beautiful without makeup she's not beautiful, imo. But other people do have other opinions.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
They feel a lot of things when they look at him. Sometimes it does express as resentment but it can't really be boiled down to any one thing.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
When one fails, there's no dignity in hiding or obfuscating the failure. Dignity is in owning the failure in a way that makes it clear that the most important thing to you about the failure is your wrongdoing or errors that caused the failure, to the extent that you welcome any and all humiliation that public ownership of that failure brings you.
Do you have any idea how rare this sort of psychological self-awareness is? You are nothing like representative of pretty much any major movement that's ever existed. That's true of more or less each of us here.
The masses of humanity don't have anything like that kind of mental horsepower or internal philosophical integrity. We throw the word 'tribe' around for a reason. Politics is generally irrational and votes come through stoking subconscious emotional responses. Under that rubric, admitting one's side was wrong is generally devastating. People want to be on the side of success, not failure.
Try instead "the process [electoral college] is flawed"; that has some legs. Or, you know what would be even better? "They stole the election from us."
Now we're cooking with democracy.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
It occurs to me that smart people often can't even imagine what it's like to be dumb.
TitaniumButterfly
3d ago
Well, the stock manosphere answer is that women want you to be naturally attractive and are a bit put off by an unattractive man who's just managed to sneakily become attractive. A man who has worked tirelessly to perfect his sport, his craft, his dating game, is less attractive from the one who was just as good without having to try.
Beyond that it simply is socially gauche, so apart from the above it's also signaling that you're uncouth.
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
>he doesn't know about the 8647 seashells
TitaniumButterfly
4d ago
a sensationalist media which amplifies any individual instances of so-called immigrant violence
I stopped here. That's the opposite of reality afaict and to see it baldly asserted pissed me off.
TitaniumButterfly
5d ago
Wait is no one else immediately convinced that this is obviously a troll?
TitaniumButterfly
5d ago
Yes, I meet fairly intelligent people all the time who actually believe this. Trying to suggest to them that the truth is less hopeful has never gone well.
I think this is straightforwardly because everyone in Western society has been raised from birth to believe that some ideas are right, some ideas are wrong, and some ideas are evil. That last category can never even be seriously considered without becoming the absolute worst sort of person. No one wants to be the bad guy, so open-mindedness here is strongly contraindicated.
TitaniumButterfly
8d ago
Sure, yeah, the map is never the territory therefore we can disregard the map.
TitaniumButterfly
9d ago
As much as I think we've lost something in the way of common culture -- when I was a kid we definitely all heard the same music -- I've gotta say it's nice to be almost entirely insulated from modern pop music. Sometimes I go to a grocery store or a restaurant and hear what's current and can only shake my head in despair and irritation, but for the most part I'm just free, free as a bird, and like it this way.
TitaniumButterfly
9d ago
Besides all that, I've read many times that lesbian relationships have much higher rates of domestic violence, so...?
Yeah the summary is kinda nice but I came here for a review. Which, upon double-checking the title of the post, is my fault.
TitaniumButterfly
11d ago
There are many, many ways to help others that don't require a tenth that much effort to get into. Not to mention the expense in terms of both time and money.
Someone who chooses to become a doctor does so only via willingness to expend blood, sweat, tears, and treasure, and lose a whole decade of their lives more or less before they can even begin. That takes some serious dedication to a very specific form of 'helping others'.
Someone with ten years of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars to volunteer could probably make a much larger difference than just being another doctor.
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
I'm responding to the numbers, above, that 16% of American physicians are not in the top 10%. I didn't do any math. (Well I guess I subtracted 84 from 100 but I'm reasonably sure I got that part right.)
To get into the top 10% you only need to make like $220k/year. Is that level of income worth putting your whole life on hold until your early 30s, not to mention the debt from all the education?
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
Personally I'm a bit horrified at the thought of putting in all the time and effort to become a doctor and not being in the top 10% of incomes. What went wrong? Would anyone do that on purpose?
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
The avocados I get at Costco are better now than they were a couple of years ago. At that time they were prone to being rancid inside before they were even soft enough to eat.
TitaniumButterfly
12d ago
Why is your problem capitalism in particular and not technology or market forces?
As usual when people complain about capitalism I get the sense that you're just unsatisfied with the basic structure of reality.
ETA I do appreciate your perspective and can relate to some degree.
For you see, sailors often leave the ship at ports, which as a rule have good water access.
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