cjet79

cjet79 1d ago

Apparently the people in the San Francisco subreddit were generally supportive of this.

go after the leftist orgs funding these protests

I couldn't find any references to them doing this. Sounds like it would just be the specific protestors hit with prosecutions.

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cjet79 1d ago

There have been blocking protests sort of like this with regards to oil pipelines. But yeah its not like they can block a significant amount of traffic.

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Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024

cjet79 1d ago

My suggestion: More friends.

We are social creatures, and a kid/wife isn't a substitute for a healthy social life.

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cjet79 1d ago

Antagonistic. You have been warned 3 times before:

5 day ban.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=FALlhXl6CmA

cjet79 2d ago

Their funding is very confusing.

They get very little direct money from the government. But they license out their content to a bunch of small and tiny radio stations that wouldn't exist at all without government money and grants.

So whenever the topic of funding comes up they get sort of talk out of both sides of their mouth . They'll say "we are mostly supported by donations", but then also say that if you cut government funding they'd have to drastically reduce their programming.

I suppose they could both be true if the donations are mostly for a few very popular radio programs.

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Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024

cjet79 4d ago

If anyone likes either the show Hot Ones or Conan O'Brien this is maybe the best of both:

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Friday Fun Thread for April 12, 2024

cjet79 5d ago

I'm terrible with differentiating accents.

Neutral is a pretty good description of yours, but I'm American so maybe that is your accent. You have a very deep voice so that throws me off a little.

I'm not sure if I'm remembering any Indian affectations or I just assumed they were there cuz I knew you were Indian. It might have just been that you correctly pronounced Indian words, which most people with non-indian accents can't do. I think it was a food item curry/Tikka/biryani etc.

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cjet79 7d ago

Don't do this, it is not polite, and it doesn't help.

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cjet79 8d ago

I appreciate seeing some of the actual allegations here. You might not have convinced the person you responded to, but it seems pretty compelling to me.

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cjet79 9d ago

Yes, I agree, as I said in the original post it seems like an objectively bad way to spend money.

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cjet79 10d ago

in the limit it costs less than a civil war would, so "expensive" is relative

Hah, that is true!

Main problem with this would probably be scaling. Which is a problem with a lot of exchange programs. The value-add of exchange programs is often in a human element. So you need good host families, good host situations, and good candidates for an exchange. But you can't really manufacture those or spin them up at need. There is low hanging fruit to be picked when the program is small.

I remember my parents hosted an Italian exchange student for a half semester during my first year of college. They volunteered after the girl had request a home change. The girl had a good time staying with our family, but my parents never signed up for it again.

I stayed with a German family during my European trip, and I stayed in touch with them for a bit afterward. They were awesome, but I also don't think they ever hosted again.

My dad was friends with a married couple that couldn't have kids. They hosted maybe a dozen exchange students over the years. I think the kids that stayed with them had a mediocre time. They apparently had a lot of strict rules, which made sense for them hosting teenage girls for two decades in a row.

Not many data points, but I do feel that maybe some of the best experiences aren't gonna be easily replicable.

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cjet79 10d ago

I don't know how highschools are now, but a decade ago when I was a college-bound high school senior the last semester was basically a joke. As long as you didn't fail anything too badly highschool had ceased to matter. GPA had ceased to matter. Even the most diligent students got caught up in the general mood of laziness. A few weeks taken out of this last semester would probably have no negative impact on education.

But I ultimately agree that it doesn't need to be handled through schools. I think this effort is private, and that's how I'd prefer it stay.

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cjet79 10d ago

Agree that more Americans should see more of America. Pretty cool place. I feel like I've done most of my traveling in the last decade just attending weddings. My wife and I both have a lot of cousins. I did more travelling in college and just after college as part of an obscure rec-level sport club (underwater hockey, check it out and play it, my endorsement is worth op security concerns)

I hate the political angle on this. It feels leftist to me that “if we just had more schools/spent more money” we would not have “maga/disinformation problem” instead of most of things being fundamental disagreements.

I am not feeling that this needs a political dimension. I think in general there are two axis of negotiation on any topic. One is the object level disagreement. And the other is a more nebulous social standing / social cohesion.

Take a simple example of where you want to go eat for dinner with a group of people. The object level concern is "what do I want to eat". If you are with people you care about and interact with regularly like your family, then you are definitely willing to go eat somewhere you don't like just to keep another person in that group happy, or make it clear that you might get later leverage on other things. Or you just love them and you want to make sure that they are happy.

Imagine you are instead going out with random strangers. They will eat at different tables, and you won't even know who they are. The nebulous social standing dimension / social cohesion negotiation space gets entirely erased. You have no reason except to advocate where you want to eat. And any compromise is a pure loss.

I think the bifurcation of America into rural vs urban has really destroyed the nebulous social dimension negotiating space. No one on either side is willing to compromise because its a pure loss for them and everyone they know. But if you stick them face to face with each other and get them to talk about politics you kind of reintroduce that nebulous social dimension.

Politics needs some grease to work. That grease is often the nebulous social dimension. Congress itself seems to partly work on these informal social dimensions. Politicians that only went after the objective political issues like Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders were semi-pariahs within congress. They often weren't useful in making deals, because they may as well have been robots.

What this exchange program does, what all exchange programs do is add some negotiating space.

When I went to India, I ended up liking my Indian coworkers better. It meant when it came time to schedule meetings that meant me waking up an hour earlier, I wasn't as annoyed with them. Because I knew it often meant staying an extra two hours for them. There were a bunch of minor effects like that. It added up to me being happier / better at interacting with India team members.

The student exchange program I went on middle school is now dead. Its an objectively bad way to spend money. Its basically subsidizing vacations for less well off PMC children that can figure out the hoops that need to be jumped through to participate. I think this American Exchange program might end up going the same way.

Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.

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cjet79 10d ago

I recently saw an item in my newfeed about The American Exchange Project:

To connect our divided country, the American Exchange Project sends high school seniors on a free, week-long trip to a hometown very different from their own.

There was some positive feedback in the news article I read. I found it a bit surprising just how much the rural/urban divide has grown. I've often lived between the two areas with my schools often having kids living in high density housing along with kids raising barn animals. My parents preferred living rurally, but still had to live close to cities to find jobs.

I've been on two exchange programs myself. One as a middle/high schooler going to Europe with Student Ambassadors (a now dead org). And the second as more of a work exchange trip going to the company's India office. There is something undeniably effective about just having very different people sit down and talk/interact with each other in a non-violent setting. Not that I really disliked either set of people before visiting them, but I felt I definitely understood them better afterwards. There are coincidences of living, and the things you see living in an area. They just sorta seep into your conscious. My young middle school self noticed that Europe generally did not give a crap about topless women. Tits galore on billboards and beaches in Spain. Europe was also pretty open with alcohol, and the 15 year old in the German family I stayed with openly told her parents about the drinking party she was going to. They had to remind her that I wasn't allowed to go, and American drinking ages had to be explained. Bunch of things I noticed in India as well, main one was just the sheer volume of people.

Had a shower thought today about how some people (like Joe Rogan) thought Covid would bring us closer together as we worked to solve and fight a collective problems. I think we maybe mostly agree that did not happen. I'm starting to think that covid was the opposite kind of problem we need. To get that kind of problem solving, humanity coming together juice, I think more people need to be offline, meeting in person, and ignoring things happening too far away from them.

~~Staring at the sun today.~~ Watching the eclipse today, reminded me about solar flares. I'd predict that a widespread solar flare that knocked out communication networks would probably leave us all a little happier than Covid. It would probably be very bad for some people, but we'd know less about those people.

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cjet79 10d ago

From the impression I've gotten from surgeons and doctors who know many surgeons, this doesn't surprise me. Surgeons have a bit of a reputation for being high class technically skilled butchers. They operate on flesh, but their treatment of it is closer to that of a car mechanic than most other doctors. I think they perhaps see it as a very easy case of tumor removal. @self_made_human may have more insight.

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cjet79 10d ago

3 day ban boo outgroup posting.

The mods have warned you multiple times lately:

If all you want to basically say is "these people are weird and they suck" say it somewhere else. Go spend the three days saying it on rDrama to get it out of your system. They are your friends not ours. This is not a space where we seek to emulate them in any way other than being off of reddit.

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Friday Fun Thread for April 5, 2024

cjet79 11d ago

I thought I'd pick comfort, but it's description in this completely sucks.

Their idea of comfort is to start at the top of the social heap, and to feel an obligation to do something with that position or at least do a lot to maintain it. How is that comfort? I'd describe that option as the "head start in life".

Some of the other options get freaking super powers. The power option actually sounded like a better option for achieving a life of comfort.

The life of comfort as id imagine it:

Live in Elysium a mostly post scarcity society that is in an orbital habitat. No one there needs anything. Whether that is medical attention, resources, etc. Your body will be maintained in near perfect health until you are 100 years old. At which point you will die peacefully in your sleep.

People on earth live in terrible conditions, you can do nothing for them except selflessly offer up your spot on Elysium.

There are five year age gaps between generations, so if you stick with mostly your generation you won't have to deal with the death of friends.

Basically just live out some fun social settings, drink and eat whatever you want for a hundred years. But ultimately you live a meaningless life of ease. That is comfort.

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cjet79 15d ago

Lol, that's cute.

Don't do this. Its a very annoying thing to do in a conversation.

You meant to say TAXONOMY not taxidermy.

Pretty sure I meant meant taxidermy. But the difference is trivial. They were a bunch of weird nerds that shared around stuffed animals. The taxidermy is what allowed Taxonomy to advance at the time. Its a lot easier to do taxonomy if you can look at a bunch of taxidermied specimens right next to each other. So the guy that advanced taxonomy did it via taxidermy. Seems accurate to say he did either thing.

And just so you know, Aristotle was a huge nerd and spent his free time studying and collecting mussels in the Mediterranean.

Imagine how much more he might have learned if he was surrounded by a leisure class aristocracy interested in "natural studies". Alas, not our timeline.

And yes, I'm only criticizing Darwin for his theory of Natural Selection.

I'll reiterate that I think this is strange because its one part of a larger text he wrote on the Origin of Species.

Creatures survive because they can reproduce and survive in the environments where they live.

And why is that? Well, because of Natural Selection of course! Now change Natural Selection for "God", and how does that change anything?

There is a difference in saying "because of [symbol without a defined meaning]" and saying "because of [symbol with concrete definition]". I think you are kind of equivocating between the two.

Sort of like the difference between a cop answering why they pulled someone over with "because they were driving 15mph over the speed limit" and "because they looked suspicious".

Natural selection adds more evidence to the "god didn't do it" pile.

Pretty sure this has gone in circles. I'll read any response you post to this specific comment, but I think I'm done with the conversation and won't respond here anymore.

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cjet79 17d ago

Popularizing / synthesizing was an important part of intellectual work back in the day. Just because other scholars knew about it, or had even written works on it doesn't mean it was widely accepted. I think if I remember correctly Darwin published earlier than he planned because he thought someone else would beat him to the punch. Carl Linnaeus' wikipedia mostly says he did taxidermy, I don't see anything about natural selection or evolution. The wikipedia on Aristotle says he believed in Teleology as an explanation for why there were different species. Its not clear to me that the greeks even knew of the problem, because they didn't have the aristocratic nerds out there collecting beetles, fossils, and weird taxidermied animals.

What was new, and I'm getting tired of repeating it, is the idea that nature was bound by XIXth century England's economic principles. Why are different species everywhere? I actually don't know, but I do know that Natural Selection explains nothing, because it only says that diverse species exist and copy-pasted species don't. But in fact both exist, and that also proves Natural Selection right. This is both obvious and useless, because it provides no new knowledge. The fact that you ignore history doesn't mean that what's obvious now wasn't obvious before. England's XIXth century ideas weren't obvious, and England's navy, without which Darwin wouldn't have been able to gather evidence from all around the world, was not useless either.

I mean I guess if you just want to focus on chapter 4 of his book, and ignore the other 13 chapters, then yeah its a shit theory at explaining how new species come about. But he wrote a book to explain the process of speciation, and Natural Selection is only part of that book.

The book barely contains any economics. Its mostly a dry description of a bunch of animals, interspersed with what is now middle school biology. Darwin was among (and was himself) nerdy beetle collectors and taxidermy enthusiasts. Not economists with an agenda. If they had wanted to do economics, they could have just done that instead. There were plenty of contemporaries debating economics at the time.

For the rest, when other people and I say that Natural Selection is an inherent trait of life, we mean to say that it is so only in possible universes. This is of course an arbitrary limitation because we don't actually know for sure what's ultimately possible and impossible, but such arbitrary limits are necessary to have any sort of meaningful conversation, since I can make up an universe where up means down and down means soup and nothing makes sense and you would understand nothing of what I'm saying. So of course you can make up an universe in your mind where Darwinism isn't tautological, but that doesn't prove anything.

You say that, but I don't think you realize how whacky some of the ideas people had about our planet were. Aristotle that you mentioned earlier was responding to a contemporary of his when he talked about different species. His contemporary thought animals just randomly formed out of fire and air, and the ones with good bodies just survived. While all the weird "monsters" died out.

Step 1 was figuring out if we were in the whacky god-controlled universe, or in a physics and rule based universe. And that was a live debate at the time that Darwin was writing his stuff. You are basically just writing off the whole importance of that debate at the time and giving the win to Darwin. And then you assign all the arguing in the actual debate to just being a proxy debate about something else. Its like a weird conspiracy theory mixed with alternate history.

And you know, you could take any biology book and change "Natural Selection" by "God" and nothing would change, the meaning of the text would remain the same. The difference being that Natural Selection is a tautology, while God is simply unknowable. Both explain nothing but one is more clever than the other.

You can't though. Quite a bit about the biology textbook changes. Creatures survive because god says so is significantly different than "creatures survive because they can reproduce and survive in the environments where they live". And the idea that creatures survive because god creates a specific role/niche for them to survive and coordinates the whole ecosystem like a great puppetmaker or watchmaker was specifically the idea that Darwin was arguing against. Others in the thread have pointed out multiple predictions made by "natural selection". I'm not gonna bother, Darwin won the debate over 150 years ago as far as I'm concerned. He and his cabbal of nerdy beetle collectors and dead animal stuffers.

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cjet79 17d ago

That kind of feels like saying Newton's discovery of gravity was useless because we already knew things fell to Earth.

You seem to vary between saying Natural selection is a useless thing to know, and blindingly obvious and thus says nothing.

I'd say its blindingly obvious NOW. But Darwin was answering a real question that people had in his time:

Why are there different species everywhere? Why isn't it just the same kind copied and pasted everywhere? That is why the book was called On The Origin of Species.

The idea of a branching tree of life was new. The idea that simple selection pressures for survival in the environment could eventually lead one species to become two was new. The idea that we might all be descended from one shared species was new.

And natural selection is the base answer to "why" of all species traits. If you've ever had a pedantic young kid repeatedly asking "why" then you know what I mean by a base answer.

Why do fish have fins?

So they can swim better.

Why do fish need to swim better?

So they can catch prey, or escape from predators.

Why do they want to escape from predators?

Because they want to live and not be eaten.

Why?

Because if they didn't want to live and be eaten they would have succumbed and they wouldn't be around.

I alluded to it earlier, but the previous "base" answer for all such questions was "god did it". And in other branches of science people chase those "theory of everything" type answers. Physics does not currently have such an answer. You can keep asking "why" in physics and eventually you wind up with "thats just how it is" which is the equivalent of "god did it".

I think you are confusing the "base" answer with a tautology.

I also disagree with some of the other posters and yourself in here that say Natural Selection is something that life would always have. You just aren't thinking outside the box enough. There is a literary genre called LITRPG where main characters are often sucked into video game universes. In those places life often doesnt follow natural selection. It is instead the whims of the gods or the system administrators that determine what creatures exist, and what traits those creatures have. The bible has a specific story (Noah's Ark) that suggests that all the creatures on Earth were picked by God/Noah and that is the only reason they are still around. That isn't natural selection, its god selection. And that is what many people believed.

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cjet79 17d ago

How would you alternatively define evolution and natural selection so that it has explanatory value?

I am perhaps confused on how it's a tautology in the first place.

The traits that species have they will tend to have because those traits are beneficial to their survival and reproduction. That is because survival and reproduction are filters on the possible types of living things that can exist. That seems to have explanatory value. Especially in comparison to the alternative explanation which was "God did it".

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