erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
28d ago
I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."
The problem with waiting until marriage is that Chad, who has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him, is not going to put up with that. And women only want Chad.
The only way this works if you have a third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being, such as her father or her brother, in control of her sexual choices.
erwgv3g34
28d ago
I don't care that it's not fantasy, I've always believed that Animorphs would be a hit if they played it completely straight as a R rated war story aimed at the YA/tumblr audience. Maybe age everyone up to college if the child soldier thing is too violent for TV.
r!Animorphs: The Reckoning already exists; you would just have to get the rights.
He made a big post about how The Motte was pointless because the time for debate was over and it was time for violence. Got a 3 day ban and never came back.
Shame; I really liked him. His Rhodesian catgirl bit was funny, and he made some genuinely good points. I still follow him on Twitter and Substack.
I got hit by the tail end of the new math. The way I was taught to do subtraction is definitely closer to Tom Lehrer's second method than the first; we would say that the two "borrowed" a one from the four, so the four got crossed out and replaced by a three while the two became twelve, and twelve minus three is nine.
I... like it? It makes a lot more sense than the first method. We didn't get taught that the four is actually four tens, since it's in the tens place, and that you are substracting ten from the forty and adding them to the two, but hearing him say it makes it obvious in retrospect that's why the algorithm works.
Tom Leher says "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer" like it's a joke, but I actually agree with that. As my calculus teacher said "your only advantage over the machine is your ability to think. Once you lose that, I prefer the machine. Calculators are faster and make no mistakes".
Anyway, we also did simple sets in elementary school. No non-decimal bases, though; I learned that on my own reading about computers, because binary and hexadecimal.
I'm so bad at memorization that I never learned the multiplication table by heart. If someone asks me what 7 x 8 is, my mental process goes: Okay, I have no idea what 7 x 8 is, but that's the same as 14 x 4 (multiply the 7 by 2 and divide the 8 by 2). Then I can just:
1
14 x
4
56
Which only takes me a few seconds, even in my head.
Likewise, I never memorized most of the trigonometric identities. Instead, I memorized cos x + isin x = e^ix and rederive them at need. When I took the ABCTE math exam, I even practiced using Feynman's notation to make this faster. And the only reason I know the common derivatives is because of this song.
The one math quiz I totally bombed in high school was when our teacher gave us a list of squares and cubes to memorize and then deliberately did not give us enough time to calculate them, to check if we had indeed memorized them.
erwgv3g34
29d ago
My oldest LessWrong comment is from 2010. Some people (or was it just one?) on the TV Tropes forum kept linking to The Sequences to make points during discussions. This was around the time when Scott Alexander rose to prominence as Yvain, with classics such as "Beware Trivial Inconveniences", "The Least Convenient Possible World", "A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies", and "Eight Short Studies On Excuses". I followed him when he closed his Live Journal in favor of opening Slate Star Codex, and the rest is history.
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