erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
6hr ago
I also struggle with insomnia. I basically have two strategies:
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Watch porn/play eroges/read h-manga/jailbreak LLMs.
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Stop trying. If you can't go to sleep, you can't go to sleep. Take a shower and do something else, whether productive (e.g. cleaning your room) or not (e.g. playing video games). Try again in a few hours. You are human; you will fall asleep at some point, even if it means going a day or two without. My usual pattern is that I sleep less than I should during the workweek, then sleep a whole day on the weekend to recover.
And, of course, don't neglect the basics; white noise machine, black sleep mask, cold temperature (72F or lower), turn off your phone, etc.
erwgv3g34
17hr ago
Forget the figurative meaning; they just need to know the mythological monster.
erwgv3g34
18hr ago
I agree with your description on the object-level, but your labeling sucks. At the point at which you are calling feminism "conservativism" you are not communicating clearly.
erwgv3g34
18hr ago
Tumblr is gone, but @Capital_Room is still here.
erwgv3g34
20hr ago
It reminds me about an old SSC post about the politics of his readership. It was mostly Bay Area bugman leftists for the obvious reasons, but among the right-wing minority there were a lot of (self-identified) libertarians, enough neoreactionaries to be worth making them a line item in the report, a significant number of people who wrote screeds about their unique political views in the free-text box, and precisely zero mainstream red tribe conservatives.
That would be "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup":
But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre local sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
erwgv3g34
20hr ago
The Argentine peso is not the world's primary reserve currency; the US dollar is. I wouldn't dare to try this for fear of causing another great depression.
The Soviet Union lasted 70 years. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The marketplace of ideas can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive.
What is the CRA?
The Civil Rights Act of 1964. See "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law" by Richard Hanania and "Your Book Review: The Age of Entitlement" for more information.
Some of those witnesses later tried to backtrack. From "Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?" by Scott Alexander:
A number of the Mormon witnesses sort of change their stories in weird ways. One, Martin Harris, supposedly admitted later he saw the plate not with his earthly eyes but with his "eyes of faith", and a neighbor said he "never claimed to have seen the plates with his natural eyes, only spiritual vision". Then Harris totally denied ever saying this and said they were definitely literally real in every possible way. Another witness is supposedly on the record as saying the angel had "no form or shape" and was more of a "vague impression", although again he's also on the much more official record as totally denying this and saying it was all definitely really real.
Yes, the good old Warm Fuzzies theory of the Resurrection: the disciples were soooo sad after their nice friend got executed by the Romans that they were really, really sad. So sad they could only sit around and think about him and how great he was when he told them secret mystic truths like "Be nice!" and "Share your stuff!"
And they sat and they sat, and they thought and they thought, and they remembered him sooooo hard that they felt like he wasn't really dead after all! And then they realised that as long as they felt like he was still with them, then... then... why then, he was with them! Always and forever! And this made them feel so, so happy after they had been so, so sad!
So they went around to tell other people about this and how if you thought really hard about their nice friend Jesus and learned from them the stories about him, why, he could be your friend too! Everybody could be friends!
I mean, the Gospels are actually really weird about this? In both John and Luke, the disciples start out talking to a random stranger, and only later "realize" that it is actually Jesus. Mark originally ended with the empty tomb. This honestly sounds like something people could have made up after the fact, not unlike those who think that a dead relative came to say goodbye to them.
As Scott Alexander points out in "Mormonism: The Control Group For Christianity?", there is less eyewitness testimony for the resurrection of Jesus Christ than there is for the golden plates of Joseph Smith, so from an epistemic perspective it is pretty odd to believe in the first but not the second.
But that's only silly old Paul and we don't listen to silly old Paul.
Why would you listen to a grifter who showed up afterwards to hijack the movement and never even met Jesus?
His son fell for the trans meme; it's fucking personal for him.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
ESL stands for English as a Second Language. The grandparent is talking about how the internet is increasingly composed of non-native English speakers.
Related, Isiah said that the Messiah would be born to a young woman. This was mistranslated in the Greek version of the Old Testament to virgin, hence Mary, who was obviously not a virgin (she had a husband and many children) becomes the Virgin Mary.
I've always found it interesting how people reconcile the fact that the Bible talks about Jesus's brothers with Mary's virginity. Normies don't even seem to notice, because normies don't read, and nobody brings it to their attention (when was the last time a preacher or movie mentioned that Jesus had siblings?) but of course Church intellectuals noticed, and had their own rationalizations.
The Catholic view is that the word "adelphoi" can mean either brother or cousin, and those mentioned are actually Jesus's cousins. The Orthodox view is that Joseph was a widower who had children from his previous marriage, so Jesus's brothers were actually his stepbrothers. And the Protestant view is that Mary was only a virgin until Jesus's birth; after that, she laid with her husband the way any other wife does, and Jesus's brothers were thereby conceived.
Jesus' brother James was the leader of the Jewish Christians, basically Jews who thought Jesus was the messiah but still wanted to keep Mosaic law and worship at the temple. James was killed and his Jewish Christianity was outcompeted by Pauline Christianity which was open to gentiles (although Paul, aka Saul, was also a Jew).
It is fascinating that there was a completely separate tradition of Jewish Christianity, headed by Jesus's own brother and which almost certainly hewed much closer to Jesus's original message, which died out early on. Modern Christianity is based on the teachings of Paul, who never met Jesus. It's probably for the best; Jesus, being an apocalyptic preacher, did not feel the need to create a Gnon-compliant religion that could last two thousand years, but Paul did.
Classic short stories in general are a great SF introduction.
Good idea. There is some pretty good collections out there; The Hugo Winners, The New Hugo Winners, The Super Hugos, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two, and The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke would all make excellent reading.
It is said that "the golden age of science fiction is twelve", but if the kid is precocious ten might be just fine.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
I will never forget when doctors signed a letter saying that it was OK for BLM to protest during the lockdowns because racism is a public health problem.
This is going to be a bit of a weird take, but have you considered fanfiction? Some of the best sci-fi I have ever read has been fanfic: Friendship is Optimal/Caelum Est Conterrens, Changeling Space Program/The Maretian, Message in a Bottle, Luna is a Harsh Mistress, The Moon's Apprentice, Stardust, To the Stars, r!Animorphs: The Reckoning, etc. Fanfiction is usually much easier to read than original fiction, because you already know the characters, so it could be ideal for building reading stamina.
Alternatively, you may want to take the advice of Eliezer Yudkowsky. From "Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life":
Reading science fiction is one of only three "software" methods I know of for increasing intelligence. (The others being (A) learning to program a computer; and (B) studying high-level cognitive science such as AI and evolutionary psychology). Like all methods of intelligence enhancement, this is more effective in childhood, so introduce your kids, too. You should start by reading early Niven and Pournelle, or David Brin (their recent stuff isn't as good); work your way up to Ed Regis and David Zindell; finally, read Vernor Vinge and Greg Egan.
See also his "Bookshelf" and OKCupid for more specific book recommendations. And while you are at it, Scott Alexander's fiction recommendations, too.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
The American system is unfortunately designed so that the only way I can meaningfully express my displeasure is to hold my nose and vote for the opposition party.
Untrue. You could always vote Libertarian. If anything, that sends a stronger signal, because the Democrats are not exactly known for refraining from foreign adventurism. Bombing random Middle Eastern countries is, sadly, a bipartisan consensus.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
Same. Every blogger has figured out that the way to make money is to put all their most interesting articles behind a paywall. And the new meta is that all articles are behind a loginwall, so you have to subscribe for free to read anything. And Astral Codex Ten is unreadable because the comments take so much compute to render that it makes Crysis look like Pong. And...
Substack ruined the blogosphere.
You don't negotiate during the emergency. You negotiate afterwards when they send you the bill. Don't mention your assets, downplay your income as much as possible, threaten to go to bankruptcy, and see what they will let you get away with.
Admittedly, I'm working class rather than middle class, but it worked out pretty well for me. I got hit with a $40,000 bill for a hospital stay and I was like "lol, lmao even". It took months of negotiations and applying for financial aid, but I got it down to $600.
Mother of Learning is a prominent webnovel which is particularly popular in rationalist circles (currently the top voted post on /r/rational, beating out Worth the Candle). It's about a young wizard, Zorian, who gets trapped in a one-month time loop after his academy is attacked by mysterious invaders. He must now use the loop to grow stronger and investigate leads until he can find a way to escape the loop and stop the invasion. You can read a longer review from ACX's contest.
Personally, I am firmly of the opinion that Mother of Learning is an inferior version of Time Braid, but others disagree.
I randomly got banned a month ago after 13 years. I literally have no idea what happened; one minute I was posting fine, the next I was gone. Took me a day until I figured out why all my comments were at 0 instead of 1 (Reddit doesn't even tell you you are banned; you have to look at your account from an incognito tab). And every single post I have ever made got deleted; guess that explained all the [removed] comments I kept seeing.
I'm not gonna bother making an account again, specially since the requirements have gotten much stricter over the last decade (e-mail, etc.). Fuck that site. It's a good thing we left when we did.
Cruz said "...the Iran war has dragged on too long. It should have been brief, decisive, and over. It needs to end..."
He didn't say "the Iran war should never have happened in the first place".
He is still cucking for Israel.
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