This is the usual facile reply to complaints about the ugly architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Uh, you complain about the ugliness of modern brutalist buildings, but actually modernism and brutalism are separate architectural movements, and the current-year trend of ugly concrete boxes and geometric turds is called something else.
You don't need to be versed in the jargon of an insular artfield to criticize its output, especially for architecture where this output is forced upon millions of unwilling victims to suffer daily.
fmaa
10mo ago
Many philosophers have identified religion has giving rise to science in the first place. Because at the most basic, fundamental level, believe in natural science assumes a priori that that reality is ordered and knowable, a proposition one must take on faith.
As with all sorts of similar solipsistic arguments, my response is this: either both me and you are actual minds existing in an external reality where induction works, or the very concept of communication is nonsense. So you can presume that every piece of communication ever starts with that assumption and go from there.
fmaa
11mo ago
Why a non-sequitur? Earlier parts of section IV show a higher steady state for asians than for whites, then they get dropped from the comparison. If they were included in this graph, it would either show that their advantage is also mostly male and asian women match white women, in which case maybe this graph says a lot more about gender than about race. Or the asian over white advantage is maintained for both genders, which would make for a much stronger anti-HBD argument. Because one of the more appealing HBD talking points imo is that by Occam's razor the black/white gap and the white/asian gap have the same basis.
fmaa
11mo ago
That's not "the same for Black girls as for the White population", it's the same for black women and white women, the white male curve is noticeably higher. And on a meta level, it's always suspicious when a paper drops categories midway through. Whatever conclusions you want to infer from this graph, they would be much firmer if it also had asians.
fmaa
11mo ago
Familiarity with the topic doesn't make it more relevant to your thesis. Dvorak is exactly as arbitrary and hard to learn as Qwerty. The relative efficiency of touch-typing english text matters when you're already doing 100+ wpm and type regularly as part of your job or something. Most people don't touch type, a different layout wouldn't help them any.
Of course, I don't think your thesis has any basis in reality anyway. The average person these days is quite proficient with phone onscreen keyboards, which are vastly worse interfaces than physical keyboards.
And, as with dictation, if you want to do your text input with eyetracking, you've been able to do that on existing computers for years. People keep using keyboards because they are in fact quite good at what they do.
fmaa
11mo ago
Hah, this is so hidebound and backward I can't tell if you're being serious. I could just as easily say "click at the wrong time, you just deleted an hours work!" Get real.
The difference is that in one case there's a bright line distinction between when you are and are not using the interface. Which becomes more pronounced in real world use vs tech demos. A gesture system that's comfortable when it's what you're focusing on can become much less so when you're casually using it and want to combine it with eating, drinking or just scratching your nose without accidentally triggering a gesture.
fmaa
11mo ago
Yes, this is actually incredibly useful. For instance even with a limited interface like Talon, I will map certain phrases or words I use frequently in my job to a keyboard shortcut, or a noise. This mapping means that I save probably ~5 minutes of work per day. Over time if we can map more of these things to even more minute/simple actions, we are looking at serious efficiency gains.
Not only is this something you can do right now on existing computers, it's much easier to do than with a noise/gesture system where the need for disambiguation makes custom definitions a much harder proposition.
Unless you're the sort of person who already has a bunch of autohotkey scripts for those tasks set up, you sure as hell aren't going to do that in a worse interface.
fmaa
11mo ago
First off, you're massively overstating the unnaturalness of the mouse. It's already fully proportional movement pointing, with the added advantages of not obstructing your view with your own hand and being able to rest your hand on a supporting surface instead of having to flail around.
Second, you can already dictate essays, most people don't do that because it's a pain in the ass compared to typing. Drawing is either highly technical detail work which massively benefits from the exact precision inputs of a mouse, or largely about muscle memory which is why artists already draw on high precision pressure sensitive tablets, benefiting from practice in drawing on paper. You're proposing they remove the tablets for no real benefit.
Third, music editing, like programming, if fundamentally a fiddly task requiring talent, practice and an understanding of the field. Both already have a billion different approaches available, someone will probably hack something together for this and someone else will have it as their favorite editor. But on the margin it will turn out that no, in fact there wasn't a massive pool people who are naturals at programming or editing except for the pesky detail of having to learn one of the billion existing options.
fmaa
1yr ago
Not only is is such a calculation possible, it is unavoidable. Most moral goods have a material cost, and basically no human picks the maximally moral side of that tradeoff. Though it is the relative, not absolute cost that matters for people, which is why the world is getting so much better. The marginal cost of saving a human life anywhere on Earth is about 5k these days, which is orders of magnitude higher than when people starting tracking things like this, as modern abundance has allowed people to actually work at saving lives on a massive scale, picking all the low-hanging fruit.
And in general your framing of the examples is exactly backwards. Increased wealth is what allows for the luxury of moral good. For example, evidently the cost of abolishing slavery (including serfdom) is too big for a pre-industrial society.
fmaa
1yr ago
Not who you asked, but the sails are good as a skyline piece while the bottom layers of the SOH are a boring block of concrete, so the whole thing looks better from a distance than up close. And looking at the works of Hadid, she reasonably exemplifies the trend of inhuman boxes and blobs of weird shapes which look interesting for 5 seconds but seem in no way to be awe-inspiring, pleasant to be around or part of a beautiful skyline.
Really, this is the essence of the issue for me - a lot of Architecture from the previous century feels designed to impress people looking at it for 5s-5min. Wow, what an unusual design. But buildings are going to be the home or workplace of many people, and part of many more people's daily commute or view. I'd pick any place from the front page of that subreddit over any of Hadid's buildings for this.
fmaa
1yr ago
The last argument is one for corporal punishment over prisons, not for mob justice.
And the big issue with mob justice isn't that thieves get beaten up, it's that sometimes the person getting beat up didn't actually do anything except be an outsider and look funny. Or more generally, that the less formal the mechanisms of justice, the more they become about social standing. India does keep popping up in international news about various gangrapes and coverups thereof because the rapists are friendly with/members of the police, which is enabled by the same mechanisms that enable your beatings.
fmaa
1yr ago
They would laugh at him for getting caught, and not taking the punishment stoically enough, and then go right back to being his friends and bullying the previous victim/the snitch. Friends laughing at each other does not make them lower status amongst themselves.
fmaa
1yr ago
I think changing the setting has to be the start. That some teens are abusive dicks is one thing. That you (and I) felt obligated to go back everyday to the place where you are regularly abused, to sit in forced confinement with people you hate, is insane.
fmaa
1yr ago
This is a terrible solution. A punishment can't really be embarrassing unless the one doing the punishing is higher status, and I don't think bullies generally respect teachers. A teacher spanking a bully wouldn't lead to him being bullied by his former friends, it would lead to him and his friends beating up the previous victim for snitching to outsider authority.
fmaa
1yr ago
https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths Proportionally less than in any previous century from violence. Or in early childhood, thanks to modern medicine. Or from starvation, thanks to industrial fertilizers. As for happiness, Ted might have had a better point if he went for the invention of agriculture. But pre-industrial agricultural society meant that the vast majority of humanity were subsistence farmers subject to frequent violence.
fmaa
1yr ago
The linked essay is so extremely shoddy that I'm not sure who you imagine would be swayed by it, at least in your direction. And the last paragraph just reminds me of Asimov's relativity of wrong.
fmaa
1yr ago
LED lights should still go in the 'against' column, as their significant advantages could have easily lead to adoption even without regulation. And unlike your positive examples, the primary cost of incandescents wasn't external.
fmaa
1yr ago
Yes, psychedelics are consistent with the soul-radio model. Dissociatives and deliriants seem a lot more like the sort of brain damage that's evidence against it. The different consciousness part was mostly a joke.
I was going off what I remembered of Scott's review. Rereading it now, my memory of it was wrong, but it seems not very relevant to this conversation. Quoting the review,
I think he is unaware of (or avoiding) what we would call “the hard problem of consciousness”, and focusing on consciousness entirely as a sort of “global workspace” where many parts of the mind come together and have access to one another. In his theory, that didn’t happen – the mental processing happened and announced itself to the human listener as a divine voice, without the human being aware of the intermediate steps. I can see how “consciousness” is one possible term for this area, if you didn’t mind confusing a lot of people. But seriously, just say “theory of mind”.
But this thread is entirely about the hard problem.
fmaa
1yr ago
If messing around with the radio makes it output an entirely different program, one would suspect that it was actually generating, not receiving a signal. (Or changed which signal it receives. Brain damage tunes your body to a different soul/consciousness is an option.)
As far the popular view of consciousness as mostly providing a narrative/excuses for subconscious processes (of which Jaynes' feels like a variation, where the narrative historically wasn't conceptualized as "I" and didn't have to have a single narrator), I feel like that would only more strongly suggest that it is inherently embodied.
fmaa
1yr ago
The strongest evidence is probably the way in which various forms of brain damage change aspects of personality, in a manner that would be very odd under a soul-radio model of the brain.
Evidence that it happens in the brain doesn't really make it much less mysterious though.
fmaa
1yr ago
I think the atheist/agnostic distinction (outside of models where an explicitly unknowable god has meaning) is special pleading. Denying the existence of god, unicorns, Santa, Russel's teapot and Sagan's dragon are all in the same category of statement. But only one of them is so frequently met with "well, technically, you're only saying they probably don't exist".
fmaa
1yr ago
With community servers, there were plenty of cheating horror stories of a different kind - people excusing/turning a blind eye to the cheating of a popular member of the community, or people turning to cheats to keep up when they care more about the community than the game.
Though I guess they were still rare enough to be stories, instead of business of usual.
fmaa
1yr ago
I'd like to be able to say, for instance "computer, match me with someone who is a about equal to my my baseline skill level," or "computer, match me with someone who will push me to my limits" or "computer, I don't really care who I match with today."
This can achieved by having multiple accounts and switching based on your level of intensity. It is often frowned upon because it can be easily abused, of course. The computer can't really tell whether you're honest or just asking for the first one but actually planning to go all out and stomp people worse than you.
I'm aware of the difference. Part of my point was that naming a specific artstyle "modern" and then sneering when people use that word to mean contemporary is just being a condescending asshole and bad at communicating.
The other, bigger part was that no, you don't need to know the jargon to complain about things being forced on you. I'm not going to find lists of NYC buildings, but I think like 90% of that Pritzker prize list is ugly and about half of it is concrete boxes. It really doesn't matter to anyone living in/near them if these particular ugly concrete boxes don't count as brutalist according to architects.
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