gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't know if this is report-worthy, but I'm gonna strongly request that people not repost (or write original) real-person porn fanfic here, even if intended as parody.
I'm gonna start by pointing out that Anton Chigurgh and his "if the rule that you live brought you to this" is not the hero of the story.
This is where the argument is weakest and where Greene, perhaps intentionally, glosses over providing details of what he is really advocating for.
Hell, there's problems even if we carefully ignore the actual racial crux he's trying to get everyone to focus on to hide from the rest of his issues.
The absolutely (and unrealistically) most charitable version of Greene's proposed solution is something like the Richmond Fed proposal from Four Replies to Unnecessariat, with all the problems and faults only magnified by real or perceived "hunger games gonna happen isn't it" happening to minorities progressives care about. We don't have a way to actually encourage this sort of clear separation between super-IQ-people and us simple peasants that's compatible with even a sick parody of free association, hilariously aggressive (if supposedly unintentional hah) efforts to use price discrimination, and there's just a big shrug when considering how all those non-big-brain areas are supposed to handle their administrative and practical requirements. There's no clear political doctrine for, or serious economic understanding around, how the simple peasants are supposed to live and work.
There's a reason there's so much overlap with what the Richmond Fed suggested and what PoiThePoi complained about: extent motions toward this as a policy have been absolutely destructive to both the winners and losers.
I mean, there's a bunch of other disagreements -- I absolutely think that there's a whole lot of ruin that needs to be undone in education, and that a lot of the strongest claims of HBD proponents get squishy when pulled to areas outside of academia and high-frequency trading, and a thousand other race-specific disagreements with the dissident right. But they're ultimately cover for the real reason to kill the Buddha, here, and that's where the Shangri-La Greene et all advocate isn't happening.
YouGov -- which I'll admit I trust slightly less far than I can throw the entire Amazon center they run out of -- did a survey on October 9th holding that only half of the populace knew Hamas intentionally struck civilian centers, and only 32% of 18-29-year-olds did. Even adjusting for these numbers being garbage, they run into the problem where a shocking number of people throughout academia will try to make the same argument explicitly, despite video fucking evidence transmitted by the terrorists.
DeBoer sucking at 'Palestinian' apologia is about as much a surprise.
That tells you all you need to know.
gattsuru
1yr ago
This whole thread could be charitably just called wrong, but it's just kinda a mess of Chinese Cardiology, bad grammar, and pretty bad understandings.
It's not like there aren't problems in the furry fandom! But it's pretty much just word association, at that level.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't think the position is right -- a lot of people care about fertility enough to torpedo in cis-cis relationships, a lot of people make romantic decisions on statistic matters as much as empirical reality, and there are 'non-physical' concerns that matter -- but :
The main objection here is that there are in fact zero transwomen who are indistinguishable from women with a womb.
I don't think this is right, either, or at least not arguing the same thing from their perspective as from yours.
Now, admittedly, I'm a bi furry, so my scales are probably not anywhere near the typical. And there's some blurry lines between "can easily be detected" and "indistinguishable". And the links from the actuallesbians post you're quoting is more highlighting trans woman the poster thought hot, more than thought especially undetectably trans. But I think there's a couple meaningful underlying threads that aren't in the obvious read:
-
The exact definition of 'indistinguishable' is not a bright line. There's probably some activist who'd make arguments about a XX transwoman, but even if such a person actually identified as trans rather than intersexed or something anyway, the more meaningful bit is that most people don't do random karotype checks of potential dating partners to avoid the one-in-fifty-thousand complete androgen insensitivity case.
-
There's a tendency to compare the most visible trans women to a platonic ideal of feminine beauty (and, to a lesser extent, trans men to masculine stereotypes). Even outside of the direct problem where out people are out by definition, and that a lot of the most visible trans women are not exactly central examples for a variety of reasons, a lot of actual women are pretty butch! This doesn't even have to be a Weird Gender Thing; 'she's just tall' or 'she's just butch' predates a lot of modern trans discourse. But there's a perception of all trans woman as 6-ft tall Adam's Apple-and-five-o'clock-shadowed pink dress wearers that's not really a good model.
-
The actual sex stuff isn't great, but it's also come a long way, in ways that aren't well-understood from outside. That's even truer in the lesbian field, where some of the limitations (not getting as wet, needing a lot of exercise to take a moderate-sized dick) are likely to be important. Even for trans guys, there's still a long way to go, but something like reelmagik (cw: if you google this, you will get pages of silicone dicks) aren't going to get the full feel of heat or the splatter, for obvious reasons, but they've got options that either wouldn't stand out or would only stand out in good ways in a crowded locker room.
-
(And, conversely, a lot of people who object to relationships with trans folk won't be pacified were we talking something like magical cloned replacement organs; cfe the discussion in the rest of this thread.)
I don't think I'm sanewashing the position. From original context:
So there's at least some recognition that there's going to be practical differences.
That's not to condone the model, or to say that it's complete, but more that a lot of the disagreement is over definitions rather than point deer make horse problems.
gattsuru
18d ago
I'm going to say that a female child raised as female knows she's a girl. A female child raised as female declaring she is really a boy? I'm waiting to see on that one.
There's not exactly a shortage of trans men who can point to an upbringing and environment that required and enforced pretty strict gender norms for behavior. To the level of 'not allowed to wear pants' sorta thing.
gattsuru
9mo ago
This argument seems like begging the question. We allow some classes of minors to do tons of things without reflecting on attitudes re sex: a fifteen year old can consent to a colonoscopy (sometimes requiring guardian sign off), without the law or morality throwing away any concerns about sexual abuse with physical parallels.
One observation he makes that I hadn't seen in other reporting on campus protests, is that college admissions select for people who are "really good at looking really good," which includes strategic political posturing.
This seems woefully optimistic to me, not least in the assumption that people would abandon these positions were they made less than maximally appealing. There's no small amount of the people leading this charge who headily predate modern college admissions being driven by "looking really good" -- up to and including professors and administrators.
I think the more plausible argument why this has gone so hard so fast is that the conventions against doing so were proven wrong. Until the mid-00s, there was an argument -- a credible and serious argument -- that the Progressive movement had to win by persuading people, not just as a matter of principle but principle and pragmatics. That one defeats one's enemies by making them your friends. But by 2012 making Bad People Afraid worked, by 2014 and the aftermath of the ACA, it had already become respectability politics; by 2015, the answer was yes, you could get everything you wanted by stigmatizing and shunning and silencing those opposed to you hard enough, and some turgid prose on top, too. All the people worried about pushback or the pendulum shifting or whatever metaphor you want were wrong, and I say that as someone who plead at length with exactly that argument in the belief my neck was on the line.
It's a genuinely harsh paradox, and harsher still for those of us who haven't let the New Respectability hollow us out like skin suits, but it doesn't stop existing just because you ignore it.
I'm curious what the PR and legal discussions leading to this "ban" were, and what may result from it.
Search term you're looking for is the Leonard Law, passed in 1992. Not sure by how much; the California legis lookup only goes to 1992. Stanford did try the our ban is our free speech thing, but courts rejected it. The 2007 Amendment was passed with pretty clear margins, though Yee (better known for his other work) being involved doesn't encourage.
gattsuru
5mo ago
... your defense, when someone points out that the first and only number you provided in this context is wildly inappropriate as a value, is to point to a higher count, which is over three weeks old, and which is no more clearly a complete total.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, I'd second this. Microsoft has weird partial outages for the sole legal download source for the entire .NET ecosystem for three days, and a half-dozen twitterites and their own github was the only place to care.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The virtuous man doesn't need to force himself to do the right thing, he does so out of habit.
"What is better? To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?"
(a video game dragon lol)
gattsuru
2mo ago
I'm hopeful, but there's a risk that Roberts may not be choosing from the full possibility space, but from a small number of best alternatives to negotiated agreement. And a lot of those leave states (and worse!) to just decide to not let a candidate on the ballot (and worse!).
gattsuru
5mo ago
The Haaretz list includes literally zero infants (or children under the age of 4). It includes one child of four years old, two five-year-olds, two six-year-olds, an eight-year-old, one 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, four 12-year-olds, two 13-year-olds, two 14-year-olds, three 15-year-olds, three 16-year-olds, and four 17-year-olds.
There is a filter between civilian, police, soldier, and rescue services. There's a few people listed as civilians with a military rank (one Captain, three Master Sgt., a Cpl., two Sergeant Maj.), and one person marked without a rank but as a Lone Soldier (IDF member without family in the area). Looking through external sources, some of these look to be retired or off-duty, but I can't tell for the remainder.
Of the 1131 names (as of 11/5), 400 have no age listed. Most of those are probably not young children. Most.
There's some possible discussion to be had with someone who wants to engage seriously with the matter, and some deeper analysis available. I just don't see the point doing so with someone that's not taking photographic evidence.
Is your argument that the half of names and ages cleared for publication are not representative of half of the sample? Why not specify that, and importantly, why do you believe that?
I think there are actually a pretty sizable number of reasons to suspect that dead children will be identified slower (they won't be in many photo databases, are less likely to have parents or siblings in other cities, may not be fully set up within any database given Kibbitz politics, and in extreme cases bones are easier to damage and dental records are less useful or present), and once identified that they are less likely to have their names released (there are broad norms not just in Israel against sharing the identities of deceased minors without parental permission, in many).
Meanwhile, there are absolutely zero under-3-year-olds (and only one 4-year-old), while there is photographic evidence that I am decidedly not going to link to of multiple dead <1-year-olds.
There are more complex and esoteric issues, but these are the ones that should have been pretty obvious to anyone looking at the data with even a passing familiarity with the situation. Meanwhile, groups such as the lqgist twitter account you link don't bother even to spell out that half of the dataset is missing entirely or missing names.
The higher count is a (surprise) twice the value of the half amount I specified, and it’s three weeks old because the original Hamas incursion was four weeks old.
Someone with any degree of insight might ponder if it would be the slightest bit strange for that number to not have gone up across three weeks, even as the count of casualties on Oct 7 nearly doubled. Might think just the slightest about if there's something of relevance there
Then my figure (which is based in evidence) did turn out inaccurate, and that will be important to note in the future. Do you think that impacts my point being made? It would be 26x more children, rather than 66x, and the point I am getting across would stand.
And there's the punchline.
That is why I'm not going into any more serious analysis of the casualty counts, or comparing to other sources than haaretz. You don't care, and now you've said you don't care. The argument is nothing more than a soldier.
There are discussions I could present on the broader topic you want to make your point -- how much should we trust Gazan casualty counts? What responsibility does Israel have for insufficiently vetting strikes to minimize civilian harm, and Hamas for collocating military caches with civilian infrastructure or refuges? How many, if any, casualties can or should we accept for a valid military objective, and where and who does 'valid' military objectives come from? Where is the breakdown for civilian combatant casualties, and where does the line between combatant self-defense, police or pseudo-military, and terrorism fall? (How do you measure non-combat civilian casualties, which Israel has probably caused more of?)
But there's not really much point if you're not engaging with the most wildly concrete components with any degree of even-handed analysis. And you, specifically, have been following this long enough and in enough detail that I know a lot of the reasons you should be skeptical aren't a surprise.
gattsuru
8mo ago
Your cite is from this discussion, discussing philosophy during 1983 by doctors, written in 1996 from interviews in 1992-1995. The same piece also describes out, from the exact same time period (though a different doctor):
Moss: I drew that line with a thick felt tip, and I thought: My house is inside the line. So what's going to happen? Are they going to put barbed wire around this line? Are they going to have a cordon sanitaire? See, at this point, we didn't know how infectious the disease was. And one thing that starts happening in 1983 is major infectious disease paranoia: Are we all going to get it? Is everybody going to get it?
Now, if it was as infectious as hepatitis B, then 5 to 10 percent of the medical staff would have died of AIDS, because that's the infection rate of hepatitis B. We didn't know it was only transmitted sexually and by blood. It could have been multiply transmitted. Everybody could have gotten it. For all we knew, the entire population of San Francisco could have been infected, or could have been threatened.
Now, if that had been true, then they would have put that fence around the Castro. They would have razed a six-block area around it, and left the gays inside it.
Hughes: In the late twentieth century, they would have done that?
Do you know about Ebola virus and Marburg virus? There are viruses that kill everybody. Now, suppose it [the infectious agent] is airborne, and you can get it by walking through the Castro. Now, how do you think people would have taken that?
Hughes: Well, there was a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Oleske on the casual household transmission of AIDS, which apparently caused a real ruckus.
Moss: Well, there were many ruckuses. There's a two-year period in 1983 and '84 when nobody knows what's happening, and the concern level has risen very high. And that's when this fear of stigmatization is going on. It makes everybody very paranoid indeed, because who knows who's getting it, and who knows what the political consequence will be? What if it really is like pneumatic plague, where you breathe on people and they get it? Or TB [tuberculosis]? We didn't know whether that was the case. Nobody knew that. And it was a reasonable speculation that it could be at least as infectious as hepatitis B, and that would have been really bad.
So paranoia was very high, and I'm drawing this line [around the Castro], and I'm having paranoid fantasies about what might happen as a result of this line. Pat Norman had the same reaction. She gets scapegoated for this, but lots of people were having the same reaction: Wait a minute. I don't want to hear this. I'm just going to quietly leave town now, before you publish it.
The interview references Oleske, but another certain famous asshole had outsized influence.
gattsuru
10mo ago
To be fair, there's been a number of "but they really did <insert minor sin here>", usually related to drugs, alcohol, or fleeing from the police. There were some conservatives and even social conservatives that handled the Arbery shooting with grace or at least recognizing uncertainty, but at the very least there were some pretty dedicated bad trolls pretending to be socons.
I'm skeptical that this particular case has the necessary ambiguity or secondary valence to this those points, though.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a lot of people going "look at all these people proven wrong by not holding off conclusions" who aren't... holding off conclusions
Yeah, seconding this. Finding that the initial story is wrong or missing information doesn't necessarily make the second shallow story complete.
One might quickly imagine why such a shooter might announce they-them profiles to be written in official documents.
The shooter doesn't appear to be filing pro se, so at the very least they managed to talk a lawyer into risking sanctions for it. Which still isn't that high a bar.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'll join the crowd picking at whether AR-15s as a class are status symbols or even largely purchased as status symbols. Individual sellers can be expensive or extremely expensive, but for the most part they're a fairly standard and fairly accessible centerfire rifle. Of course, when you see someone with a high-end reflex site and no cleaning kit, then 'status symbol' is one of the more charitable options.
((And a lot of this stuff is at least partly about deniable and even self-deniable 'stores of value'.))
Blue Tribe... depends a bit on the subculture. Honestly, more than the political alignment. I think Blue Tribers are a lot more likely than Red Tribers to focus on custom plastic or cloth trinkets, where Red Tribers might be more likely to spend on custom woodworking and large metalworking art, but to the extent that's even true, it's only true statistically and it's easy to come up with fairly simple outside causes.
gattsuru
6mo ago
My claim is less that housing prices have been the Single Best Return On Investment, and more that they're just very consistently rising.
Separately, I don't think the St Louis Fed's residential property price index is really an apples-to-apples comparison to stock investments or what I'm motioning around, but their documentation on what data means exactly is pretty painful. This measure is probably closer, but because it's an average of sale values rather than of all values some of the drop in 2008 is probably about decreasing velocity at the top of the market, and it does hide some of the inflation-related 'real' value drops.
Zoophilia is not that common a paraphilia, practicing zoophilia even less, removed from contexts like degradation or zoosadism yet rarer still, and female non-degradation-focused zoophiles even more uncommon.
((I don't recommend using Bad Dragon as a metric, since regardless of Varka's issues the median Bad Dragon sale or advertisement revolves around the fantasy of a sapient and often bipedal partner, but a) the median customer has or had a dick, and b) an overwhelmingly male ratio applies to self-reports among actual-bestialists, too.))
It's just more visible, in the sense that someone getting arrested and/or publicly shamed for animal abuse (whether in any remotely less-violent way, or as the degradation or animal-sadism sense that very few incels would want) shows up in the news for incels to talk about, where "woman with kink for ugly/submissive/pathetic men" doesn't in any visible or identifiable way. But the later is more common than you'd think; if more generally spaced among written fiction than visual pornography.
And, of course, the broader "average-looking beta provider" is far better off, even before considering all of the ethical and pragmatic problems with actual animal abuse.
((Peter Singer's impact on the Wider EA Community isn't the worst thing that hit the tumblr ratsphere, but that I know this stuff is definitely not a benefit.))
gattsuru
9mo ago
But I think it is also responsible partly for degree of dissatisfaction. How many people in a social context where transition wasn’t an option, would have been happier not transitioning than people not transitioning in a social context where it is an option?
It's hard to long for the solely-imagined, but there were a lot of people longing for the solely-imagined into the mid-90s and early-00s, and I only start there because that's where I first ran into it. That's actually driven a lot of art and transhumanist trans stuff, because magical or magic-science explanations for gender swapping predate Ranma 1/2 or Heinlein by decades. And while having it only be the realm of magic makes it more unreachable, it also hides a lot of the costs and tradeoffs: Ranma 1/2 fans could envision transition where the only serious ramifications were some social impacts, your rival hitting on you, and maybe some lost muscle strength, without questions like what surgical or even hormonal intervention might involve.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't think that's a norm that we established very widely. There's individual jobs you can lose for an individual thefts on this scale (or even more severe crimes like DUIs), but they're things like 'police chief'. I expect that's why you're moving to the psychological profile, but in addition to the limitations and risks of remote psychological diagnosis, the above poster's specific question was "First, should he be fired for stealing?"
((That said, I also think the position is a benchwarmer's benchwarmer's job; anyone following nuclear science knows nothing's going to actually happen when it comes to nuclear waste policy. So I may be evaluating it differently.))
gattsuru
2mo ago
I don't care about TTV, and I don't care about their evidence. I saw what happened in Atlanta, in Philadelphia, in Detroit.
I don't think this is coherent. If you believe or especially if you have evidence of X, you should be absolutely frothing at the mouth if a bunch of people yelling loudly about not!X are soaking up a ton of money and attention and trust for grifting to coopt your beliefs. That looks different than Meskhout's position, but it's not ambivalence, either.
Against A Purely HyperDunbarist View
World’s for FIRST is in a week.
For those unfamiliar with the organization,
For Increasingly Retrobuilt Silly TermFor Inspiration in Science and Technology runs a series of competitions for youth robotics, starting from a scattering of Lego Mindstorm-based FLL competitions for elementary and middle schoolers, to the mid-range 20-40 pound robots of FTC that play in alliances of 2v2 across a ping-pong-table-sized space, and for high schoolers FRC running 120-pound robots in 3v3 alliances around the space of a basketball court. Worlds will have thousands of teams, spread across multiple subcompetitions. (For a short time pre-pandemic, there were two Worlds, with all the confusion that entailed.)If you’re interested, a lot of Worlds competition will streamed. And a lot of both off-season and next-season competitions and teams are always looking for volunteers.
The organization’s goal... well, let’s quote the mission statement:
There’s a bunch of the more normal culture war problems to point around. How goes the replacement of the prestigious Chairman’s Award with
IgniteImpact? If not, complain at least that it’s a missed opportunity on the level of POCI/POCI for replacing a bad naming with a worse one? How do you end up with events playing the PRC’s theme song before the US national anthem?There's even internal culture war stuff, which may not make a ton of sense to outsiders. Does the move away from commercial automotive motors to built-to-FIRST and especially-brushless motors privilege teams with more cash, or compromise safety or fair play? Should regional competitions, which may be the only official field plays small teams get, also accept international competitors? Should mentors white glove themselves, should they only do so during official competition events, or should the possibility of the Mentor Coach be abolished?
But the biggest question in my mind is how we got here.
Worlds competition is an outstanding and massive event, with an estimated 50k-person attendance at a ten-million-plus square foot convention center. And it’s a bit of a football game: there’s a lot of cheering and applause, and a little bit of technical work. There will be a number of tiny conferences, many of which will focus on organizational operations like running off-season events. People network. That’s not limited to Worlds itself, though the dichotomy is more apparent there: there might be one or two teams per regional competition that have a custom circuit board on their robot, but I'd bet cash that the average regional bats under 1.0 for number of teams with custom polyurethane or silicone parts.
Indeed, that football game is a large part of how teams get to Worlds. The competitions operates as a distributed tournament, where players who win certain awards may elect to continue to the next event in a hierarchy. The exact process and what exact awards count as continuing awards are pretty complex and vary by location (especially post-COVID), but as at the FRC level, the advancing awards prioritize two of the three teams that won a local competition's final, and then the team that has done the most recruitment and sponsoring of FTC or FLL teams over the last three (previously five) years, and then the team that has done the most for the current year. (Followed by the most competent Rookies, sometimes, and then a whole funnel system rolling through more esoteric awards.) In addition to the inherent randomness of alliance field play, there's a rather telling note: the 'what have you done for FIRST today' award, if won at the Worlds level, guarantees an optional invite to every future Worlds competition. By contrast, teaching or developing esoteric skills or core infrastructure is an awkward fit for any award, usually shoved into the Judge's Award, which with 3.5 USD won't buy you a good cup of coffee at Worlds.
There’s reasons it’s like this, and it’s not just the Iron Laws of Bureaucracy, or the sometimes-blurry lines between modern corporate infrastructure and mid-level-marketing. The organization hasn't been hollowed out by parasites and worn like a skinsuit (at least not in this context): it's the sort of goal that the founders and first generation would have and do consider a remarkable victory. I’m not making the Iscariot complaint, because it’s not true.
FIRST couldn’t exist in the form it does without these massive events and the political and public support they produce, not just because you wouldn’t hear about any smaller organization, but because the equipment and technology only works at sizable scale. Entire businesses have sprung up to provide increasingly specialized equipment, FIRST got National Instruments to build a robotics controller that resists aluminum glitter a little better, even the LEGO stuff has some custom support, and they can only do so because an ever-increasing number of teams exist to want it. SolidWorks, Altium, dozens of other companies donate atoms and/or bits on a yearly basis; the entire field system for FRC wouldn’t work without constant support and donation by industrial engineering companies. WPI might devote a couple post-grad students to maintaining a robotics library without tens of thousands of people using it, but I wouldn’t bet on it. States would not be explicitly funding FIRST (or its competitors) unless those programs can show up on television and have constituents that can show up at a state politician’s door.
Those demands drive not just how FIRST operates today, but what its interests are looking toward the future, not just in what it does, but what it won’t do. From a cynical eye, I wouldn’t say with certainty that FIRST would drop ten community teams for a school system buy-in, or twenty for a state program, but I wouldn’t want to be on the community team for any of those hard choices. There is no open-source motor controller or control board available for FIRST competition use, and there’s not a procedure available to present one, and there won’t be. There’s a lot of emphasis on sharing outreach tricks, and a little for sharing old code or 3d models, and a lot of limits to providing skills.
Because throughout this system, the most impactful thing you can do is always getting more people. It’s not Inspiring, it’s not
ChairmannyImpactful, but that's what those awards are, with reason. Shut up and multiple: the math, in the end, is inevitable.And I’m going to deny it.
There's a story that goes around in the FIRST sphere, where one of FIRST's founders bargained or tricked Coca-Cola into in exchange for developing some other more commercial technology. The exact form and valence tends to vary with who tells the story, whether to highlight the speaker's anti-capitalist frame, to gloss over some of the frustrations with the Coca-Cola Freestyle (tbf, usually more logistic and maintenance than with the pumps themselves), or to wave away the rough question of whether it paid off).
But that last point is a bit unfair: Solving Problems In Extreme Poverty is the sort of difficult and low-odds environment where high-variance options make sense to take, and you should expect a high-variance low-odds option to fail (or at least not succeed wildly) most of the time, and at least it wasn't as dumb an idea as the lifestraw. Maybe (probably!) enough of the steps that combine to keep FIRST running fall into the same category.
I'm hoping teaching kids isn't a low-odds environment. And ultimately, most volunteers and teams and sponsors signed up more for that than for the flashing lights and the fancy banners. But teaching, in matter involving true interaction, can not be done at the scales and directions that turn a roll of the dice from gambling to a variance strategy. It's difficult enough as a mentor to remember all the names the students and family for even a moderately-sized FRC or FTC team; few in a team that "support 128" teams (not linking directly: these are teenagers) can name every one or even a majority. These organizations have, by necessity, turned to maximize how many opportunities they present to their affiliates, without much attention to what that opportunity is. Few turn to the full argumentum ad absurdum where the recruitment exists solely to get more recruiters, but they’ve not left that problem space behind, either.
((There are other nitpicks: the same economies of scale that make these answers work eliminate many less-difficult problem whose presence is necessary to onboard and upskill new learners, the focus on bits over atoms breaks in similar ways that the outreach-vs-teaching one does.))
Dunbar proposed an upper limit to how large a social group the human mind readily handles. There's a lot of !!fun!! questions about how well this will replicate, or how accurate the exact number is, or what applicability it has for a given level of interaction: suffice it to assume some limit exists, that some necessary contact increments the counter at some level of teaching, and that it can't possibly be this high. At some point, you are no longer working with people; you're performing a presentation, and they're watching; or you're giving money and they're shaking a hand. At best, you're delegating.
These strategies exceed the limit, blasting past it or even starting beyond it. They are hyperdunbar, whether trying to get fifty thousand people into a convention center, or trying to sell ten thousand books, or 8k-10k subscribers. There are things that you can't do, or can't do without spending a ton of your own money, without taking these strategies! Whether FIRST getting NI's interest, writing or drawing, building or playing video games full-time, you either take this compromise or another one, and a lot of the others are worse.
But they're simultaneously the most visible strategies, by definition. I do not come to kill the
IndigestionImpact Award; I come to raise the things that aren't in the awards. Even if FIRST could support a dozen teams that emphasized bringing new technologies forward in a one-on-one basis, and if your first exposure to the program selected from teams randomly, you'd be much more likely to hear from the hyperdunbarists -- hell, it could well be that way, and I've just missed the rest of them.Yet they are not the only opportunity. You don't have to be grindmaxxing. One team, even in FIRST, can share skills simply for the purpose of sharing skills. It’s why I volunteer for the org. You can go into an artistic thing knowing you want a tiny audience, or to cover costs and if lucky your time, or as a hobby that's yours first. It shouldn't be necessary to say that outright, as even in hyperdunbar focuses, most fail down to that point. Yet even in spheres where Baumol's hits hardest, it can be a difficult assumption to break.
More options
Context Copy link