lemongrab
12d ago
whether Macedonians should take back all lands given to their ancestors by Zeus.
Many Greeks would like a word with you about those Slavic poseurs of North Macedonia appropriating the legacy of invincible Ἀλέξανδρος. Then again, those Greeks have also abandoned Zeus, so maybe it's up for grabs.
lemongrab
1mo ago
As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.
Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.
These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.
lemongrab
5mo ago
I've also seen versions of the view popular in NRx circles.
I won't pretend to have read it all, but Moldbug wrote a whole book about this in 2007, https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/
strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything.
I'm reminded of Scott's old homeschooling post where, iirc, he proposes that in early childhood there's just an underlying brain maturity process that can't be meaningfully accelerated toward basic educational attainments, such that you could either spend every day from, say, age 5 to 7 strenuously trying to teach a kid how to read and do arithmetic before their brain is ready for it, or you could spend those years doing basically anything else and by the time they're 7 they'll pick up reading and arithmetic easily in a couple of weeks. (Some version of this has to be true -- you can't teach a baby to read).
I was "unschooled" through elementary age myself and I don't think I learned to read til I was 8, but when I did it barely required any instruction and I was reading at a college level by 12, possibly because I hadn't learned to resent the attempt.
So much of this striving for early acceleration is probably pushing rope, physiologically, putting in 10x the effort to get to (at best) the same result marginally faster.
This isn't complicated -- if they're asking you to use their service for free, it's cause they want you to use it (they think it's worth their money to subsidize your service, e.g. to further long term growth). If you want to oppose them, don't use it.
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