nand
9mo ago
Can you elaborate on this point? What is the key difference in their immigration policy and why does it work so well?
nand
9mo ago
Personally, as an Apple user, I always felt that Apple is better at designing hardware than software. Designing software is more of a necessary factor in being able to design the hardware with the freedom they want. (Bespoke chips everywhere, complete control over the entire trust chain, etc.)
iOS is pretty much a pile of trash and the major downside to being able to use an Apple device.
nand
10mo ago
There are orders of orders of magnitude difference in probability between a 10-ton fighter jet arising from pure chance, and a microscopic DNA (or RNA-based) protocell with a few dozen to a few hundred nucleotide bonds.
If the latter took all of the universe to create, the former would be outrageously impossible.
nand
11mo ago
For small countries which do well, this leads to a different sort of jadedness where the national broadcaster is trying to ensure that their country loses deliberately for financial reasons (but is generally not able to say this to its viewers, who like winning). Ireland is the most famous example where eventually the cynicism got through to the viewers.
Can you elaborate on this point?
nand
1yr ago
I disagree with your assessment of the situation because to me there is a significant distinction between "weak, injured or malformed" and "psychopathic, murderous, criminal". In a crude analogy with another important system of life, the immune system, the former represent damaged cells that need to be repaired, and the latter represents cancerous cells that need to be excised.
Side note, I don't think dwarf fortress is a representative simulation of the social dynamics at play, because it doesn't model what it's like to have, say, an asshole boss whose coworkers actively suffer because of his ongoing existence.
nand
1yr ago
Isn't it on aggregate better for the world for the children of mentally unstable murderers to die before they can continue the cycle of harm?
As for the fathers, it really doesn't requite a lot of effort not to impregnate a crazy person.
nand
1yr ago
Where can you find these people, you ask. Try looking at the way people talk. How many real words are they using? Are we sure the human species is not effectively bimodal at the age of 40?
Can you please clarify what you meant by this? What is a 'real word' in this line of thought?
nand
1yr ago
I can be accepting of other people's preferences while not sharing that preference myself. I publicly accept the existence of pistachio flavored ice cream, even if I do not like it myself. Maybe only a few people do, I do not know. But I have no reason to disapprove of it, because I do not think there is anything fundamentally wrong with pistachio flavored ice cream. I just don't like the taste.
If I find myself unattracted to people of substantially difference race, that doesn't mean I find anything wrong with the concept. As long as two people are attracted to each other, I don't see the issue. I'm just not personally attracted to certain people, for reasons that include physical appearance.
nand
1yr ago
I mean, I was formally diagnosed with a psychosomatic pain disorder because I kept claiming I had stomach cramps to get out of going to school. This whole thing strikes me as a bunch of adults becoming genuinely confused that somebody could legitimately fake illness to get out of unwelcome chores, and lie about it with a straight face.
Teenagers are monsters whose moral compass has not yet developed. There is no "mass sociogenic illness" being "spread" via social media. Infohazard? Seriously? Just don't pretend to be sick to get out of work and you're immune.
I think this is a very valuable change. There are certain users I would personally auto-minimize, not because I find their posts bad, but just because I find their choice of submissions personally uninteresting. But I definitely wouldn't block them, and if somebody I have "blocked" responds to one of my own comments I'd definitely like to know.
I don't see a reason for a block functionality to exist on this site, except as a short-term spam mitigation feature (e.g. for PMs).
nand
1yr ago
Birds have more neurons in their prefrontal cortex than humans (relative to brain size).
nand
1yr ago
Shower thought: I live in an area that has 100% green electric power generation. If I use more power than necessary, does this increase or decrease my net carbon footprint? Say I pay out of my pocket to run 1 MJ of green power through a resistor. What effect does this have on my carbon footprint, as defined by the difference in overall emissions compared to the counterfactual world in which I didn't do this?
I have conflicting thoughts:
-
Power is power. If I didn't use that power, it could have been used instead of coal-derived power by somebody else. And obviously, most people would prefer to use greener power rather than less green power, if given a choice - and this argument holds all the way down the chain to the person using the least green power available. So the net addition to my carbon footprint when wasting 1 MJ of energy is determined by whatever it takes to produce 1 MJ of power at the tail end (i.e. coal). Or a slightly refined version: By supply and demand, increasing demand on green power just drives up the price of green power, causing more people to use non-green power because of the price differential, thus leading to the same 1 MJ to be burned in coal plants to cover the waste.
-
As a consumer of green power, I am essentially paying for the construction of green power plants. So all I'm doing is subsidizing the production of more green power, so my net carbon footprint is the sum of what it takes to build that infrastructure, minus whatever benefit will be derived from it after I'm done using it - so probably effectively neutral (or slightly negative).
I want to call this a "reference class fallacy". Any logical conclusion derived from treating something concrete as a typical member of a larger reference class.
To analyze it from another angle: the narrower the reference class you're arguing based on, the more statistical power your argument has. If I can prove something about everybody named /u/georgioz, I have proved quite a lot about you as an individual. But if I'm proving something that only holds in a statistical aggregate of all humans, I have gained almost no knowledge about you specifically. All I have gained is a tiny probability.
A reference class fallacy is when you pick an absurdly big reference class (e.g. all individuals) and then use reasoning based on the big reference class to infer knowledge about a potentially very small, distinguished subset (e.g. yourself, or even just humanity) of that reference class.
Since the reference class of individuals in the grabby aliens argument is potentially massive, the uncertainty of whether statistical statements over the entirety of that reference class applying to us specifically becomes quasi-infinitely high, thus making the argument vanishingly unlikely to be valid.
How many and what variety of women have you dated?
I used to be skeptical of the ideas presented in GP's post until I started dating a lot and experiencing all of these dynamics for myself - from the "losing interest quickly in women that are too open to having sex" to the mad, head-over-heels attraction to excessively coy women that nonetheless give off ever so slight hints of their sexuality. I can wholeheartedly agree with this characterization of gender roles and human sexuality.
Hell, even the women I speak to about these topics basically confirm the picture: their dream man, overwhelmingly, seems to be a high-status, independent and adventurous psychopath who turns into a sophisticated poet and lover in their arms. But you have to sell that image to maintain their interest. The moment you actually give them too much affection, they genuinely lose interest - a prize easily obtained is a prize worth little. (This goes for both sides, of course)
The net result is that the only relationships which end up lasting for a long time is one in which neither party is too interested in the other person, only just enough to be worth the effort. (And also why I think the best on-ramp to a relationship is a friendship with somebody you didn't particularly plan on fucking)
nand
1yr ago
Women being more susceptible to cults is an obvious example that comes to mind.
nand
1yr ago
I have a slightly related tangent story from my days at a psychological clinic. To cut a long story short, one patient was convinced she was being gang stalked by her family (and associates). Whether or not she was actually being gang stalked or not, I don't know. The evidence I saw is consistent with both confabulation and reality.
In any case, this (17-year old girl) patient was terrified to go to school. So she arranged an escort to accompany her there and back. Cue me and another (female) friend of hers, a highly schizotypal, spiritual person who believes in quantum healing and homeopathy, and so on. On our way to pick her up from school, we noticed a man standing outside and smoking (in the no-smoking area). He could have been watching us, or he could have been not. (Having gone to the same school, it was certainly not unusual for older middle-aged teachers to be chain smoking during the breaks.) Our reports to the clinic staff?
"She was being stalked by a man who gave off a menacingly evil aura! He did not fit the setting at all, I'm sure he was up to no good"
vs
"Uh, what I saw was a man standing next to a door. He didn't do anything of note, and I'm not sure if he even looked in our direction. The end."
tl;dr, different people can interpret radically different things into the same observations. Women are generally leaning towards the schizophrenic, neurotic end of the spectrum, and also generally more receptive to propaganda. So it does not surprise me one bit that a world filled with feminist "women are victims!" messaging has women end up hallucinating terrifying delusions of persecution into completely benign events.
nand
1yr ago
When people talk about big tech failing my first thoughts are Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix and Apple. Not exactly companies designing industrial manufacturing / CAD software.
nand
1yr ago
I am curious, in such arguments, whether you refer to Gf or Gc as the relevant factor in determining whether somebody ought to run the country?
nand
1yr ago
And then of course, there's the virus itself. It's easy to say the world could have reacted better, but it's hard to imagine we could brush off covid as a bad flu season. It's difficult to avoid both a large number of deaths and borrowing from the future.
But the majority of the people killed by the virus were negative GDP, so the first-order effect of the virus should have been to improve the economy.
Intuitively, it would appear to me that in the hierarchy of needs, a large chunk of the tech sector essentially falls into the highest bucket - entertainment, self realization and pursuit of curiosity. I would imagine that, as an economy suffers stress, we would see industries failing in a top-down manner, where the most abstract industries that are the furthest removed from immediate basic needs feel the burn first.
Is there any prior art establishing whether or not big tech is such an industry?
nand
1yr ago
Language exchange platforms.
Incidentally, I have never gotten a single match ever on dating apps. Just shows you how rigged they are.
nand
1yr ago
Something I thought about extensively at the date of the last iPhone launch was that this entire situation comes down to archaic pricing practices and a dearth of seemingly obvious technological solutions.
For example, instead of selling phones at a "first come first serve" basis and forcing people to suffer through stressful virtual queues and server overloads, why not just introduce a sort of "dynamic auction"? Give people an X-day grace period with which to register their blind bids. For each 'batch' of products that come from the factory, take the top N bidders at that point in time, and have them all pay the price needed to outbid the N+1th person in the queue. Break ties by number of 'batches' the person has been in the queue for, and break sub-ties by random chance.
Easy to understand (the more you're willing to pay, the faster you get your phone), simple, stress/DDoS-free, and all of the profit goes to the company making the product - not middlemen scalpers.
nand
1yr ago
Those four examples have something in common which is completely unlike the defense missile example, though. A defense missile is a defense mechanism.
You are using four examples of retaliatory attacks, not defensive maneuvers. I think that is a very crucial difference. Compare the analogy to manslaughter in self defense vs murder. Nearly every nation agrees that it's legal to use lethal force to defend your life, but not to seek out your attacker and kill them in retribution.
Just to clarify, your primary concern is the belief that an excess population of lonely and/or frustrated men will lead to a massive, horrific war? I'm trying to figure out if you consider the fact of men having to (increasingly?) compete for women's attention to be an inherent problem or whether or not you are only worried inasmuch as it will lead to a larger calamity.
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