official_techsupport
who/whom
No bio...
User ID: 122
official_techsupport
who/whom
7mo ago
I'm reading the webnovel A Practical Guide to Evil on @official_techsupport's recommendation.
For the record while I can recommend several webnovels, I've never read this one and also have a very low tolerance for badly written stuff.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I started developing weird pains in my right wrist, then read somewhere to pay attention to how you sleep, in particular that you don't have your palm angled at 90 degrees forward from the wrist. Then I discovered that for some reason I did this all the time, made a conscious effort to stop doing that, and had no issues since.
official_techsupport
who/whom
8mo ago
I think I can. I'd also ask like half of the people I play Blood on the Clocktower with regularly and they will probably agree and we will make it.
I think that if/when there's a call for it, it won't be the average ability of some particular ethnicity/faith/whatever, but self-selected (but also gatekept) people that are multiple deviations above the average in whatever traits you think are good for manning a generation ship. A random 1000 mormons have nothing on the top 1000 <insert the ethnic group you most despise> most excited about colonizing Alpha Centauri.
I don't think this has been proposed yet, in this exact form: you can do a trick by having a cis person trapped in a trans body, as a result of an unfortunate polyjuice potion mishap or teleportation incident or whatever "easy way to change gender" the setting allows, but with a twist that they can't easily change it back for whatever reason--some extra spell stabilizing the body or a booby trap in a sci-fi setting or like some info they can't risk being destroyed.
Make sure to firmly establish their original gender, so there's no doubt that when they keep behaving and dressing etc the same way after the incident that happens half the game in, that's their true self. Have explicit quests trying to change them back and explicit evidence of them trying to ameliorate their dysphoria at least partially.
This is going to be neatly subversive, because on the one hand it's sort of gender essentialist and everyone knows that the character really started as their original gender and there's no mystery about what happened to them, but on the other hand, all right, what do we do now that their genitalia don't match their gender? And what if some people are actually born with such a mismatch in our world? Kind of like, since I know that I'm definitely right-handed, I'm open to the possibility that definitely left-handed people exist.
An interesting question is what to make their original gender: male would be more relatable for the intended audience (but you have to play it completely straight, never once veering into the fetish territory), originally-female would be more CW-salient.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
IMO Pact and Twig were more or less unsuccessful attempts at putting novel twists on Worm's awesome formula.
There's a foolproof way of keeping the reader captivated: by having a bunch of nested quests and subquests. Pact actually starts very formulaic in this respect: Blake is fighting a goblin because he was sent to do something in a graveyard by the Lord of Toronto, because he needs help getting back into his grandma's house, because he needs to read up on and figure out what's up with the karmic debt thing. Each blow in the fight is meaningful because it advances all of these quests.
One of the most fascinating things about Worm was how it repeatedly added new Main Quests, on top of and sometimes directly contradicting previous Main Quests (the infamous four word chapter comes to mind). So we start with a girl whose Main Quest is avoiding her bullies and end with literally cosmic scale stuff. And it worked perfectly!
With Pact Wildbow tried to see what happens if instead of the Main Character having to make greater and greater sacrifices to complete the new grand Main Quests, the quests themselves get progressively canceled, like, OK, this problem is beyond fixing, OK we no longer even hope to achieve that thing. Well, it turned out that the second half of the book, where the author started doing that, was just depressing and pointless.
With Twig Wildbow tried to see what happens if instead of the Main Character having all these grandiose quests, it's actually someone entirely else. Well, it turns out that the first half of the book, until the Main Character and his posse acquires enough strength and purpose, was just boring and pointless.
That's the price of doing daring experiments, more often than not you discover that there are good reasons for why nobody does this thing that seemed so cool on paper.
official_techsupport
who/whom
9mo ago
Is it really more likely that academics believe HBD but resolve to fight it anyway?
Yeah, when surveyed anonymously only about 15-20% believe that there's no genetic component in the Black-White achievement gap in the US.
http://lepo.it.da.ut.ee/~spihlap/snyderman@rothman.pdf - 1987 survey.
https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301886 - 2020 survey.
This contrasts with practically nobody saying this in public and consequently the public (exemplified by you here) believing that this reflects on the actual privately held beliefs of scientists.
And, specifically, if you want to see how an example of speaking power to truth looks like in this context, https://www.chronicle.com/article/racial-pseudoscience-on-the-faculty (paywall bypass: https://archive.li/ZxVYk)
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
Indigestion is a common side effect of alcohol withdrawal. Alcohol helps with that.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
https://xkcd.com/512/ but for arguing on the internet.
official_techsupport
who/whom
11mo ago
You might want to read this paper on Reverse Dominance Hierarchy: https://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/readings/boehm.pdf
I got to it from https://meltingasphalt.com/tears/ which you might want to read first, as an aperitif of sorts.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
If you remove the recency requirement then:
-
Original Bioshock is misunderstood by most people IMO. What was the point of Ryan's final speech? If he knew the code phrase, why he decided not to use it?
-
SOMA had some very visceral non-political based and reality-pilled moments which I don't want to spoil.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
what do you mean by burning off horrible habits, how does that work? if somebody died having stolen on some occasions, burning in purgatory is not going to reverse any of the thefts he did. and once he gets into heaven why would he need to steal anyway and if he steals in heaven, there is nothing in christianity about being kicked out of heaven, and if there was, purgatory would no longer be needed by your rationalization.
Imagine the world as a reinforcement learning environment that's intended to produce Good Servants of God. Emphasis on willing to serve God. Now the thing is, God doesn't care at all about punishing anyone, it only cares about burning out whatever parts of one's personality that prevented them from obeying His rules. An evil person who rejected God completely will have only a few parts of his personality lifted into the Godhood. A nice person who sinned occasionally and was upset about it will have the sinning part of himself removed, as he wanted all along, and get uploaded mostly intact.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Any amount of alcohol temporarily reduces intelligence and precision in your physical movements - a tiny bit if buzzed, a lot if drunk.
Not true, alcohol is considered a PED and is banned in shooting competitions: http://www.faqs.org/sports-science/Sc-Sp/Shooting.html
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
This reminded me of a note from the Talos Principle:
You know, the more I think about it, the more I believe that no-one is actually worried about AIs taking over the world or anything like that, no matter what they say. What they're really worried about is that someone might prove, once and for all, that consciousness can arise from matter. And I kind of understand why they find it so terrifying. If we can create a sentient being, where does that leave the soul? Without mystery, how can we see ourselves as anything other than machines? And if we are machines, what hope do we have that death is not the end?
What really scares people is not the artificial intelligence in the computer, but the "natural" intelligence they see in the mirror.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
"Never let me go" is very fucked up, I'm not sure there's another book that touched me so deeply. Actually, when I try to recall anything similar, certain moments of "The Talos Principle" come to mind, in how it builds a very relatable world and then force kicks you into the Acceptance stage of grief about it while you're utterly unprepared.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
My insight was that intuition is analytical thinking encoded.
No, absolutely not. You can train intuition (think, reflexes, like playing tennis) without any analytical thinking at all. Animals do it, no problem.
The main point of analytical thinking is to provide a check on intuition for when it goes wrong. Like, you encounter an optical illusion, a fish in the water appears farther than it is, so to spear it properly you need to aim closer, "wat in heck, my eyes deceive me" is where the improvement starts.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Pirate metal is pretty upbeat. Alestorm - Fucked With an Anchor for example!
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
OMG THANK YOU! It's been bothering me literally for years!
How did you find it?
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Baba is You in the puzzle category, no contest.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Muphry's Law strikes again LOL.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
It's Kisilev btw, you keep misspelling his surname.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
I spent a lot of time observing these sorts of groups a while back and in the end they come across as, I guess, sad, since they never end up creating much of anything useful and for many of their members it seems to eventually become a damaging obsession.
So you're saying that you spent copious amounts of time cataloging instances of events you believed made such things or groups look bad. Endlessly.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
It's exactly what someone who wants the non fertile eliminated from the future would try to persuade you of. A sane and sensible person will dismiss such words as munitions fired in a 5th generation memetic war of genocide in all honesty.
Exactly. There's a powerful drive to remove leftist genes (yeah, yeah, I'm extremely oversimplifying it) from the gene pool, and that's a good thing that we all should support bipartisanly.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
An argument you can make against mail in voting is that voting is a proxy for a civil war without the associated costs and so requiring people to get off their asses and vote in person is good, while letting anyone with a heartbeat vote is actually bad.
This of course must be understand in the context of trans- and cis-democracy.
official_techsupport
who/whom
1yr ago
Not quite what you're asking about, but Stephen King's N. allows for an extremely fitting alternative explanation where the protective circles are actually summoning circles. Imagine that you're Cthulhu and you can send some mortals nightmare visions trying to get them to summon you: obviously you should convince them that what you want them to do prevents you from being summoned.
I disagree that this is a very small subset of problems, the majority of real life problems let you decide to wait and collect more information or decide how many resources you're willing to bet. See examples in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
For example, I think I first noticed this problem many years ago in one of Scott's linkdumps where he disapprovingly linked to Obama saying that CIA told him that such and such thing had a 70% probability but really they had no good information so it was a coinflip. And Scott was indignant, 70% is 70% what more do you need to know before you authorize some military operation, even the President doesn't understand probability smdh. In my opinion Obama was right, if technically imprecise, while Scott was wrong, which demonstrates the danger of having a little knowledge and also the need for more awareness.
You say this as if it's not Bayesians' fault that they have not developed (or got into a habit of using) a succinct way of conveying how much of the estimate comes from the prior and how much from the previous updates. I would understand if it was an acknowledged hard problem in need of community's attention, but for example Yudkowsky sequences don't mention it at all.
More options
Context Copy link