omfalos
Nonexistent good post history.
User ID: 222
omfalos
1yr ago
Ban anonymous browsing of the internet. Publicly broadcast all internet users' media consumption habits.
omfalos
1yr ago
Do you have a dark yellow shirt or a red-orange shirt with a color ambiguous whether or not it is orange? If I were you I would wear a dark yellow shirt and tell people (truthfully) that it is the closest thing to orange I have in my wardrobe.
omfalos
6mo ago
The Arab League needs to follow Sri Lanka's example for the sake of peace. 🕊️
omfalos
1yr ago
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/all-the-nerds-are-dead
For the last decade, mass culture has been nerd culture, and a nerd is someone who likes things that aren’t good. This is not to say that everyone who likes things that aren’t good is a nerd. Fast food is bad food: cheap, tasteless, unhealthy, and unsatisfying. But if you grew up eating frozen burgers as an occasional treat, and you still find it nice to sometimes stumble drunk into a McDonald’s late at night and wolf down a Big Mac—because it reminds you of something, because it’s the sign for a certain vanished pleasure—then you are not necessarily a nerd. But imagine a person who collects the boxes from every McDonald’s order he’s ever made, who’s yapping with excitement about the new McDonald’s partially hydrogenated soybean-canola oil blend, who can’t wait for them to release the McBento in Japan so he can watch video reviews all day, and who acts incredibly smug every time McDonald’s posts its quarterly earnings and they’re growing faster than Burger King’s. You know exactly what this person looks like. A total failure of an adult human being. Fat clammy hands; eyes popping in innocent wonder at every new disc of machine-extruded beef derivatives. An unbearable, ungodly enthusiasm. Does he actually like eating the stuff? Maybe not. It hardly matters. His enjoyment is perverse, abstracted far beyond any ordinary pleasure. It signifies nothing. This person is a nerd.
I found this essay on hipster culture and nerd culture to be interesting and enjoyable to read. I'm linking it because it seems relevant to some of the topics discussed here. It raises questions about what effect AI will have on art and cultural production.
omfalos
6mo ago
Human beings have an instinct that makes them lash out violently against oppression, real or perceived. If it were possible to eliminate this instinct through genetic engineering, would it be worthwhile to do so? Would the Palestinians be better off if they were engineered to feel less emotional in response to discrimination and ethnic cleansing?
omfalos
1yr ago
Maybe I'm tone-deaf, or maybe we just have different taste. I enjoyed the essay because of the author's colorful prose, and I thought it raised interesting questions about art and culture. I didn't think the purpose of the essay was to attack any specific group of people, despite the fact that it is written in the style of an attack. I'm sort of a Quokka in that I perceive these sorts of essays charitably as being directed against abstract ideals rather than being targeted against specific people.
omfalos
1yr ago
How about this for a mascot?
https://www.deviantart.com/klaatu81/art/Cartoon-Chess-Pieces-596793102
omfalos
3d ago
It looks like Russia is developing a giant pincer movement that will envelop Niu-York.
omfalos
3mo ago
I tried rephrasing my question for ChatGPT, and it gave me a pretty close answer:
"What is the name of the logical fallacy where you believe other people think the same way you do?"
ChatGPT: "The logical fallacy you're referring to is called the 'false consensus effect.' This occurs when someone believes that their opinions, beliefs, or preferences are more common or widely shared than they actually are. It involves an overestimation of the extent to which others agree with one's own views."
omfalos
4mo ago
I made a post on here about a year ago proposing a sort of elaborate version of how state legislatures could appoint national representatives.
https://www.themotte.org/post/167/smallscale-question-sunday-for-november-6/27482?context=8#context
omfalos
6mo ago
If you really have an idea nobody else has thought of, you should hop to it before somebody else beats you to the punch! Good luck!!!
omfalos
6mo ago
100,000,000 Africans will immigrate to the United States. I'm calling it now.
The term right wing refers to the seating arrangement within a legislature. Creating a corporation whose board members are appointed by the right half of a legislature is the quintessential example of right wing patronage. This is a pedantic point to make, but I couldn't resist. I know what you really mean.
omfalos
7mo ago
I think this racist is better than the last, but the next racist will be the really good one. That will be our lucky racist. He will grant us three wishes.
omfalos
7mo ago
Try searching for "Misleading Liberal Democrat Bar Graphs" and you'll find a bunch of examples. It's become an internet meme.
omfalos
1yr ago
Siberians, Mongolians and Inuits can be handwaved away by saying nomadic pastoralism cancels out the benefits of living in a cold climate.
omfalos
1yr ago
The left recurrent laryngeal nerve and the vas deferens are classic examples of suboptimal anatomical features. One might imagine there are structures in the brain that are suboptimal in a way that is analogous to the left recurrent laryngeal nerve and the vas deferens. Perhaps there are some we have yet to recognize as such because we don't understand how the brain works.
omfalos
1yr ago
The human body below the neck has remained largely unchanged since the evolution of Australopithecus four million years ago. One may conclude from this that the body is well optimized. The human body above the neck has changed continuously since that time and only converged on its present form 250,000 years ago. One may surmise from this that the brain is in some ways less optimized than the body.
omfalos
2mo ago
What if I engage in a form of magical thinking where every choice I make steers the universe into a timeline where people like me are more likely to make the same choice?
omfalos
1yr ago
I thought for a minute that the first half of your post was AI generated. But AI's still can't write stylistically with that degree of verisimilitude.
I would say the difference between a knowledge worker and a skilled laborer is that a knowledge worker can physically execute an idea (i.e.- type it into the computer) as fast as they can think of it, while a skilled laborer can think of an idea and then take several hours to execute just a single idea. A skilled laborer can queue up ideas in his mind well in advance and have long periods of absent-mindedness (zuhandenheit) between the execution of one idea and the initiation of the next. A knowledge worker does not have this luxury because once they think of an idea, the execution is immediate, and now they must think of the next idea, or take a break from work.
omfalos
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I also like ballet and think it's sublime. I even consider dancing and engineering to be related, because the human body is like a machine. Programming robots to be able to do what humans can do is a cutting edge field of research.
My favorite ballet is the Triadic Ballet, produced out of the Bauhaus school. The costumes worn by the dancers show different aspects of the human body's geometry. The ballet is divided into parts based on various mechanical motions of the body. It's not just a demonstration of painstakingly perfect choreography. It demonstrates ideas and principles that can be generalized to other fields of knowledge.
The different races in LOTR roughly correspond to different European nationalities. Hobbits are British. Elves are either Finnish or they represent Christian clergymen. Dwarves are Jewish. Men of Rohan are German. Men of Gondor are Italian. Orcs are Hunnic, Hungarian or Turkic.
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