problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Been making my way through a fiction backlog. Tried Recursion by Blake Crouch two weeks or so ago, which was an extremely fast paced and not-all-too-deep mind-bendy read where the stakes increase astronomically towards the middle and end of the book, sort of like the kind of thing a turbo-charged Christopher Nolan would write if you plied him with a lot of LSD and crack. There is one Big Lie you have to believe in order for the book to make any sense at all, and towards the end of the book the characters completely overlook an obvious solution to the main conflict of the story after over a hundred years of iteration with only a relatively thin plot justification for the oversight, but if you can accept that (and the very simplistic prose) the story's good fun.
Read The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch on Saturday after having it on the back burner for a while; it was entertaining for a bit but the prose was clunky and story-wise it felt all over the place, since it was trying to pull together so many elements - murder mystery detective plots, apocalypse scenarios, time travel (of a sort), deep space travel, incomprehensible starfish aliens, timeline-hopping Nazi vigilante groups, and more - and it never felt particularly unified as a result. The book doesn't always explore these plot points to its fullest extent and threatens to become incoherent under the weight of its own story a lot, and I never got the sense that there was an underlying gestalt to the entire story, which is something I generally like with twisty sci-fi. Also somehow nobody ever sees an ethical problem with creating whole temporary universes filled with people who think and feel, all of whom will blink out of existence once the traveller leaves.
Currently on Quarantine by Greg Egan and enjoying it a lot so far, though some of the futurism has aged rather poorly in retrospect.
96%, and I'm actually surprised because in real life I hardly remember the faces of anyone I don't meet frequently (I actually often struggle to pick out prominent public figures by their looks, who I remember far more by their names and policies than I do their faces). In practice I store people as an abstract set of traits and positions in much the same way I do concepts.
In the vast majority of contexts the specific way somebody's face looks is probably the attribute of theirs I care the least about, and I suppose I just don't bother to commit it to long-term memory.
It's a fantastic show. Without spoiling anything in particular, you have to be patient with it at least until the last episode of S1. I understand how the pacing would come off as slow at this stage, but all of the setup pays off hugely with one of my favourite season finales put to screen.
S2 is more of a mixed bag in my opinion with some borderline nonsensical plot points towards the second half of the season, but still manages to pull itself together in a satisfying way and is very worth your time.
I've been listening to the new Boards of Canada album Inferno, which released just two days ago. My expectations for this one were high, given they were a seminal electronic band of the 90s, and Inferno breaks a massive thirteen-year hiatus where they all but went radio silent and left the entire fanbase twisting in the wind. It's all too easy for artists to fumble a comeback after an extended hiatus (looking at you, James Murphy, American Dream has all of your worst music), but I'm glad to say that this is one of their best albums. It also doesn't feel at all like a cheap attempt at nostalgia-bait where an artist tries and fails to capture the sounds of their heyday; in fact they go in a completely fresh sonic direction that couldn't contrast more with the fuzzy, warm, childhood tape sounds of their first two albums.
The tracks here are extremely dark in tone, as well as sharp-edged and unmistakably electronic in their sound. They also draw from a far more eclectic range of inspirations than any of the tracks on their other albums - most of their other albums had a much clearer singular source of inspiration; Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi are clearly based off the music and sounds on old educational tapes and Parks Canada ads, whereas Tomorrow's Harvest is obviously a pastiche of 70s/80s apocalypse film soundtracks. The Campfire Headphase is a bit less cohesive and incorporates aspects of acoustic folk into its sound, but still relies on the more pastoral and sweet atmospheres of their early days. Inferno, however, is... not that. In spite of the music on here bearing superficial hallmarks of their earlier work such as ambiguous transposed chords and extensive samples ranging from Hare Krishna chanting and televangelists to educational docs and so on, their sound is now unexpectedly jagged and hi-fidelity. The production is absolutely immaculate, which is not a typical approach for Boards of Canada.
So many highlights. Prophecy at 1420 MHz, Father And Son, The Word Becomes Flesh, Into The Magic Land, Deep Time and All Reason Departs are fantastic tracks that really epitomise what the album has to offer. The second Prophecy comes in you know you're going to be in for a ride, the onslaught of hard-hitting drums and the electronic synth textures are infectious. But probably the biggest surprise on the album is the penultimate track You Retreat In Time And Space, which is placed on the album after a whole onslaught of increasingly ominous and evil tracks; it acts as a climax to the album with an absolutely blissful slow synth-funk ballad featuring a whole lot of guitars, bells and warbly synths that almost appear to sparkle. One could almost mistake it for a Daft Punk track if they didn't know Boards of Canada made it, albeit on a second look it's not all too difficult to see their DNA all over the track.
The fact that a band this old and this heralded is still putting out quality works this late in the game is great. Fantastic album. 8.7/10.
Warning: Shitty vent post, typed out hastily in a hotel somewhere in rural Australia.
Last Friday a good number of things happened at work that sent my anxiety levels through the roof, all of which were caused or exacerbated by the decentralised structure of public tax accounting, which features a system where one preparer works under a number of reviewers on different jobs (which can be anything from a tax return to a business activity statement to a tax planning task).
So the inciting incident for this cascade of bullshit is that I had booked five days of leave a good while ago, and I had followed the proper procedure by sending a leave form to my most direct superior that then got sent to the firm’s secretary for dissemination. But somehow one of my managers didn’t seem to know about this beforehand and was surprised the day before due to some kind of error in internal communication on the firm's end, at least that's what I was told when I asked about it, and as a result I had to perform emergency handovers of some tax returns I was working on one day before I went on leave (since this was the case, I have offered to assist periodically with work when I can make myself available). This has never occurred before and in all previous instances my superiors appeared to know I would be going on leave before I even had to inform them, but it appears I cannot rely on internal communication and will need to take things into my own hands in the future, despite any expectation to that effect never being communicated to me. Somehow I feel this issue is going to end up being placed on me in the end as the junior. “Doesn’t communicate well” or something.
In addition, I got bitched at by one of my managers that same day for dropping one of the 5000 balls I’ve been juggling - I forgot to send out a reminder email to a client for a business activity statement, while sidetracked with other extremely urgent work that had to be completed, and this meant the necessary client information arrived late. The lodgement date came due over my leave period, and he complained that he would now “have to” work on the client’s business activity statement in my stead, in spite of the fact that applying for an extension of the due date would have been an option. I consider this criticism to be rather hypocritical since just less than a month ago his own failure to sign and approve a lodgement email had resulted in this same client lodging an instalment activity statement two months past the due date, and the only reason why it got solved is because I noticed the issue; I suppose mistakes are only unacceptable when they're mine. Nevertheless I stayed at work four hours late that day just trying to placate him and getting the workpaper to at least a reviewable state, though why the firm couldn’t just ask for a due date extension from the ATO is unclear to me (requesting extensions is not uncommon at all; ostensibly the reason for not seeking extension in this case is not to jeopardise the payment plan the client has with the ATO, but if lodging an instalment activity statement two months late doesn’t jeopardise it, I seriously doubt this will either). He was also not happy that I “got to their tax compliance late”, meaning I deprioritised this client’s tax return in favour of meeting the year-end lodgement dates for other taxpayers. For the record that is a decision I fully stand by, since this client is nearly insolvent and I would prefer to prioritise clients that actually pay us and not ones who are in arrears for a year’s worth of billings.
I consider both of these to be prime examples of how the multiple reporting lines of public accounting firms really messes everything up. Firstly, you report to so many people that when one person doesn’t get tied into what you’re doing due to some breakdown in internal communication it ends up causing issues. Secondly, it misaligns incentives really badly - different clients are assigned to different managers that then get delegated to you, and while on a firm level it’s better to prioritise clients that actually do pay you as compared to clients whose status as a going concern is in serious question, on an individual-manager level everybody just wants you to get to their clients regardless of how much it makes sense at all because it personally affects them and how they are evaluated. I always see people saying that accounting is a “good job for autistic people” but frankly I just think it’s terrible, at least if you go into public. You need to communicate almost constantly with a revolving door of managers, reviewers and clients to make sure things don’t fall apart, and there are so many seemingly nonsensical aspects of the job that really only make sense once you start interpreting them through the lens of incentive structures. Yes, I am badly burned out and looking for exit opportunities.
IIRC this has also been heavily supported by all of the data collected on the topic, where the Chinese routinely rank as some of the most optimistic people in the world, in many cases taking away the top spot. I concur that there seems to be a general vibe in China that their lives in the future will be better than it is today, whereas many people in the West seem not to believe that, appear to believe their future is mainly governed by institutional forces, and take stagnation as a given.
Like OP mentioned even Rust Belt-ish depopulating industrial cities in areas like Dongbei don't seem to have this same downbeat view nor do they have the same level of self-destruction, drug use and crime that impoverished areas in the West do. There's just a lot less self-sabotage in general, IMO.
My hair is pretty nice. Just short of unmanageable East Asian straight, though I suspect that I've settled into a pompadour and fade that I'll keep well past the point it goes out of fashion.
Count yourself lucky. My hair is the most unmanageable chink hair you can possibly imagine; it stands up so straight that it looks like I've been electrocuted, even when grown out relatively long. It's impossible to style and gives me painful hair splinters that I'm constantly picking out of my fingers. I just get it all buzzed off (which poses its own problems, since short hair needs to be cut very often and my hair grows blisteringly fast).
problem_redditor
25d ago
It exists in some point in the possibility-space, in the same way that technically you can also arrive at Shakespeare's Macbeth through a random character generator. The question is why our universe happens to have taken on these specific exact properties. Making anthropic arguments to explain this primarily only makes sense to me if you postulate the existence of many other "rolls of the dice": e.g. the existence of other universes with different physical laws, or the idea that physical laws are actually not consistent throughout the universe.
You're at this point arguing against a position I haven't taken.
If there are an infinite number of tickets then the odds of any individual slob winning are virtually zero, yet win someone must.
We're basically just rehashing another one of the stock arguments yet again. Really, I'd like to see you apply that reasoning consistently across the board. Every stone in the world is idiosyncratic in its shape, so coming across a perfect cube shouldn't give you pause. If you're playing poker with someone and they get royal flushes 10 turns in a row, there's no reason to suspect cheating, since it's about as probable as any other specific configuration. Any set of hands is unlikely, right? I suppose if you detect a radio signal from the heavens that appears to be sending out primes in sequential order, you should just shrug your shoulders and go on with your day, since it could also just be random noise. Right? There's nothing to explain.
Then there's the fact that we don't even know how many drawings there have been.
Sure? Yes, the whole infinite-drawings explanation is indeed a possible solution. I'm atheist and don't think a magic man did it at all. I'm generally against jumping to conclusions on the issue; rather I'm saying there is something there which does appear to be strange, I reject assertions that there is nothing weird about the apparent fine-tuning, and note that there are a bunch of possible explanations virtually all of which can't be supported.
I don’t have nearly as much certainty as you’re imputing onto me. Perhaps model your opponent correctly first before trying to get into an argument with some imaginary creationist.
That doesn't actually help anything though, because even if it were the case, then I'd just want to know where the hell he came from and what was going on before that.
This is certainly a problem with the religious explanation. It would be more convincing as an argument if infinite regress wasn't also a problem that plagued all cosmologies.
By basic twiddling you mean your absolutely wild and seemingly totally unexamined belief that the laws of physics are arbitrary and were determined by RNG at the Big Bang.
If you're willing to throw out any ability to make any basic Bayesian inferences sure that argument holds water.
And anyway, there's definitionally no such thing as a universe where life is impossible and anyone is around to notice it.
Yes, I see you're cycling through all the stock criticisms that have been levelled ad nauseam. I have always thought this usage of anthropic reasoning was completely flawed. Facts that we deduce from our existence do not explain why we exist at all. The conditional statement "if physical observers then an observer-permitting universe" does not answer the question "why observers?" The anthropic argument explains why we don’t observe a life-prohibiting universe, but it doesn’t explain why a life-permitting one exists.
But some basic twiddling with these free parameters results in universes with barely any chemistry at all. Consider the cosmological constant: a seemingly small increase leads to a universe with no structure whatsoever, and a small decrease (to negative values) leads to no universe whatsoever. If you decrease the mass of the down quark by 8 percent you end up with no atoms. The vast majority of these proposed universes are so simple that there is nowhere for alternative life forms to hide.
But even absent that, no math presently exists for this kind of speculation on the matter.
Both you and @JustGottaDoot have raised this objection, and sure, we just have a sample of n=1 and as such we don't have any frequency data through which to ground the idea that the free parameters of our universe are determined in an RNG-like way and are as such extremely low probability.
This is just where noninformative priors come in, where absent any available frequency distribution your first assumption should be the simplest one, say, that the probability of every given outcome is 1/n (n being the number of values a parameter can take). Bayesian reasoning about prior probabilities like those are very useful heuristics to build off and show up in a good number of applications, including in theoretical physics. A lot of scientific investigation could simply not work without specifying initial beliefs about an uncertain parameter, there's a reason why the maximum entropy principle is so common.
In other words, I think this objection proves too much, and throws out the core idea backing many useful Bayesian inferences. That doesn't mean I think the explanation is "God" (it is funny that I'm the atheist arguing for fine-tuning and you're the Catholic arguing against it though), but it does appear to me that there is something there worth explaining.
The main difference in my mind isn't about complexity or whether God is personal, the distinction for me is whether the process that created us had sapience involved in it somewhere. An infinite, impersonal multiverse might be very complex, but it doesn't have thoughts or an agenda, it just is. God would be an agent that acts intentionally, whether it makes sense to pray to said God or expect divine intervention on your behalf is another matter entirely.
To be honest if that fine-tuning version of God exists I have some very strong words prepared. Imagine if a mad scientist created a simulation where millions of sapient suffering beings compete with each other to maximise inclusive genetic fitness and then let it run unchecked. What the fuck.
Regarding the rational arguments, I think that arguments from consciousness are probably the most compelling. Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is.
I'm not sure this is all that compelling; it makes some psychological sense that you would pinpoint consciousness as the strongest argument here, given your prior statement about finding no phenomenon "to be as interesting as other people". But it's unclear why this has to imply the existence of a God, just because something isn't yet understood and possesses weird properties does not mean you have to invoke a deity to explain its existence. As an atheist myself I think the strongest argument in favour of theism is some sort of cosmological fine-tuning argument pointing to aspects of the universe that seem extremely improbable, but without which human life would not be possible (you seem to have mentioned this as a theist argument, but for some reason appear to have deprioritised it relative to the argument from consciousness).
A big example of this is the triple-alpha process, which is how carbon gets formed in stars - it begins when two helium-4 nuclei (alpha particles) fuse to produce beryllium-8, which is highly unstable and decays with a half life of 8.19×10−17 seconds, but sometimes a third alpha particle enters the fray and produces something called the Hoyle state, which is a "resonance state" of carbon-12. This resonance state also almost always decays back into three alpha particles, but sometimes it settles into a stable form of carbon-12 that then eventually gets dispersed into the interstellar medium in the latter half of a stellar lifecycle. There are many apparent coincidences in every step of this process - probably the most mentioned one is that the resonance state has to occur at a very specific range of energies for sufficient carbon to be produced. It occurs at 7.656 megaelectronvolts (MeV), and the triple-alpha process is very sensitive to this value. Vary it by 0.1 MeV and the reaction will slow, producing less carbon, and a change of more than 0.3 MeV will halt carbon production altogether. There are also other constants here where, if they were even slightly different, would mean that most carbon would have been converted to oxygen.
There are also other examples of this, like the strong nuclear force's specific value seeming almost perfectly calibrated for stable atomic nuclei and stellar nucleosynthesis, and where a change of even ~2% in its value pretty much destroys all life. And these aren't rare to find, there are so many fine-tuned elements of the universe you can point to if you want to strengthen the argument. The emergence of life at all seems to have been an exceptionally low-probability (read: downright infinitesimal) event based on a constellation of fundamental physical constants, all of which basically had to be balanced on a knife's edge in order for it to appear. Almost as if it was intelligently designed.
Now you can explain all this through some form of anthropic argument invoking an infinity of hypothetical universes (for example), but it's unproven any of them exist and as such the epistemic status of these multiverse explanations is actually not quite too far from asserting the existence of a creator God. You could speculate that hypothetically different sets of physical fundamentals could result in different sets of lifeforms we aren't familiar with, but actually many of the other parameters result in the universe degrading into some high-entropy or low-energy state that doesn't permit the existence of sufficiently complex structures, and in any case that's just guessing again. Cosmological fine-tuning doesn't prove God, but it's at least a clear absurdity that deserves explanation, and this time God is actually a relatively plausible and intuitive explanation for the observed phenomenon since all our possible answers are also just unfalsifiable bad guesses.
I intellectually agree with you on the broad strokes and the impossibility of restructuring society around the whims of "creatives" - yet emotionally sympathise with @Corvos, since I find myself in a similar boat and used to create a lot of music in university (as well as when I was laid out flat by chronic illness). Given the musical taste you've demonstrated here I doubt you would like any of what I made, but I honed my skill at it until I would say I was at a professional level, or at least close to it. I have some receipts to prove it, too; I minimally marketed my music and ended up selling over $1,000 worth of it with pretty much close to zero financial investment on my part (this is not much in context, but considering how little I was trying to get eyes on it, I'm surprised it actually gained so much traction). At one point I had a friend show a track of mine to someone who had studied audio engineering in university, and they asked to speak to me so they could understand how I was making what I was making. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I was good at it.
At this point, though, I've been so radically run down by the endless demands of my work, which I have complained about here and here, and I barely find myself making anything at all. I used to be so much more of an interesting person; I used to make more, I used to read more, I used to care more about things, and now I find myself largely blanking out in front of the screen during much of my free time because my work and personal commitments swallows all of my energy. I would be lying if I said it didn't bother me.
To be fair, I constantly see artists who are just bad and whose creative endeavours amount to just dabbling make this claim as well (way too many people in the electronic music sphere are capable of only making drone music), and a lot of times it does in fact boil down to a skill issue and placing a lot of blame on "capitalism" to mask their own lack of motivation and talent. But not every eight-hour shift was made equal, and the amount of time I spend at work almost certainly heavily exceeds eight hours per day when you count the unpaid overtime, I'm not really capable of sparing the time to have lunch many (most?) days. The fact that people use the justification to bolster their own failure to accomplish things is not incompatible with the existence of people who are actually burned out as hell on their jobs, barely keeping their head above water on that front, and who would genuinely make things that are worthwhile if their motivation wasn't constantly being sledgehammered.
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