domain:pedestrianobservations.com
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1m ago
Working my way through Bret Easton Ellis works (have already read American Psycho and Imperial Bedrooms in the past). Finished The Informers, started and put aside Glamorama (insufferable main characters for the first few chapters and I can't imagine spending 400+ pages with them), and now about halfway through Lunar Park.
FistfullOfCrows
9m ago
Eh those kinda edits would be fine, but I've seen how people abuse editing on reddit.
aqouta
17m ago
Not allowing edits would be an extreme form of discrimination against my human right to correct egregious typos.
aqouta
18m ago
Sure, there are definitely bits and jokes to be told about biden. It's just a lot easier for something like the onion to do so in a headline with a couple paragraphs of puns. Southpark has to commit more to bits, most episodes have something like two plot lines going on and unless they're devoting one to presidential politics it's not super easy to just have a scene where the president is doing something. Family guy with it's reference thing can do that but south park is more situational humor so you need to devote like a whole b-plot to the president, and that's a harder sell for Biden than Trump.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
20m ago
Like Corvos, I like how you can use AI as a sounding board and maybe get information that’s useful back. I take it with a grain of salt — I notice details in most responses that don’t match the actual facts — but occasionally I’ve gotten some great “deep cut” information on very specific topics that either was sourced to a link I could verify or started me on a course to verify the claim myself.
I don’t really chat with AI as a person, though I do use very human-like language similar to how I write on the motte. I do know people who’ve explored chatting with AI as a person, giving it a name, telling it about daily details to see what it’ll say. But I don’t relate to AI in that way.
I’d compare using AI for brainstorming to the “active placebo” version of rubber duck debugging: it’s a good excuse to actually write out what you’re thinking, with the possibility of something valuable coming back at you, so you have incentive to be detailed. It’s happened to me more than once that I’ve typed out a technical or personal problem as an AI prompt and figured out the right solution in the process of writing it.
erwgv3g34
29m ago
I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."
The problem with waiting until marriage is that Chad, who has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him, is not going to put up with that. And women only want Chad.
The only way this works if you have a third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being, such as her father or her brother, in control of her sexual choices.
GoofyGoose
36m ago
So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.
I agree that there is a lot of information in reports of subjective experience, I think most people would agree. Some people are mistakenly believed to disagree with this just because they believe that it is easy to be led astray by such information.
Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here? I have never tried to read them, and my knowledge comes only from popular depictions (which seem to be unfair, tbh). I did read The Denial of Death, which made quite a bit of sense to me. What’s the best way to learn about the work of Freud or Jung for someone who is worried about it being just woo but willing to give it a chance?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
39m ago
I've been reading His Broken Body, a book about the ongoing schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, based on someone here recommending it. It's been good, though seeing the differences of opinion laid out I certainly get the impression that the churches will never be united again. Not terribly surprising, but given that part of the pitch of the book is how to heal the divide, it does seem like that part might be underwhelming.
I've also recently picked up a copy of Stranger In A Strange Land, since I've enjoyed the other Heinlein works I've read. Hopefully this one is as good as his other books, but I'm only a few pages in.
wayfarer
42m ago
as far as I'm concerned Sandy Hook was a hoax
I am curious: why you think so?
a single person can't offset enough energy their entire lives to make up for a jet airplane doing a single cross Atlantic hop.
how that is related to whether global warming is real or not?
they nailed Alex's ass on a technicality
AFAIK he did much to nail themself, his incompetent lawyer helped obviously there was thorough lack of sympathy to him (part for valid reasons, part for invalid in my opinion)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
48m ago
I’m a convinced Christian but rather skeptical of “retvrners” mostly because I don’t see a living faith per say (granted this isn’t everyone and im an outsider on a lot of it) I don’t see talk of praying or charity in the name of God, or attempts to live out the faith. It’s got rather a zombie feel to it, as though the person is going through motions and pep talking themselves into it and into doing the trappings but without the faith behind it.
erwgv3g34
55m ago
I don't care that it's not fantasy, I've always believed that Animorphs would be a hit if they played it completely straight as a R rated war story aimed at the YA/tumblr audience. Maybe age everyone up to college if the child soldier thing is too violent for TV.
r!Animorphs: The Reckoning already exists; you would just have to get the rights.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
58m ago
There's a major confounder here that prevents a straightforward liberal vs conservative spin on things: "Science of Reading". As the now-famous (in education circles) Sold a Story podcast helped reveal, a lot of American teachers got suckered into a new teaching methodology for reading that just doesn't work as well (oversimplified: a de-emphasis on phonics). This spread in liberal circles partly through network effects (e.g. the Columbia Teacher's College was a major promoter). It just so happens that Mississippi as part of their reforms made sure to emphasize better practices and follow the neuroscience and good quality research.
Contextually, though I could elaborate, one of the most prominent examples of the trendy but poorly-backed programs was originally focused on reading interventions. However, these interventions sometimes did more harm than good. Infamously you'd get some teachers actively encouraging students to guess an unknown difficult word based purely on context clues and pictures. While that's a good strategy for, say, a high school student encountering a genuinely rare or unknown word, it's a terrible strategy for kids first learning how to read encountering a word that they eventually will need to know. Furthermore, one of those intervention programs had a classifier that was objectively broken. They did a study and found that their assessment of whether a student was actually one who needed help (behind level) or not performed little better than a coin flip compared to more established methods... but kept using it! Ironically, this low-effectiveness intervention program was usually the one well-meaning reading advocates at the time would adopt (or even adapt for general learners, similarly unhelpful there). Notably, Mississippi not only required individualized help for students behind but also required that help follow better, more scientifically validated methods, and so very specifically dodged this issue that plagued the rest of the country.
cjet79
1hr ago
Ave Xia Rem Y (A Very Cliche Xianxia Harem Story!)
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15193/ave-xia-rem-y
The title doesn't do it justice. It is very cliche in many ways, but it does the tropes honestly. And it can also subvert the tropes in fun ways. Angry young masters have been converted to friends and allies. The powerful masters that rule over everyone can be all too human in their flaws and prejudices. Characters in the story grow and have motivations separate from the main character.
Its a great rationalist story in the sense of having rational characters. Idiot ball plot points are rare. The main character is absolutely not a murder hobo, but instead a doctor and one of the kinder cultivators around. It's easy to like him and want him to succeed.
Yeah, I don’t doubt that’s a big part of the concern. But also, that’s the sort of thing that some say as an excuse — “chuh, no, I’m just looking for validation and attention online to make me feel good about myself without actually having to be in a position of connection or vulnerability” is not exactly a great thing to say about yourself, even if it’s true. I can certainly understand safety concerns about meeting strange men, but having those concerns while continuing to swipe and even to mock the people who are trying to connect with you is simply vicious, based on bad-faith.
The real truth about dating apps is that they’re good for window shopping — and people who like impulse purchases — and not much good for much else, though people do get lucky in the same way people used to get lucky at a bar or a club. Or I got lucky at the college atheist org meetup. (Yeah, really. The history of my romantic life has some wild twists and turns around my spiritual convictions, and not a one of my girlfriends didn’t have something to do with religion, either positively or negatively.)
But the purpose of the system is what it does, and not only the purpose but actually the intended function of the swipe-based matching apps is to facilitate hookups, not deep connections.
A big part of the problem for a lot of older guys seems to be that women with a realistic sense of romance and a strong drive to find a real partner tend to choose early, and confidently. The rest are waiting for something exciting to happen, or just trying to “enjoy life as it comes” same as young men do.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
Even Intel N100 is good enough for Chrome/Office/Netflix and you can build a pocketable fanless mini-PC with one.
Tenaz
1hr ago
People are constantly trying to change their own beliefs, usually with little success.
I am pretty much constantly in a state of procrastination-fueled stress. I have learned, hundreds of times over, that work is not only the way out of that stress, but is also in the moment more enjoyable than continuing to procrastinate. Yet I still don't believe it. I would pay virtually any amount of money just to convince myself of something I already know for a fact is true.
The same goes for my religious beliefs. I've seen prayer and fasting lead to big results over and over yet still don't truly believe they work.
Really I think what's happening is that it's easy for reason to come around to emotional beliefs, and very difficult to do the reverse. When people "fake it until they make it," converting to religions they say are strictly speaking false, they're recognizing on some deep level the good that comes from those religions.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
Hanson’s arguments emphasize that there are some emotions and thoughts that we are not fully aware of because it is better not to know.
...Yes, that was the foundation of Freud's entire body of thought. Jung was a close associate of Freud's in the early part of his career. He was intimately aware of all these issues. (Hanson thinking that he's providing an original insight here is a bit like someone walking up to an engineer who's knee deep in troubleshooting a critical production issue and asking them, "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?")
Although the problems of introspection are extremely complex, it's also clear that people are able to successfully introspect on certain things at least some of the time. Otherwise, they would never be able to accurately report their own emotional states, they would never be able to tell you any of their stable preferences or dispositions, they would never be able to accurately report on biographical memories, and in short, it's hard to see how interpersonal interaction could ever function at all. So, keeping in mind that introspection will sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, we have to simply dive in and get started, and address individual problems as they arise.
There are certain well known biases in the MBTI community, in particular it's common for people to mistype themselves as INxx types because these types are seen as the most "intellectual" (which is, well, one way of putting it I suppose. Personally I think that the INxx types all represent distinct flavors of autism spectrum disorders, or at least they represent personality types that are "on the way" to autism spectrum disorders). But there are many other cases where people are honest about their own traits and honest about their own strengths and weaknesses.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
I come back to a thread after a few days only to see a string of user self deleting their posts, random replies to them still hanging. I guess I could just run a scraper slamming the site for every single reply so they can't be removed from posterity, but that shouldn't be the solution.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
To some extent - like if someone starts a prayer life they might receive signal graces and start to have the "proof" they need to believe for real. But if those signal graces don't come, or if they do but they do not lead to a deeper intellectual understanding, then doubt and distrust will quickly set in.
wemptronics
2hr ago
don't allow edits
Ruinous! Posting functions should trend towards forgiving so as to encourage contribution from would-be or marginal posters. Locking people into mistakes that demand more clarifications might be tedious.
don't allow deletion
More reasonable. Ideally users can delete their profiles and history, but the contents of their posts remain up. Maybe an edit lock that only goes into effect after so many days would make the most sense.
Which part is the major issue? Is it mass deletion or user edits bamboozling your replies?
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
2hr ago
I’d be in
Let’s use Sleeper and try for 12t and SF
But I’m open to anything - anything except using any other app but Sleeper tbh
It’s a gambling filled abomination of an app now but it’s still 10/10 for fantasy imo
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Accepting a religious belief you don't actually hold may lead to embracing it, though.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
This would be a request for @ZorbaTHut, but while it's annoying when people go on deletion sprees (and we have banned people for it), I don't think we'd want to prohibit deleting a post you had second thoughts about.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
To be clear, historically Catholic schools were staffed by nuns(unmarried women) and in the United States other schools were staffed by literal teenaged girls(unmarried women). Now high school teachers require more subject matter expertise(and this probably extends into many middle school grades/subjects) so it seems like this was always a college educated job. Agreed that even the taliban allows preadolescent girls to go to school with no special conditions, and that modern special ed, flawed as it is, is genuinely a skilled profession that is likely an improvement over previous systems. But the fact remains that a bright sixteen year old can teach a 'normal' third grade classroom, elementary school teaching as a career track- and at least a large portion of the administration growth in schools- is about pulling middle class women who love children into careers. Absent that ideological push 'elementary school teacher' would be similar to 'lunchlady' or whatever, where a college degree isn't necessary.
It's also important to note that elementary school used to be much shorter, with less demand for teachers. My own parents remember kindergarten being treated as advanced preschool(and regularly skipped), with no such thing as preK and first grade having a loosey-goosey attitude to attendance, sometimes first and second grades were combined. While not doing this obviously requires more teachers it's not clear that it's better.
Any suggestions for books to learn more about the modern conflicts in Israel, especially wrt Gaza? I figure that requires some amount of covering history, but my actual objective is to be able to understand the modern state of affairs, rather than to understand history for its own sake. Maybe 2-3 suggestions, to capture a range of political viewpoints.
Podcasts/blogs would be OK too, but I'd rather books.
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