domain:thezvi.wordpress.com
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2m ago
Quantumfreakonomics
3m ago
Lol yeah. Have fun locking your capital up and missing literally everything.
charlesf
6m ago
Anything like this that still exists on the internet has to be protected from "the web at large". These sorts of things worked in the past due to the filtering of all internet users for for smarter, more tech savvy, PC owners. Anything today that gains a reputation as someplace quality discussions might be taking place will be face a number of dangers from people and groups who would have been filtered out in the old system: bots, paid shills, culture war crusaders, and people who interact with the internet entirely through their smart phone. This has forced the older, higher quality users onto largely private Discord servers, Onion sites, or fora that otherwise apply a filtering mechanism locally, either through vigorous manual enforcement, like this place, invitation only membership, paid accounts, or other equally effective systems. While I don't think its been explicitly investigated or analyzed, I think its largely the case now that the dangers that the new cohorts of internet users present to thoughtful discussion spaces significantly outweigh the potential losses of smaller numbers of new quality contributors.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7m ago
on average
If we're only concerned with the most positive possible outcome, I guess you're saving for retirement by buying lottery tickets.
AvocadoPanic
8m ago
Aren't
people think that if we don't deport 50 million brown people the country is doomed
and
people think we're sliding into fascism and non-white people are going to be put in camps soon
the same people, if they think both are a good thing?
shoeonfoot
16m ago
Some people think we're sliding into fascism and non-white people are going to be put in camps soon.
Other people think that if we don't deport 50 million brown people the country is doomed.
It's good to be a sensible centrist.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18m ago
Good post. I agree way too many people take their wishy-washy vibes, put them on a chart and then zoom off to infinity.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
18m ago
Even if you make enough money, working in a blue collar job all day means you hurt all evening, which is going to interfere with physics. Einstein may have overly romanticized plumbing.
shoeonfoot
20m ago
it isn't up for debate that there are massive differences on average between the kind of child OP could have (if not infertile) and the kind up for adoption.
Everything is up for debate. They might adopt Rob Henderson.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
24m ago
The main thing summer jobs were supposed to teach middle class kids when I was that age was how much low-skill jobs sucked and thus why you should go to college.
roystgnr
33m ago
Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts
That's true for some people, but if you're smart enough to be an auto-didact, you're probably smart enough to have noticed just how bad most people are at simply reading. The biggest difference between you and the dumb kid isn't that you had more exposure to texts, it's that he had more exposure to tests - in theory there's at least some level of verification, even in the liberal arts, that he picked up what he was supposed to from the lectures and reading (at least from the Cliff's Notes). If you swear you did all the reading, you might be much smarter than him, but you also might be much dumber, and we've got no quick way to tell except to take your word for it, and even people who skipped the readings on game theory and mechanism design can intuit why that's not good enough.
In practice, those tests are also increasingly not good enough, and for some reason even the average human who can understand why "I'm self-reporting how good I was at learning" is bad still manages to get lost before they figure out that "We're self-reporting how good we are at teaching" is also bad, so the problem may just continue to get worse, at least until nobody respects college degrees as credentials much more than they respect high school degrees. A degree from the right college name at least may still certify that you had an SAT score in their range and didn't drop out for 4 years, but that's a really expensive SAT test; much safer to be in a field where you can take the PE Exam or grind LeetCode or something on top of getting your diploma.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
36m ago
It never made sense to me in art, literature, history, or other liberal arts. Those things can be easily learned by simply reading tge texts, or practicing drawing or writing. If I had a kid who wanted to be a writer, im not sure I’d make him go through university— in fact it’s a waste of time.
There used to be (and still is in some areas) a long, rich tradition of the humanities, passed down throughout the centuries via the academy and other institutions of knowledge generation.
This tradition and gatekeeping it is crucial, and keeping the chain of humanities alive is in my opinion crucial as well. If you just let the masses go at it as they will, art becomes diluted and we stop caring about the old great works of art. As we're seeing now...
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
38m ago
Friend, mate, old buddy, old pal - learn a new song? "Righties are dumb and smelly and low-class and have too many bastard kids and are way too sympathetic to the low-grade low-IQ blacks and browns who have too many bastard kids" is getting boring now.
Ok come on now. @AlexanderTurok is biased against many right-wing folks as he has admitted, just like 80%+ of us here are biased against the left, progressives, wokes, etc etc. The entire point of this site is to allow us to discuss across ideological divides.
Personally I think this post was fine and shows a willingness to take the feedback from the mods he was given earlier.
While it's a bit of a personal attack, I do think this is a interesting frame - should the elites not care about the working class? So far in America they have (at least nominally), seems like folks nowadays are sort of turning against that. I am curious to see where elite consensus moves on this.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
40m ago
Interesting post! I agree that all things being equal, a summer job is a great way to spend time. I did a couple summer jobs, but also spent a few summers just playing video games nonstop from sunrise to well past sundown. Personally I think if I was forced to get a summer job every summer, I would've developed a lot more virtue overall.
I'm curious overall - do you not see a benefit to being in touch with the working class whatsoever? To understanding how the other half lives, so to speak?
Or are you just saying that being in touch with the working class isn't good strictly in the sense of getting into an Ivy League school?
Magusoflight
42m ago
I have found I’m a blackpilled doomer in many ways. I have Noticed that I am always quick to be pessimistic and assume the worst, even though i am frequently wrong. I think im just a generally more anxious person though, and am probably an odd conservative sample
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
43m ago
I’m not disagreeing with any of that. I’m fully aware that the people I’m talking about start their instruments at a young age. That doesn’t mean they don’t still need a bunch more instruction and practice later on.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
54m ago
Conservative, think I'm much happier with my life, but not because of any kind of optimism towards our political future. I place about a 20% probability on a default and/or civil war in the next 20 years, but Christ is King so who cares? I'm American though so no thoughts of leaving. I'll die with this ship singing a song of praise that I was born on this land.
(Conservative happiness may not be dependent on optimism about material prospects.)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
56m ago
The problem of ensuring that they’ve interfaced enough with the real world to prevent them from spiraling into the delusions of Pure Political Theory™️ is a very real one, but I’m not convinced that making them flip burgers or pick strawberries for a year is the optimal way to achieve that end.
That's not my primary aim, though it may be a secondary benefit. I think the major benefit of working a job is developing independence early on in teenagers. They get money of their own, they have obligations outside the home, they have the necessity (and therefore the right) to travel outside the home.
Below, and always, we are talking about the problems of young people dating. Summer jobs are the number one solution! Give them money, get them out of the house, encourage them to have independence from their parents outside of structured and scheduled "day cares." Give them the means and the reason to get a cheap used car. Give them the ability to take someone on a date without asking mom for the money.
That said:
Musicians can actually, you know, improve past what they’ve learned by age 12. That’s when serious musicians start grinding, learning new techniques, expanding their knowledge of theory, etc. My high school’s band program (of which I was a part) was small and pathetic compared to wealthier schools in our district, but a number of the musician kids I knew even then were spending a lot of time practicing to get good enough to potentially pursue it further into college and beyond. A disproportionate number of them, as I’m sure you can imagine, were Asian. Far from the Tiger Mom caricature — toiling away miserably at an instrument they hate in order to farm Extracurricular Points — most of them seemed to genuinely love the opportunity to get better at creating beautiful music.
I don't think a part time summer job excludes hobbies and interests outside of work. Spending part of your day stacking boxes, or mowing grass, or hanging drywall doesn't exclude going home and playing the violin for an hour. The tiny, hyper-talented fringe minority of 14 year olds who have the kind of talent that has been identified for nurture by that time, sure, give them a scholarship to some music program. But that's maybe a few dozen kids across the country that we're talking about, they're completely irrelevant to the question of "should kids get summer jobs?"
I think our society does still need a basically aristocratic class of people who are afforded the luxury of focusing purely on pursuits of the mind.
So I guess my question is, how large should that class be? Because it seems intuitively obvious that it should max out at the 2-5% of the population easily identified by standardized testing regimes.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
57m ago
The issue with viciously competitive games is that they are attractive mostly to viciously competitive players. A game that is designed with "play to win" in mind doesn't necessarily accommodate those who "play to play".
roystgnr
59m ago
Biden was at least aware of and got on board with most of the radicalism. When Biden was a 2020 candidate, he was the sole voice of sanity in the Democratic primary on the question of whether the Presidency could govern like a kingship or whether it had to obey the constitution, but when Biden wanted to govern like a king and the Supreme Court stymied him he went on camera to decry the decision. Shortly after, he explained that "this is not a normal court"; the context on that also included his annoyance that the killjoys wouldn't even let Harvard violate anti-discrimination law at the expense of Asians.
Maybe he governed like a radical because senility made him fuzzy headed or easier to manipulate, but he was at least receptive enough to any manipulation that his hypothetical puppet masters had no problem letting him go on the air to speak for them afterward.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
It’s not just looking good for an employer. The main benefit is that while study-maximizing might help you get into a better school, it’s not very good if the lack of work-ethic, time management, prioritization, or working with other people to solve a problem mean that you end up failing or underperforming because you lack the skills to capitalize on the opportunity given to go to the elite school. It’s the difference between optimization to get the first date and optimization to get a fiancé. You can absolutely find advice about how to get through the dating app grind — and it is important to do so. But that advice doesn’t necessarily work when the game changes and now you want to keep the relationship. Getting into Yale is a skillset unrelated to staying in Yale. If you spend all your time training to get in, but none learning the skills that allow you to thrive in an environment where no one is around to give you the step by step instructions on how to do everything and stay around to see that you actually did it.
And actually this is the thing that I’m seeing lots of high school and college educators complain about with the younger generation. They don’t have the skill of doing things without being told, they don’t have the ability to work ahead on projects. And a lot of them don’t know how to problem solve when there are no explicit instructions on how to do that. As I said above,im not convinced that only a stint as a fast food drone will teach those kinds of soft skills. In fact sports and volunteer work can do so as well. But unless kids learn those skills to do things without the adults walking them through every step, they cannot possibly do well in college and probably even after college.
georgioz
1hr ago
If your point was that rationalists are deontological in practice, why did your first post in this thread express confusion as to why rationalists like the pithy phrase expressing this rule, not a useless utilitarian tautology?
Because they pretend to be utilitarian, but are in practice quite dogmatic. This Sagan's quip is actually a good example of that, because it is self-defeating paradox. If taken literally, it should destroy itself. It is a very poor choice for some deontological rule for a wannabe utilitarian. There are much better rules - e.g. give 10% of your income to charity.
07mk gave the rationalist answer to why prefer the shorter version.
I think 07mk did a pretty good job for why rationalist should ditch the whole sentence. He pretends, that the shortened version is somehow better, because it gives less space for individual whims and preferences. But he also basically admits, that it should not be applied all the time - of course subject to individual whims and preferences. How is that better? I focused more on the paradox side, but it does not mean that 07mk's explanation is satisfying in any way.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
From the little I've seen of stories like this, it seems to go: "hospital hits you with incredibly huge bill, you go "nope", the insurance company goes "nope" and you get on to the special department the hospital has to negotiate "okay let's pay something reasonable", and only the honest and bewildered try to pay the incredibly huge bill" as hospitals will try and charge you for everything with the expectation that "nobody will really pay this, it's haggling time".
HereAndGone
1hr ago
I mean, yep to all that. It reminds me of the case I mentioned recently, where the girlfriend of the "head-to-toe tattooed drug addict samurai sword murderer with crazy eyes and a smirk on his face" guy gave a character reference to the court of how he was a loving and affectionate partner and father.
Yeah, despite all the evidence of reality, some people steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the truth.
Ah, noted. Regardless of topic?
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