domain:pedestrianobservations.com
magicalkittycat
1d ago
How certain are you that you're actually being attacked and it's not underdog bias?
I know and see plenty of leftists online who say similar things in the way you're saying now. That the powerful conservatives are attacking everyone and that their left wing censorious behavior is justified in defense. They're just as convinced as themselves as you are.
Knowing that people delude themselves into the very same style of bias perceptions you currently hold, knowing that there are studies and evidence suggesting that this happens on both sides of pretty much every topic, how certain are you that you're not just experiencing an underdog bias and failing to see the ways your own side might hold institutional powers unfairly? And how does any answer you give look differently than what a leftist under the bias would give?
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
I've never gotten around to reading the Mars trilogy. Maybe I should, but the one novel I did finish, Aurora, made me want to puke. Now I feel like writing a full review which will be, no points for guessing, highly negative. The following is a Cliff notes version, not spoilered because I literally don't respect it enough to care:
- Humanity sends a generational colony ship to Alpha Centauri. It is arguably the worst designed ship and mission ever conceived.
- The protagonist is a moron, in the metaphorical, literal and technical sense. The novel outright says so, apparently all the humans on board, after several generations of insular degradation, have become dumb as rocks. The exact mechanism remains unclear to me, something something insular dwarfism? They did not have the sense to pack medical or genetic tooling to prevent this.
- The life support and ecology degrade. This is somewhat understandable, closed loops are hard on a smaller than planetary scale. What doesn't make sense is how they are so ridiculously underequipped to tackle it.
- The AI, running on a quantum computer, somehow becomes self aware. Don't ask. It is also about as smart as the protagonist.
- They get to their destination, land a ship with colonists and minimal environmental protection, and almost everyone sent down dies of a prion illness.
- They just... give up. No robotic follow through, no real attempt to find solutions.
- There's a political schism, the protagonist and half the crew want to go home. The other half stays. As a compromise, both decide to kill themselves, by splitting the available resources.
- You're telling me that a civilization that launched a ship that could cross interstellar distances and survive 170 years is that bad at ISRU? They 100% should be capable of using their existing infrastructure to make durable habitats or asteroid mining. Fuck me with a rusty pole I guess.
- They launch the ship.
- Things go south, the people left behind likely die. The ones on board would die, if Deus Ex Machina in the form of the civilization back on earth finally inventing cryopsleep didn't save their asses.
- They get to Earth, there's no real mechanism to terminate their residual velocity. The novel dodges the issue of AI sapience by having it ride the ship into the Sun.
- Turns out interstellar colonization really is impossible, because the ineffable Earthiness of Earth is that important. Even interplanetary spacers must make pilgrimages back to kiss the dirt or floss their teeth with it, or die I guess.
- The end. Don't try interstellar colonization kids, Mother Earth is all you need, and all you'll get.
The characters are retarded. The tech is woeful. The novel has no redeeming qualities I can think of. It's a morality tale dressed up in a hard-sf frock.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Libertarians are non-entities though, and it would be an odd one if they complained about government grants being cut.
You can be against government grant funding as a concept and be against unconstitutional anti free speech idealogical selection in grant funds if it does exist.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The modern ACLU continues to employ a prominent lawyer who has literally gone on the record supporting banning certain books.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Well if you no longer believe in freedom, ironically that's your free right to do so. American society is powerful enough to withstand anti-American values such as yours as we have been since the foundation of our country.
Far more powerful threats to freedom have tried to take down the constitutional rights, the freedom fighters who don't give up keep pushing it back up.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Oh ok, are you gonna use force to start enforcing free speech rights being targeted by the government now?
For the purpose of discussion I'm just taking his assertions at face value and assuming they're sincere. If you ask me though, I'm cynical enough about academia and the kind of environment it fosters that I don't think it's a given that any of the statements he's made about politics can be assumed to be genuinely held (including this writeup that's attracted so much controversy). It's possible they're all informally coerced in one way or another.
Somebody with a profile like him probably gets harangued by colleagues to "speak up" and "do some good" a lot, and it's not hard for me to believe that making the right mouth sounds is a low enough price for him to pay to keep doing the maths he likes.
I went for a run on Sunday to break in my new runners. I was hoping to do 5k, but I'd barely made it 400 metres when I tripped coming off the footpath and fell over. In the past whenever I've tripped while on a run, I've just gotten back up and kept going, but this time felt different. After getting to my feet and hobbling across the road, for a moment I actually thought I was going to burst into tears from the pain.
I managed to limp home and laid down on the couch for a bit. By the evening my foot and ankle had swelled up like a balloon and I was limping heavily. I tried to keep it elevated when I went to bed, and didn't get much sleep. On Monday morning I was genuinely considered going to the hospital, as I wasn't sure if it was a sprain or a fracture. Fortunately I had a compression sleeve to put on it, and by Monday afternoon the pain had mostly subsided and I could put weight on it. Three days later the swelling is starting to go down, it barely hurts at all and I'm walking normally - but large parts of my foot are covered in dark purple bruises. It's sort of fascinating to look at, actually. I had no idea a sprain could look so dramatic.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
"White America" received its worst ever cultural hostility and abysmal political achievements from the Trump administration
This is...dubious.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
I concur with this. I sing my eldest to sleep every night, and it is consistently one of the happiest experiences I have each day. It's gonna hurt when they get too old for it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I was in a half price books this weekend and saw a couple about my age looking at Anathem. I mentioned it was my favorite Stephenson book; they ended up buying it.
On the way out, I learned they’d come to the store looking for Dungeon Crawler Carl. I could only wish them luck.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
FtttG
1d ago
The other scandal.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
1d ago
(Un)fortunately I am a pretty standard-issue Rootless Cosmopolitan, so I guess I’ll have to make do with my cat, for now!
Sloot
1d ago
There was also when Nature or some other large, prestigious journal (might had been Science itself) yes_chad.jpg'd it in reaffirming that, indeed, protecting and/or advancing the interests of Vulnerable Groups takes precedence over impartial truth-seeking. It's not political nor bias-inducing, of course; it's called being a decent scientist. Whether it be on Reddit or on here we discussed this one when it happened, but I couldn't find the discussion upon a brief searching.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Having kids is pretty awesome and generally brightens my day, no matter how retarded things get out in the real world.
Lorian_Aristedes
1d ago
I didn’t even see that controversy, I was hooked by the insane statements on green lighting LLM use and how complaints around this had ‘classist and ableist undertones’. What a shit show.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
1d ago
Well, it’s a solution!
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
1d ago
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Well, you’re not wrong.
It’s a tricky proposition, though. I rarely have the will to actually bother engaging here, and the pushback I’d doubtlessly get from pushing unpopular talking points creates a very real risk that I’d burn out shortly after making the initial post (which, on a related note, is why I still have 29 other responses from my last post that I really should have responded to)- and since dropping top-line drive-by posts is bad form, I typically figure that not commenting at all is the least-bad option available.
TowardsPanna
1d ago
Tilt your head back and laugh at how perfectly retarded everything is.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
1d ago
No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Certainly, my enemies never did.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.
This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.
Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Uh, what conservative science gets government grants?
Surely people are Goodhart'ing it, but either they're not very good at it yet or they're not trying very hard. The first two math department heads I looked up, at a large top-50 research university, were at [edit: approximately] 1.5 (for a relatively young guy, to be fair) and [edit: approximately] 2.5.
It's a metric that's somewhat designed to counter Goodharting of simpler "publication count" metrics. Divide your research up into "Least Publishable Unit" chunks, and you get more papers, but then the people who want to cite you end up only citing the most relevant chunk and killing your citations-per-paper.
[edit: the "Formatting help" link says you need to double up the ~ character on both sides of text to create a strikethrough, and the preview text rendered fine, but in the thread my pair of single tildes turned into a strikethrough...]
Should it matter? "I was just following orders" usually isn't a defense for actively helping the enemy. Would Tao be willing to go full MAGA if it meant Trump would give him funding back?
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