domain:science.org
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
22hr ago
I don't have a creative bone in my body, but I can read the codes well enough to put together crushingly boring designs in infinite variety. Presumably a person capable of reading the DSM would fare no worse.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
22hr ago
That's a little bit reductive; there are a lot of things on that "or" list, some of which are perfectly fine. Deducing that I have one of the traits on that "or" list from my significant walks to the supermarket would be correct (specifically, I don't have a driver's licence; I'm absent-minded and don't think I'd make a great driver).
2rafa
22hr ago
Ryanair is a meme. Their CEO, O’Leary, is a kind of pantomime villain, always willing to bait the press in a symbiotic relationship because, as he knows, the passengers always come back.
It is never worth flying a budget airline in Europe unless it’s a last minute flight (when the legacy carriers jack up prices to accommodate urgent and unplanned business or personal travel; in part this is because of the unusual way intra-European business class works where the seats stay the same, they just don’t sell the middle seat, which means that they can sell as many business class seats as they want up to the day of departure).
Book in advance and regular airlines (which are bad enough) are barely more expensive once you account for all the fees, the fact that you’re going to a normal airport instead of some dump 90 minutes away from the city with cheap landing fees, the psychological burden of encountering one’s fellow passengers etc.
2rafa
22hr ago
When it was founded all of the main founders were either libertarians or techno-anarchist types. The ideological evolution of Huffman, Ohanian and so on happened later.
2rafa
23hr ago
Reddit’s financial history is pretty interesting. Yes, it lost money for 20 years, but Condé Nast (or rather AP, the parent company) kept selling off small pieces to VC firms and other investors, which meant that both (a) they didn’t lose any money on it and (b) the book value of their stake kept increasing.
When the company webt public in 2024 they made $2bn from the IPO; they still own about 25% of the company. And throughout their 18 year ownership, even though Reddit didn’t make money, Condé Nast’s losses on it were minimal as they slowly sold the company off piecemeal.
roche
23hr ago
Has anyone here toyed with the idea that they may be too weird to belong to any community?
So far as my personality goes, it's a mish-mash of everything, and it's spread so thin that I generally only have one narrow means of connection with any given person. Back in school for example, I had a reputation for being the quiet kid who'd chime in out of nowhere and tell a great joke. This won me enough reputation that people would invite me to hang out, and I'd have absolutely nothing to say because I couldn't relate to them on a fundamental level. Actually, in the 6th grade when I was placed in a Spanish class full of hispanics and blacks, that was the first time I felt that socializing at school was easy. Before long I was even making race jokes and had my whole table cracking up. I'm half-Anglo half-Italian genetically, but I can never socialize with other whites unless they're stupid. Yet even that fails once you get beyond jokes.
It's strange. I feel like a genetic experiment. I have all the emotions of a person, the same interests, the desire to contribute and belong. But it's like a machine where all the wires are hopelessly crossed. And I'm turning 27 so this is a pressing concern. A life of isolated achievement or idleness isn't necessarily a nightmare, but I'd dearly appreciate knowing what's going on and whether or not it's even necessary. Perhaps it's some strange childhood trauma, who knows? My uniqueness once seemed to be a blessing, but now it feels very much like a curse.
BahRamYou
23hr ago
I've heard from anonymous sources that there's a whole service economy for the ultrarich, based around this sort of thing. The basic idea is that their time is very valuable, so they'll pay astronomical prices to avoid ever having to wait or be distracted by petty bullshit. The extreme example might be having a private jet/helicopter to help them travel faster, but it exists for all sorts of minor things too. So they might have a personal assistant who's job is to cue up just one episode of their favorite TV show, then slowly turn down the lights and help them sleep. or whatever else they want.
Obviously some of that is a privilege that only the very wealthy can afford. But it does seem like, to some extent, we should be able to pay for services that help middle class folks do that too. it's odd that we can't. If anything, it seems to be going the opposite direction, where like, even if you pay for premium, it will still insist on showing us adds and doing that sort of attention-grabbing addictive bullshit. It feels like I'm going to a restaurant and the owner is telling us "yeah I don't care how much you pay, you must sit in the smoking section and smoke at least one cigarette. i'm not letting you enjoy my food without a little nicotine on the side."
Ok so you're an employer and you see an employee of yours on the internet in front of millions saying things that you view as disgusting and horrible and that you don't want in your business. Are you only allowed to fire them if they mention your company during it?
That's how it currently works. If I find homosexuality, transgenderism or Islam disgusting or horrible, I still can't fire a worker for that. I don't know if I could even fire them for activism in favor of surrogacy, even though that's not a protected class.
I never said that, but yes from the perspective of the business owner they do lose some rights from anti discrimination laws. That is just a fact.
Ok, so I'm saying we already live in an authoritarian society, and that it's odd to criticize someone as "authoritarian", when they claim authority should be wielded in a different way.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
23hr ago
Really? Based on the recent ACX alpha school review, I was under the impression that cash for books does work.
As far as I know Fryer has not done any super-long-term studies of the impact of his experiments, but he did look at the mid-term effects. After the “read books for $$s” study ended he followed the test and control group for what happened to their reading habits when they were not getting paid. He found, in contradiction to concerns about loss of internal motivation, that the test group continued to read more than the control group.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
Which studies do you mean?
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
23hr ago
But America is widely diversified. There is not a single corporate/religious/etc other private entity with that power.
America is a highly centralized modern managerial nation.
Try living your life after having been deemed a politically liability whom no bank will touch and come back to me.
But you don't even need society wide nets to ruin a person, just industry wide. Remember when James Damore got fired and people tried to prevent him even getting any job back? Because I remember.
People always do this dance of pointing to some Emmanuel Goldstein that survived cancellation because they can't actually name the ones that were successfully ruined, since they disappeared from the internet since.
I personally know half a dozen such people. The modern world and its secular Cathedral does have excommunication. I know so.
phailyoor
23hr ago
Kind of shocking how hands off Reddit was given how much of an SJW the founder is right now. I guess he was willing to shut up when he had to, but once he got the network effects, he was ready to push the agenda.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
23hr ago
even the mystic needs to “crucify his flesh” and “make no provision for the flesh”
I guess it must be acknowledged that there is strong (and historically violent) disagreement on this question, I align more with Orthodox teachings and the concept of theosis, whose associated ascetic practice is not a rejection of the flesh but specifically a transformation and integration of the body as a temple.
humans are not as innately reasonable as they are innately animal
Again I do not see these as opposites as you do. Reason is but the conscious manifestation and structuration of our wants.
Humans aren’t designed to plot out in their mind how they will feel in five years if they continue to smoke and then imagine it saliently with excellent theory of mind and then decide to ignore the urge to have the sugar because they remember this mental image they developed.
I wholly disagree. Humans are designed specifically to do that, imperfectly. And my evidence is that they do in fact do this and have done so for as long as we can tell.
I do not believe as you do that culture is an innovation. Only that it's technological manifestations have evolved over time.
We always told stories and always made society.
phailyoor
1d ago
How to overcome Reddit’s massive network effect?
Convince Elon to buy Reddit and merge it with X. Other than that Reddit-like sites have past their peak and if you wanted to compete with them it would be a viscous fight for a shrinking pie.
phailyoor
1d ago
Instead, I'm probably going to have to give in and start joining discord voicechats.
I'm quite surprised. Discord voicechat is just something so different from Reddit that I can't imagine it as the first replacement.
aldomilyar
1d ago
I feel like optimization culture has pushed into hobbies, though. There's way more concern around 'performing' at even casual activities
aldomilyar
1d ago
Also the impulse to add professional/monetary incentives to everything mean that the second you stop heading upwards in the rankings it's kind of depressing.
I was a pretty good Rugby player growing up, got into the professional academy system and ultimately washed out at 20. I then stopped playing Rugby since just kinda hanging around being an amateur felt depressing as hell. This trend's happened a lot with the guys who went through the process, compared to previous generations where really the entire 'pinnacle' of the sport for the vast majority of people was just playing for the suburb's best team and a career would be ping-ponging between grades for 10-15 years until injury or life got in the way.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
And that makes me a little sad. Discord is fine, but I can't help but notice that I'm going dow the same path that so many repressed 3rd worlders do and resorting to discussion on unsearcheable, ungovernable silos. For all the sins of social media, it really does-- or at least did serve as a modern public square. And I'll miss the idea (if not necessarily the reality) that the debates I participated in could be found, and heard, by a truly public audience.
I want to feel sympathy for you, because I know how demoralising it is to lose a source like that - but that's because I went through it a decade ago. Social media has not represented the public since, it has been a variety of attempts to control the public. I guess I can appreciate that you finally see the problem.
roche
1d ago
I think this allows the kinds of actual work that used to happen, especially when you also remove the constant commentary of social media either encouraging or blasting everything and creating performance anxiety and creating inertia.
IMO it's not even really fair or appropriate to say, "Yeah you could scroll Tiktok, but you could also choose to learn origami! Or write a story!"
Because Tiktok (and recreational drugs, high stimulus TV, and porn) exist on a sort of "alternate mental plane" where 99% of reality is irrelevant. Like, the other day I was working on mindfulness and it was storming, and I crouched down at my kitchen window then to look up at the sky. I was shocked to realize I hadn't done this since childhood, where I'd actually tangle myself up in the living room curtain, get comfy, and just watch it rain for a while. And the thing is, even if I somehow had the idea to do this while I'm overstimulated, I know it wouldn't hit very hard. Kids aren't fascinated by their environments because they pay attention, but rather because their nervous systems are relaxed enough to pick up on things we can't.
Anyway, what's clear is these two ways of perceiving the world are incompatible. The "Gen Z stare" happens because the mental pace of the zeitgeist right now is breakneck, so teenagers have to get stoned before work and keep their air pods in just to make it bearable.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
I did pass them via cramming stuff instead of developing any real mastery which was stupid of me.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
1d ago
I missed that part. Commercial insurance coverage should be enough by a single party to cover this so I don't know why the judge went out of their way to punish the yellow light driver.
I caught my first Ryanair flight, heading down from Edinburgh to London, and holy shit.
I didn't have very high expectations (and I think I got scammed by paying for extra baggage), but the experience was abysmal.
The initial point of failure was informational. Upon checking in online, the website presented me with a series of warnings, escalating in their shade of digital red, that as a non-EU citizen (despite possessing a UK residency permit, a distinction the system seemed unable to parse), a printed, physical boarding pass was a non-negotiable requirement. Failure to produce one at the airport, it was implied, would result in some combination of fines, exile, or possibly being sacrificed to the god of baggage fees.
This sent me on a quest through the Edinburgh airport for a Ryanair helpdesk, a quest which revealed that the designated helpdesk was less a "desk with helpful people" and more a "suggestion of a desk, currently unburdened by the presence of staff." (This is presuming someone's half eaten lunch doesn't count). The system, it seemed, had a single point of failure, and had failed.
An airport assistance employee who, taking pity, escorted me through a staff channel to a hidden check-in line. Here, the ground-truth epistemology contradicted the website's stated doctrine: no, of course I didn't need a physical pass. The dire warnings were, apparently, just a sort of generalized, non-binding advisory. This was my first lesson: the Ryanair informational layer operates on a different plane of reality from its physical one.
It only got worse. After getting to the terminal, I found myself boarding a perfectly normal airport bus. Tad bit crowded, when I got there, but no biggie.
And then people kept coming. And then more showed up. The bus showed no signs of readying for departure. Yet more people kept being shoved in, and you can tell that even the legendary British tolerance for minor inconveniences was taxed beyond its limit. We were semi-apologetically informed that there was only one bus operational today, which didn't really make things better.
People were loudly asking if they couldn't just walk to the plane, others made comparisons to being sardines in a can, and I added my own take by simply questioning why they didn't just do two trips if they had one bus?
Why didn’t they? One might hypothesize that the marginal cost of a second five-minute bus journey (fuel, driver time) was calculated to be greater than the cumulative disutility experienced by 180 passengers compressed into a human brick for thirty minutes. Or perhaps it's a form of signaling: you wanted the cheapest flight, and this is what The Cheapest Flight feels like. You are not a customer to be courted; you are a parcel to be shipped, and parcels do not have preferences about packing density.
Eventually, the boarding staff ceased their efforts, which had begun to resemble viral videos of shinkansen "pushers" in Tokyo, though with less efficiency and more audible sighing. Whether this was due to hitting a hard physical limit or a soft limit on potential passenger revolt remains an open question. The ten-minute journey to the plane was a miasma of condensation and shared misery, followed by another ten minutes of waiting in the poorly ventilated bus at the foot of the stairs before we were permitted to ascend.
The aircraft itself was a masterclass in apophatic design. An angry wasp, and just about as comfortable to ride. It was defined not by what it had, but by what it had aggressively stripped away. The cabin was a symphony in hostile shades of yellow and blue, a color palette that seems optimized to discourage any sense of calm or well-being. The seats, clad in a thin, sweat-inducing pleather, were clearly selected for ease of cleaning over any consideration for human comfort. The legroom was a theoretical concept, not that the seats could recline and take any more of it away.
I had paid a non-trivial fee to place my modest backpack in an overhead bin, a transaction that now felt like a failure of game theory on my part. Observing the general chaos and the apparent lack of rigorous enforcement, I suspect the Nash equilibrium for a frequent Ryanair traveler is to simply ignore the ancillary charges and bank on the operational entropy being on your side. The airline is running a tax on the risk-averse. They won't pull the same trick on me again, I promise you that much.
This flight can't leave soon enough, but now I half expect them to charge me if I use the toilets in-flight.*
(I promise you that even the most budget airlines in India don't cut as many corners. It's frankly quite impressive.)
*I fucking knew it. Their CEO had actually floated the idea of coin-operated toilets a while back, but was stymied by airline regulations. I'm no longer a minarchist or libertarian.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
Maybe. But there's an increasing trend of social anxiety making people just not want to go to things at all -- and of course the internet rectangle makes it easy to develop parasocial relationships or social media addictions and spend time on those instead of actual people. The flakiest people I know are the least busy.
For instance, I have a friend who wanted to hang out and I haven't texted him back in 3 days (but to be fair, it took him 4 days to get back to me). And my girlfriend is in the other room and I'm typing this right now. I'm choosing you over snuggling, faceh-less internet person! Something has gone wrong there.
I saw a t-shirt at Target the other day that read, "Canceller of Plans." And I know the rush that comes from cancelling plans. But it's still pathological avoidance.
I, uh, fucked up. I was supposed to be here next weekend. Now I'm in London, and unsure what to do with myself.
(I'd like to blame this on Ryanair too, but that's a stretch. It's probably chronic sleep deprivation and forgetting how to use a calendar)
I'll take your advice to heart, and if I come back again next week, it'll be on a carrier that isn't going to nickel and dime me to hell and back.
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