Trump will ask athletes who kneel during anthem to recommend people for pardoning
>"I'm going to ask them to recommend to me people who were unfairly treated," [..] "What I'm going to do is, I'm going to say to them instead of talk ... I am going to ask all of those people to recommend to me -- because that's what they're protesting -- people that they think were unfairly treated by the justice system," Trump said. "And I understand that."
Good idea? With Kushner working on prison reform, and the recent pardoning of Kardashian's candidate, maybe Trump is serious about reducing racial injustice. Or at least wants to give the impression he is.
Even if the athletes say these pardoning are just symbolic and not fixing the bigger issue, it might at least force them to outline the systemic changes they want to see.
A criticism I have with BLM is a lack of clear and actionable goals. Maybe the aim of activism is just to raise awareness and let someone else figure out the policy, but that way it's very easy for the goal posts to shift.
I have no idea how he found the strength to ignore the fact that Robinson's book is called Trump: Anatomy of a Monstrosity.
Maybe not the most charitable criticism, but man is it juicy.
That's an incredibly poor take. If you knew nothing about China's rise and didn't want to spend any effort whatsoever understanding what happened, that's the take you'd come up with.
Deng Xiaoping had to play an intricate game of go against an armada of party officials who were incentivized to keep things running without major reform.
In Deng Xiaoping: Chronicle of an Empire you get an insider account of what went down. It was a great struggle.
The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right is 288 pages and was published on Tuesday, so I'm guessing Kavanaugh is more "convenient foil" than "impetuous" for him leaving the right.
My new ironically favorite thing Trump has ever done - Trump invokes War of 1812 in testy call with Trudeau over tariffs
>According to the sources, Trudeau pressed Trump on how he could justify the tariffs as a "national security" issue. In response, Trump quipped to Trudeau, "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?" referring to the War of 1812.
Also have to love CNN's reporting on this:
>The problem with Trump's comments to Trudeau is that British troops burned down the White House during the War of 1812. Historians note the British attack on Washington was in retaliation for the American attack on York, Ontario, in territory that eventually became Canada, which was then a British colony.
Yes, that's the problem with Trump's comment. That he didn't understand the full context of British colonial forces counter attacking the US after a failed invasion. Not that he's invoking a long forgotten 200 year old war that has nothing to do with anything any more.
Markets in right-wing signalling: Reasons To Vote For Democrats, a completely empty book, hits #7 on the Amazon best-seller list.
It's not exactly the same thing, but I feel like this phenomenon is related to the one discussed in Jon Ronson's book <em>So You've Been Publicly Shamed</em>. I think it's a real problem of our age, and it seems like the amount of damage it is causing -- not just on the personal level for those people who've had the internet hate machine pointed at them, but for its chilling effect on discourse in general -- is underappreciated, or at least under-discussed.
​
I don't think most people would have chosen to live in a world where a single mistaken comment online or the expression of a "bad" opinion can lead to loss of employment, social ostracism, and death threats. Yet here we are. It feels somewhat like a Malthusian trap of the comments section.
​
Edit: Disclaimer, that book is a pretty stressful read. At least, it was for me. Don't get me wrong, I think it's important and well executed, but the subject matter is stressful.
You could say the same for any subdivision of a company, and it seems this is often borne out in practice.
The author of Bullshit Jobs interviewed someone who would audit the operations of companies in such a way that he would end up the only person, including the companies' management, who had an actual thorough understanding of how the departments were operating and what they were doing, and he would find cases where substantial majorities of jobs in the companies provided no benefit to its operations. And many people throughout many industries, given their best understanding of what they're doing for the company and why they're being asked to do it, don't think that their own jobs are useful for the company or anyone else. The idea that executives, boards of directors, etc. would ruthlessly optimize to shed unnecessary functions or avoid ineffective methods seems to be theory not borne out by reality.
Here's a video.
The notion that she didn't deserve a penalty for the racket smash and repeatedly yelling at the referee and demanding an apology is absurdity.
This would get an outright ejection in most other sports.
Charles Murray, 2018:
> But the fact is that in my own life, the federal government plays hardly any negative role at all. Neither Donald Trump nor Barack Obama has done anything that has gotten in my way. De facto, life is still pretty good for a lot of Americans. We still have the freedom to live life as we see fit.
Charles Murray, 2015:
> American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government—not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, “Try to fight this, and we’ll ruin you.”
I am curious if Charles Murray expressed these blasé sentiments about the federal government even once during the span of 2008-2016. (Please do not rush to inform me Charles Murray is a NeverTrump. I'm aware. That doesn't make him non-partisan.)
The real reason school shootings happen is because they've been heroized by the media - just check out all the fanmail they get:
> Postmarked from all over the United States and Europe, they are from women, girls and grown men. Some are handwritten, others are typed. They are written on college-ruled notebook paper and in fancy greeting cards with cartoons. Some are stuffed with sexually suggestive photos of women and teens in lingerie.
Wow, flooded with fan mail from sympathetic (and apparently horny) young girls from around the world! Some choice excerpts of the kind of fan mail one can expect to receive:
> "I know you could use a good friend right now. Hang in there. Keep your head up! No one else is dealing with your demons, meaning maybe defeating them could be the beginning of your meaning, friend."
> "I have freckles like yours. I think your beautiful. Even if you don't write back feel free to ask me anything." The writer signs off, "Love, (name)." / "Oh and I forgot to mention that I'm a girl lol."
Perhaps my favorite - a handwritten note signed by 15 different girls:
> "Dear Nikolas, Know that you are prayed for. We are a Girl Scout Troop. May you realize the wrong you did. We will lift you up and all those that you changed their lives on that day. May God Forgive."
Don't forget - we'll even post your score up on the "worst school shootings of all time" board on the nightly news so you can see how you measure up!
So yeah. That's my explanation for why school shootings happen. It's part of the American memeplex because it fuels huge amounts of media hysteria and hence, views/clicks/shares/ads.
> ...but there aren’t Thinking Teachers or anything analogous, at least not until college. Why the hell not? Is this a huge structural gap or am I just sick of reminding people to do a little mental balancing?
Cynical-but-not-wrong answer is pretty simple man:
The Tests have to be graded.
Follow up question: by what caliber of person must they be graded?
Follow up reading is deep. One book (that's a little extreme, but I appreciate it for taking a thesis) is The Messianic Character of American Education, but you could approach the problem from many angles.
> and I always thought "oriental" referred to the Far East, so really not sure what the article was on about.
The article is drawing upon Orientalism by Edward Said, which is a important and popular text among cultural studies types. And is specifically about European attitudes towards the Middle East.
You can meet interesting people in the audience. If you manage to participate in the Q&A, some people will talk to you about it later. If it's recorded, you might even be approached by friends & acquaintances who recognize you. That's what happened to me when I attended Sam Harris's Waking Up talk in SF. I would never have suspected they were fans.
If you're curious, my question is at 2:06:03 in this video: https://www.bitchute.com/video/AnDB9l9VqD77/ (I wish I could link to a timestamp but that video host doesn't seem to support such a feature.)
It's not always worthwhile, such as when I went to the conversation with Harris, Shapiro, and Weinstein. The crowd's applause and energy encouraged more performance than conversation. Harris & Weinstein mostly resisted the temptation but Shapiro got pretty annoying. Had I been listening at home, I wouldn't have been so invested and I could have skipped the annoying parts or the episode entirely.
There’s something kind of fascinating about the self-loathing that seems to me to be at the core of 4chan. Take, for instance, this “Robot” test from the /r9k/ board. (Click here for an easier way to tally your score). Is this self-revulsion, or gallows humor, or something else? I cannot think of another Internet community which reviles itself and likes picking at its own scabs like 4chan does.
For the record, I’m a “Chad” according to this quiz.
Personally, 'credible' requires any amount of evidence beyond he said/she said. Pictures, DNA samples, old journal entries even (from the time when the event occurred and not therapist notes from 30 years later)... Eyewitness testimony is insanely bad. Most people aren't great at remembering faces two days after an event, much less decades later, and trauma-memory tends to be even worse. Picking Cotton is a good, readable book-length example of eyewitness gone wrong.
I think the statue of limitations (not applicable to the Kavanaugh situation, I know, but as long as I'm commenting already...) really needs to be cut down. Respecting baseless accusations that are later found to be hogwash casts an unfortunate shadow on legitimate cases.
Maybe one evidence-free accusation that is within the universe of probability is sufficient for disqualifying a person from the Supreme Court, and that all the Justices need to be completely Teflon-coated saints. Until we start hatching them from pods, however, the standard needs to be just a little lower.
I don't have strong feelings about Kavanaugh being a good/bad Justice or a good/bad person; I do have strong feelings about the standard of evidence and people treating accusations like Gospel.
I don't think anyone has the answers you're looking for, predicting future outcomes of political conflicts is hopelessly hard, anyone who claims with any certainty to know how this will end up doesn't know what they're talking about. What I would suggest is to simply not worry about it, these things are virtually completely out of the control of any ordinary person, what is under your control is your life and immediate future, so focus on those. Spending your time worrying about the outcome will not bring you anything, I suggest you read up on Stoicism and (yes) practice meditation (here is a secular meditation book who goes into great details about the experiences you go through in meditation and what you need to do)
I'll play this game. Let's check out the most recent video on infowars.
MATT BRACKEN: SHOW US YOUR ALGORITHMS
I mean, nothing in that seems crazy. It's fairly wonkish skepticism about the algorithms SV deploys to "curate" what you see.
And lets check CNN
Trump voter: The President is a monster
Man, it's hard to tell which one of those is more hyperbolic, divisive, and inflammatory. Although I will give CNN props for cleverness. They aren't doing it personally. They just staged an event where a bunch of normies can spread misinformation. Clever! Although actually watching the video, the title really isn't representative of the actual sentiments expressed except for one really over the top guy. But once again... that goes to lying and misinformation.
And yeah, all I did was grab the first video off their respective pages. I didn't sit around watching each for 10 hours to get a real good sampling. But you're claim was it should be obvious how crazy Infowars is just watching any of it at all.
Then again, I just grabbed a random video off InfoWars that didn't specifically have Alex Jones. Then again again, it was InfoWars that was blanket banned, not Alex Jones specifically.
You know what's better than GDP per capita adjusted for PPP? Net take home pay. No billionaires or tax refugees increasing the average, no tax differences to create inconsistencies. The most fitting numbers I've found so far. When you account for U.S private healthcare spending, you get the (seemingly accurate) picture that the U.S basically matches Europe north of Italy regarding standard of living. Any discussion about how rich a country is will inevitably prove intractable, because it's not one question, it is several. ('Where should you move to maximize your (average or median) income? Where should you be born to maximize your (average or median) income? Given a particular level of human capital, which country earns you the most income? Given particular lifestyle assumptions and aptitudes?')
The answer to these questions, which are the ones actually posed, are the following:
Until you reach the level of finance/STEM jobs, your income is by far the highest in Europe north of Italy, particularly the Nordic countries. Finance and STEM jobs are more lucrative in the U.S. Entrepreneurs and startup founders (potential billionaires) make the same everywhere, although slightly more people take the chance in the Nordic countries.
Reddit and Forbes are bubbles of well-paid white collar workers who'd take a significant pay cut if they moved. For everyone else, it's more or less true that northern Europe is the richest region of the world.
I have a similar sort of distractability to you, I think; while I haven't particularly succeeded in spending that time doing something directly productive, I've managed to divert most of it into reading things that are at least less mindless and provide some amount of self-improvement, so every time I'm wasting time I'm doing so in a way I approve of.
How? RSS feeds. Get an easily-accessible RSS feed reader (I use a Chrome extension that's only ever a key-press away) and throw good content into it. Prune anything that you don't want to be reading. After a while, you'll have an enormous stream of high-quality content ready for consumption, all the time. And if you can make that your default procrastination tool, you can be wasting time reading blogs about neuroscience and /r/slatestarcodex and mathematical webcomics and the AI Safety newsletter and Givewell conversation notes and new papers from the arXiv and so on. It's not actually productive, but it's a hell of a lot better than /r/pics.
NPR: What Living On $100,000 A Year Looks Like
Saw this over on the tax thread, but not really much to do about taxes, and at least culture-war adjacent. The most r/nottheonion thing I've seen in a while, too.
The first two families I'm definitely calling BS on; I used to work in Gaithersburg, on a salary of about $60,000 in today's dollars. It was more than fine. Gaithersburg isn't a super-high COL area (compared even to nearby Bethesda, let along NY or SF). The reference to credit card debts (since wiped out by bankruptcy) adds to the impression that these people just aren't good with money
As for the second... $100,000 is tough for a family of 3 in Kansas? Come on, now.
If I google, "Cuck Army," I get this t-shirt, whose description reads:
> Cucks unite! Let the alt-right know its not okay to use your lifestyle as a slur with Operation: Take Back Cuck.
If the same company that made this made the one I saw, then it looks like you're right about the anti-Trump thing, but wrong about the "not to be taken literally" thing.
Also, I could have picked a million other examples of what I considered to be strange BK behavior to illustrate my point. This just struck me as a particularly easy-to-communicate version of the every-day absurdity.
It was really surprising! I wasn't even trying to pick anything remotely controversial; Robert Putnam is a liberal, and his work is extraordinarily well-supported and pretty uncontroversial in his field. And, I think, outside of it too. Bowling Alone isn't exactly The Bell Curve. I wonder if bringing up hand-grip strength would have gotten the same response.
I'm not an expert, but I recommend The Man Who Was Thursday if you like fiction, and Heretics if you like non-fiction.
Funding the site. They're not subsidized by profitable divisions of a big company. To reduce costs, they're distributing video via WebTorrent, so everyone watching helps re-seed. There's still a non-zero cost, so they offer paid perks and accept donations.
I played violin in high school, and that involved 'tests' that determined seating. We had one kid with autism who was angry at his bad seat, and threw a school viola and bow at the teacher, breaking both of them. The teacher, who is a 'Ryan Seacrest type', just got up, picked up the pieces, and said to the kid 'I want you to stay here until you cool down'.
I've had some good teachers in my life that I'm thankful for, but that always stood out to me as a model of how I want to behave, and none of this immature, vindictiveness that people seem to be celebrating.
Bronze Age Mindset, by the exalted master of natural philosophy Bronze Age Pervert, without who we would be maggots writhing underfoot. Submit!
(BAP is one of the most famous users on """frogtwitter""", a post-rationalist-adjacent proto-alt-right splinter group that are terminally irony poisoned and talk about philosophy a lot. The book is actually very good, if you're the type of person that appreciate new viewpoints without having to agree with them. There are, naturally, less reputable ways to read it.)
For starters, I can't use the same one in every city I go to. New York has its own (though it's hardly needed, since you can just hail them from the street), for instance. I don't want to have to do research ahead of time to figure out wtf taxi app I need in a particular city. (Oh, and whether it's on Android and not just iOS.)
Secondly, in Uber I can just put my destination in the app itself. They don't all support that, which leads to me trying to explain to some driver with an accent I can't understand (who often can't understand my accent) where I am trying to go. Whenever I take a taxi (when I visit NYC or DC) I generally find myself giving up, typing my destination into Embiggen, and holding it up to the window. In Uber? I already put my destination in. I get in the car and go. The Uber interface is damn near perfect ever since they added that capability.
I realize Uber's done some sketchy business tactics at the top level, but they're also having to compete against taxi monopolists that held back city transportation for decades and are trying to outlaw Uber entirely in order to maintain their monopoly, so my opinion of "playing by the rules" went to zero, because I do not give the tiniest bit of a fuck about the taxi companies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russian-hacking-election-intelligence.html
>What is missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the Russian government engineered the election attack. That is a significant omission: Mr. Trump has been expressing skepticism for months that Russia was to blame, variously wondering whether it might have been China, or a 400-pound guy, or a guy from New Jersey.
>There is only a whisper of dissent in the report — the eavesdroppers of the N.S.A. believe with only “moderate confidence” that Russia aimed to help Mr. Trump, while their colleagues at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. have “high confidence.”
>While most of Congress and much of the public appears to accept the agencies’ findings, Mr. Trump’s prominent doubts, accompanied at times by scorn for the agencies’ competence, has rallied a diverse array of skeptics on the right and the left. Under the circumstances, many in Washington expected the agencies to make a strong public case to erase any uncertainty.
>Instead, the message from the agencies essentially amounts to “trust us.” There is no discussion of the forensics used to recognize the handiwork of known hacking groups, no mention of intercepted communications between the Kremlin and the hackers, no hint of spies reporting from inside Moscow’s propaganda machinery.
It's possible that the classified evidence they have does prove their case, and there's good reasons why they can't make that evidence public. But the word of John Brennan and James Clapper is not enough to convince me that is the case. I wonder what the new CIA/ODNI directors will say, when they have access to all of the evidence.
There seems to be a Social Justice incursion into tabletop gaming currently going on; there's a lot of paranoia over-sensitivity among the anti-SJW side of the geek divide, and they're kinda in the business of making a big deal out of stuff like this, but I still find it worrying.
http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/10/feminist-40k-admins-respond.html
https://kotaku.com/dungeons-dragons-stumbles-with-its-revision-of-the-ga-1819657235
Pretty much any female weightlifter or athlete who has taken steroids will concede in private (or at times publicly) that it sent their libido through the roof.
I was cross-referencing my anecdotes via googling "women steroids libido" and "women anavar libido", and kinda horrified to see some forums related to dead bedrooms recommending women take steroids solely to increase libido. Personally I don't recommend that, but it appears WebMD touched on it in 2003.
I would suggest reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. The modern secular mindset that buffers meanings in the self from the outside world is a lot more recent than you think.
Perhaps Trump can hear the music, and it sounds like what Snoopy hears when he does the Snoopy dance. Certainly that part about gun control makes me want to do the Snoopy dance.
As even the New York Times admits, one reason performers are leery of the inauguration is they're getting pressure ("widespread scrutiny") not to; it's hard to make the point that Trump is so horrible he can't get musicians when Trump's opponents are pressuring them not to appear. And while the article says otherwise, he IS getting some high-level (if dated) talent at least in country music -- Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood.
The Rockettes are not, in fact, being coerced to appear. According to this interview, the 13 full-time Rockettes were initially expected to appear (as they would for any performance) but it was later made optional; 3 opted out. For all the rest (80 dancers) it was always optional, and they had plenty of volunteers. The Rockettes recruit nationwide; is it really that surprising they include many dancers who do not have the coastal hatred for Trump?
> The best way to be sure that 2017 is not 1934 is to act as though it were.
sigh No, that's the best way to ensure that 2020 or 2024 IS 1934. WOLF, WOLF!
> I remember that back in the 90s, there were a lot of articles about The Layoffs Crisis and how layoffs were A Sign Of The Decline Of America.
From 1997: <em>The Ax</em>
> Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company when the cost-cutting ax falls, and he is laid off. Eighteen months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search -- with agonizing care, Devore finds the seven men in the surrounding area who could take the job that rightfully should be his, and systematically kills them. Transforming himself from mild-mannered middle manager to ruthless murderer, he discovers skills he never knew he had -- and that come to him far too easily.
The Proactionary Imperative, coined by Steve Fuller of the University of Warwick, is probably what you're looking for.
Not the commenter, but I'd recommend 400 things cops know. It's a series of vignettes written by a cop, and is equal parts funny and heartbreaking.
It helped me understand more about a cop's perspective. Every day they are asked to deal with the absolute worst our society has to offer and unsurprising, it leaves them cynical and distrusting.
Isn't there a name for the cognitive bias in police that develops after years of seeing high-impact crimes, lies, and constant subterfuge? You just stop trusting anyone at their word, because your brain's statistical model says "everyone I interact with is scum and everyone lies all the time".
Very little spillover. From what I've read, it didn't even impact his ability to memorize a string of random alphabetic characters. That said, people have done a lot with mnemonic techniques to accomplish amusing tasks like memorizing the order of 27 decks of cards in an hour, and some techniques there can be trained for a somewhat wider range of tasks.
Ezra Klein interviews the author of Kill All the Normies.
I was somewhat bemused by this. Two clearly intelligent, earnest people trying to understand the online culture wars. And yet their discussion was so superficial that it could be boiled down to "tumblr sjws dueling with 4chan MRA types led to Trump and Brexit". Although, tellingly, the term SJW is never actually uttered (although they do talk about the phenomenon itself).
I haven't read the book, so maybe it's actually somewhat more accurate in its intellectual history. But the author speaks as if her mental map of the ideological internet is
> TumblrTwitterFacebookReddit4chanAmRenStormfront
Which is like, sorta correct, but akin to a map of USA consisting of just CA, TX, FL, NY, MA. (Not ideologically, but in terms of eliding too much meaningful geography to be a useful map.)
I wear a helmet when I drive. This is the best one I have found (light, doesn't block visibility) but it looks really silly to wear while driving. These kinds of helmets don't look silly to wear when driving, but probably give less protection.
I was homeschooled (unschooled) K-12 and similarly wondering about this some time ago and stumbled on Joseph Murphy’s Homeschooling In America[1]. He’s a Dean of Education at Vandy and the book can be a bit dry and difficult to get through if you’re not used to reading academic papers. But, it summarizes the current state of peer-reviewed research on homeschooling well.
In terms of results, you probably won’t be surprised that homeschoolers tend to be more religious than average. They also tend to fare better than corporate schoolers on standardized tests and future income, even after accounting for parental income and education levels.
Of course, correlation isn’t causation. Without running a forbidden experiment like randomly selecting which kids go to normal schools and which are homeschooled, we’ll never really know the relative contributions of parents-really-invested-in-child vs’ actual homeschooling.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Homeschooling-America-Capturing-Assessing-Movement/dp/145220523X/
Edit: just realized this was r/ssc not r/homeschool. Answer the same either way, but the book will be an easy read for the average SSC follower. I’d love to know more about fellow non-traditionally educated ssc readers.
> I think Amazon has as much right not to distribute a book with 3-D printed gun schematics as it does to not distribute a book with instructions for how to make a bomb in your garage.
> I'm watching the events around the Alex Jones deplatforming with some concern for where it's going. I understand that people further to the right than me have every right to be more worried than I am.
Ok, thanks. That's really all I'd have the right to ask for.
StackOverflow released their 2017 Survey Results.
Good culture war material because it includes data broken down by ethnicity and gender, e.g. Developer Role and Gender. Any idea why the gender ratio in embedded systems is so much more imbalanced than that in machine learning?
Is the "OK" hand gesture a white supremacist signal? This came up today when someone sitting behind Brett Kavanaugh was spotted making this gesture with her arms crossed. I had never heard of this being a white supremacist sign, so I did a little googling which led me to this article: https://lifehacker.com/is-this-an-innocent-ok-sign-or-a-white-power-symbol-1825575794.
Taking the article at face value, it seems like there was a conscious and somewhat coordinated effort by prominent white nationalists/white supremacists to claim this gesture as their own. People like Richard Spencer and Mike Cernovich are spotted making the gesture, and I guess a certain segment of extremely online people, including 4channers recognize that some white power message is being conveyed, even if only "ironically."
In that sense, this reminds me of the "it's OK to be white" and "all lives matter" slogans. Obviously, these things by themselves have no racist connotations outside of the culture war context. It's only in the context of certain online/activist communities that these things can be understood to be controversial at all.
I think we're going to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the future because it seems to be good for culture warriors of both tribes. For individual red tribers, these kinds of things give them plausible deniability that could potentially protect them from the social consequences of unpopular/bad beliefs. For Blue Tribers, this kind of thing supports their belief that white supremacists are everywhere, and might allow them to tar conservatives that aren't socially aware enough to know of the latest controversy as white supremacists.
Stephen Levitt (the Freakonomics guy) gave a talk where he mentioned that there was an economics "puzzle" of why executives at failing companies get generous compensation, and no one seemed to object. A drug dealer explained why:
> If you start taking losses, they see you [as] weak and shit.
It seems related- subordinates want their bosses to have high status because it reflects onto them, but also because it motivates them to accomplish more.
Alcumus. It covers a range from pre-algebra through geometry, including probability and number theory, with a lot of incredibly creative and difficult problems. The creators are probably the leading US group in preparing people for competition math, and they do a fantastic job of presenting what is compelling within math. It’s my single favorite learning-focused website in any subject.
You might also try brilliant.org, although that one has some costs attached and is a bit more corporate.
Parenting's been all right for me, despite being a very light sleeper who needs a lot of sleep, with difficulty tolerating loud noise (oh god the screaming), general impatience, and not being the most interested in spending time with young children. Though the stress is at times severe.
It's nice to do fun stuff with the kid, and I expect it will probably make my life significantly better when I'm old. Of course, that's not certain and things could go terribly wrong.
Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids was a big influence on how I think about that topic. Parenting is mostly good for the kids, though, and I think it's a big, obvious good if parents do at all a reasonable job.
Good self-help books are underappreciated. They can provide the push needed to us in critical moments of our lives, e.g. to overcome short-term pain / excessive risk-aversion when making an important decision, and let us change the fundamental frames / instill useful mantras into our lives, changing our trajectories significantly. These two self-help books definitely changed my life, providing both motivation and timeless advice:
How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life by Scott Adams
Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odd by David Goggins
I recommend these to all my friends and everybody who read them so far loved them (note that for max effect probably best to space them out and to first read Adams and then Goggins a few months later).
This is a surprise to nobody. People saw Milo coming from literally 50 years ago. It was widely understood that the moment wealthy, white LGs got what they wanted (marriage, respectability) many of them would happily abandon the left and switch over to the conservative movements that do a much better job protecting the privileges of all the other key components of their identity (wealthy, white and male). It didn't really matter. Leftists and liberals fought for gay rights anyways.
> Most others have felt it necessary to expand and explain, though, and I wonder if that's a pattern.
Again, none of this is new. If you actually want to engage seriously with these ideas (admittedly, judging by your comment, you probably don't, but heck, maybe others might) I would recommend putting down "Deadspin" and reading Allan Berube (https://www.amazon.com/My-Desire-History-Essays-Community/dp/0807871958) particularly I think the essay called "How Gays Stay White."
I think the big difference between being a semi-red-pilled libertarian/classical liberal (Scott Alexander, Steven Pinker, the IDW), and going full on reactionary is realizing that the scientific revolution predates the "Enlightenment" -- the scientific revolutions originated out of a Christian culture of truth-seeking in order to discover the true nature of God's kingdom. And then on top of that, much of the "Enlightenment" was actually a step backward in our understanding of human nature and human society (eg, did Rousseau's Treatise on Inequality actually improve our understanding of how the world works?). And for every revolution in the name of "freedom" and "democracy" that kind of worked, a dozen ended in disaster and worse tyranny. (See the book Holy Madness for some examples).
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to Trump there if he wasn't so involved in the birther movement. Or, wait, he wasn't himself involved, he just had doubts.
> He may not be born in this country. And I'll tell you what, three weeks ago I thought he was born in this country. Right now, I have some real doubts. I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding.
Or who could forget this wonderful exchange with an audience member:
> Audience member: We have a problem in this country, it's called Muslims. Our current President is one. We know he's not even an American. We have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That's my question, when can we get rid of them?
> Donald Trump: We're going to be looking at a lot of different things. A lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We're going to be looking at that and a lot of different things.
If we take SSC's approach, then should we really assume that when Trump says "something else is going on" he's talking about something completely innocuous and only ending his sentence in an ambiguous way on accident? I'm all for the principle of charity, but it seems to me that there's such a thing as taking it too far.
Food grade silicone sealant. Any leaky bottles or cups, pipes in your house, shower or sink fixtures, ceiling during the rain, whatever. It glues, seals, and waterproofs cracks and you can remove it by scraping it off.
Isopropyl alcohol, over 90%. It's not the 'best' cleaner but it evaporates completely clean and it's very cheap, you can buy it in the pharmacy section for like 2$. Unplug my keyboard, use a isopropyl-soaked paper towel and just go to town. Evaporates in 5min.
Flexible clear tape (the kind for first aid, make sure it's flexible and not matte white). Big bandages, compresses, and other shit are too expensive for me to just have extras of in my first aid. Flexible clear tape and paper towels can do like 90% of what these other expensive things do. Ghetto-wrap a gnarly injury then go and get a real ace bandage when you actually need it.
Adjustable ratcheting socket wrench. Sorry for the Amazon link but I wanna make sure you get the right one [here]. I've unfucked so many bad bolts, screws, whatever with it. Paid for itself many times over.
Edit: I realize now that this was meant to be advice for people with lots of disposable income. The only thing I can think of is an EpiPen (200$) and a defibrillator (1000$+) in your car in case you're out in public and someone has an attack, you might save a life. Car-saving stuff like a portable battery jump and jack maybe.
I've been reading and enjoying Kai-Fu Lee's punchy new book on AI and geopolitics, AI Superpowers. In essence, the book claims that China is likely to rapidly overtake the US in AI technology in the next decade.
In short, the author claims that tech-dominance in the machine learning age is a function of (1) access to lots of good data, (2) an aggressive and smart entrepreneurial class, (3) brilliant researchers, and (4), political will. It's hard to deny that - pending a new Manhattan project for AI - China owns the US in (1) and (4). China and the US are close on (2), but Lee points to China's more cutthroat markets as giving it an edge. Finally, while the US dominates in (3) for now, Lee claims that the recent advances of ML as laid down by Hinton et al. will take decades to implement, meaning that the field belongs to tinkerers rather than geniuses (for now).
I've not finished yet, but my only qualm is that the US might have political stability in its favour, for now. For all the problems America faces, they at least have a track record of muddling through relevantly similar scenarios, whereas we've yet to see what happens in China in the wake of, e.g., major growth slowdowns.
Anyway, highly recommended to all, and interested in case anyone is reading along and has thoughts. The most astonishing fact presented so far to my mind was this: "In terms of funding, Google dwarfs even its own government: US federal funding for math and and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google's own R&D budget."
+1 for this. "I'm not a programmer, but I work well with them and can translate for them to non-technical people." is exactly what a PM is. You might find this book valuable.
People today aren't 10 times smarter than people 200 years ago, but they are 10 times richer. When you are comparing two rates that are rapidly rising, a slight head start means a huge discrepancy.
The IQ of a region obviously isn't sufficient for prosperity (look at the Koreas), and any model that tries only using IQ is super simplistic and will get you basically nowhere.
If you want details, there are books on the topic.
It seems accurate but incomplete, because over the time that college has become the 'default option' I think it's also become less intellectual in some traditional sense. Like Sertillanges' The Intellectual Life, for example. It's a heavily Christian book, being as the author was a priest, but it also speaks to the intellectual life as a calling and in Great Books/classic literature sense, of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. This is the view I entered college with, that it was a place for discussing the big questions and trying to figure out the mysteries of life, that it was an ivory tower separate from the lowly concerns of corporations.
Only to find that that attitude, if it ever existed, does not today, or is at least far more rare. If you want to discuss big questions or uncover mysteries of life, go to grad school and pray for grants. Undergraduate is just another thing you do, like high school before it but way more expensive.
That is to say: I think the intellectual life exists, and I would agree it's not for everyone and that it's okay that it's not for everyone. However, I do not think universities (at least undergrad) embody the intellectual life in any significant sense.
I took my SJ class as an online course around 2010 or so. It was pretty milquetoast in comparison to yours and mostly technical. I think the most interesting stuff to me were the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham vs. John Stuart Mill. We used the book Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do by Michael Sandel
I do not know what the birdcage analogy is and there was no discussion, I recall, about agents, allies, and accomplices.
I'll be the dissenting voice and say ignore the sequences and harry potter. Go for Thinking, Fast and Slow and Superforecasting instead. Kahneman a bit dated in a few places but it's mostly solid.
The bar has been set so low. This is far from the worst. Not worth getting butthurt about it, considering who writes these articles. Notice Bannon is considered some sort of freak genius savant because he reads books.
NYT:
>Mr. Bannon, who did not return a request for comment for this article, is an avid and wide-ranging reader. He has spoken enthusiastically about everything from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which sees history in cycles of cataclysmic and order-obliterating change. His awareness of and reference to Evola in itself only reflects that reading.
Politico:
>Bannon, described by one associate as “the most well-read person in Washington,” is known for recommending books to colleagues and friends, according to multiple people who have worked alongside him. He is a voracious reader who devours works of history and political theory “in like an hour,” said a former associate whom Bannon urged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “He’s like the Rain Man of nationalism.”
I think that becomes far less true once you get outside the Abrahamic religions. A literal reading of Aristotle or Plato wouldn't lead to nearly as much barbarism. Ditto for many eastern traditions (though Hinduism has a decent amount of violence in it). Fundamentalist Buddhist schools would lead to rather harmless things happening. Then there's Jainism, which came up with this 2,500 years ago:
> All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away.
– Mahavira
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a classic for a reason. When I've implemented it I had the "mind like water" that the author puts as a goal. The other thing I love about it is that it allows for bottom up organization. You can just dive in and use it to better your life immediately. Lots of books want you to sit down and plan you perfect life before you can use the system. This doesn't do that and that's great.
How to win friends and influence people is another classic. I've been impressed with the people who took dale carnegie courses and the book has some good stuff in it, though I haven't re-read it recently so I'm not sure how actionable it is.
The Tools is a great book. It isn't for everyone and every part isn't for everyone. But it gives 5 actionable brief mental exercises that do what they purport to do. Each exercise or Tool is designed to counter a specific problem many people have. The authors are therapists and the Tools come from their practices. Many of them are very woo sounding, but if its stupid and it works then it ain't stupid. Every Tool I've used has worked, often shockingly well. But I haven't used them all because they don't all apply to me.
> would you feel comfortable having your real name attached to your participation here?
I presume the NSA knows I participate here and that is plenty. My a priori is ~.6 that I am on some type of "this person is on record as potentially a troublemaker" list, and not only because of participating here. On the other hand towards how many people and how closely can they attend?
I can still fly with no interference. And I know from the personal reports of fellow citizens (N = 3) that there are people on the airport no-fly lists and special screening lists that are on those lists purely because of security agency incompetence. There is only so much they can do.
So I think the proper criteria here is not "can you outrun the bear?" (you cannot outrun a bear). But you definitely don't want to be a slow guy when there is a hungry bear on the loose. (there are hungry bears on the loose.)
I would never post on reddit with my real name nor post doxxable data regarding my real life. If anybody knows of a HOWTO for staying away from the top of the various shit lists without being a craven parrot I would be very interested in seeing it. For some odd reason there is no publication such as "The NOLO guide to staying out of Gitmo." If they published one I would buy it. The NOLO Criminal Law Handbook is great but they don't cover thought crime.
I suppose buying such items dings your citizen credit score but I have no desire for a perfect citizen credit score.
Article TL;DR - Many of the studies in Thinking, Fast and Slow fail to replicate because the sample sizes were too small, a methodological flaw that Kahneman and Tversky pointed out was endemic to the field of psychology in the early 70's. Many also stand up to replication, but there may be a need for several chapters to be rewritten to account for these experiments that failed to replicate.
On a personal note, this is why I haven't finished Thinking, Fast and Slow. I know some of the science is great, but I also know that some of the conclusions are based on these poor studies and I don't have the time or know-how to filter out which conclusions are good to believe.
Many people dispute this. Within economics, the idea that much of the gains from college are due to signaling rather than human capital formation are perhaps less marginal than when Bryan started working on the book, but still far from dominant. Outside of economics, you can see the "college for all" idea in the title of the Bernie Sanders bill and the Ballou High School episode, among other places.
Adolph L. Reed Junior is fantastic. Brilliant academic, prof at UPenn, specialising in race and politics. Socialist to the bone, very critical of neoliberalism, and absolutely savage about identity politics, which - somewhat crudely - he regards as a divide-and-conquer capitalist ploy to undermine the real shared interests of the American poor. He's a bit too academic to be compared to Moldbug, but he's written some brilliant long acerbic pieces. See eg this:
> Black professional-managerial class embeddedness has become increasingly solidified with the Clinton/Obama/Emanuel wing of the Democratic party’s aggressive commitment to a left-neoliberalism centered on advancement of Wall Street and Silicon Valley economic interests and strong support for social justice defined in identity group terms. But that is necessarily a notion of social justice and equality that is disconnected from political economy and the capitalist class dynamics that generate the most profound inequalities in the society. And militant opposition to conventional left norms of justice that center on economic equality unites the Clintonite neoliberal Democrats and race-reductionist antiracists.
​
I have over 3000 webpages on my OneTab list (It's a browser extension that adds a button to close all your active tabs and put them in a list). I've pretty much given up on the idea that I'll ever read them all, but it has a few purposes. The main one is that it just gives me permission to close things. The fewer things I have open to distract me, the better. I don't want to close them, because I'm afraid I'll lose track of them. Putting them somewhere where I can have them saved, and technically be able to access them in case I need them, is a good way of finding that I really don't need 90% of them.
I think this capability/ability discussion is a huge red herring.
Take indian programmers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1p0flr/behind_the_bad_indian_coder/
"95% Engineers in India Unfit For Software Development Jobs". https://slashdot.org/story/325199
Can you imagine the hell storm if the same anecdotes were told about women?
"Two third of female engineers can't write compilable code"
"We made the mistake to outsource a core project to women and it doomed the company"
"tl;dr not all female programmers are bad, but the situation as a whole is sad."
It is so ridiculous outlandish, that even the biggest misogynist wouldn't even dream of it. But here is a group facing these widespread huge negative stereotypes, and they are thriving in the industry! Sillicon Valley loves, absolutely loves, hiring Indians! Because if they are crappy they are at least cheap. And if they are not cheap they are actually quite decent. And even if not, then throwing a warm body on a pile of work is still better than not.
I feel that Scott was slightly too kind to the Socialists saying that everyone supported socialism and no one before Hayek and Mises really had the intellectual argument against socialism. See The Man Who Predicted the Venezuelan Catastrophe in 1893.
> In 1893, [Richter] turned his concerns into a dystopian novella entitled Pictures of the Socialistic Future, in which he vividly predicted what would happen if the socialists of his day were to gain control of the German economy. Narrated by a devout socialist, the novel tracks the course of events as the party and its members labor to implement their utopian vision. The narrator documents the tragic consequences of the government’s policies on his family—his wife Paula, his son Franz, and his daughter-in-law Agnes. What starts as a joyous, popular revolution soon disintegrates into a socioeconomic nightmare, and the conflicted narrator, who initially resorts to excuses, finally has to confront the real reasons for the tragedy.
Scott's comment sort of has thread-ender vibes to me, so I'll post one.
<em>Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time</em>, by Carrol Quigley.
The Amazon blurb is overly sensational, but not by as much as one might think. For more info I'd recommend checking out Quigley's Wikipedia page.
Excerpt:
> There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.
(This was written in 1966.)
>What books or concepts are essentially the opposite of SSC? Things that allow you to get in touch with your fun and childish side, your System 1. What has helped you become happier and less neurotic?
Read native american mythology or fiction.
Seven Arrows is one of the best books ever
there is a tremendous amount of wisdom in traditional cultures or rather cultural traditions, this includes stories that may be irrational but is a product of cultural evolution that had some adaptive value in propagating a people or society.
My brain is hyperlogical but my girlfriends is tapped into the native american mythology and traditions but somehow she is one of the most reasonable people i ever met who i have to explain the least amount of stuff too in everyday life. Intuitive people understand these things at some lizard brain level.
Amazon is currently out of stock of the NootropicsDepot brand melatonin at 0.3mg. It appears the mention and link in SSC has caused a version of the reddit hug of death. Either that or there's a regulatory hurdle in my area that I'm not aware of.
The NootropicsDepot website seems to still list it for sale though.
Somebody actually wrote a book about Donald Trump, the Alt-right, their memes and how it's all connected to western esoteric traditions and "dark magick".
I read some excerpts and must say that it is less crazy than I thought, his analysis of 4chan is nuanced and interesting. He connects their memes to esoteric concepts like Egregore.
His reasoning is not implausible. It's not "esotericism is true", but the assumption that people didn't get suddenly rational over night and that old, irrational teachings could be used to understand new, irrational teachings.
Or maybe the book sweers toward insanity - I don't know, but I bet it'll be at least entertaining.
> Operatic diseases are largely those with overtones of moral, not just physical, infection. Tuberculosis was a 19th-century favorite, associated with feverish passion and the self-consuming flame of artistic creativity. The authors contrast tubercular heroines before and after the discovery of the illness's cause, which altered the perception of TB from a disease of temperament (La Traviata) to one of poverty and overcrowding (La Bohème).
- Amazon.com review of "Opera: Desire, Disease, Death"
Smart-aleck reviews for the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates Paperback from Amazon and Goodreads:
> I bought two copies of this book. I find that the first copy perfectly predicts what the numbers will be in the second copy. I feel cheated.
and
> "A Million Random Digits"? HA! They only used 10, and just kept repeating them in different combinations! Don't be fooled!
and finally
> After reading the book a while I started seeing a pattern. I did extensive research to prove my theory. After hours of mathematical modeling I conclusively proved that there is a set of numbers in this book that it not only a pattern, but is outright sequential!
> The top corner of each page (left corner on the left side pages, right corner of the right side pages) was a list of sequential numbers from 1 to 628, all in a row. No numbers are skipped. Even the prime numbers are included! At first you don't notice this because there is only 1 number on each page. But as you advance through the book you notice that the numbers keep advancing by 1 every time you turn the page.
for reference: <em>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court</em> by Mark Twain
> “Now then, I will tell you what to say.” I paused, and stood over that cowering lad a whole minute in awful silence; then, in a voice deep, measured, charged with doom, I began, and rose by dramatically graded stages to my colossal climax, which I delivered in as sublime and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life: "Go back and tell the king that at that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun, and he shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall rot for lack of light and warmth, and the peoples of the earth shall famish and die, to the last man!”
What do you value your time at? (Sidenote: I recommend using this calculator if you haven't already)
My time is personally around $55 an hour. If it takes me a bit more than an hour to write and maintain a Boomerang-equivalent, then it's probably cheaper to pay someone for it.
Disclaimer: I don't use Boomerang, but I do use YesWare, which is a much more full-featured version for salespeople, and is essential in my daily workflow.
Not directly about Trump, but if you want insight read Fussel's book on Class. Still mostly accurate even though it came out in the 70s iirc. https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253
Class in the US is only somewhat related to money. It mostly has to do with preferences and cultural attitudes that are very hard to shake once they're ingrained as the default for a person at a young age.
> As this report notes, in 1980, these three sectors [healthcare, housing and education] accounted for 25% of total national spending — today, they account for more than 36%. They also account for most of the total measured inflation over this period. And without inflation in these sectors, real annual productivity — defined as GDP per capita growth — would have been an estimated 3.9% instead of 1.7%
In other words, it's three sectors that were resistant to containerization and Amazonification which are damaging the economy. Everything else got cheaper in real terms because the shipping and handling costs went way down.
The economists at the Fed interpreted this cost reduction of everything else as "inflation is low" because of how inflation is calculated, and ran low interest rates for far longer than they should have, plus QE on top of that.
This had the effect of raising the actual rate of inflation, causing what we perceive as "cost disease" in the sectors that didn't benefit from the colossal decline in shipping and handling costs. It's closing the barn door after the horse has left (and running danger of inverting the yield curve) to raise rates now; which might actually make things worse.
I'll read the rest of it after my workday, but the fact that the summary alone singles out those sectors as a drag on the economy suggests it might actually be on to something.
CNN reports it was an accident
>[T]he White House has still not corrected a key omission in its official transcript of President Donald Trump's news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin. [...]
>The omission appears to be due to an issue with an overlap between simultaneous translation of Putin's remarks and the first part of the reporter's question to Putin in the audio feed the stenographers rely on. Private transcription services also made the same error.
Their point being that it should be corrected by now, rather than it was maliciously edited.
At the same time, a rapper was detained in the "Slavic" part of Russia and his concerts cancelled after siloviki threatened organizers and owners of concert hall.
https://meduza.io/feature/2018/11/21/v-krasnodare-zaderzhali-repera-haski-glavnoe
Now he is investigated by police and General Procuracy (Office of Public Prosecutions), his music video "Judas" is blocked on Youtube.
In the last couple of months concerts of over 10 musicians were cancelled in Russia (in the city of Moscow that you mentioned as well). So don't delude yourself that there is ultraconcervative Caucasus republics were gays and weebs are persecuted and the rest of Russia that is culturally and socially libertarian.
I'm not convinced you can dismiss the larger global pool of applicants that easily. Asia has 60% of the world population so it's trivial to model ways they dominate admissions while being statistically similar to other ethnic groups. It doesn't rule out HBD but the admissions rate for Harvard sure isn't a massive load of ammo.
International culture war in the Maker scene! https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5046 https://thenextweb.com/asia/2017/11/07/make-magazine-founder-apologizes-after-accusing-chinese-maker-of-being-not-a-real-person/?amp=1 The TL:DR :
*Naomi Wu is a maker out of Shenzhen *She tends to dress prevocatively *She also tended to call out the local Maker Media events for a lack of women makers in a rather aggressive way *Because of this, and some minor mistakes made in a video, the head of Maker magazine called her a fake, and that people were feeding her lines *Queue the uproar *He gives a rather mealy mouthed apology
I thought that Bunnie's article goes into some of the ways that getting called out in particular is hurtful to Wu in a decent way. Although I think that most of the Maker movement itself is form over function, I've been following Wu on Twitter for long enough that if she is a fake, it's a very long con, and done with a large amount of skill. Large enough that I find it improbable.
Also was strange to see culture war randomly erupt in my Twitter feed in a part that it hasn't before.
We're not in the end times; the Millennial generation is simply at the same age the Boomers were in the 1970's. The Boomers were horribly destructive at that age, and the Millenials are simply repeating the behavior of their parents. Eventually, people will get hate-fatigue and it will be Morning in America again.
The book 80,000 Hours has 6 things necessary for a dream job:
1) Work that you are good at
2) Work that helps others
3) Engaging work that lets you enter a state of flow
4) Supportive colleagues
5) No major negatives like long hours or unfair pay
6) Work that fits your personal life.
The problem with getting a PhD is that it fits at best 4 of those, and more likely 1-2.
1)If you are working on some of the hardest problems in the world, you probably aren't good at it.
2) If you are doing anything at all vaguely esoteric, you probably can't see how it directly helps the world.
3) The work is engaging, hopefully. Ill give PhD's this
4) ehhh, mine were good, maybe not in every department Ill give it 50-50.
5) hahahaha
6) hahahaha
In his autobiography comedian Henny Youngman tells the story of a mobster in the 50s asking Henny to watch his gun for a while at a restaurant, Henny later found out it was so that the mobster could go into the kitchen and rape a waitress. (I read this 20 years ago so I may have the details wrong, but that's the gist of the story.) Based on that I'd guess that even if the Godfather accurately represented mafia ethical principles they weren't that good at following them.
EDIT: I got the story right, although it was a Jewish gangster, not an Italian: "Among his more dismal tales is one about mobster Waxey Gordon asking Youngman to hold his automatic pistol, then following a waitress into the Lido Venice's kitchen and raping her on the floor."
Okay, I now understand that you got the correlation measure from that paper instead of calculating it yourself. Why you did not mention this or link to this paper in your OP is beyond me, but whatever.
So: what is the actual correlation referring to? Turns out the correlation is between total innovation rate per decade between 1450-1950 (N=50 decades). The two datasets are (1) Murray's, and (2) Huebner's, who literally gets his data from the innovations included in this book (which are arbitrary innovations the authors of the book liked, I guess).
So you cannot use the fact that the correlation is high to conclude anything about whether Murray's data is culturally biased. You cannot use the fact that the correlation is high to conclude anything about the middle ages in Europe. You also probably shouldn't use it to conclude innovation is declining, mostly because that's not-even-wrong (it's not well-defined).
Well, from previous incidents we can tell they already have a policy-making system in place that he only has the power to veto, rather than propose. He's got the right to get stuck in and micromanage, but it's easy to tire someone like that out through malicious compliance.
There's lots of ways to go about sidelining a boss, but the end state is handing him options to choose from that don't really give him a choice at all. If he doesn't like either, and wants a third option, tell him "well, that will have to go through legal. We'll take your order under advisement and draft a new policy". Two weeks later, hand him the same damn thing written slightly differently, until he gets tired of it.
And if he ever says "who's in charge here, me or you?!", they can chuckle and reply "now, don't be silly". (watch the whole thing, seriously. It's like dry gold)
If he doesn't have a hierarchy of loyal staff under him, a boss really doesn't have much power in an organization, incidents like this aside. And clearing out his loyalists with a huge clusterfuck PR nightmare when one of them fails to ban Rapelay 6: The Loli-ing is just the way to set that up.
> That's the conspiracy theory or motivation you should be focusing on.
OK, the article is pimping Susannah Cahalan's new book. It is not her first book. Her previous book, Brain on fire is her memoir of being diagnosed as psychotic when she suffered from an auto-immune neurological condition.
So we can guess her agenda: she wanted to put the boot into psychiatry. Find Rosenhan's pseudopatients, interview them, revive the old criticisms, and plunge the sword into the heart of psychiatry again.
But Rosenhan let her down. The tale seemed off, suspiciously off. OK, change targets, stab Rosenhan.
I strongly suspect the argument that "having children increases your carbon footprint" is just totally specious. Bringing one less person into the world doesn't decrease your carbon footprint, it decreases the number of people. The carbon footprint in question isn't your carbon footprint, it's your child's carbon footprint.
Similar reasoning concludes that one way to decrease your carbon footprint is to just murder more people. In fact, if you murder more than one very young child, you've just offset yourself plus some number of your friends!
Of course there are other reasons to not murder people, and it would be silly to not take those into account! Likewise, there are many good reasons to have children, and so it would be silly to not take those into account also. If you want to think very seriously about those, I recommend Bryan Caplan's book on the subject.
Get a mouthguard to grit your teeth harder and make yourself sound even better. You'll probably want some extra fluff for the reference to trim, rather than give them a reasonable amount of self-promotion that they then trim to an accurate and boring description.
>It's hard to dig up information on people like her (again, because she's a nobody) but from what I could find her career is doing the same as it was before the hate mob.
She was covered and interviewed in Jon Ronson's book on public shaming. At least as of that time, years later, her life definitely had not returned to its previous state or quality.
Overlapping WorldCon CW, NRx, Scott, etc and possible incoming drama warning: Scott's going to be name-dropped in Travis J. I. Corcoran's (@MorlockP) Prometheus Award acceptance speech for The Powers of the Earth.
>Writing my speech, and I'm name-dropping like a mofo.
>
>Robert Heinlein, Albert Hirschman, Christopher Priest, Moldbug, Scott Alexander, Robert Nozick, David Friedman
>
>Just added a Mussolini quote.
>
>[...]
>
>I'm not attending Worldcon, but I'm writing an acceptance speech to be delivered for me.
(Good book. On sale, but ends on a cliffhanger. Sequel is good too, but not on sale.)
The problem is that once you are in a situation where someone has a gun by your head you've already failed at self-defense.
The blaze loves to cover situations where ordinary people used guns for self defense. If none of the situations they describe there happen to you, then ok, you're probably safe.
I'd comment further, but I'm not a trained professional. Marc MacYoung, however, is. He wrote a book on self-defense. Not focused on techniques of defending yourself, but how to avoid self defense situations and how to survive the consequences.
I liked the narrative imagery, the picture painted of women as wolves: excluded from the eco(nomic) system, but at the same time just what the system needs.
Also, I think everyone struggles with the same issue at some point or other: Do I take what's on the table, or do I demand more?
For those who find themselves wanting more woman-wolf archetype stories, I recommend Women Who Run with the Wolves.
My impression of enlightenment based on reading Waking Up by Sam Harris (highly recommended) and Jeffery Martin's PNSE studies is that it doesn't necessarily change your personality much and it does not really have much to do with moral behavior one way or the other. Gupta would likely behave in a similar way whether or not he was enlightened.
> putting hungry dogs in a room where there's food on the other side separated by a metal plate giving mild electric shocks, so the dog must decide if it's hungry enough to weather the immediately unpleasant shocks, or it is not
This experimental design sounds like it is testing anxiety and the hippocampus. The utility function analogy doesn't seem appropriate. The dog is facing a conflict between approaching the food (motivation system) and avoiding the electric shock (defense system). The hippocampus is the brain region that is specialized in detecting goal conflict, selecting a resolution, or if no resolution is achievable initiating anxiety. In the absence of resolution, when anxiety is initiated, negative valence is amplified. Changing the valence inputs is the strategy for driving resolution.
The way I read your description of the experiment, the dog chose just fine: don't get shocked. The catatonic state vs. rage state sounds like dogs of different temperament reacting differently to frustration (not getting the food). I have known dogs that react to being alone all day by moping and I have known dogs that react to being alone all day by destroying anything they can get their jaw on.
Edit: The Neuropsychology of Anxiety, 2nd Edition by Gray and McNaughton
> Attempting to re-create all the formatting and links in one go can't have been any fun.
It's trivially easy if you have RES. It adds the "source" button (between "permalink" and "embed"), which shows you the comment as it was typed.
> His love of Thiel is total idiocy.
Yes, there are countless articles that have called Thiel an idiot. That is what happens when you play a role in bringing down a "jounalistic" endeavor.
But even the New York Times and Dowd couldn't make Thiel look like an idiot in their recent profile and it looked like they were trying.
I'm interested in hearing why admiring Thiel is idiocy.
Even the news articles are just using "climate change" as a headline and saying it's one of many factors, so I don't think you have to be a full-on climate change denier to suggest anything else:
> Fire suppression tactics have also created a more dangerous situation when a fire is sparked, according to the Washington Post. In the example of the Carr Fire, some of the dry brush that allowed the wildfire to quickly grow out of control had been dead for decades and was never cleared by controlled burns or other means, the report added.
(Disclaimer: I'm not the expert you're asking for.)
> No race riot killing > 5 people: 95%
This seems overconfident to me, for three reasons.
First, after consulting Wikipedia, it looks like we're currently seeing about one and a half instances of major race related unrest each year. We can probably expect that number to increase to around two under Trump and the Republican Congress IMO. Partly due to preexisting trends, partly due to worse policies.
Second, I think that when unrest occurs we're going to see individuals much less inclined towards peaceful protesting as opposed to violent action under a Trump administration. This is rational because Republicans are unlikely to make large concessions. Black people's faith in the political system will also be undermined by Obama's exit from the presidency, especially due to his contrast with Trump. Obama often appeared on television to sympathize with rioters and urge them to protest nonviolently. Trump's more likely to actively aggravate tensions.
Third, I think Trump's presidency is going to encourage heavy handed responses to rioting from state and local police. We're not going to have Obama keeping the national guard restrained when the next Ferguson happens. That makes escalation likely.
I think the odds that we see a riot killing five people or more are about 30%. The odds we see a riot where at least one person dies are over 90%.