@NurseRatched The government can't afford to do most of what it's doing. It should be taking considerably more from taxpayers than it is as a result.
I'm not saying paying more taxes is a good thing, but basically what we have right now is we're getting a bunch of government services we never intend to pay for, and that's going to leave our kids paying for it.
Some people might disagree with me on this, but I feel that indenturing your children into a lifetime of debt so you can get money is basically selling your kids into slavery.
To me, the ideal would be to raise taxes and lower spending and actually pay for some of the "free stuff" we've been getting. So-called "experts" might say "But that might hurt!" and I'd reply that it hurting is the point! There is no free ride.
It might be too late. If it is too late, then it won't matter anyway because taxes will be going up imminently, program spending will go down extraordinarily, and we'll be sending all of our blood sweat and tears to bankers who happily funded all of our "free stuff" along the way.
I'm not saying paying more taxes is a good thing, but basically what we have right now is we're getting a bunch of government services we never intend to pay for, and that's going to leave our kids paying for it.
Some people might disagree with me on this, but I feel that indenturing your children into a lifetime of debt so you can get money is basically selling your kids into slavery.
To me, the ideal would be to raise taxes and lower spending and actually pay for some of the "free stuff" we've been getting. So-called "experts" might say "But that might hurt!" and I'd reply that it hurting is the point! There is no free ride.
It might be too late. If it is too late, then it won't matter anyway because taxes will be going up imminently, program spending will go down extraordinarily, and we'll be sending all of our blood sweat and tears to bankers who happily funded all of our "free stuff" along the way.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
— Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
— Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias"
@parker @bucadibeppo @The_Quantum_Alpha
Giirl, girls girls
Which are good? Which are bad?
Girls girls girls
Ask your mom or ask your dad
(I think that's 50% canadian content?)
Giirl, girls girls
Which are good? Which are bad?
Girls girls girls
Ask your mom or ask your dad
(I think that's 50% canadian content?)
@tpostmillennial Sotomayor should just realize that she's a case hearing machine, and so she has no right to refuse to work in-person, because machines don't get rights.
@Hyolobrika @mattskala Ultimately, my solution was to essentially appeal to your intuition while running sanity checks to make sure the ideas were workable and internally consistent.
I remember the moment my existential crisis ended vividly. I was in class and the teacher, this little skinny stereotypical 70s nerd, was talking about hiking through the mountains in Kenya, and I was really impressed with his story. Here I was in the middle of this terrible existential crisis of nihilism and my heart was moved by this story.
It made me realize that I didn't need to appeal to some incomprehensible universal, I've got a set of values built into me that doesn't care about the earth will be bathed in atomic fire for billions of years after the solar cycle changes from hydrogen to helium.
Later on I came to realize that many of those are a gift from my ancestors, from a library written over billions of years, and it's useful and I should listen to it, but I also have to understand that not every lesson is relevant, such as social lessons for a 50 person society where we live in a world of 8 billion, or lessons on conserving and storing excess energy that saved my ancestors from starvation but isn't particularly useful in a society where I can get unlimited food at any time. You have to use your brain and your willpower to temper pure instinct and pure societal pressure. That's how you end up as the person you want to be.
I remember the moment my existential crisis ended vividly. I was in class and the teacher, this little skinny stereotypical 70s nerd, was talking about hiking through the mountains in Kenya, and I was really impressed with his story. Here I was in the middle of this terrible existential crisis of nihilism and my heart was moved by this story.
It made me realize that I didn't need to appeal to some incomprehensible universal, I've got a set of values built into me that doesn't care about the earth will be bathed in atomic fire for billions of years after the solar cycle changes from hydrogen to helium.
Later on I came to realize that many of those are a gift from my ancestors, from a library written over billions of years, and it's useful and I should listen to it, but I also have to understand that not every lesson is relevant, such as social lessons for a 50 person society where we live in a world of 8 billion, or lessons on conserving and storing excess energy that saved my ancestors from starvation but isn't particularly useful in a society where I can get unlimited food at any time. You have to use your brain and your willpower to temper pure instinct and pure societal pressure. That's how you end up as the person you want to be.
@mattskala @Hyolobrika That's a really cool article! I wrote about an existential crisis that looks an awful lot like "stage 4.5" that occurred during my STEM education in my book The Graysonian Ethic. What was written is exactly what happened -- having mastered rationality, you realize that you can't apply it universally because you can't derive any universal first principles. To get out of bed in the morning is irrational.
I can't say that I transitioned into a stage 5 postmodernism because I can't say for sure what that looks like -- maybe I devolved into stage 3 pre-rationalism since the answer I came to was embracing my humanity to find first principles as an answer to the first principles problem -- but regardless it was a very interesting article given the parallels I saw.
I can't say that I transitioned into a stage 5 postmodernism because I can't say for sure what that looks like -- maybe I devolved into stage 3 pre-rationalism since the answer I came to was embracing my humanity to find first principles as an answer to the first principles problem -- but regardless it was a very interesting article given the parallels I saw.
@Hyolobrika @mattskala Well, if you look at it in terms of what the article is talking about, the benefit of it is basically that it represents mastery of rationalism.
There's a few steps to mastery. First you don't know the rules, then you are learning the rules, then you master the rules, then you learn how to break the rules in useful ways.
As I mentioned before, critical theory is in part essentially breaking the rules of logic. Instead of starting with the initial parts and moving towards a conclusion, you start with a conclusion and work your way backwards hoping to find a path to the initial facts. This can be useful because for example if you look at 19th century texts through a contemporary lens you can get further insights into the work and maybe into humanity. In that sense, it's sort of like the historical practice where gold companies would go back and reprocess their tailings using better technology and retrieve more gold.
Thing is, let's say that if instead of reprocessing tailings from a gold mine you repocess tailings from an iron mine. You might get something out the other side, but instead of gold you might have nothing but impurities, and then if you don't have the mastery to identify that you don't have anything but impurities, you'll parade around your impurities and claim it's gold.
There's a few steps to mastery. First you don't know the rules, then you are learning the rules, then you master the rules, then you learn how to break the rules in useful ways.
As I mentioned before, critical theory is in part essentially breaking the rules of logic. Instead of starting with the initial parts and moving towards a conclusion, you start with a conclusion and work your way backwards hoping to find a path to the initial facts. This can be useful because for example if you look at 19th century texts through a contemporary lens you can get further insights into the work and maybe into humanity. In that sense, it's sort of like the historical practice where gold companies would go back and reprocess their tailings using better technology and retrieve more gold.
Thing is, let's say that if instead of reprocessing tailings from a gold mine you repocess tailings from an iron mine. You might get something out the other side, but instead of gold you might have nothing but impurities, and then if you don't have the mastery to identify that you don't have anything but impurities, you'll parade around your impurities and claim it's gold.
@houseoftolstoy You're absolutely right. My statement was more about the hypocrisy of saying "right wing echo chamber" when said "echo chambers" are presently entirely open and free (in the case of youtube, actually heavily censored in favor of the left) while their spaces are specifically closed and censored, but it can all change in a heartbeat. We know gab isn't free. We know Gettr isn't free. I'm pretty sure truth social won't be free.
I'm not a young man. I remember that the right wasn't the friend of freedom when I was growing up. Nobody has a monopoly on authoritarianism, and just because you're supporting freedom now doesn't mean that won't change the moment you think you're dominant.
That's why it's so important to keep using your eyes and your brain and to make decisions about what's going on without being told what your decisions or opinions are. The moment your turn off your brain, you're just a tool for someone else.
I'm not a young man. I remember that the right wasn't the friend of freedom when I was growing up. Nobody has a monopoly on authoritarianism, and just because you're supporting freedom now doesn't mean that won't change the moment you think you're dominant.
That's why it's so important to keep using your eyes and your brain and to make decisions about what's going on without being told what your decisions or opinions are. The moment your turn off your brain, you're just a tool for someone else.
@Hyolobrika This is a really cool set of articles! just read it all.
It started out strong, and the criticism of introducing postmodernism to a mind that hasn't reached rationalism sounds a lot like my criticism of critical theory being applied (haha) uncritically. You're intentionally breaking the rules of logic in the hope of getting meaningful data, but if you aren't trained to rationally analyze the output of the tool and separate the wheat from the chaff, then you will present the unfiltered results uncritically and look like a monster.
The second article I think was really broken in that we know the press just lies, and in ways that obviously don't always rely on hypotheticals.
The final article I found very entertaining, but I'm not sure it was particularly persuasive.
That being said, it's sort of unfair to judge too harshly because we've had much better arguments present themselves since 2018. I feel a lot of the divide in the past two years better illustrates the writer's point -- On one side you have people asking "but what if the vaccines turn out not to be safe?" and on the other side you have people saying "but they said it's safe so it must be safe", and the difference between people who consider the hypothetical unintended side effects of massive policies versus the establishment's stated effects of the same policy.
Another one of the discussions in the original posted video I think was about nested conversations. If you have two named characters having a conversation about a conversation two other named characters had, that's something even a lot of people of average or slightly above average intelligence can struggle with, and it will increase in challenge as the layers of hypothetical increase. If we consider that ability to have a nested hypothetical to be another layer, then I can see looking past the presented official narrative as a similar sort of nested hypothetical. Deeper, looking at what a hypothetical response to a hypothetical response and the consequences of those responses is getting into some difficult stuff but it's absolutely doable and why the "conspiracy theories" that were simply considering responses to responses have largely turned out to be true.
It started out strong, and the criticism of introducing postmodernism to a mind that hasn't reached rationalism sounds a lot like my criticism of critical theory being applied (haha) uncritically. You're intentionally breaking the rules of logic in the hope of getting meaningful data, but if you aren't trained to rationally analyze the output of the tool and separate the wheat from the chaff, then you will present the unfiltered results uncritically and look like a monster.
The second article I think was really broken in that we know the press just lies, and in ways that obviously don't always rely on hypotheticals.
The final article I found very entertaining, but I'm not sure it was particularly persuasive.
That being said, it's sort of unfair to judge too harshly because we've had much better arguments present themselves since 2018. I feel a lot of the divide in the past two years better illustrates the writer's point -- On one side you have people asking "but what if the vaccines turn out not to be safe?" and on the other side you have people saying "but they said it's safe so it must be safe", and the difference between people who consider the hypothetical unintended side effects of massive policies versus the establishment's stated effects of the same policy.
Another one of the discussions in the original posted video I think was about nested conversations. If you have two named characters having a conversation about a conversation two other named characters had, that's something even a lot of people of average or slightly above average intelligence can struggle with, and it will increase in challenge as the layers of hypothetical increase. If we consider that ability to have a nested hypothetical to be another layer, then I can see looking past the presented official narrative as a similar sort of nested hypothetical. Deeper, looking at what a hypothetical response to a hypothetical response and the consequences of those responses is getting into some difficult stuff but it's absolutely doable and why the "conspiracy theories" that were simply considering responses to responses have largely turned out to be true.
@boilingsteam That would be a shame -- Microsoft's long-time customers know better than to invest in Microsoft stuff like that.
"They're running right-wing echo chambers!"
The "right": Tries not to remove any content or ban anyone
The left: Ban happy, reports, blocks, bans all thoughts they don't like with extreme prejudice
You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The "right": Tries not to remove any content or ban anyone
The left: Ban happy, reports, blocks, bans all thoughts they don't like with extreme prejudice
You keep using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.
A first principle of maintenance (and in my opinion is this applies to medicine as well) is that "run to failure" / "do nothing" is often the appropriate action.
Take the transmission in your car. Something like that often has a short infant mortality period where it is more likely to fail (under warranty if you buy the car new), and if it makes it past that initial period it has a very low chance of failure until the probability of failure starts to rise near the end of service life. If you were worried about your transmission failing and as a result you have a new transmission installed every year, you would actually cause the likelihood of a failure to massively increase because every time you put a new part in there's a chance you do the replacement wrong, or there's a manufacturing defect somewhere so it experiences infant mortality. The right choice for most people is to drive until the car starts having problems.
Choosing the right thing to do requires you to balance the potential consequence of doing nothing with the actual or potential consequences of doing the thing. If the actual consequences plus the weighted potential consequences of doing the thing outweigh the weighted consequences of doing nothing, then you do nothing.
The same concept I think applies in healthcare as well. The common cold has negligible consequences most of the time, so we would never consider cutting people's noses off to prevent it, or injecting people full of morphine and antibiotics, because all those things have big negative consequences and likely won't have a big chance of doing any good. The right thing to do is basic hygiene to prevent it and basically no medical interventions if you do get it unless there's a good reason besides "I have a cold and I don't like it"
"We should *do something*" is sometimes a dangerous thought and can lead to spending a bunch of effort and maybe money doing something that actually makes things worse. Also, every single intervention comes with risk there wouldn't have been if you didn't do that thing. In maintenance and medicine, every time you intervene there's a chance you walk away from something -- or someone --- who was working correctly and isn't when you walk away. Even good technicians and good doctors can have this happen to them. Just have a bad day, just have something unexpected come up, it doesn't take much.
Take the transmission in your car. Something like that often has a short infant mortality period where it is more likely to fail (under warranty if you buy the car new), and if it makes it past that initial period it has a very low chance of failure until the probability of failure starts to rise near the end of service life. If you were worried about your transmission failing and as a result you have a new transmission installed every year, you would actually cause the likelihood of a failure to massively increase because every time you put a new part in there's a chance you do the replacement wrong, or there's a manufacturing defect somewhere so it experiences infant mortality. The right choice for most people is to drive until the car starts having problems.
Choosing the right thing to do requires you to balance the potential consequence of doing nothing with the actual or potential consequences of doing the thing. If the actual consequences plus the weighted potential consequences of doing the thing outweigh the weighted consequences of doing nothing, then you do nothing.
The same concept I think applies in healthcare as well. The common cold has negligible consequences most of the time, so we would never consider cutting people's noses off to prevent it, or injecting people full of morphine and antibiotics, because all those things have big negative consequences and likely won't have a big chance of doing any good. The right thing to do is basic hygiene to prevent it and basically no medical interventions if you do get it unless there's a good reason besides "I have a cold and I don't like it"
"We should *do something*" is sometimes a dangerous thought and can lead to spending a bunch of effort and maybe money doing something that actually makes things worse. Also, every single intervention comes with risk there wouldn't have been if you didn't do that thing. In maintenance and medicine, every time you intervene there's a chance you walk away from something -- or someone --- who was working correctly and isn't when you walk away. Even good technicians and good doctors can have this happen to them. Just have a bad day, just have something unexpected come up, it doesn't take much.
