Highly fatal viruses kill their hosts so fast they don't spread much as I recall. There were some really bad flus recently (past 15 years) but they died out almost immediately along with anyone who had them.
And as I like to say: "predictable and predicted"
Which makes it worse imo, it wasn't like nobody was warning if these consequences.
Which makes it worse imo, it wasn't like nobody was warning if these consequences.
Ironically, I come to the opposite conclusion. Fedi is about the only place you can still have longform discussion since you face so many road blocks elsewhere. A lot of people might not like it because they want short zippy discussions, but the free, open, customizable nature of the fediverse means you don't need to ask permission like you might on big tech and you are still connected to a greater whole unlike a web 1.0 website.
Especially if it's a habit. Like, it kind of is strange how many times my Matrix trilogy postmodernism analysis comes up in my thoughts about various things. You dig and dig and dig and if you're not careful it all makes sense up to that point but only if you read the rest of the volumes.
In an earlier effortpost (see?) I looked at how left wing memes have this problem where you need to have a whole body of knowledge just to understand their worldview, where for right wing memes typically you're relying on self-evident hypocrisy.
I guess though, that's a warning to us to at least try to keep our thinking grounded in real life. I like to call it "nailing your feet to the ground". Spend enough time and our amazing minds can justify anything. You have to keep your feet nailed down because you still have to spend time on the ground or you'll zip off into space.
In an earlier effortpost (see?) I looked at how left wing memes have this problem where you need to have a whole body of knowledge just to understand their worldview, where for right wing memes typically you're relying on self-evident hypocrisy.
I guess though, that's a warning to us to at least try to keep our thinking grounded in real life. I like to call it "nailing your feet to the ground". Spend enough time and our amazing minds can justify anything. You have to keep your feet nailed down because you still have to spend time on the ground or you'll zip off into space.
I've been thinking about why certain people are so allergic to #effortposting
I think I've got it figured out.
Now to be sure, there's some people who just don't want to engage with the long post. I get it. I like to read but not everyone does.
But I think that there's quite a few people where a fully fleshed out post just breaks their rhetorical flow.
Like let's say that I would typically make a post that says 1 + 1 = 2.
So someone might take that post and then respond "1+1=10" because they think they're being clever and they're doing this in binary. Someone else might say "1+1=1" because they're using symbols from digital logic. Someone else might say "can you say for sure that 1 + 1 really equals two? Do you have any kind of evidence?", and yet another person will make an argument about what even is a one or a two.
A lot of discourse online ends up looking exactly like this because it's easy. You get to have what looks like a real conversation with the other side, you get to very easily appear to be defending whatever point you're trying to make, and you can have a low effort conversation that's perfectly fun. Along the way, every little piece that gets engaged with you can just nitpick some more and you can have these long very important looking conversations that don't really go anywhere.
So the problem is, it's a little conversation that's perfectly fun and it's kind of stupid. I think this is why you've seen a lot of people whose conversations look exactly the same today as they did in 2016. Things don't have to move forward if a simple conversation about 1 + 1 can be drawn out into forever over semantics that in reality everyone kind of agrees on anyway.
So you make a wonderful effort post, that says 1 + 1 = 2 if you are in a number system whose base is greater than or equal to three, if you're using the Arabic number system that is widely used in the West and around the world, if the plus signal is intended to mean addition. You can use examples from people's lives, you can point out that when you have one thing and then someone gives you another thing then if you count those things you will have two things. Maybe you have examples from history or from the physical world where you have one thing and you add another thing and you have two things. Lest you be accused of a eurocentric or American centric worldview, you can take examples from other civilizations, such as imperial China or the Islamic world or even Africa.
I should mention, that even though my 1+1=2 argument appears facetious on its face, it is an actual argument that was extremely popular for a short time on Twitter. And guess what? Many of these exact same tactics were used by people who are arguing against the idea that 1+1=2.
So that point, you've created a wonderful effortpost, you covered most of the common counter arguments, there seem to be three options.
The first is to try to continue to nitpick, but this is an option who's calculus is changed in an effortpost. In 2004, in a presidential debate between John Kerry and George W bush, John Kerry pointed out that there were only three countries included in his supposed Grand coalition. George W bush famously replied "you forgot Poland" which was true in a literal sense but didn't really do anything to the argument that had been made that the war in Iraq wasn't some Grand operation.
The second is to stop attacking the content of the discussion and start attacking the form of the discussion. Relatively constantly lately I've been talking about how idiocracy the movie looks at anti-ntellectual idiocy for its basis, but the pseudo intellectual basis for idiocy is equally valid. A lot of big fancy words to explain that you just wanted to have a dumb conversation made up of the simulacrum of intelligent conversation that has been created in the postmodern age. "You see, I'm supposed to say this and then you're supposed to say that and then I'm supposed to say this and you're supposed to say that" -- a discussion which preempts common arguments by addressing them ahead of time involves actually doing some leg work and brain work rather than just reiterating points that somebody else has already thought up for you.
The final one is the best one, but it's pretty rare. It's to actually engage with the content of the post. There have been people who were able to properly engage with what I have said in effortposts, and actually done a decent job of showing where there was a flaw in my thinking. People who can do stuff like that I value very highly, because at the end of the day anyone who thinks that they're going to change the world by arguing online is simply mistaken, the only one that you can change is yourself and the people that you're talking with, and none of you are that important in the grand scheme of things. But, by properly engaging with ideas even if you don't come away agreeing with each other you can both come away enriched.
I think one of the most dangerous parts about effortposting is that once you start to get off the beaten path you might find that you're no longer part of either tribe. By coming up with your own ideas, you might find that you agree with the guys that you thought you didn't like, or worse yet you might find that you don't agree with either major team. I think that it's safe to say we're in an age right now where most ideas on the tribal front of left versus right are fundamentally broken and fundamentally unworkable, and so once you start to look for something that's actually true rather than something that's acceptable for someone of your tribe to say, you are very likely to end up in a location that doesn't make anyone but you happy.
It's been interesting though lately, because a thoughtful argument chases away unserious people. There's a lot of people who pretend to have all kinds of interesting things to say but in reality they're just cheering for their team. Once the chance in slogans are used up, the conversation effectively ends.
The fediverse in particular has some attributes about it that make it a particularly decent platform for effortposting even if many people would prefer not to. For one thing, individual system operators can choose the maximum length of posts, so while Mastodon is by default about 500 characters, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from having 1500 or 5,000, or 50,000. The other thing that's particularly nice is if you are either on a friendly instance that allows and encourages effort or you operate your own instance, you don't need to worry about some YouTube AI deleting your massive effortpost. Yet another thing that's nice about the federal verse in particular is the deep ideological diversity. There's everyone from Communists to ancaps, anarchists to totalitarians. Now granted some of these people don't like to talk to one another, but I think that it's important that they are all there.
In the end though, you can almost think of effortposting as a metaphor for the way someone should live their lives. Are you just doing the things that you think you are supposed to do, or are you acting with intent, thinking for yourself and choosing what actions to take? One of the reasons why there's so many people who are miserable right now I think is that everyone is doing what they think they're supposed to do because that's what they've been told and not because they've put that much thought in into it. People who are only doing what they're told of course aren't going to put that much effort in, and so there are a lot of people have a lot of levels who self-evidently aren't putting that much effort in, and they aren't getting anything like great results. Besides that, they resent the society that they feel forces them to do things that they don't see as beneficial. To live a good life is to live an effortpost. You have to look at the world around you, make decisions for yourself, and change your behaviors based on personal decisions that you make for yourself. If you are the one who chooses how you want to live, and you put an effort towards that, I think that you'll find even if you don't achieve the results that you like you are still happier with the life that you've lived.
I think I've got it figured out.
Now to be sure, there's some people who just don't want to engage with the long post. I get it. I like to read but not everyone does.
But I think that there's quite a few people where a fully fleshed out post just breaks their rhetorical flow.
Like let's say that I would typically make a post that says 1 + 1 = 2.
So someone might take that post and then respond "1+1=10" because they think they're being clever and they're doing this in binary. Someone else might say "1+1=1" because they're using symbols from digital logic. Someone else might say "can you say for sure that 1 + 1 really equals two? Do you have any kind of evidence?", and yet another person will make an argument about what even is a one or a two.
A lot of discourse online ends up looking exactly like this because it's easy. You get to have what looks like a real conversation with the other side, you get to very easily appear to be defending whatever point you're trying to make, and you can have a low effort conversation that's perfectly fun. Along the way, every little piece that gets engaged with you can just nitpick some more and you can have these long very important looking conversations that don't really go anywhere.
So the problem is, it's a little conversation that's perfectly fun and it's kind of stupid. I think this is why you've seen a lot of people whose conversations look exactly the same today as they did in 2016. Things don't have to move forward if a simple conversation about 1 + 1 can be drawn out into forever over semantics that in reality everyone kind of agrees on anyway.
So you make a wonderful effort post, that says 1 + 1 = 2 if you are in a number system whose base is greater than or equal to three, if you're using the Arabic number system that is widely used in the West and around the world, if the plus signal is intended to mean addition. You can use examples from people's lives, you can point out that when you have one thing and then someone gives you another thing then if you count those things you will have two things. Maybe you have examples from history or from the physical world where you have one thing and you add another thing and you have two things. Lest you be accused of a eurocentric or American centric worldview, you can take examples from other civilizations, such as imperial China or the Islamic world or even Africa.
I should mention, that even though my 1+1=2 argument appears facetious on its face, it is an actual argument that was extremely popular for a short time on Twitter. And guess what? Many of these exact same tactics were used by people who are arguing against the idea that 1+1=2.
So that point, you've created a wonderful effortpost, you covered most of the common counter arguments, there seem to be three options.
The first is to try to continue to nitpick, but this is an option who's calculus is changed in an effortpost. In 2004, in a presidential debate between John Kerry and George W bush, John Kerry pointed out that there were only three countries included in his supposed Grand coalition. George W bush famously replied "you forgot Poland" which was true in a literal sense but didn't really do anything to the argument that had been made that the war in Iraq wasn't some Grand operation.
The second is to stop attacking the content of the discussion and start attacking the form of the discussion. Relatively constantly lately I've been talking about how idiocracy the movie looks at anti-ntellectual idiocy for its basis, but the pseudo intellectual basis for idiocy is equally valid. A lot of big fancy words to explain that you just wanted to have a dumb conversation made up of the simulacrum of intelligent conversation that has been created in the postmodern age. "You see, I'm supposed to say this and then you're supposed to say that and then I'm supposed to say this and you're supposed to say that" -- a discussion which preempts common arguments by addressing them ahead of time involves actually doing some leg work and brain work rather than just reiterating points that somebody else has already thought up for you.
The final one is the best one, but it's pretty rare. It's to actually engage with the content of the post. There have been people who were able to properly engage with what I have said in effortposts, and actually done a decent job of showing where there was a flaw in my thinking. People who can do stuff like that I value very highly, because at the end of the day anyone who thinks that they're going to change the world by arguing online is simply mistaken, the only one that you can change is yourself and the people that you're talking with, and none of you are that important in the grand scheme of things. But, by properly engaging with ideas even if you don't come away agreeing with each other you can both come away enriched.
I think one of the most dangerous parts about effortposting is that once you start to get off the beaten path you might find that you're no longer part of either tribe. By coming up with your own ideas, you might find that you agree with the guys that you thought you didn't like, or worse yet you might find that you don't agree with either major team. I think that it's safe to say we're in an age right now where most ideas on the tribal front of left versus right are fundamentally broken and fundamentally unworkable, and so once you start to look for something that's actually true rather than something that's acceptable for someone of your tribe to say, you are very likely to end up in a location that doesn't make anyone but you happy.
It's been interesting though lately, because a thoughtful argument chases away unserious people. There's a lot of people who pretend to have all kinds of interesting things to say but in reality they're just cheering for their team. Once the chance in slogans are used up, the conversation effectively ends.
The fediverse in particular has some attributes about it that make it a particularly decent platform for effortposting even if many people would prefer not to. For one thing, individual system operators can choose the maximum length of posts, so while Mastodon is by default about 500 characters, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from having 1500 or 5,000, or 50,000. The other thing that's particularly nice is if you are either on a friendly instance that allows and encourages effort or you operate your own instance, you don't need to worry about some YouTube AI deleting your massive effortpost. Yet another thing that's nice about the federal verse in particular is the deep ideological diversity. There's everyone from Communists to ancaps, anarchists to totalitarians. Now granted some of these people don't like to talk to one another, but I think that it's important that they are all there.
In the end though, you can almost think of effortposting as a metaphor for the way someone should live their lives. Are you just doing the things that you think you are supposed to do, or are you acting with intent, thinking for yourself and choosing what actions to take? One of the reasons why there's so many people who are miserable right now I think is that everyone is doing what they think they're supposed to do because that's what they've been told and not because they've put that much thought in into it. People who are only doing what they're told of course aren't going to put that much effort in, and so there are a lot of people have a lot of levels who self-evidently aren't putting that much effort in, and they aren't getting anything like great results. Besides that, they resent the society that they feel forces them to do things that they don't see as beneficial. To live a good life is to live an effortpost. You have to look at the world around you, make decisions for yourself, and change your behaviors based on personal decisions that you make for yourself. If you are the one who chooses how you want to live, and you put an effort towards that, I think that you'll find even if you don't achieve the results that you like you are still happier with the life that you've lived.
The benefit that you can get from being a local store is the fact that I can just go straight there get the thing I want come home and immediately start doing whatever I need to do. But if you don't have what I need, then not only am I wasting my time to go visit but I end up on Amazon anyway...
And it's not just for super individual stuff either. It's like, if I want to go buy a 50 ohm resistor, where do I get it from? The answer is I can't buy one in my city. To go to Amazon or ebay or something like that.
And it's not just for super individual stuff either. It's like, if I want to go buy a 50 ohm resistor, where do I get it from? The answer is I can't buy one in my city. To go to Amazon or ebay or something like that.
Thank goodness there were no former Marines around or something bad could have happened!
I've written that length about this idea (of course I have lol I can't shut up)
Individuals need to focus first on themselves to become strong enough to participate in a community or build one if there isn't one. Then they can focus on the people immediately around them. Once they have helped the people immediately around them, then that little molecule of people can coalesce amongst other molecules and we can build a community.
In my view you can't have a community without strong individuals. Otherwise what you're trying to do is like the.com bubble, you lose money on each one but you make up for it on volume.
In this way, ultimately you will have a very small number of people who are incredible who have saved themselves, save the people around them, saved the people in their community, and start having positive effects on the broader culture. A small number of those people end up going on to change the world.
But it all starts with a virtuous individual, and without that virtuous individual there can be no social groups, there can be no community, there can be no Nation.
There's only one way to inspire virtue, to be virtuous and live a blessed life thereby. People see the blessed life and want to have it for themselves, And so follow the example of the good man.
Many communitarian societies end up failing if they neglect personal virtue as the basis, because you simply can't make up the difference in volume. You need good people to have good communities. Perhaps certain individuals are lacking such as individuals with disabilities, but their inclusion is a sign of the overall virtue of the group and without the virtuous there will be no room for anyone who can't immediately contribute.
In some cases, sorry to say, there might not be a role for the weak if they're too weak. You can't build a kakocracy based on including people who lack all merit or virtue. For them you must give them the tools but if they can't be meritorious by any measure then they must be on their own. But it's key that virtue isn't just about success or physical strength but about moral virtue or self control -- things that can be cultivated.
Historically, groups with strong individuals that build strong communities can outcompete merely oppressive systems. It might not happen all the time, but virtue can edge out vice in the long term even if it doesn't look that way at first.
Individuals need to focus first on themselves to become strong enough to participate in a community or build one if there isn't one. Then they can focus on the people immediately around them. Once they have helped the people immediately around them, then that little molecule of people can coalesce amongst other molecules and we can build a community.
In my view you can't have a community without strong individuals. Otherwise what you're trying to do is like the.com bubble, you lose money on each one but you make up for it on volume.
In this way, ultimately you will have a very small number of people who are incredible who have saved themselves, save the people around them, saved the people in their community, and start having positive effects on the broader culture. A small number of those people end up going on to change the world.
But it all starts with a virtuous individual, and without that virtuous individual there can be no social groups, there can be no community, there can be no Nation.
There's only one way to inspire virtue, to be virtuous and live a blessed life thereby. People see the blessed life and want to have it for themselves, And so follow the example of the good man.
Many communitarian societies end up failing if they neglect personal virtue as the basis, because you simply can't make up the difference in volume. You need good people to have good communities. Perhaps certain individuals are lacking such as individuals with disabilities, but their inclusion is a sign of the overall virtue of the group and without the virtuous there will be no room for anyone who can't immediately contribute.
In some cases, sorry to say, there might not be a role for the weak if they're too weak. You can't build a kakocracy based on including people who lack all merit or virtue. For them you must give them the tools but if they can't be meritorious by any measure then they must be on their own. But it's key that virtue isn't just about success or physical strength but about moral virtue or self control -- things that can be cultivated.
Historically, groups with strong individuals that build strong communities can outcompete merely oppressive systems. It might not happen all the time, but virtue can edge out vice in the long term even if it doesn't look that way at first.
[Admin mode] Down for a bit, I can't explain in the least what happened, looks like a config file changed. I do have this feeling it was related to letsencrypt because it added a challenge file to the config file, but we're back up now. Backups are good for your soul.
Then I realized we were rebooting constantly, which suggested that apache was overloaded. I saw in the logs that I was trying to open unlimited threads, so I tuned that up, and now the site's been up for hours without a problem.
Then I realized we were rebooting constantly, which suggested that apache was overloaded. I saw in the logs that I was trying to open unlimited threads, so I tuned that up, and now the site's been up for hours without a problem.
The oldest baby boomers are 78. The generation that's older than that is called the silent generation, the ones born during world war 2 who came of age in the post-war period.
Biden, Pelosi, and McConnel are all part of that generation.
Biden, Pelosi, and McConnel are all part of that generation.
I've got most of my powder dry at the moment in money market funds that are basically risk free because they're just keeping the money in reverse repo facilities at the fed for 5%, because I agree and I don't intend to make the mistake I made in 2008 and not be able to pick up any of the bargains.
Problem is things have been so screwed for so long people look like geniuses for doing dumb things. Eventually fortunes will be lost, but until that happens people refuse to think about the idea that lines sometimes change direction.
Happened many times throughout our lives -- 2001, 2007, to an extent 2020, but people think this time is different and more importantly people assume secular cycles will always play in our favor.
That isn't to say that you can't invest in the stock market without it being gambling, but if you're in on the next big thing that's been going up for several years hoping that you're not the last person holding the bag, you are gambling. Absolutely.
Happened many times throughout our lives -- 2001, 2007, to an extent 2020, but people think this time is different and more importantly people assume secular cycles will always play in our favor.
That isn't to say that you can't invest in the stock market without it being gambling, but if you're in on the next big thing that's been going up for several years hoping that you're not the last person holding the bag, you are gambling. Absolutely.
There was an article a couple weeks ago about how he mostly just hangs out playing video games and doesn't really get involved with social life. Gee, I wonder why he might do that at NYU?
Sometimes you see people who read a whole bunch of books or at least claim to, and it's like..... "Do you, though?"
People who follow me have at some point seen me talk about some of the books that I read. I mean I only seem to read books for 14 year olds so there's that, but you can actually tell that I read a thing now and again.
In 2022, I made it through a whopping 111 books. In 2023, I made it through 84, and this year has been a much quieter year with only 27. But anyone who's been following me can tell. I didn't just read the books, I had something to say about them sometimes or I soaked up some set of ideas from them. Meanwhile it really seems like a lot of these people who claim to be reading all these books -- and not books for 14-year-olds like I read but actual book learning books, and yet most of these people haven't had a new idea in their heads in 15 years.
Look, I don't want to make this all about me. Reading 111 manga and light novels in a year isn't that much to brag about. But you've got someone like Barack Obama who claims to have read all of these big important books, and you never see him engage with any of the ideas in any of those books. Like what was he doing? Looking at the pictures?
My little brother did the same thing to me. He said they're talking about how he read a thousand books, and I'm like "bro you barely made rent for the last 6 months. Last time you produced anything creative was the Bush administration. What were these books about?"
People who follow me have at some point seen me talk about some of the books that I read. I mean I only seem to read books for 14 year olds so there's that, but you can actually tell that I read a thing now and again.
In 2022, I made it through a whopping 111 books. In 2023, I made it through 84, and this year has been a much quieter year with only 27. But anyone who's been following me can tell. I didn't just read the books, I had something to say about them sometimes or I soaked up some set of ideas from them. Meanwhile it really seems like a lot of these people who claim to be reading all these books -- and not books for 14-year-olds like I read but actual book learning books, and yet most of these people haven't had a new idea in their heads in 15 years.
Look, I don't want to make this all about me. Reading 111 manga and light novels in a year isn't that much to brag about. But you've got someone like Barack Obama who claims to have read all of these big important books, and you never see him engage with any of the ideas in any of those books. Like what was he doing? Looking at the pictures?
My little brother did the same thing to me. He said they're talking about how he read a thousand books, and I'm like "bro you barely made rent for the last 6 months. Last time you produced anything creative was the Bush administration. What were these books about?"
One big problem with banning people from selling stuff is that you still live on earth.
You can develop explosives using chemicals you can distill from urine. Are we going to ban urination?
Cyanide is really easy, you can get jars of ferrocyanide for cyanotypes.
There was a story about a young man who was able to acquire large amounts of radioactive material through entirely benign means including commonly available fire detectors. One year I picked up a bunch of glow in the dark tubes that use tritium, a poisonous gas that is also radioactive.
You can ban cyanotypes if you want, but you can also get cyanide from almonds, particularly bitter almonds. Cyanide is a naturally occurring substance inside many plants. Are you going to ban most nuts?
And then there are industrial uses as you mentioned. Cyanide is sold the gold mining by the ton, and many industrial plants use radiation from radioactive sources to do various things, whether it is farming which uses radiation to eliminate germs from meat, or something like a paper mill which would use radiation to measure the density of certain chemicals.
Besides the fact that you can make incredibly poisonous hydrogen cyanide with bitter almonds and a bit of vinegar, you can make incredibly poisonous chlorine gas with nothing more than salt and water.
All of this leads to one fundamental thing that I've come to agree with: it is authoritarian to believe that everything can be solved by the state, or even most things. Instead of trying to have the state try to micromanage every substance that exists, we need to build non-governmental institutions, things like strong families, societal institutions, popular ideologies, religious institutions such as churches, and anything else we can think of to help push people towards doing the right thing. It's only because people are worthy of being free that they can be free, and they can't be made worthy through an omnipresent State alone. Using that tool by itself, what ends up happening every time is people end up hyper focused on what they are allowed to do rather than what they ought to do.
Anyone who claims to believe in liberal values must therefore realize that if you want liberty, "what laws should we have" is actually mostly the wrong question. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a state shaped hammer. The question we should be asking is: "how can we holistically reach outcomes we want?" And the answers actually probably won't make anyone happy in the short term.
You can develop explosives using chemicals you can distill from urine. Are we going to ban urination?
Cyanide is really easy, you can get jars of ferrocyanide for cyanotypes.
There was a story about a young man who was able to acquire large amounts of radioactive material through entirely benign means including commonly available fire detectors. One year I picked up a bunch of glow in the dark tubes that use tritium, a poisonous gas that is also radioactive.
You can ban cyanotypes if you want, but you can also get cyanide from almonds, particularly bitter almonds. Cyanide is a naturally occurring substance inside many plants. Are you going to ban most nuts?
And then there are industrial uses as you mentioned. Cyanide is sold the gold mining by the ton, and many industrial plants use radiation from radioactive sources to do various things, whether it is farming which uses radiation to eliminate germs from meat, or something like a paper mill which would use radiation to measure the density of certain chemicals.
Besides the fact that you can make incredibly poisonous hydrogen cyanide with bitter almonds and a bit of vinegar, you can make incredibly poisonous chlorine gas with nothing more than salt and water.
All of this leads to one fundamental thing that I've come to agree with: it is authoritarian to believe that everything can be solved by the state, or even most things. Instead of trying to have the state try to micromanage every substance that exists, we need to build non-governmental institutions, things like strong families, societal institutions, popular ideologies, religious institutions such as churches, and anything else we can think of to help push people towards doing the right thing. It's only because people are worthy of being free that they can be free, and they can't be made worthy through an omnipresent State alone. Using that tool by itself, what ends up happening every time is people end up hyper focused on what they are allowed to do rather than what they ought to do.
Anyone who claims to believe in liberal values must therefore realize that if you want liberty, "what laws should we have" is actually mostly the wrong question. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a state shaped hammer. The question we should be asking is: "how can we holistically reach outcomes we want?" And the answers actually probably won't make anyone happy in the short term.