> in Wikipedia you can spend hours reading banal pop-slop content or instead spend that time reading amazing articles about history, literature, arts, and science.
I'm not saying you're personally doing anything wrong, but there's a parallel here, when smart and curious people read articles about history and literature and art and science, rather than engaging directly with the real thing.
Or then the next level down, where creating amazing work in all of those domains depends on enough "slack" in the system for people to pursue deep work that will not be immediately profitable.
Do you see where I'm going with that? We (and I'm very much including myself: here I am on HN, instead of reading something more substantial) skim the (Wikipedia) surface, instead of diving truly deep. AIs (right now) are the ultimate surface-skimmers, and our fascination with and growing reliance on them reflects something in our current surface-skimming cultural mindset.
Well, my dad got migraines from everything° on that list bar tomatoes - though he did from dried tomatoes, so does that count as everything on the list? I don't know the biological pathway, but it was neither self-diagnosed, self-derived, nor made from woo; he visited several real-MD neurologists before someone identified the chemical(s) at fault, and gave him a list of foods not to eat.
°In fact it was all cheeses, not just parmesan; the more aged the worse. And also chocolate, and olives. Basically anything aged or fermented. I don't know how that lines up with MSG's chemistry, but he was careful with MSG, though nothing like as avoidant as he was with soy sauce and cheese.
Not like the 1930s, no. But there are similarities in the discourse to how jewish people were demonized in the decades (well, centuries, in that case) previous. Your comment seems to suggest that no one should speak up for themselves until they face literal genocide. Care to walk that back?
Not really the same at all. For a start, Jewish men didn't have laws passed to grant them unrestricted access to every space intended only for women. But men like the commenter upthread have had this done for them, at the request of allied activists. Can you see why this is such an unpopular policy? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's a whole child-harming medical scandal on top of this.
I won't defend those laws, if you'll agree not to defend the opposite legislation which would force very masculine-appearing individuals into the same women's spaces (obviously scary to the women there), and very feminine-appearing individuals into (scary-to-them, for obvious reasons) exclusive men's spaces. The bathroom issue is an area of easy agreement for people of good will: provide a few private, gender-neutral spaces. Job done.
The activists who talk about non-binary whatever being the apotheosis of humanity are annoying, because the reality is far more boring: transgender experience is a totally normal part of human variation. There's lots of evidence that they've always been a small minority in every society, much like most (all?) other sorts of neuro-divergence. They deserve recognition, dignity, respect, and reasonable accommodation, just like every other human being.
The rhetoric on the other side, however - there are examples linked in this thread, if they haven't all been flagged - is truly dire, eliminationist stuff. It's the same as has said about jews, and many other scapegoated minorities. Regardless of anything else, those sorts of statements must not be made about any human being, in any civilized society.
I'm as big a YIMBY as you'll find, and urban trees are really important to making a city a nice place to live. There's no contradiction to those positions - just, you know, build more housing and plant more trees. (Spotted owls, of course, have nothing to do with urbanism, so I don't know how they got dragged in here.)
Depends on your measuring stick. Cheating themselves out of an education? Yep. Cheating themselves into a credential -> job - the status / remuneration of which is almost entirely divorced from the quality of the education, being aligned rather with the name of the organization on the diploma.
Former (second-generation) college professor, here. I find it almost impossible to be cynical enough about the US education industry.
And they're still a pain to spend, because too many people refuse to believe they're real money. Or else don't want to take them because there isn't a slot in their cash drawer. I inherited a couple of bundles from my dad last year (he made $2 bills his "thing", much like Woz, because he enjoyed arguing with cashiers), and exchanged them all at the bank for "real money".
Many years ago a friend of mine used to tip bartenders and servers with dollar coins (a dollar tip on a drink was good at the time). They remembered him for that and he got better service even though it was probably a bit of a PITA for them to deal with the coins. $2 bills could probaby be used in a similar fashion.
They're socially awkward to spend, because people don't want to take them. That was true each of the four or five times I used bills from my father's stash, though I was outright refused only once. Unlike my father, I don't enjoy needlessly provoking minor hostility, so I turned them into the bank. We're all just gabbing on the internet, my dude. You might find $2 bills a fun investment.
I've had that happen a couple times, too. The first time I was super excited, and looked up the collectable price, and it was like $8 for a (pristine) $5 bill. I think I kept it for a few days to show to people, and then spent it. I inherited a couple from my dad last year, and the collectors' price hadn't changed, so I did the same thing. Still cool, though. I hope whatever cashier received them from me got a similar thrill.
This exactly is what drew in my late father, who was a scientist (not climate, obviously!) with raw intelligence several standard deviations above average. "They" were using climate change as a stalking horse for communism / woke-ism / whatever other "big government" thing he thought was counter to the interests of people like him.
He wasn't always like that. Maybe he wouldn't have described himself as such at the time, but in his twenties and early thirties he was a Liberal. He was a Peace Corps volunteer, attended Civil Rights marches, advocated on behalf of gay people, argued for gender equality, strongly opposed the Vietnam War, and was appalled by Watergate.
Fast-forward to the last decade of his life, in which my father donated to all three Trump presidential campaigns, displayed a Gadsden flag on his mantle, rejected his trans-gender grandchild, and made (at the very least) replacement-theory adjacent noises. Oh, and preferred Ivermectin over covid vaccination, of course.
What I think happened was that he was culturally out of step with most people who otherwise shared his politics in the 1970s - he was religious, so viscerally disgusted by drug use and "extra-marital" sex - and got captured by the propaganda machine that others in this thread have described. I believe the biggest turning point was 9/11: it terrified him, even if he couldn't quite admit that to himself, and he lived the rest of his life in a state of inchoate fear - stoked, naturally, by Fox News and other right-wing media.
So, that was the (white) American Baby Boomer Experience, writ small. He did materially well, but I think was a better and wiser person in his twenties than he became later on.
Rejecting climate change ("anthropogenic climate change", my father would point out, which let him off any evidentiary hook) is only a small part of an entire ideological project, which demands to be swallowed whole.
By the way, his notion that introspection is an "invention of the 1920s" is historical bullshit. I think he's taking potshots at psychotherapy? Whatever, man, but then do that. It's not like a Freudian concept of the self is beyond criticism - far, far from it - but using that to interdict "introspection" is just sloppy thinking.
Anyway, leaving aside anything else to be said on the topic, the idea that "great men of history don't introspect" is utter bullshit. I'll see you Abraham Lincoln, and raise you Marcus fucking Aurelius.
So, if what you really want to say is that "most 'great men of history' were sociopaths" then, well, yeah: you're probably onto something. If your next thought is "and I want to be like them", then that's 1) a pretty damning confession, and 2) also evidence that you, sir, aren't actually a sociopathic "great man" at all, just an insecure nerd who got lucky a few times, and now are getting high on your own farts.
You would probably consider me to your right, but I'm right there with you. Prison should be protective: we lock up people from whom the rest of us will not be safe unless they are segregated. Ideally it is also rehabilitatative, and once (if!) prisoners will be safe and productive members of society there is no point to keeping them locked up.
If there are other methods short of prison that can render law-breakers harmless - such as restrictions on certain activities and occupations - then those should be pursued first.
The ghost of this philosophy, however attenuated, can be seen in systems of pardon and parole.
I acknowledge that a desire for retribution - to punish the evil-doer; make them suffer for what they've done - is a strong impulse (I feel it myself!), deeply imbedded in our tribal psyches, but it should be fought, not indulged.
This seems to me to be the only moral basis for a system of justice and incarceration, though I have no idea how to nudge a society towards this model. Some northern European countries approach it.
(In fact, I may well be nearer to your position than my description implies. I use the term "leftist" because I hate the way the term is applied to anyone who isn't a Republican. My beliefs, in the Clinton/Obama range, are "leftist" only if one is dumb enough to believe what one hears on Fox News.)
Heh. I sometimes describe myself as "basically a communist" for the exact same reason. Actually, I lived in Europe long enough to be maybe a little left of you, but still Clinton / Obama center-right, in world historical sense. I expect we'd get along. :-)
I'm not saying you're personally doing anything wrong, but there's a parallel here, when smart and curious people read articles about history and literature and art and science, rather than engaging directly with the real thing.
Or then the next level down, where creating amazing work in all of those domains depends on enough "slack" in the system for people to pursue deep work that will not be immediately profitable.
Do you see where I'm going with that? We (and I'm very much including myself: here I am on HN, instead of reading something more substantial) skim the (Wikipedia) surface, instead of diving truly deep. AIs (right now) are the ultimate surface-skimmers, and our fascination with and growing reliance on them reflects something in our current surface-skimming cultural mindset.
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