Better to learn to explore and build knowledge from the ground up than to repeat it back.
It is still good to know what's already known. But the teacher isn't the source for that. Google is. And there are skills for getting the most out of Google.
Those skills are teachable, as is the fact that Google isn't reality either.
Capability Based Security is essential to the continuation of a free and open internet, and democracy in the USA.
Without it, nobody's computer is safe. Without that, we can't trust random sites on the internet, and get stuffed into walled gardens, and our privacy is mined for the profit of others.
"What important truth do few people agree with you on, but is also innocuous enough that you can admit to on a public forum where your true identity might be known or revealed?"
It's not true because of "eventually" it's true because of "fiat".
When an entity (e.g, the government) decrees (which, remember, is what the word "fiat" means) that some piece of paper or entry in a database is "money" is when the trouble starts.
I prefer my money to be a medium of exchange and account as well as a store of value that I can trust which, by implication, means it cannot be decreed to be so by some "authority".
My corollary is: Nothing matters unless we make it matter. The only place we can find meaning is if we create it. I call this the weird optimism of nihilism.
I'd say the world is a sandbox and we are all creators. Everyone can easily manipulate the world around them. Such is the sandbox.
But the cost is that the easier it is to manipulate worlds, the more temporal it is. Some talk about climate change and the extinction of humans and such. But IMO it doesn't really matter. Better civilizations have perished out there, millions of years ago.
At a large scale that's unarguably true. But that's as such a coarse resolution as to be less than useless. At higher resolutions, the scale of a human life, there's a nearly boundless fabric of meaning and mattering to be had.
I've recently been making a study of misinformation and am forced to agree. The more I dig into how we as humans process and validate information the more I realize how bad we are at it. Myself included. As I've attempted to create formal methods for validating information I've had my confidence in my own rationality severely shaken.
We have obvious needs that are biologically embedded through the forces of evolution. Tracing back from that, actions in most situations, and pitfalls, are predictable.
Acting over time, I doubt there's any misinformation that human intelligence can't see through.
And if it did exist, it would be invisible.
But, yes, in the short run, we can all be duped into believing SOMETHING, given the right circumstances.
What rules can we follow to reduce the chances?
Maybe LIMIT how much we consume from volatile sources like news sites.
Maybe act slowly.
One thing I've found is that it also really pays to explore something fully when you don't understand it. Just because someone isn't explaining something well may not be sufficient to dismiss it.
Don’t have biological kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t fly in planes. Don’t drive. Live in the smallest home you can in a dense city. Take action politically.
This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.
All of those were needed to get us to the point we are at now, where we can "solve" climate change but don't have the collective political will yet to do it.
What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff. Environment would be completely rekt.
> All of those were needed to get us to the point we are at now
Yes and look where it's got us. Time to stop doing those things. The solution to climate change is going to be nothing like what people expect it to be. Nuclear or some magic solution isn't going to present itself. The solution is going to be a monumental shift in how people live and several decades of misery for people who aren't used to being miserable.
> What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff
This would be preferable. London would have been ruined but we wouldn't have been able to scale this to ruin the entire world the way we have now.
I'm curious your take about serious climate interventions, i.e. geoengeering. I hear some people with the viewpoint of "we don't need to do anything, the future will be fine" and others, similar to you, who hold more of a "we need to do as much as we can to prevent/correct climate change".
I'm curious how these are balanced in your mind. For instance, if we could solve global warming by activating a load of fusion reactors to sequester atmospheric carbon and pollutants, would you then be okay with rural living, meat-eating, and lots of kids? What about greening the sea to absorb more CO2, or similar ecosystem modifications?
Curious whether this viewpoint is more ideological or practical in its roots.
It's a bit more ideological than practical. But there's just not really going to be a pleasant way out of climate change. If people won't stop eating burgers, they're really not going to like what comes next. Although they'll be dead and their kids will probably be dead before the bill comes fully due, so it really doesn't matter anyway.
Honestly, I believe that the effects of climate change are going to be way worse than anyone alive today can begin to imagine.
The way climate change will "fix" itself is through a massive population reduction and adaptation to an (as of today) unimaginable way of life over the course of a few centuries.
People alive today (and at pretty much any time in history) will do whatever they want and rationalize whatever actions they take in whatever way lets them sleep at night.
If there was some magic way to fix climate change that allowed us to keep living the way we are, sure go ahead and do that. It's not like we're going to change anyway.
Stop shaming kids for screen time and video games.
Related: video games have positive mental health benefits.[2]
As a parent, nothing seems to create more issues than screen time. Ive seen other parents get fairly harsh with extreme limits with their kids screen time consumption. It’s like abstinence education for sex: it just doesn’t work and ultimately backfires. Indeed research has shown kids have to get pretty extreme in their screentime usage for it to be harmful [1]
Better to let kids have screen time and teach them safe ways to use it and work with them to moderate their usage. It just so happens this is what treatment for “video game addiction” does - teaches moderation of the activity not abstinence.
The only true/intelligent thing Margaret Thatcher ever said was that there is no such thing as society, only individuals.
> I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Success is not the amount of stuff you have. It's about being content.
Capitalist culture is convinced that greed and desire and impatience is good, because it leads to more stuff being created and bought, and from some arbitrary standard, this "economy" is the golden standard of success.
And yet suicide rates and loneliness go up in these places, while family values go down. What are you really working so hard for?
Poverty is a problem, but most poor places are poor because of corruption. And corruption happens because some people think they need 8 cars or whatever to be content. And the reason they're not content is because they think contentment leads to complacency and poverty.
You could also perform a systems thinking analysis looking at the n-order impacts and game effects of your decision. It might be a larger impact than your single vote.
This is only a concern with electoral systems that deny the losing group representation. Like winner-take-all.
It wouldn't make any difference at all with proportional representation. And PR can even be implemented in the executive branch, as the Swiss have demonstrated.
> It wouldn't make any difference at all with proportional representation.
Yes, it would.
Any PR system is going to have thresholding, so there will be some number of votes that do not effect the outcome. (Majoritarian elections are just one-seat PR with the Droop quota, maximizing ineffective votes.)
There is a third option, spoil your ballot. It's invalid then, yes, but it's a statistic that the election/party analysts will track.
Up to a certain threshold a spoiled ballot might be considered a mistake, but once over that threshold, it could me something more. For instance, that voters are not interested by the policies of any parties on the ballot.
"...the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts... It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person."
The recent normalization of mass censorship is the most fundamentally illiberal social development in the history of liberalism and will have a net negative effect on the progression of human rights and the evolution of the human mind.
"Put your oxygen mask first, before you help others."
Focus on yourself. Figure out what brings you joy. Follow it. Work hard. Don't complain. Be kind. And once you have something to share, offer it to everyone around you. Anonymously, unconditionally, shamelessly.
Many people seemed convinced that voting is a significant part of the solution. I disagree. Be the best version of yourself and then share that wealth with the ones around you.
It might otherwise have been interesting to contemplate, but now that
I know it's Peter Thiel's famous question, I can't unsee it as a
transparent attempt to gain my confidence by pretending to identify
with me, sort of like when police interrogators try to act like the
suspect's bro. It also seems to presuppose that I crave an opportunity
to be heard and validated by anyone who will listen. If I'm not
worried about alienating the questioner, my honest answer is "what
crazy beliefs do you envision me holding and what gave you that
impression about me?". If it's a high stakes situation, my answer is
whatever I think the questioner endorses.
51 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 97.9 ms ] threadMost of success comes from hard work, persistence, the ability to readjust often, and a lot (like really a lot) of good luck.
Taking pleasure in learning is 10 times much more important than grades.
And the funny part is that if you succeed, you will get good grades.
It is still good to know what's already known. But the teacher isn't the source for that. Google is. And there are skills for getting the most out of Google.
Those skills are teachable, as is the fact that Google isn't reality either.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit
Without it, nobody's computer is safe. Without that, we can't trust random sites on the internet, and get stuffed into walled gardens, and our privacy is mined for the profit of others.
This is corrosive to democracy.
What's the best source of info on this topic?
Which is why this is true.
But I doubt there aren't any currencies around from 1000 AD that haven't suffered that fate.
A decade? 2? a century?
When an entity (e.g, the government) decrees (which, remember, is what the word "fiat" means) that some piece of paper or entry in a database is "money" is when the trouble starts.
I prefer my money to be a medium of exchange and account as well as a store of value that I can trust which, by implication, means it cannot be decreed to be so by some "authority".
But the cost is that the easier it is to manipulate worlds, the more temporal it is. Some talk about climate change and the extinction of humans and such. But IMO it doesn't really matter. Better civilizations have perished out there, millions of years ago.
- PROT
And if it did exist, it would be invisible.
But, yes, in the short run, we can all be duped into believing SOMETHING, given the right circumstances.
What rules can we follow to reduce the chances?
Maybe LIMIT how much we consume from volatile sources like news sites.
Maybe act slowly.
One thing I've found is that it also really pays to explore something fully when you don't understand it. Just because someone isn't explaining something well may not be sufficient to dismiss it.
This is how you should live your life if you are worried/care about climate change.
What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff. Environment would be completely rekt.
Yes and look where it's got us. Time to stop doing those things. The solution to climate change is going to be nothing like what people expect it to be. Nuclear or some magic solution isn't going to present itself. The solution is going to be a monumental shift in how people live and several decades of misery for people who aren't used to being miserable.
> What if we were stuck in an 1800's london type environment, just reproducing and burning stuff
This would be preferable. London would have been ruined but we wouldn't have been able to scale this to ruin the entire world the way we have now.
> Environment would be completely rekt.
Environment is completely rekt today.
A little cliche but isn’t this how we get Idiocracy? Assuming we’re not already there.
I'm curious how these are balanced in your mind. For instance, if we could solve global warming by activating a load of fusion reactors to sequester atmospheric carbon and pollutants, would you then be okay with rural living, meat-eating, and lots of kids? What about greening the sea to absorb more CO2, or similar ecosystem modifications?
Curious whether this viewpoint is more ideological or practical in its roots.
Honestly, I believe that the effects of climate change are going to be way worse than anyone alive today can begin to imagine.
The way climate change will "fix" itself is through a massive population reduction and adaptation to an (as of today) unimaginable way of life over the course of a few centuries.
People alive today (and at pretty much any time in history) will do whatever they want and rationalize whatever actions they take in whatever way lets them sleep at night.
If there was some magic way to fix climate change that allowed us to keep living the way we are, sure go ahead and do that. It's not like we're going to change anyway.
Related: video games have positive mental health benefits.[2]
As a parent, nothing seems to create more issues than screen time. Ive seen other parents get fairly harsh with extreme limits with their kids screen time consumption. It’s like abstinence education for sex: it just doesn’t work and ultimately backfires. Indeed research has shown kids have to get pretty extreme in their screentime usage for it to be harmful [1]
Better to let kids have screen time and teach them safe ways to use it and work with them to moderate their usage. It just so happens this is what treatment for “video game addiction” does - teaches moderation of the activity not abstinence.
1 - https://thenextweb.com/news/screen-time-doesnt-harm-kids-but...
2. - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0026...
That's a preference for action, not an (even debatable) truth.
> Related: video games have positive mental health benefits
That's at least potentially a truth, but not all that controversial.
> I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Capitalist culture is convinced that greed and desire and impatience is good, because it leads to more stuff being created and bought, and from some arbitrary standard, this "economy" is the golden standard of success.
And yet suicide rates and loneliness go up in these places, while family values go down. What are you really working so hard for?
Poverty is a problem, but most poor places are poor because of corruption. And corruption happens because some people think they need 8 cars or whatever to be content. And the reason they're not content is because they think contentment leads to complacency and poverty.
It can't be truer, but somehow people get really mad at me when I say it.
Tied and one-vote margin elections are not at all unheard of.
It wouldn't make any difference at all with proportional representation. And PR can even be implemented in the executive branch, as the Swiss have demonstrated.
Yes, it would.
Any PR system is going to have thresholding, so there will be some number of votes that do not effect the outcome. (Majoritarian elections are just one-seat PR with the Droop quota, maximizing ineffective votes.)
Up to a certain threshold a spoiled ballot might be considered a mistake, but once over that threshold, it could me something more. For instance, that voters are not interested by the policies of any parties on the ballot.
~ Solzhenitsyn
Focus on yourself. Figure out what brings you joy. Follow it. Work hard. Don't complain. Be kind. And once you have something to share, offer it to everyone around you. Anonymously, unconditionally, shamelessly.
Many people seemed convinced that voting is a significant part of the solution. I disagree. Be the best version of yourself and then share that wealth with the ones around you.