astrocat

gpm's point is that it's a collective action issue. And even if one individual can't fix is, we can with a movement. And we SHOULD care about things like this. We're fairly familiar with these: big problem, only solved if enough people do a thing. But in general, almost all collective action problems we face are ones where either:

a. every incremental actor improves the overall picture with their individual choice (however small, even if it takes a threshold to be "solved": think, recycling, vaccines) b. every individual actor actor's choice has no _direct_ impact until some threshold is met (maybe voting?)

THIS situation, however is very different: every individual choice for blue makes things WORSE up until the threshold is met. And not just a little, but a LOT worse. That's not normal collective action territory, so we shouldn't be assuming the same kind of reasoning. The stakes of missing the threshold are not "aw shucks" or "keep trying, there's more chances later!" The stakes of missing the threshold are "everyone who cares about the threshold is dead."

I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?

The arguments made about wanting to protect the children/babies and those with cognitive impairments are well meaning, but I think misguided. The bottom line is that the world has been put in a shit situation and you can't fix it. Encouraging blue is encouraging an increase in the likelihood that all the truly nice and wonderful people that would would actually follow through on a blue vote for altruistic reasons wind up dead. And that doesn't seem like an altruistic position? It seems more like self-martyring. Well meaning, but actually making the likelihood of a bad outcome worse.

holy units batman

> Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air.

Pick a lane BBC.

But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that drives global ocean ecosystems... just chefs kiss

[1] https://www.nature.com/research-intelligence/nri-topic-summa...)

> I’d love some app with the polish of Bear Notes but that just edited raw Markdown files.

Typora? (https://typora.io/)

woah. This is a regex use I've never heard of. I'd absolutely love to see a writeup on this approach - how its done and when it's useful.

this is essentially the gist of https://how.complexsystems.fail which has been circulating more with discussions of the recent AWS/Azure/Cloudflare outages.

The heart-warming gem:

> I sent a note about these Easter eggs to Scott Corley [the game's developer]. He said that he had recently pulled out the game to show the marriage proposal to his son. But he’d forgotten the code and couldn’t make it work! He and Melissa did indeed live happily ever after.

we already do have plants that produce (sort of) high-energy-density liquids for us. So if you want gas to be as expensive as maple syrup then... sure. :)

Interesting. I don't think I follow your examples, but here's my attempt to read it: It sounds like you may be using the term "real" to be mean specifically something like "tangible." Like, Santa isn't tangible because he's a fictitious character. Courage isn't tangible, it is a term that refers to an idea. It can't be isolated, bottled. And likewise, society isn't tangible either. To reference my earlier example "emergent properties" isn't tangible. Like "courage," it is a term that refers to an idea. Many things can be described by it. And the specific issue you (maybe?) take is with ascribing causality to non-tangible things, in some sense. For example, "emergent properties" didn't knock me over at the beach, a wave did. Or, the answer to "how did you defeat the dragon?" isn't "You had courage," -- it is "You stuck your sword through it's heart which ceased blood circulation and killed it." Those are the tangible actions that led to the outcome.

And that is true and a useful analysis in a lot of circumstances, like when you're asking questions of "how?" To take this back to the ancestor comment, if you're looking at "how did this wheelchair ramp get built?" you can describe the chain of events from the creation of a law to the construction of the ramp and all the individuals involved along the way making decisions and doing actions. And that is a good and useful analysis. Some tangible entity called "society" is not involved in that chain. And I think that might be your original point. And yes, that's accurate, in that kind of analysis.

So now, take that chain of events, and multiply it by, I dunno, a very large number; hell, infinity. Every outcome and the chain of individuals and actions that led up to it. How do we study this? How to we increase our understanding without having to treat every single outcome and every chain of events completely independently? You probably see where this is going already... :) We could treat every possible combination of coin tosses as an infinite set of independent events. What someone flipping a coin 10 times has to do with someone flipping a coin 1000 times isn't anything tangible - the flips, the individuals who make them, and the outcomes are independent. So... shrug and move on? Nope. We study probability. It helps us describe WHY - if 1000 people each flip a coin 1000 times, most will have a near 50/50 split heads/tails. Probability isn't tangible, but it certainly is real.

My revised argument then is: society is a concept like probability. It is like probability distributions that come from an ever-changing sea of individual opinions, predispositions, and actions. We can measure certain parts of it at points in time and review historical outcomes, and develop theories about why certain patterns are more common, certain outcomes more likely, and use this to enhance our decision making and understanding of the behaviors and tendencies of large groups of people. So to say "society isn't real" is true in the sense of tangibility, but also myopic - and like saying "probability isn't real, there are only outcomes."

Hows that?

Your argument is essentially that emergent properties don't exist. It's like saying "there are no such things as waves in water, just individual water molecules." Individuals are the water molecules, and "society" is the blanket term for the emergent properties that happen when a lot of people are together. The phenomena are real and have real effects and impacts. Intrinsic and environmental factors affect the system: hydrogen bonds between water molecules (intrinsic) creates the emergent phenomenon we call "surface tension" and wind (environmental) creates waves. So too in people: intrinsic attributes of individuals and connections between them as well as environmental factors affecting entire populations create emergent effects that can be observed and studied.

I suspect you mean to appeal to the recognition that, unlike water molecules, individual humans have free will and agency and the ability to make choices completely independently. I suspect you abhor the notion of 'groupthink' and excuses for behavior that are underpinned by concepts of culture and social constructs. And there is truth to these ideas, but as with most things, they are helpful as part of a broader model, and not as a totalitarian view of human behavior. We are complex creatures, in complex systems; to ignore the tendencies of our emergent behaviors is as risky as turning your back to a rough shorebreak, believing all the individual water molecules will simply be rational and choose not to hit you, only to be engulfed in a wave that really does exist.

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Your approach sounds like the mindset of chasing growth instead of sustainability. Short term gains over long term value.

what I found fascinating is that the effect is maintained even when you're not focused (like lens focus, not attention focus) on the circles. If you let your eyes relax their focus to a point beyond the screen, the blurry circles maintain the illusion.

And bonus points if you find the focal point where a third circle is in the middle which is a composite of both the left and right circles, and... it doesn't move. I don't know how to better explain the effects of letting your eyes wander out of focus and the artifacts it creates in your vision, but I'm sure someone will get it.

This is absolutely amazing. Thanks for sharing :)

Stumbled across this today and was blown away at the level of organization, information, and detail presented. They provide specific examples of common uses for components, as well as material information like what alloy is used, what's in the alloy and what it's properties are. It was an absolute joy to explore.

This right here is what I've been waiting for all these years...

The Trauma of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller is probably a good read to throw in here if this is the direction you're looking to explore - especially if you can get an early edition that hasn't been watered down. Some of her perspectives into experiences as a child that are commonly accepted as "normal" but are often experienced by the child as trauma and grow into dysfunction as adults were interesting.

"Love & Sex" is the title of issue 88, the current issue of the print/online magazine in which this article appears.

omg... somebody else who knows the secret of garlic confit and Costco. Seriously, it's probably my favorite kitchen secret.

Amazon explicitly recommends naming buckets like "example.com" and "www.example.com" : https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-host...

Now, it seems, this is a big problem. V2 resource requests will look like this: https://example.com.s3.amazonaws.com/... or https://www.example.com.s3.amazonaws.com/...

And, of course, this ruins https. Amazon has you covered for * .s3.amazonaws.com, but not for * .* .s3.amazonaws.com or even * .* .* .s3.amazonaws... and so on.

So... I guess I have to rename/move all my buckets now? Ugh.

>Why not give people a means to participate?

Sounds great. How? Show how you can provide everyone the means to participate and doesn't just raise the bottom line on the cost to participate, returning to the normal equilibrium that you'd expect from a market where there are always those who are priced out. How does it avoid the pitfalls of things like UBI?

>Non-sequitur

A non-sequitur would be talking about the reproductive life of penguins. "Inconceivable!" The concept of "you're free to choose" always sounds great but glosses over reality: choosing schools is not like choosing apples in the grocery store. Choice comes with cost, and the costs of attending different schools can be enormous. Not all schools are right outside your door. Since socioeconomic groups are frequently geographically concentrated (sides of the town/tracks), you'll end up with terrible schools in poor neighborhoods and good schools in good neighborhoods far away. Sounds like what we currently have, right? How does a "market" improve on this situation? It would seem that it provides incentives for schools to work against integrating student populations. Schools are disincentivized from enrolling poor kids, because poor kids are much less likely to perform well. A rational school will do everything legally possible to avoid accepting kids from populations statistically less likely to perform well in school.

So maybe you try to solve that problem with regulation? Schools are... what, required to do all acceptance via random lottery if they want to be eligible for payment through federal vouchers so they can't discriminate against poor applicants? Well, now school-choice isn't much of a choice anymore, it it? Maybe you have better suggestions on ways to force a rational, privately run school to accept kids they don't want to accept.

> We already have this entity.

I'm tired of people wanting all the benefits of "markets" for themselves and hand-waiving all the problems away back to the government. The public school system cannot exist in its current capacity if there is a massive shift to school privatization. So no, you can't just assume it will exist, you have to support your case with how you think it will function, and how it will be more likely to provide better outcomes than the current system.

Fundamentally, you have to be able to justify the merits of your proposal in real terms, and not in terms of "markets make everything better." Markets are awesome, and for so many of the goods and services in life, using and acquiring them through a free market with good competition to establish true market prices is really optimal. But market's are not a panacea. Roads do not work well in a universally private market. If every user of a road had to deal with transaction costs for every road they used during the day it would be a nightmare. The entire society is better off when people are free to move around. The federal/state ownership of roads funded by taxes is part of what makes the entire economic market work. Education, I believe, is the same: when everybody has access to education, funded by taxes, the entire economy is better off. Privatization will only lead to worse disparity for the vast majority who cannot afford to participate.

The current ecosystem is more like road vs air travel. You can go across the country by car, on public roads. Nobody will stop you. But if you want a better/faster experience, you can pay private companies for that service, but in so doing, you do not get a tax rebate for the road you didn't use. Private schools are great - It's all I've ever been to - but attending a private school should not free you from supporting the system that is universally beneficial.

We have major problems in our current school ecosystem, yes. And they do resemble many of the problems that a market-based system would have: the "best schools" are full of wealthy kids. But unlike a market system where this that outcome is optimal, it's a secondary effect of the residential clustering of socioeconomic strata, AND the reality that the quality of the school is driven less by the quality of its teachers and administration, but the quality of it's students. Student performance is most strongly tied to factors related to the poverty/wealth. So instead of trying to tread the symptom, we need to address the cause: poverty, and poor social mobility.

I think your example here of “rational choice” is a great example for the problem of treating the school ecosystem like a market. Only those with means to participate will benefit. If there is someone with no means to pay for better, what is the default? You quickly end up with a system where those who need access to quality education the most (the poor) have the least access, or only access to the worst.

Furthermore, markets require demand to drive pricing. In k-12 education, demand is completely inelastic - school attendance is compulsory. Who services those who can’t afford to participate but are required to do so? And how does the entity serving those have motive for quality? There’s no competition.

Yeah this helped me create a mental picture that kind of makes sense. It would clarify why negative mass is also concentrated in areas of high mass, and could also provide the mechanism for constant universe expansion, as the space between masses is constantly being pushed away by the diffuse negative mass. Heh, armchair physics is fun :)

It's also easy to look down on others from a position of moral superiority. Yeah, it's the same story, but why is the behavior so wildly rampant now when it wasn't previously? I seriously push back on the position that "nobody romanticizes it" - the self-made entrepreneur, the kid who backpacked around Africa for two years then started a successful NGO and now gets to meet celebrities every day (this is completely made up) - the point is, our culture DOES romanticize this, and frames it all in the context of "they followed their passion!" or some other baloney like that.

I have two kids, and the ONE THING I try the hardest to teach them is personal responsibility. Yet I recognize that generally the term "personal responsibility" is kind of used as a gatekeeping term against the poor and the young. Whatever their problems are, they are self-imposed as they lack personal responsibility. Sympathy, compassion, charity not required.

Every generation of parents is a generation of first-time parents. The best we can do is learn from past generations. I don't see any harm in identifying causes and effects of generational shifts in parenting style in order to better correct for the next round.

It seems like "you can always find meaning in anything you do" turns the sentiment back into being about YOU, which is what OP seemed to be lamenting in the first place.

As you expressed, you see the task as "find meaning in yourself," a concept that can maybe be expressed as "meaning comes from within." This sounds nice! I think what OP was getting at is that this perspective has two problems: 1. It requires you to produce your own sense of "meaning" (whatever that means) that is self-satisfying, AND that works well in the society/community in which you exist; and 2. it is fundamentally self-centered. A hypothesis could be that this perspective seems to most frequently result in a failure to find "meaning" (probably better called "contentment") in anything.

As OP said, faith/religion traditions tend to hand you a set of pre-defined "here's what's meaningful" morals, and these also tend to be skewed towards group value instead of just self-satisfaction. When handed this outlook on meaning/morals, it seems possible there might be benefits - not having to come up with a self-fulfilling sense of meaning that also meshes with broader society, as well as a focus on being useful to the community instead of just yourself.

I personally find the whole "be yourself" / "do what you love" dogma-du-jour to be terrible, and prone to actually resulting in depression and shame. It is at the same time selfish, and self-sabotaging.

Honolulu used to have two daily papers: The Star Bulletin, and the Honolulu Advertiser. A while back, they merged and created the "Star-Advertiser."

Totally agree, and I think this is where so much discussion gets off track - few problems are ones that haven't been seen before in human history. But when something comes along that suddenly facilitates or exacerbates a problem in a uniquely powerful way, we need to really examine that.

I'm like full of weird analogies today, (see other posts on this thread) but, like, take the modern diet. It's not as though obesity, or diabetes, or heart failure, or whatever, never existed until now; but some things changed in how we create, package and distribute food over the past century: food processing and preservation, artificial flavors and fillers, pesticides and antibiotics, sugar... sugar EVERYWHERE. And yeah, all of these things have come with ENORMOUS benefits. But we're also starting to realize the cumulative effects these new processes are having on the public health.

We already KNOW there are massive negative side effects of Social Media use for individuals - especially with depression and bullying, and unhealthy self-image. And collectively we're starting to see the effects of such a singularly huge network with no accountability or oversight and how that can shape public opinion and knowledge. All this noise about Social Media is just us as a society trying to figure out just what to do about it all.

> Yet I think a reasonable view to hold from the perspective of a user.

What someone thinks they're getting out of something, and what they're actually getting out of it can be very different, and when the differences are huge, the consequences can be deadly.

MLM participants THINK they're getting an independent business opportunity - and sure, that's a "reasonable view to hold from the perspective of a user" - right? They've got product, a market, a way to transact sales, a clear hierarchy to climb... But a broader perspective and closer inspection of the details reveals it is a terrible business position to be in that puts all the risk on you, the individual. But it's easy to see how someone who doesn't have the skills or training to examine such things might think the opportunity is "reasonable."

So yes, I wouldn't be surprised if most users were convinced of the utility they were getting out of their use of Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat etc... but like the person caught up in MLM, they can't see the real risks and side effects until they become overwhelming.