obscurantist

That's quite an interesting take on how to counteract depressive states. Do you know if there are any academic publications that have similar findings? I think this needs to be explored further, because this sounds prima facie credible.

I've lived in the Bay Area since before starting kindergarten. No way the average IQ of software engineers here, or anywhere, is close to 130. Software engineering might be one of the only STEM disciplines that gives credibility to the Ortega hypothesis.

>From a street hobo, that gets you instantly dismissed, but there's a counter-intuitive aspect where if you're a Jaron Lanier, it just further underscores that you're Jaron Lanier and can do as you like. Because he is not trying to maximize trust in any way, he comes off as plausible even when expressing stuff that's unusual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling

Unlike my laptop battery, he has a long lifespan and I'm sure he'll stick around for the next few years. Just enough time to finally award the man.

Those studies have generally shown liberals to be only somewhat less tolerant, as an aggregate. Most liberals are still tolerant, as are most conservatives.

He made pretty okay art and cared about the suffering of animals.

The lack of overhead bins makes me go WOW.

Finding a good tenured position is comically difficult now. I know an assistant professor of engineering at Princeton who just left for Renaissance Technologies because he couldn't secure a long-term professorship there.

The USSR achieved more than just the same thing. When you say more hostile environment, I'm assuming you mean they were in an essentially autarkic condition, unlike contemporary China. But beyond that, the Soviets produced far greater, actually novel results in sciences, mathematics, and technology while having only one-fifth of China's population.

In America they're called brand ambassadors.

Was this guy the inspiration for Mr. Bean?

Excuse me, but Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia was Italian.

"Jamie, pull up the video of the chimp getting run over by a Tesla."

People in other parts of the Bay Area still don't move to San Francisco or have any desire to, even if they have the means.

Facebook's ability to prop itself up and exist as it does, despite all the animus against it, reminds me of the essay Meditations on Moloch.

I can assure any megamind in here that Socrates offended more than just 50% of Athens' population.

I also remember Back to the Future Part II

I'm taking none of your ancestors or grandparents lived during Stalin's reign?

I can also imagine walking through 1.5 miles of Phoenix sprawl is dreadfully boring, compared to somewhere like San Francisco or Berkeley.

It's different 60% of the time, every time.

>There's a long tradition of political extremism among engineers in cultures around the world

Funny you say that, as most of the major Islamist terrorist groups were founded by or led by men with engineering backgrounds.

That's true for most European countries, but not America.

There are maybe four people alive I would class alongside Einstein and Tesla in terms of sheer cognitive power:

Murray Gell-Mann

Grigori Perelman

Ed Witten

Saul Kripke

Not to mention much taxes, particularly the state income tax.

I don't get why more developers don't take notes from CD Projekt.

There is a massive, massive asymmetry between men and women when it comes to sex or romance that exist even when you're not in an area with a skewed gender ratio.

This just further proves how incoherent the entire unidirectional left-right spectrum is.

It's profound what utter doublethink (not cognitive dissonance, because these people can literally say two egregiously hypocritical and contradictory statements in the same breath and not consciously recognize the inconsistency) people in China often have about what standards they should hold their own country to, versus standards for other countries.

I read her stuff in my cultural anthropology class years ago. I enjoyed that class a lot.

This guy is one of those insufferably left-wing Jews who are borderline tankies most of the time. Most Jews, both my mom and dad, for example, either are indifferent or outright dislike other groups more than they do modern day white supremacists. My dad, who by the way isn't some country bumpkin, but is a senior VP of engineering at a company HQ'd in Palo Alto which I won't name, has made so many passionate rants about blacks, Hispanics, Asians, communists/socialists (both my parents are from the Soviet Union), etc., that I couldn't even remember the individual instances anymore. Funny enough, Benjamin Netanyahu's son recently said the left is currently a bigger threat to Jews than white supremacists currently are. In my own life, I've heard way more antisemitic remarks from blacks and mestizos, and even Asians, than from whites, even though I've been around many more whites in my life.