Better to think of ways to not spend money than think of ways to keep on living relying on other peoples' money.

You don't get rich that way, though. Sure, you can accumulate a comfortable amount of low-grade wealth, but all the real games are played with other people's money. The only difference between BForBandana's trick and the typical externalities exploited by your average high roller is the number of zeros involved in the figures.

Nutrition is not the only derterminant of height.

Certainly; nor is it the only determinant of intelligence. "Highly dependent" != "solely dependent". But someone who wanted to maximize the chance of interacting intelligent and successful people would do well to pay attention to height, for multiple reasons - not the least of which is that everyone ELSE who wants to maximize the chance of interacting with intelligent and successful people tends to pay attention to height (even if they themselves are not tall).

Also, note that your "name X highly intelligent people who were not at optimal height" strategy is primarily anecdotal, and also that 6'2" to 6'4" is the optimal height for maximizing your height-based status gain, not the baseline height.

There no reason why we should give more status to tall people or who are otherwise physically strong.

I'm very curious why someone would vote this down.

There no reason why we should give more status to tall people

Actually, like skin color and facial structure, height is a pretty good indicator of intelligence. (This isn't genetic or even A->B causative; it's simply a fact that height and IQ are both highly dependent on childhood nutrition).

I don't say this to advocate heightism any more than I would advocate racism; I'm merely pointing out that in our current environment, they happen to correlate pretty well, and anyone under 6'2" should pause and contemplate the implications of that.

Yes, but my internal inference-checker refuses to be associated with it.

I strongly disagree with this statement, but truly hope that people continue to engage with it rather than downvote it - we actually need to have this conversation and understand that there actually are pros and cons, so that we can accurately weigh them.

My own objections to the idea of "repressive tolerance" is that humans aren't very good at managing it responsibly - the decision of who to repress is just as much of a Hard Problem as the decision of who gets to make the decisions (in fact, they're functionally equivalent at timescales of greater than a few months).

This is a concept that we need to perform research and experiment on, NOT a concept that we need to be implementing at this stage in our social development.

Why do you find it satisfying when someone can be pushed into an irrational state?

The problem is, once we concede that Reverse Authoritarianism doesn't let us do much, WHO exactly is going to figure out which authoritarian-like actions are "legitimate" and "needed"? It can't be all planned out in advance by community consensus, either.

...

To avoid yet more abuse of power, you can't merely tell people to make the object-level "correct" decision; you need a system that would constantly correct for self-serving rationalizations, corruption and power-blindness among the decision makers. If abuse and tyranny emerge as "spontaneous orders", then their prevention must be a perpetual and multi-faceted process, not a one-time Gordian knot to cut.

The rational response would be to acknowledge that this is a Hard Problem, and that there are not yet good answers. This is exciting, because it identifies places where significant progress can be made.

I'm not sure that's the entirety of what he's getting at. I think he's saying "don't make it acceptable for people to make excuses for defecting, because people will then use that as an excuse in cases where they would otherwise cooperate."

Fortunately, there are numerous studies examining the efficacy of that strategy, too.

As it turns out, being generous to people who need it and letting a few people get away with pretending to need it is much more cost-effective than trying to root out all the "cheats".

Unless, of course, the specific goal is to maintain a status hierarchy simply for the sake of staying on top of it, with no real concern for the costs or benefits of that hierarchy.

Actually, most people will identify with a scientist's last name more than a first name - so pick a scientist's last name that sounds like a first name for your own first name, and then another last name that sounds like a last name for your last name.

I'll be Maxwell Tesla.