I fail to see how not knowing what someone meant somehow compels you to make up elaborate fantasies about what the person meant, or even excuses it.
. . . and of course nobody ever does anything other than actually cast a vote when strategizing for the future. There's no way anyone could possibly, say, make the voting part of a grander strategy.
. . . and I suppose you probably think that I think voting is a winning strategy in some way, basically because I pointed out some possible strategies that might seem like a good idea to someone, somewhere, as part ...
I won't pretend it's a great thing to vote if you promise you'll stop pretending I pretended any such thing, or that I was talking about anything other than comparisons of voting strategies.
The US suffers from a major problem with institutionalizing false dilemmas in politics. Playing the long game as a voter might well involve actions intended to lead to eventual disillusionment in that regard. Whether your time is better spent, in the long run, doing something other than voting (and learning about your voting options) is a somewhat distinct matter.
In s...
You were right when you described "along one dimension" as being simplistic. There are other options than extreme-left, left, centrist, right, and extreme-right (for instance). Engaging in false dilemma reasoning as an excuse to vote for a mainstream candidate with no interest in sending political messages encouraging reform is not particularly rational.
It's the "Lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from weevils!" tactic. Well . . . maybe not weevils, but not evil either, in this case.
Your objection to the ultimate utility of avoidance doesn't seem to take the desire to avoid distraction and wasted time even when successfully resisting the biological urges toward relationship-establishing behavior into account. Even if you (for some nonspecific definition of "you") simply find yourself waylaid for a few minutes by a pretty girl, but ultimately ready to move on, the time spent ...
If a stressful day is enough to give you a craving difficult to resist, I think that saying "anything less than complete abstinence has a chance of kickstarting the habit" is a misleading statement of how it works. It might be more accurate to say that every cigarette you have is one cigarette closer to having a habit you need to kick. It seems, in fact, that there's sort of a gradient of average craving from abstinence all the way up to two packs a day, with variances around those averages. It seems a bit obfuscatory to suggest that "com...
Key to Memetic Value:
Make sure the landing page is simple, to the point, with no necessary scrolling to get the entire message in a matter of only a few moments, and without clutter. Perhaps include a simple, clear diagram -- but that's not necessary, as long as you have a simple, brief textual explanation that dominates the page. Include a small number of obvious links to other pages on your site for additional information if you want to go into greater detail. If you want to include links to off-site resources, they should probably be collected on a s...
It depends on your ability to come up with an alternate force-multiplier to the offered weapon to establish some kind of tactical superiority. If you quickly come up with one, or are at least confident of your ability to do so, the smart move is to induce the others to deal with each other first, then attack the winner from a position of strength after he has been weakened by the initial exchange with his first opponent. Otherwise, pick up the offered weapon; then the ideal strategy is still probably to see if you can get the other two to attack each oth...
I phrased my query based on the fact that the moment I start trying to judge by anything other than ordinal position in the survey, myriad possibilities of roughly equal potential suitability come to mind. My first thought was that lower on the list is better, but (like you) I ran into a problem with the "other weapon" option being at the bottom, then I noticed that the "hunting rifle" option came later than the "assault rifle" option which seemed inconsistent with popular understandings of terms like "assault rifle"...
A major incentive in the design of the combat rifle was a cost-benefit analysis in terms of the expenses involved in the training, equipping, and potential resource loss of soldiers. Better-trained soldiers outfitted with larger-cartridge battle rifles -- even when they are semi-auto only and not select fire rifles, like the M1 Garand -- are more individually effective, for instance, than assault rifles. On the other hand, fielding such more highly trained, effectively equipped soldiers is much more expensive and a greater loss to aggregate military powe...
Okay, thanks.
I "voted" for the "I own an assault rifle" option. Given common ideas of what what constitutes a "hunting rifle" (though an AR-15 is one of the "varmint hunting" rifles of choice), I do not own a "hunting rifle", but I own at least one of every other category of weapon mentioned. There are at least two caveats that apply to my case, and one more that probably applies to the way you phrased things.
The first caveat for my specific case is that, technically, an assault rifle is defined as a sele...
What happened? I got up early, went to the Bean Cycle, and it's now 07:15 with no Evelyn (or anyone else I recognize). At this point, I plan to finish my coffee, go home, and figure out a plan for how to avoid being the only person at a meetup someone else organized in the future. A plan for an experiment comes to mind. . . .
"What distinguishes a semantic stopsign is failure to consider the obvious next question."
I disagree. The distinguishing event is a refusal (not just a failure) to consider it, for reasons other than something like "I don't have the time right now." One cannot ask all questions in an average 70+ year lifetime, so one picks which avenues of questioning to pursue most fervently. Sometimes, one simply has to say "I choose to avoid thinking too much about what came before the big bang, because I have to spend more time thinking abou...
Actual tech/science smart people buy -- or build -- gadgets because they're useful or interesting for tinkering. The "middle class" of tech/science buy gadgets because they're fashionable. The former is perfectly happy having an old example of a gadget if it performs admirably and is not on the edge of the person's tinkering interests; the latter discards old gadgets and buys new. As a result, you basically get two kinds of early adopters. One is the person who consciously adopts new tech, spending money for status, and the other is the perso... (read more)