All of lsusr's Comments + Replies
Panksepp was battling a behaviorist establishment that believed animals did not have feelings.
The history of psychology is as ideological as the history of economics. After Freud, which barely qualifies as science, the reactionary behaviorist establishment effectively suppressed anything which conflicted with their ideology, including common sense. Affective Neuroscience—which should be uncontroverial science—must instead explain basic concepts of the philosophy of science. The book plays so defensive against behaviorist ideology I got bored and never g...
Lex Luthor or Lex Fridman?
Once I had several positive things to say to a very good CEO. When I was done, he just waited. He was so used to receiving compliment sandwiches that he just assumed my compliment would be followed by a criticism.
1I think we're in agreement that dense 4-story buildings tend to be usually more efficient than skyscrapers. I'm mostly referring to the cities like Paris which are shorter than free market economics would build—and especially cities (and even more, suburbs) of the USA where land use restrictions are even more restrictive.
Another option is to go full Victorian, with coattails and a top hat.
I'm glad we're on the same page. :)
Personal moderation decision: I'm cutting off the Trump discussion here. Any further comments will be removed, on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion.
This policy applies only to this post and does not generalize to my other posts.
I solve this problem by telling jokes and expressing opinions so far outside the Overton Window they'd get me stoned to death by the general public. After setting the honesty baseline that high, it would be bizarre for my friends to fudge their food preferences.
On the contrary, there would be nothing at all bizarre about that; it would be perfectly normal and totally commonplace.
What you are doing by expressing opinions outside the Overton window is not, in fact, “setting the honesty baseline”—because there is no such thing as “the honesty baseline”. There is “telling politically incorrect jokes is tolerated in this social context”, and there is “telling my vegan friend that I hate vegan food and I tolerate his vegan dinner parties with gritted teeth and a forced smile would hurt his feelings to no purpose whatso...
It is indeed rude to ask your hosts to make you something special to accommodate your diet. That's why I don't do it. This is part of how I try to not be a problem for other people. If I'm not expecting vegetarian options, I just eat in advance and then nibble on the bread or something. I did this around Anglos even back when I ate a normal diet, because Anglos often serve so little food.
My East Asian family doesn't see it as an affront (though I can't speak for everyone—especially not anyone under the age of 18). To the contrary, it's a source of common g...
I guess I should qualify my statement, since this post is about surplusses based on value-added business like manufacturing and technology. A trade surplus based on resource extraction is not necessarily a source of long-term wealth.
I agree with the statement "The notion that bilateral trade deficits are per se detrimental to the respective national economies is overwhelmingly rejected by trade experts and economists.", by the way. The key word is "bilateral". Consider the China-Australia example I used in my original post. China has a bilateral trade defi...
That sounds like it would be interesting to visit.
Yes. This is sufficiently well-established and uncontroversial, that I don't feel the need to dig through the specific examples.
Bullet trains are nice, but I feel they make more sense for connecting cities. Generally-speaking, the best direction to expand cities is to build upward and downward.
Yeah, I started wearing a suit in specific contexts after many months of careful consideration. It's not random at all. Everything about it is carefully considered, from the number of buttons on my jacket to the color of my shoes.
I mostly wear it around artists. Artists basically never wear suits where I live, but they really appreciate them because ① artists are particularly sensitive to aesthetic fundamentals and ② artists like creative clothing.
Being polarizing is way better than being neutral for meeting people and making friends.
This is really important. If I meet 100 people and make 1 really good friend, then it doesn't matter whether the other 99 like me or not. Being polarizing helps filter for the small number of people I want to talk to.
It's can also be fun to play into American stereotypes overseas. It's not everyday that a Czechian gets to meet an authentic American cowboy. I much prefer that look to the generic sloppy baseball cap + T-shirt.
A waistcoat is my favorite attire for social dancing.
Denji is indeed a caricature of himself, both diagetically and metaphorically. I believe this is a deliberate metatextual self-reference to how popular Chainsaw Man has gotten in the real world.
1I think what makes Chainsaw Man great is that the characters are dangerous, insane, and relatable. What really sold me on Asa Mitaka's story was Asa's conversation with Yuko about the murder. Asa's story has strengths and weaknesses compared to Denji's. I much prefer that over a retread of the original Chainsaw Man story.
I feel the whole aquarium arc was genius, especially the ending. But to understand it on all the different levels requires knowing that the beginning of the aquarium date, where Asa lectures about fish, is a riff on the aquarium date scene from Rent-A-Girlfriend.
Just a blazer is a more conventional solution to this problem. Personally, I like how unified it looks to use a matching fabric for blazer and pants.
What do you mean Chainsaw Man 2? Do you mean Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc? I've only watched the regular anime season, plus read the English translation of the manga. I'm loving Asa Mitaka's story.
Japan is different from the USA and Europe because they have two sartorial lineages: a native one and a Western one. While it's not possible to counter-signal with a suit in Japan, I feel the equivalent would be to wear traditional clothing like a samue or jinbei, which have their own set of challenges.
That Onion article is savage. It's hard to imagine any culture and circumstance where wearing a business suit ironically would work. That said, I did successfully wear a suit ironically once. It was part of a running joke someone else started.
I haven't watched How I Met Your Mother, so I'm afraid that reference is lost on me. The only sitcom I've watched is Little Mosque on the Prairie, which is about a community of Canadian Muslims.
That's a good point. I've changed it to "wokking".
+1 to Taleb's Extremistan vs Mediocristan model
I like the original title [NSFW] The Subspace Jhana better too. I wrote the entire post with that title in mind. This version loses the original's elegance.
[Note to future readers: This post went through many different titles. Some of these comments are out-of-date.]
Why then does it make sense to subsidize exports? That's the core of the question I'm trying to answer. Because paying money to subsidize exports costs a government money, which puts upward pressure on domestic real interest rates.
Thank you for the kind words and the corrections. I have fixed the errors you pointed out.
I think different people are using the word "free" to mean slightly different things, and that the distinctions about which words we use to describe things in this case is confusing, but unimportant. The same goes for the stuff about cashing in payments.
Yeah, this is all macroeconomics 101. I wrote this because macroeconomics 101 is counter-intuitive. When I originally saved macroeconomics 101 into my brain, I was basically just memorizing a set of conclusions. This post is me going into those cached thoughts, ripping them up, and replacing them with better ones.
The core question I'm trying to answer is "Why do countries subsidize exports? Derive the answer from first principles."
One of the things I like about your comments is how much common ground we have, despite you writing in Vajrayana and me reading in Zen. It's just a different finger pointing at the same Moon.
I think you're correct. I have modified my original post to classify subspace as a mushin, instead of as a jhana. Jhana is characterized by stability of attention, which is not characteristic of subspace. Mushin is characterized by the absence of self-originated willful volition, which is absolutely descriptive of subspace.
Meanwhile, Ikkyū (1394-1481):
Stilted koans and convoluted answers are all monks have,
Pandering endlessly to officials and rich patrons.
Good friends of the Dharma, so proud, let me tell you,
A brothel girl in gold brocade is worth more than any of you[1]
Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyū, translated by John Stevens, pages 75-76, White Pine Press, 2003, via Wikipedia. ↩︎
The way I look at things, there are multiple dimensions from which a form of meditation can be BDSM-y. For example, metta meditation involves lots of oxytocin,
Somewhere in the multiverse, the keisaku and the spanking crop are called by the same name.
It doesn't work at that small of a scale. More generally, this principle doesn't work on any scale too small to support an international industrial economy. It wouldn't even work for trade between different tribes of farmers. This is a phenomenon that you only see at very large scales of human behavior. You need massive coordination failures colliding with each other for these ideas to kick in.
I will clarify my position: I'm not going to bet with you on any subject whatsoever, regardless of the odds. I take bets very seriously, and require as a prerequisite that I and the other person are on the same page regarding lots of peripheral details regarding bets. I feel that you and I have different implicit understandings of how bets should work. This has nothing to do with the criminal justice system, and everything to do with precision of language.
1I'm not taking your bet. There are many reasons for this, but a sufficient dealbreaker is that I only place bets with legibly unambiguous resolution criteria. Your proposal fails to meet my standards in that dimension. I feel that betting with you carries a significant likelyhood that you and I have a disagreement about who won the bet. That makes this bet a non-starter.
First of all, welcome.
What questions go ultimately goes down to personal opinions, so here are my personal opinions:
- General questions you're comfortable with the public seeing can go here. Questions usually don't require much back-and-forth. If yours do, then you can make a note of that to set expectations properly.
- Intercom should be used for questions that must be answered by a moderator. Moderator bandwidth is limited relative to user bandwidth, so err on the side of asking the community instead of asking moderators. (The moderators here are super hel
I find it's useful to clearly distinguish between two kinds of materialism: materialistic values vs materialist philosophy. They're two different things that confusingly share the same name.
First of all, thank you for the correction. Legalization occurred in 2012, and the statutory maximum penalty for selling marijuana[1] is four years in prison.
That said, your specific bet that sounds messy to adjudicate. Consider this example:
A father and son from Seattle were each sentenced today [February 13, 2024] to 30 months in prison for their scheme to violate the state’s marijuana production regulations and produce and sell marijuana on the black market, announced U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman.
They're in prison for selling marijuana witho...
Pro: We get a second Australia.
Con: We get a second Australia.
1I accept this compromise. To improve your suggestion even further, I propose we gamify the drone-operating app. Utopia is within our grasp. We need only the courage to do what must be done.
If you can answer "is this representation harmful", you can answer "is this unnecessary shock value".
That's one direction to go. I prefer to ask "Is this representation true?" and just let the silence echo.
Winning a conversation feels like dropping a Moltov cocktail and walking away, right?
If you're really good, then you can turn morally-charged debates into fun explorations by asking funny questions. For example, basketball was invented by a white man. That means "black people playing basketball" is cultural appropriation. Ramen was originally a Chinese dish. They didn't even change the name. "Ramen" is just what you get when you pronounce the Chinese word "lamien" with a Japanese accent. Down with Japanese appropriation! (This is another joke.)
This works because you don't tell the person what to think, or even that they're wrong. You just let them tie themselves into knots.
But executions are frequently bungled.
This isn't particularly high on my list of concerns, but there is a reason most suicide victims use a gunshot to the head if they can. It is the simplest, most reliable, and quickest way of killing someone. But it blows brains all over the wall, which makes people feel squeamish.
So instead we inject people with a lethal combination of drugs which can take hours to work, if it works at all, often leaving them in agonising pain the whole way. The solution is to just use the gun.
Like you, Nazi Germany needed to execut...
It's in the right ballpack. This article based off of US Death statistics puts the number at 0.7%.
But yes, some innocent people will be killed.
The important question to ask is "how many innocent people" are worth killing to achieve an end? A 2014 study estimated that 4% of death row inmates would be exonerated, had they remained under sentence of death indefinitely, which means the real proportion of innocent people getting executed is higher than 4% and we don't know how much higher.
If death sentences are expanded, then the fraction of innocent people getting executed would increase to well over 4%. I feel that that's too high, especially if 1% of ...
1The important question to ask is “how many innocent people” are worth killing to achieve an end? A 2014 study estimated that 4% of death row inmates would be exonerated, had they remained under sentence of death indefinitely,
"Exonerated" doesn't usually mean "innocent", it typically means "is guilty of something slightly lesser".
If you only execute repeat offenders the fraction of "completely" innocent people executed goes way down.
The idea of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and then being executed gives me pause.
The idea of being framed for shop lifting, framed for shop lifting again, wrongfully convicted of a violent crime and then being at the wrong place at the wrong time is ridiculous.
But executions are frequently bungled.
This isn't particularly high on my list of concerns, but there is a reason most suicide victims use a gunshot to the head if they can. It is the simplest, most reliable, and quickest way of killing someone. But it blows brains all over the wall, which makes people feel squeamish.
So instead we inject people with a lethal combination of drugs which can take hours to work, if it works at all, often leaving them in agonising pain the whole way. The solution is to just use the gun.
Like you, Nazi Germany needed to execut...
Did the Ask Question type post go away?
It's still present, but the way to get to it has changed. First click "New Post". Then, at the top of your new post, there will be three tabs: POST, LINKPOST, and QUESTION. Click the QUESTION tab and you can create a question type post.
1I'm glad you're enjoying the posts.
I haven't had any experiences like the one you describe. I have instead had the opposite experience; my writing usually comes from a place of tension, which meditation dissolves.
I love the title "Trojan Sky" and the word "screensnake".