All of rpcrpcrpc's Comments + Replies

Haha I was kinda scared I'd done or said something very wrong, thanks for the reversal!

I feel like I recently was in a similar head space, struggling with trying to be "appropriately" (or even "ideally") cooperative. Something that personally helped me a lot was the idea/mantra of, essentially, I am a more benign entity in the world than I tend to fear.

What I've found over time is just that people are exceptionally caught up in their own narratives/life circumstances -- they are, after all, human beings with their own lives and priorities -- but as part of that, they're accepting that things are sometimes inconvenient for them, sometimes the

... (read more)
2habryka
(Sorry, the new spam detection seems to have been overly aggressive and marked this as spam. I undeleted it, and apologize for the inconvenience)

I'm generally hesitant to get into this line of thinking (and others like it) because knowledge is such a thoroughly multi-dimensional space and usually the ends people are looking to move towards with these kinds of models aren't terribly realistic.

I think the true answer is that it's both hard to know what anyone knows about a given field and it also very rarely matters. It reminds me of the talk "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People" -- there's a habit among intellectuals, academics, and learned professionals (usually in that order) to get

... (read more)
2ozziegooen
In response to your last point, I didn't really get into differences between similar areas of knowledge in this post, it definitely becomes a messy topic. I'd definitely agree that for "making a suspension bridge", I'd look at people who seem to have knowledge in "making suspension bridges" than knowledge in "physics, in general."

The NYT had an opinion piece talking recently about how Americans (especially younger ones) are in fact the *loneliest* they've ever been, and how this is being attributed as a cause for a whole host of social ills:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/opinion/loneliness-political-polarization.html

That doesn't seem to go along with the "easier to find another social group" hypothesis. Anecdotally, I and almost everyone I know has had an incredibly hard time making new friends, especially outside of college.

I could see the inverse argument then (as is apparently being made) that maybe the lack of community ties is making people more resentful/anti-social/destructive in their interactions.