All of Massimog's Comments + Replies

Working as the programmer on a game, I would get bug reports from artists playing through themselves, often including their own hypothesis as to what was causing the issue. These issues were all obviously real and required immediate diagnosis, but over time (for issues with non-obvious causes) I learned to take the artists' "helpful" speculations as indicators of where not to start looking.

I second The Mind, seems to be close to what you're looking for as described in your other comment.

Yeah, I'll admit I am more iffy on the fiction side of this argument, Hollywood isn't really kind to the reality of anything. I was actually not aware of any of these movies or shows (except superintelligence which I completely forgot about, whoops), it does seem things are getting better in this regard. Good! I hold that climate change still has a much stronger non-fiction presence though.

Yeah, I think this gets at a crux for me, I feel intuitively that it would be beneficial for the field if the problem was widely understood to be important. Maybe climate change was a bad example due to being so politically fraught, but then again maybe not, I don't feel equipped to make a strong empirical argument for whether all that political attention has been net beneficial for the problem. I would predict that issues that get vastly more attention tend to receive many more resources (money, talent, political capital) in a way that's net positive towa... (read more)

I’m unsurprised people who first learned about cryonics from Wikipedia have an unfavourable view of it, their page on the subject takes a fairly negative slant. I vaguely recall something about an editor having it out for the field.

If you’re considering places to move outside of the the US then it’s worth knowing that north america is pretty bad when it comes to urban design and car safety. Here’s a video on car crashes in the netherlands, I recommend this guy’s channel in general for comparisons with that country, which is quite sane relative to the US and Canada: https://youtu.be/Ra_0DgnJ1uQ

I also hear japan is pretty good at urban design and safe public transport (trains especially).

Have you heard of the conlang Toki Pona? I'm not super familiar with it and it's community since I just learned about it recently but it's only got 123 root words, I've heard it claimed that you can learn it in a weekend, and (from my limited perspective) it seems quite popular in the wider conlang community.