Viewing profile — tycho-newman

Robert Sapolsky has a fantastic discussion of depression as a form of learned helplessness. We see it in abused animals: https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc?is=YnnSt1292XjiGbEE You are no…

Years ago I had a little token that printed auth codes. They were everywhere. I had it on my keychain. I recall thinking it was nifty.

I think the consensus sought here is narrow enough.

Parliament can make any law.

We only tolerate totalitarianism in the private sector!

Lots of Americans live on that right now. It would go further in India.

It sounds like you object to the exploitation rather than to the H1-B.

Nothing. American workers will rarely consider offshoring themselves. Which is a shame.

Maybe we should let people work wherever they want? The tech companies will just offshore the jobs they’d otherwise use for visas. India is a cool place. Lots of Americans would do…

Simpson Tide predicted this.

Writing probably arose from reading animal tracks in soft mud.

QM is so platonic though. Reality consists, ultimately, of forms that can only be described mathematically. It just happens that the math returns (what we see) as a probability dis…

The snark is part of the vibe. The world is full of people still working through their inferiority/superiority complex. Many of them convene in the Halls of Power. The Economist re…

Given statistical distribution of this language, try to predict the next token. Reward if correct. No reward otherwise.

Facts.

In "On Love", bell hooks points out just how screwed children are by their circumstance and their lack of agency/autonomy. Highly recommend reading her.

Indeed. For me, being aware of those complexities is what gives me hope that there’s a new emerging paradigm.

I get why you see this as me having an inflexible black and white rule. I see it differently. I see respecting individual autonomy as the best way to respond to the shades of grey …

That's all valid, but I'm going to stick to my autonomy rule. People are free to make fatal mistakes.

I did nazi this coming …

Altruism, trust, and cooperation often emerge from acts and choices that seem completely self-interested. Heck, cooperation is a survival strategy that came out of evolution. It ex…

I don’t make the distinction between asking and forcing. To me, you can ask why someone wants to die. But stopping them? Or asking them to stop? Eh, not up to me.

“On their own” is in air quotes because it’s a vast simplification. In kinship group days, and especially before vaccines, children simply didn’t survive. They died by the millions…

No one should ask a suicidal person not to kill themselves. If you believe in autonomy, every human has the right to decide when and how to end their lives. Slavery denies human au…

Communities, like all living things, are subject to the whims of extinction events. When a mountain falls out of the sky, it’s no one’s fault (not even the bad people) that the com…