09bjb · HackerTrans

4 years agodiscuss

Fantastic work by the team in taking the wonderful things mining has done for the planet and expanding it to the oceans! I'm sure once we've had our way with the ocean and left almost nothing to live that we can find a way to live harmoniously with what remains.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Do you want to be less aware in general? Or spend less time ruminating about aspects of your own personality?

I found the book "Self Awareness" by Red Hawk pretty helpful in disentangling and disambiguating some of this stuff.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Wish I could upvote this one ten times, or a hundred. Thanks for taking a little time to type it up.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

This is how 3-story apartment complexes get approved in my town :)

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Cognitive Liberty and Religious Liberty FTW. Medicalization implicitly promotes the idea that you should need a "medical issue" in order to have the government's permission to ingest plants and fungi that spring out of the ground spontaneously.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

I'm open to proposals for an ethical basis for technological work that's better than "well it's not nearly as societally destructive as what I was building before!"

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

No, but imagine a world in which brain power was distributed by consensus via a decentralized ledger, rather than a bio-authoritarian central party! The crowdsourced, democratic nature of DeBi(o) would sense this problem early and avoid it in the first place. There are other solutions as well, but they all have one thing in common...you guessed it, blockchain technology!

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Well, if we let our "leaders" run amok with the powers of warfare I'd expect some serious repercussions to the citizenry. "I didn't vote for him" won't get us much sympathy with our brothers and sisters elsewhere if our government is out killing people en masse.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Until we treat "unintelligent" people in our society with compassion and respect I think "intelligent" is a misnomer for the remaining demographic.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Source? I have no reason to doubt you but would love to see where those data. Most of what I heard is that "lead exposure above zero is significant" and "if you're living near an airport, especially one serving smaller plans, you are being exposed".

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

$GOOG stock has pretty much doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, meaning the company has been having absolutely no trouble whatsoever doing its job with a fully remote workforce for 2 years now. They don't "need" employees to come back to the office.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

I was talking to a friend last week who got hired this way (initial rejection, then a position opened up that seemed a better fit). It does happen, I guess.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

I'm not sure what field you're in but if you're reasonably competent, being transparent and honest with what gaps there are in your knowledge can be an attractive trait for a candidate. Someone who's forthcoming about things they're unsure about is someone you can train faster because they recognize that they don't know everything...and that trait keeps them open to learning and open to better solutions too. Sometimes people want to hear that you struggle with the same things.

All of this probably goes out the window in hyper-competitive fields but in my field for example (software engineering) where there's a labor shortage, I've found this to be the case anywhere outside of the companies that just want to test how well you remember your Computer Science degree.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Canola is a branding name to distract you from the fact that the oil is technically from the nearly un-marketable "rapeseed".

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

It's more nuanced than that but you could do a lot worse than that list. Fat profile matters, and smoke point matters, e.g. olive oil is great but if you're frying stuff with it you're turning a lot of it toxic; avocado oil is better for high heat.

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Mice strike the best balance for science of animals who are decent proxies for humans, are inexpensive to breed and genetically manipulate, and who don't trigger much ethical backlash.

It seems to me though that the extent to which mouse biology and behavior translates well to human biology and behavior might also be the extent to which it's totally immoral. "Yes, but think of how many future lives I'll save by vivisecting this sentient or semi-sentient being..."

09bjb

4 years agodiscuss

Both Opera's built-in adblocker and uBlock Origin on other browsers takes care of most of this nicely for me.

09bjb

5 years agodiscuss

Correct, but if we never came up with better hypotheses based on the accumulated results of previous studies then science would have no utility and it would be pointless to perform in the first place. Is that your argument?

09bjb

5 years agodiscuss

Here's a to-scale visual timeline of the earth's temperature change over the last 20,000 years. See if you can find anything anomalous ;)

https://xkcd.com/1732/

09bjb

5 years agodiscuss

Neomania is dangerous. New things are usually not fully understood, and what we understand about them is usually asymmetric: the upsides are generally obvious and occur in the near term, and the downsides are generally poorly understood and take a while to become apparent. The history of science is absolutely littered with examples of this in nearly every applied field.

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