Artoemius

Fortunately, it's still possible to retain anonymity online. I wonder for how long.

An elucidating quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

"It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove."

It might be one of the cases where correlation doesn't imply causation. For an objective study, we would need to assign children to groups randomly. Otherwise, we can miss various obscure selection effects. (For example, if children who are more likely to be scouts, are also likely to be from a particular socioeconomic background).

I don't know. The Japanese are usually known for their dependence on the society and social norms. In the corporate world, they find it normal to work overtime without pay, never take vacations longer than several days at a time, and they seem to find it hard to disagree with their bosses. That's not what I would call a culture of independence.

It's Trump's hug of death this time.

Given that the race was pretty close, I wonder if we have Peter Thiel to thank for this result. Personally, I have a feeling that Trump would lose without Thiel's support.

Great resource! I hope it grows to be a huge collection indeed. Also I hope it'll manage to avoid all the potential legal problems when people (knowingly or unknowingly) start submitting books that are not actually freeware.

I think the lesson here is that people are tired of anything plain and boring and are eager to vote for something more unconventional.

Brexit, then this. Life on Earth is becoming unpredictable again. A bit scary, but fun. It was way too boring.

Everything about Apple these days points to the same elephant in the room: their top management are just a bunch of clueless salesmen without their leader.

This was a fun read, and I found myself agreeing with him on most of the points.

I would call his attitude "confidence in his own ability to reason clearly".

For some reason, in Europe, even less people seriously consider cryonics as an option, despite the population being generally less religious. Some view it with cynicism. Others just laugh.

Musk strikes me as an imaginative but a very rational person who deeply thinks about stuff, so this is confusing to me.

His argument that our world is most likely a simulation does seem logical given our current knowledge. However, breaking out of the simulation is completely another matter, more in line with Hollywood thinking than with anything that scientists can be engaged to do, at least currently.

Here's a post that tries to solve the geek vs nerd argument with Science!: https://slackprop.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/on-geek-versus-ne...

P.S. The mandatory xkcd link: https://xkcd.com/747/

Other than being very interesting, this article provides one of the funniest instances of the crazy humor generated by the Cloud To Butt Plus extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...):

“The merge has begun—and a merge is our best scenario. Any version without a merge will have conflict: we enslave the A.I. or it enslaves us. The full-on-crazy version of the merge is we get our brains uploaded into my butt. I’d love that,” he said.

I had to disable the extension to verify that it was its work and not the actual quote.

two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation

I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.

This is probably the most profound work out of these (no sarcasm):

On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit http://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html

The problem is that even if people hear it like this, P is still a more likely exact description of reality than P&Q.

if somebody takes the trouble to point something out to you (say, that someone you've never met used to be a very politically-active left-winger), what they pointed out must be relevant to the conversation.

Even if the brain believes that all things that are pointed out are relevant, that still doesn't explain this problem with bad communication.

There are two statements, P and Q, and you have a question of what's more probable: statement P or the conjunction P&Q. The experimenter (communicating badly) makes you believe that Q has a very high probability. However, it is still logically impossible for P&Q to be more probable than P.

nobody can prove or disprove the existence of a higher being or a religion.

You don't believe in something just because you cannot disprove it. You must have some evidence to believe it in the first place. Otherwise, you would believe in all kinds of celestial teapots.

That depends on how you define an idiot.

It's true that one half of people literally has less-than-average intelligence...

Sorry, most people are indeed not idiots, but that doesn't apply to creationists.

It's one thing to go to a church (there even might be purely social reasons), and it's another thing to discard overwhelming scientific evidence and believe something based on the principle of not needing any evidence at all. I become especially sad when I think of the confused minds of the poor children of these people.

On the topic, I've found The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins a very enlightening read if one wishes to understand the arguments of religious people.

Yes, it's entirely possible to be both human and a piece of shit at the same time. It's the scammer's job to convince everyone that he is more human than a piece of shit, and it's our job not to fall for that. The factual validity of whatever bad names we might call him is irrelevant.

(No, I don't think that calling scammers bad names is a viable anti-scammer strategy. I just don't agree with the opposing effort, which should only be expected from the scammer.)

Although calling someone a psychopath without access to their medical history is not literally correct, I don't agree with the spirit of your comment.

After being caught, this scammer was actively trying to be seen as a human being. That is exactly the tactics he chose and this is exactly the tactics that helped him escape any punishment so far. I would advise against humanizing scammers too much.

I agree. Begging is a skill, and this scammer is already a professional in that respect.

If he was 16 or 17, it probably wouldn't be too late to tell his parents, although that depends on the family. 22 is way too old for that.

In addition, I think the author should at least release the details of the eBay account to the public to make them googleable in connection with the scam. Since it was the eBay account that convinced the author to go first, it can convince other people too.

Artificial intelligence.

Not seriously. But I wouldn't seriously argue that it is always rational to follow the law, either. Sometimes you really need the money.

This is kind of like robbing a bank and then saying you really needed the money.

That's a radical idea, but it has started to gain some popularity: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stealing-food-not-a-crim...

Is there a reason to have a password other than 123456 on last.fm?

I'm surprised that not a single comment here suggested that mediocrity is boring.

Boredom is of course a subjective state of mind, but I have a feeling that the average and the boring cannot be entirely statistically unrelated in humans.