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Bodell

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I have made this account irretrievable for myself by changing the password to something I don't know. I no longer wish to belong to this community as it has soured considerable since my joining it five yeas ago.

August 14, 2021

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Yes the problem is that I just don’t understand a how to use this fresh new innovative product that will sweep the world by storm with its ability to take the burden and hard work out of the whole writing process. If only I see the light through these amazing stupefying mind-befuddling product demos…

And no I do not write ad content for the web nor will I ever get a computer to write my feelings for me. Not in 5 years, not in 10 years, not whatever you tell your up-incoming investors. The fact that writing about personal grief and marketmuse are being equated as like things is rather disturbing, in a sociopathic/psychopathic sort of way.

Judging by all of these comments I believe I may just be in the wrong place and that hacker-news is no longer for people like myself.

1. You nailed it no one cares about the dead sister… not even the author of this piece.

2. No it’s not a real affair because you can’t have an affair with inanimate objects.

3. I am a writer (so your No True Scotsman implication doesn’t work here) and it’s neither fascinating nor terrifying. The only people who feel threatened by it are bullshit artists worried they will get out bullshited.

Since I’m not the one who used my sisters death to sell a product - and I mean really read what she wrote, she is purposely insinuating that she is having a love affair with the product. “I’ve never read such an accurate Modern Love in my life”, “I felt acutely that there was something illicit about what I was doing” , “One night, when my husband was asleep” - I think I’m being quite nice about it. If I knew this person in real life I don’t believe I would be as nice.

Well I’m not speaking for everyone, but since I think I’m the only one who used the word “phony” here, I’ll speak for myself. I used that word not to disparage the tech (the tech I simply called worthless, as it’s not worth even discussing) but the person writing the article. If I were her family I do not believe I would ever speak to her agin until she retracted her product advertising in which she shamelessly used her sisters death to help sell. Her words are what I found disgusting.

I’m also 31 and obviously into tech to be here, so not an old man waving sticks at trains. What bizarre assumptions you have.

What Is Value? 5 years ago

In regards to your second link, I found this quote coming to mind while reading about your linkages to chromaticity: “Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.” - Ulysses This too if you dig a little deeper is an allusion to Aristotle’s work. So I would say that many others have also found abstract analogous meaning in the way in which we decipher color and the way in which we decipher the world.

I just want to add to your number 1.

Not only would this be marginal it also wouldn’t necessarily be catching the real “monsters”. I don’t think if you find someone with old already known about images that it would necessarily equate to someone that actually abuses children. I think about this in a similar way (not exactly) as I do with drugs, just because a person gets busted with drugs doesn’t mean they are a drug dealer or a maker of drugs.

This is not to say that perhaps there are some more active real-time stuff in these databases that maybe with enough searching could make its way back to the perpetrator and indeed maybe even find a victim. It’s just seems that that would be far more marginal and is generally what I’m concerned about when it comes to these issues. For me it’s more important to protect children than it is to bust some weirdos for looking at the wrong porn (these can both be related as well and I do understand that I just think it’s not as cut and dry as we believe it is), further if it keeps said weirdo from actually harming a child then let them have it. We allow these databases to exist for, presumably, the same reason, with the idea that we can stop future victims from happening.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I do not think with disagree very much on this topic, other than our subjective impressions of the game - liking and/or disliking. I do think that we may be talking on slightly different levels of abstraction. Which is tough for me to get right with short online comments. Thanks for engaging on this, though. I enjoyed reading your thoughts very much.

My play through definitely implied that social media was good and that not using it was bad. Seems to me that anyone could play this and decide their own interpretation of "anxious wolf" which is exactly my criticism of it. Things that contain more depth are less subjective in their interpretations. I would even take aim at the idea that "fear of being a bad person" is something we over-estimate, I often wish more people had this fear (like vaccines because it's good).

It reminds me of the whole Colbert paradox, where he polls equally well with all sides of the political spectrum despite engaging with politics daily. No matter what you believed you felt he believed the same things as you.

This is not that I disagree with your overall view here - I don't, people should absolutely apply logic in reasoning to their rick/reward calculations rather then going on pure gut feeling - however I just do not believe this game really goes into any of this in a manner fitting to the complexity of the subject. But really, how could 6 min flash game do that?

I was not expressing a critical view of news media simply because it is not contextual in this situation. The “game” is actually very non-specific as to what the “news” is - or anything else for that matter. So, I was simply applying something like covid or global warming to it in order to show that the generalized premise of the game does not hold as a very insightful view of human being’s relationships with their anxiety.

I just finished playing this and I wasn’t particularly impressed. It seemed to be saying that your anxiety is controlling you when you choose not to use, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tinder. I don’t believe that using social media apps is a necessary or meaningful thing to do with your life. Nor do I think it’s fair to imply that people who choose not to engage on those platforms are suffering from anxiety disorders. In fact it often seems more the opposite way around.

However, I’m not entirely sure that this was the intended insinuation. Yet it’s hard to read anything else into it since its about a girl trying to engage with her friends on her phone across these various platforms and being stopped by the ‘anxiety wolf’. She even gets her health dinged for sharing a news story, which to some extent could be viewed as engaging with reality.

Engaging with reality can most assuredly cause anxiety, however I don’t really view this as improper. I don’t believe that mental health should be thought of as a framing or mindset one has to the extent that it frames reality away. I.E. I may feel better if I pretend covid is not real though I am not making a healthy choice if I do.

I was so furious when I found the camera I confronted the president of the board that day on the street. He cooped to it in that conversation, said something about ‘our neighborhood is changing and we need to do something about it’, which was a referencing to a recent event involving a friend of a black family not being wanted at the pool. He was scared because he knew it was wrong, as cowards often are when confronted, and told me it would be removed, which it was, the same day. I mentioned it in the next meeting and was promptly called a liar, screamed at for 5 minutes and kicked out. The board made an official statement at the next meeting chastising my conduct and denying the entire incident.

Of course I still have the pictures of the camera, though I realized quickly I was the only one concerned with the surveillance, and rumor was I was the nefarious person that needed to be watched out for because ‘what does he have to hide then anyway?’

The board continues to hide cameras around the neighborhood whenever they see fit.

The real kicker to the whole thing was that at the same time I found out our Vice President, the one behind the whole shtick, was a disbarred ex DA, who is now an ex felon because he stole a gun out of an evidence locker gave it to his mistress and told her to kill his wife. What a world!

Slightly off topic but I wanted to add a quick story to this.

In my neighborhood I made some waves with the HOA when I complained about secret hidden cameras I found at our pool. After investigating I found out rather quickly that members of the board decided to put them up with out telling anyone including most of the rest of the board, which my girlfriend was a member of at the time. When I complained I was told the same thing: you can’t make a complaint without offering a solution. I was told this two more times when we suggested that they should not be having big meeting and gatherings during the pandemic, and when we suggested they should not be illegally miscounting property owners votes (this one ended up involving us paying a lawyer to straighten out).

Every time I was told I was not being constructive and offering a solution and every time I had to explain that I was. The solutions were very simple do spy on your neighbors and take secret videos of them, in their bathing suits especially. Don’t invite people to large in person gatherings during a pandemic when an online meeting will do. And follow the already legally established way of counting peoples votes without creativity reimagining it in your own favor.

For all those solutions my girlfriend was removed from the board and we are no longer allowed to vote.

Stallman is offering a similar simple solution “do not use Apple products.” The parent comment here is simply mad that Stallman has not invented a way for people To have their cake and eat it too.

Sometimes I see articles about a wrongfully convicted man being let out of prison. This usually comes with a cash payment of some sort. The whole we took 20 years of your life, oops, here’s a million dollars. Every time I see this though I think ‘no, no way does money replace my time.’ That’s simply not good enough. And not because the payments are usually ludicrously low, but because there is no amount of money that would buy off my life.

Same as there is no amount of money you could give me to end my life, a position which I assume is shared by a vast majority of humans.

Time is not money. It’s not even close as an exchange rate. I would never put myself through these types of interview processes (not to mention that I would assume that sort of thing to be indicative of the job itself and company as a whole) because I value my actual life and dignity far and above what I value as an upper middle class income.

I remember having some issues the year when I switched schools and states in 3rd or 4th grade (not sure exactly). The school district we moved to had kids memorizing all their multiplication tables and would do 2 min tests to ensure they were memorized and not thought about. I did terribly on these tests because I had not memorized them the year or a half year before like the other kids since I was at a different school. My mother got upset that I was being failed in math because she knew I was good at math. So she took me with her to parent-teacher day made me do double-digit multiplication in my head in front of my teacher. This was something no other kid in my class could do and made it apparent to my teacher that I should not be failing math.

As an adult, I have mixed feelings about this experience. My mother used to brag about this she had me do it in front of her friends, other parents with kids my age. I distinctly remember during this in a Perkins while trying to enjoy my breakfast. For me, this was simply a trick involving a larger “working memory” as opposed to “rote memory”. Being that it was still a matter of being a “trick” that required practice albeit a different kind of practice it becomes something I thought of as a trained monkey scenario.

This has come up a lot I’m my life. I worked in construction for a while out of high school and my boss would treat me this way as well. He would have me be his human calculator to help him figure out measurements. One time this was going on in a complicated octagonal room where we were trying to lay out brackets for a projection screen. He asked me to run some numbers for him and I refused. I did this because I understood what he thought he was doing but knew that his method was flawed. So I refused to give him the wrong answer, even though it was the right answer to the numbers he gave me. It caused I really big fight where he began talking down to me and tried to put me in my place.

Another Forman was there who witnessed the whole thing and I ended up doing a job with that other guy like 6 months later, but he had not forgotten the incident. He brought it up and gave me a long speech about how I should have just given my boss what he asked for instead of the correct measurements. Something I, to this day, steadfastly disagree with. Fast forward a year or two and my boss was fired due to his incompetence in measuring and ordering the materials that cost the company many tens of thousands of dollars.

Intelligence and thinking skills, in general, are practiced and exercised. However, they are not trained-monkey tricks. It is a method of living well and garnering fullness from life. And to no other end is it acceptable to waste such a thing.

I’m not sure I understand why people would violently react to a picture of a typewriter. If these same people saw a young kind with an original game boy would the urge be to punch them. Nor do I see how it’s ironic. The only real irony being that people who are striving for online attention are enraged when perceiving someone else as trying to get attention. It’s seems anytime I hear or read the word “ironic” it’s used in some novel way and is impossible to get a read on what it means in any given context.

“Hipster”, “ironic” and “pretentious” seem all to be very slippery words that are really just a judgements of how “normal” or not something is. It smacks of assimilate or die. Which are typically a projection of how little that person values their own life and how easily shaken they are by someone not make if their same choices. It’s no real wonder to me that a hyper-competitive culture would bring about this sort of behavior though.

Disclosure: I do pay for premium because I do not like ads.

However, I find myself more sympathetic to the issue you’ve described. Perhaps if people felt that the “content creators” would revive a fair shake of those premium monthly charges I pay they would be more likely to enter into such an agreement. As it stands this is simply not the case and the same holds true for most all content streaming services. The provider and about 1% of contributors get the real lions share, the rest are fighting for scraps (often at the mercy of YouTube’s moderation algos, e.g. getting banned, having videos removed or demonetized because a computer doesn’t really know what it’s looking at.)

On top of that YouTube uses my demographic and video watching data to serve me ads everywhere else, my email, my browser, etc. not exactly a fair trade off in simply removing ads from the videos themselves.

It truly is not an egalitarian system, therefore the erosion of trust, and as a consequence the unwillingness of its consumers to “play ball”, is simply a product of their own making.

Why stop there? We could just load them up on an assembly line and have one of those automotive robotic arms use an air gun on them like they do for cattle. Better yet just rip their heads clean off with an automated guillotine. Then us regular folk could check it out on the latest “how it’s made” episode and remark to our selves on how satisfying the sheer efficiency of it is. Do that long enough and we could even have kids react to the old people’s way of electrocuting them in a chair. They’ll think that shit be cray. Sounds to me like the killing business is ripe for disruption.

In my experience the system incentivizes this sort of behavior. I'll give my personal story as an example, singular though it my be. This is very long winded but I feel many here at HN may appreciate the details so I've included them.

I'm currently going back to school and my experience in doing so is quite troubling. Largely my issues reside in two classes, English and Ethics. While I have a B in both classes, I have not at any point learned anything in either class. By learned I mean learned in the traditional sense of doing class work, receiving feedback, revising, repeat. This process usually culminating in a full formal essay or test.

In English, my professor gives only a few sentences of rather generic feedback on each class item. We write many pieces of a total essay that we turn in to receive this feedback on before putting it all together into an major essay assignment. So for one of these pieces we were supposed to give a critical response to a couple of articles we read about the tech industry and its effects on human thinking. One argued that human beings were "evolving" into man/machine "centaurs" such as the super powers of "ESP" that are gained by using Twitter (not joking). The other was an article from The Atlantic titled "Is google making us stoopid?" (no, I did not misspell "stupid", that was the title). The assignment was to argue for which one was most persuasive.

I of course found neither very persuasive. I found some sentiments that I agreed with in the second one, such as people losing their ability to focus for long periods of time brought about by an industry of attention battling (too many distractions). But overall this was not a good case for human brains being made defective, which to its credit was said in the portion where the article's author talked to a neurologist.

In the first article I found an overwhelming misunderstanding of general and specific A.I. This position of my final essay had one note on it from my professor, it was a YouTube link to a dancing robot that I presume was supposed to be a snarky response displaying how intelligent robots actually are.

So I wrote my paper with the thesis that neither of the two were persuasive. I focused much of my paper on the fact that intelligence was poorly defined throughout despite it being the foundation of each argument. I spent a portion of the essay explaining that even though computers played chess (a main sticking point for article 1), this did not constitute anything near human intelligence and that is not exactly viewed as an overall positive thing from the chess community at large (I myself have played chess for many years, won a couple state championships as a child and currently after not playing for a long time have a rating of around 1600-1700).

I received little to no feedback on any of the smaller portions of this essay and got full marks for each. Yet, when it came time to put it all together, I received a C and was told my thesis "side-stepped the entire point of the exercise". I wrote my professor and said that I had already turned in drafts of my thesis twice and I was not told it would be outright rejected. The only real thing I had been told to change was my summaries of each article, as they were too thorough and I should cut it back to the "gist". My final essay was scored poorly on the summary section for "only capturing the gist". I also pointed out that in my last draft, I had specifically asked (parenthetically to my teacher and fellow students) if my thesis was okay or unclear in any way as I felt summarizing intelligence arguments in 5 pages or less was difficult to do effectively. This note was ignored and I was given no notes on it at all, only top marks.

He responded saying he graded it for overall effectiveness and that if I wanted to try again I was welcome to. I declined since I did not have time to redo it as by the time I received this, I was three weeks into our next essay. It's interesting to note that a week later I was told I had to scrap the work on this "formal research essay" as well because it contained "too much research" and was not "opinionated enough".

The point is, I was really trying to use my time at school to actually learn something. I know my writing can be better and I want to make it better, but this environment is not conducive to doing so. Admittedly, even this comment could use some work: better organization, less choppy thought structure, etc.

My ethics class is much the same way. We read portions of our two textbooks and take lock-down browser quizzes (on camera) as well as major tests. The quizzes are intended as practice and for understanding what you should study for the test. However, you are only allowed to see the numerical results of those tests and quizzes! You are NOT told which ones you missed or what you maybe did not understand. I fail to see how anyone can benefit from this approach to learning.

Which is an extremely long way of saying I understand completely why people would cheat and not try while in school. I myself am not one of those people but the design of the institution, at least the one I attend, seems to be begging people to game it and further circumvent actual practice and learning.

On top of all of that, when I asked an English professor about my issues leading up to that first essay, she informed me that my generic non-feedback sounded like the output of A.I. grading software. Something I had not before known existed and was mortified to be made aware of, as ironic as that is in light of the subject matter my class was concerned with.

Seems to me that the schools themselves are also outsourcing their jobs.

An example of this software: https://elearningindustry.com/artificial-intelligence-new-ro...

I too read this around 14 and have revisited recently at 30. I was most intrigued by the but I fully written sentences when I was younger but now I’m older see it in a much more complicated light. A good sort of complication.

I think of Lolita as a puzzle of a story. There are quite a few clues that lead to a metaphor that make since of HH’s proclamations at the end. I think Nabokov was satirizing himself as an artist through HH’s character. This view makes Delores the incarnation of “art” and HH the artist. The artist “loves” art as it affirms his whole life and reason for being. He seeks to control art, own it, and manipulate it for his own purposes. HH does not realize till the end that art/Delores lives and breaths on its/her own and that this autonomy outside of his control is truly what makes her her and art beautiful. Her struggle becomes real to him in the end, even if only a glimpse he does to me seem to actually recognize her as something separate not something he owns. He sees that seeking to calcify art only kills what was special about it in the first place; something like worshiping a corpse.

It reminded me of a statement David foster Wallace said once. (I’m paraphrasing heavily here) when I’m done with a book I’m dead and the book lives on through the readers. I think he was trying to say that he does not control the ultimate meaning of his own work and if he did it would be the other way around his book/art would be dead.

Amy Hungerford has 3 lectures on Lolita this is the 2nd one given by a guest speaker. I suggest all of them (Hungerford is a great literary analyst) but this one is a compelling argument for the above. https://youtu.be/QPnxLNFzA8s

While none of this would push me so far as to personally cheat, I do completely agree with your comment. Due to lose of work and virtually any prospects, caused by covid, I have returned to school for the first time in 10 years. Since doing so I have felt emphatically everything you have mentioned.

Although I do not attend a top school ( it’s a local tech school) and they do not have “top-proctoring” software, the same points still hold.

1: my classes are mostly just me reading my book and filling out online material with next to no feedback on anything. The computer grades most of my work. Some of my professors have refused to answer questions and respond to emails. I even proved my English teacher wasn’t reading my assignment by asking questions personally to him parenthetically which have gone unnoticed. I accidentally turned in the same summary assignment twice and received wildly different grades ( one a 100% the other 75%). Math has been okay but the free materials online are far better and most fellow classmates I talk to are learning everything on Kahn and ignoring the online class material.

2: We do use a proctor software. And I have been threatened more times than I can count about zeros and cheating, as if every single one of us is out to cheat. This holds particularly true, and rather ironically, for my ethics class. Where even our pre-test prep materials have to be done on camera, with full “environmental checks” etc. To top it off the system also keeps us from seeing what we got right or wrong on any test, pre/prep or not. Which to me defeats the purpose of the whole exercise, and really the foundation of learning.

Agin I do not condone cheating but I do agree that backing everyone into a corner like this offers them less options and they will fight back to some degree. Mostly, what I am seeing though is a 25% drop out rate (at half way through the semester). I’m not sure if this is normal but to me it feels high considering most of those happened after the date in which you could be refunded.

You have accused me of saying many things thus far that I have emphatically not said. Which I would point out is worse than not providing "full context". I specifically stated that it would be silly to think everything Peterson said was false. I made almost no explanation of his views that were my own words other than accusing a portion of it to be Calvinistic thinking. If you think there are finer points in believing in hierarchical superiority amongst genders because of "Genesis" feel free to let me know as I must be too unsophisticated to recognize the nuance.

In fact I have not much of a clue as to anything of the things your referring too and lack the imagination to see a context larger than what those quotes establish. I have watched a bit of his videos, they are full of outrageous and unsubstantiated claims, often self defeating, and because of that, to your point, are hard to summarize. There seems to be beliefs that Peterson holds that are dear to you in some way, and I'm sure a great many of them have merit. Feel free to debate Marx, Foucault, WWII, etc. but if you claim the pecking order is the way it should be due to "nature" and "god" expect some kick back. Such as I would have expected a person, who believes those quotes to not be reflective of Peterson's views, would have said exactly what they believe them to have meant instead. Did he not imply that feminism leads to fascism, does he in a more complex way than I can see supporting gender equality? What are these enlightenment ideas that I missed? Not sarcasm, here, I really do not know what you mean.

I'm sorry if quoting the New Yorker, Wikipedia or the man himself is sub-par to your standards. If you have some better sources I'd be glad to hear you out.

I'm sorry. I was very murky with my wording. I was not trying to say that the field of Psychology had failed or was a failure. What I meant to say was that, our current state of academia has in this instance demonstrated "a" failure. That failure to me is highlighted by the comment I responded to when it was implied that Peterson's view was more "bonafide" because it was from a "real" psychologist. By all academic standards the commenter would be correct. Peterson is not only a Psychologists but also a professor, A widely published and cited one at that. One who has been afforded debates at collages with Sam Harris and Zizek. This to me is a failure of the academic world to distinguish between leaders of the field of psychology and crackpot YouTube personalities. By credentials alone he is both and this is unnerving to me.

That said, of course, I do not believe that it speaks to psychology as a whole. But again I poorly worded that sentence and take responsibility for the misunderstanding. I would only add that I think, and I may very well be wrong, that if a physicist were to parrot "free-energy/perpetual-motion" to anyone that would listen, that person would be promptly removed from teaching at any legitimate university. That is not to say physics is better than psychology, if anything it implies that it is easier than the still very important soft sciences.

I do not believe I mentioned a single thing that you are talking about in your comment. I'm not entirely sure what you are talking about in your comment. You seem to have quite the bone to pick with postmodernism, something I left completely left unaddressed about Peterson.

I only implied that saying men will become fascists if they are feminized is ludicrous. Does "postmodernism" mean feminizing men? And I suggest that the idea of men having rightfully taken their god given place higher up the hierarchy of society, is Calvinistic, by definition this is true. Is this what you think is "western superiority"? because I don't think I've ever said those two words together in my life. I also don't think I quoted out of context. Though it seems you feel the context reaches as far back as the enlightenment, in this way I have not given a history of the world before judging Peterson's arguments as something that should be met with skepticism.

I really do mean to go check it out for yourself. All the quotes I grabbed were from the Wikipedia page, I have not hidden anything. I've seen very little of what Peterson has to say, but all of it strikes me as very crackpot like. If I were a professor and publishing psychology papers I do agree my "citations" would not be up to snuff. But I am not either of those things and was not attempting to cite him in that manner. I think there should be more proof to the legitimacy of Peterson being a scientist rather than my HN comment needing more proof that he is not.

Jordan Peterson is a great example of the failing of Psychology in the academic world. I'll list some quotes by him below and you can decided weather or not he should be listened to, or if he is simply selling right wing propaganda on Youtube.

"If men are pushed too hard to feminize they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology."

"the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence." [referring to men being placed higher than women in society]

""Peterson says that "disciplines like women's studies should be defunded", advising freshman students to avoid subjects like sociology, anthropology, English literature, ethnic studies, and racial studies, as well as other fields of study that he believes are corrupted by "post-modern neo-Marxists".""

He also has a bible series on YouTube that asserts that god created the appropriate hierarchy of man, and that it should not be tampered with. We should mold society on the archetype of the book of Genesis. Which in my humble opinion is simply Calvinism in the extreme.

Most of this can be found on YouTube or his Wikipedia page.

This is not to say everything he says is wrong, that would be silly. But I believe it should be approached with a heavy dose of skepticism.

This article does contain very little information.

But this channel is one I watch a lot of. It is dedicated to in depth chess commentary with some bits of chess history and I highly recommend it if you play. This it not the first time this has happened to Antonio. He even discussed it a bit the first time, 7 months ago. In that instance it was a single video that was removed. In that video he says “white will always be better” while analyzing a specific position (interesting to note that in the starting position of chess this is also always true). YouTube said it was removed for “harmful and dangerous content”. Without anything else to go on I’d say it’s a fair assessment the it was banned for racial content. I’m not sure what else could be “dangerous” about chess analysis.

https://extra.ie/2020/07/02/news/world-news/chess-youtube-vi...