Skrillex

For that visual part, I think that that is the case for most people, including those without aphantasia. From what I have gathered from personal experience and by talking to other people, this so-called mind's eye is (somewhat unintuitively) not really related to your actual eyes, so closing them would not necessarily lead to you seeing things. When I personally know something strongly enough to "see" it without it being in front of me, it feels more like I begin to momentarily stop focusing on the input from my eyes and instead prioritize that thing. It is not like overlaying some images over what I am seeing with my eyes (although some people are apparently able to do this also), but rather I temporarily ignore my eyes and am more interested or focused on this alternative source. This is an entirely* voluntary process and can in fact require some effort on my part depending on how corrupted the data is, but I could not say how it is for others. The images are not at all intense or of high fidelity, and failing to focus on them is sufficient to stop seeing them for me. I might just have relatively weak image visualization though.

I am not sure if I have any meaningful anecdotes regarding reading fiction. I do not believe I have seen or otherwise visually imagined the events in either fiction or non-fiction most of the time unless reading it made me recall something that I remember. It might be possible if I were actively trying to do that, but I can say that whatever experience I am extracting from reading fiction is not primarily due to being able to see it. If people are really imagining that sort of thing automatically, I feel pretty envious of that myself.

When it comes to sounds though, I am something of a captive in my own mind. For the majority of the period that I am awake and not highly focused, my mind is using approximately 98% of its resources to replay, construct, combine, and modify music. This is usually much more interesting than what I am hearing and what most people have to say to me, and it can require conscious effort to hear the latter. Unlike the images, this sound is of high quality and is not at all consensual. I have been told that this is not quite normal. In hindsight, this could have been a useful trait had I worked with it instead of worked through it.

*Assuming that these memories are not brought on through involuntary means, such as some drugs and trauma-induced flashbacks.

Basically. See US vs Alcoa [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

I believe that the usual response to this is that the devices include some kind of unmodifiable time and location stamping, although that argument spirals out of control pretty quickly.

Maybe they are. I know of one site that had a premade array of "X bought Y" in the source HTML, which I imagine they repopulate after some amount of time.

Check out Brandolini's Law for a slightly less short examination of this idea, but the tl;dr argument against this is that any effective refutation of a "bad idea" is necessarily more costly to produce and less likely to be remembered than the bad idea is. So unless we want to have some paid antishills to astroturf our platforms with the not-bad ideas, we need to come up with a better way.

By thinking about how it might happen if it were tech companies, I have a possible answer.

From that perspective, I am assuming that the top (in hierarchy, not importance) groups from the then-incumbents will be the fastest to raise new companies, which will still be able to attract talent with the prestige that the old company used to have (think about how startups founded by ex-FAANG work). E.g. Nature executives and leaders develop N2, FOX builds Wolf, Tesla builds...Tesla, all of which start off with more credibility and popularity than offerings without this benefit. I do not think that the exact same situation would arise though. There would still be easier entry into these markets than before, at least at first.

I would be willing to choose the latter option for FB money. If it were that lucrative, I'd already be there with my new startup.

Worse, showing how obstacles are overcome and not seeing it applied in real world is soul crushing.

I think that this is an important consideration. If I am not mistaken, this is part of the reason why the super-geniuses in the larger comic universes (e.g. Marvel) do not cure cancer.

Calling "they" an ugly or cumbersome construct seems like a reach. I am a native english speaker, and the use of that word to describe people with unknown characteristics (such as criminal suspects and people with obscured features or seen from a distance) has been very common even before the gender-obsessed people took root. It is merely english.

Would you say that your argument is essentially "This person is wrong in such a way that would not be possible without irrationally hating the president"? If that were the case, I would argue that people can be wrong for any reason(s), which seems like a truism to me.

As for the counter-examples, you have not provided any. You are arguing that the president is the most moral politician (which, while an extraordinary claim, has not been disagreed with by anyone in the thread as far as I can tell), while I am arguing that someone's lack of belief that the president thinks long and hard about his moral positions is not sufficient evidence that such a person has an irrational hatred of the president. I would normally have left it there since we may not even be talking about the same thing, but it seems like your argument is for a unified theory that not only is the president moral, but he is moral to the extent that the belief earlier expressed is evidence that the person holding it both hates the president, and does so irrationally. I was wholly incredulous of that claim, but was seeing if there were some obvious part of it that I missed. That is the confusing part. Does statement actually make sense to you without 5 or 6 extra assumptions in between?

I do not understand what "the democratic party, their propaganda outlets, and their commisars" have to do with whether or not the president has thought long and hard about his moral positions. I explained why I think that he does not, but even if that reason were not provided, it does not follow that someone with the position that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions would need to have an irrational hatred of him. To briefly reduce your position to a strawman:

Person X believes that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions -> Person X has an irrational hatred of the president

My issue is with that deduction. There is a logical jump somewhere in here that I am not able to follow. You reference multiple third parties and contrast them to the president as if to suggest that whatever differences that they may have means that it is clear that this hypothetical Person X has an irrational hatred of the president, or that a particular decision that the president has made proves this, but these are not obvious conclusions to me. As for why "he didn't want to bomb random Muslims but the democratic party, their propaganda outlets, and their commisars did", I actually do not have to explain that. The reason that I have given is in no way refuted by or related to this claim.

Instead, could you explain why the opinion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions is sufficient evidence that the holder of that opinion irrationally hates the president?

I do not want this to sound ironic, but the explanation that seems most intuitive to me is that the parent has been informed of some number of the president's actions (likely through the media and/or aquaintances) and came to the conclusion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. While the parent may indeed have an irrational hatred of the president (I do not immediately see any evidence for it, but you may not prove a negative), it is not a hard requirement in order to maintain the opinion that the president does not think long and hard about his moral positions. Does that seem plausible?

On an unrelated note, I do not hate the president, but also believe that either he does not think long and hard about his moral positions, or simply does not actually share them with the public. In my case, I believe this because he appears to rapidly shift his opinions, attitudes, and words in a way that makes it difficult to infer what he believes, or even what he wants people to believe that he believes.

It seems to me that it is your view of reality that might be distorted if you can and have inferred that the parent has an irrational hatred of the current president of the United States from that particular sentence.

I imagine that most people abstract at the levels above and below assembly languages. E.g. they know about high level languages, and that a CPU cannot directly run that, but their view of the lower level probably does not include any human readable artifacts such as latin characters but rather binary and voltages.

They have probably been to a school at some point though. This guy is on another level.

That can make it even better, particularly if you can remember why you were making the decisions that you did.

I think that the educational content on YouTube can definitely outweigh any and all of its issues, as long as we are seeing YouTube for what it is. I am incapable of describing the breadth of knowledge that can be accessed on that site, so I will not. I can definitely see the argument that YouTube is a net-harm for children under some circumstances, but I would definitely be sad to see that amount of useful information be unavailable for everyone because it is bad for children. It is not a babysitter, and no one should trust it to be. I reject these "think of the children" arguments for something that is not designed for children to begin with.

The parent was not being rational, and noted that they were doing the same thing as other people. They later changed their behavior due to exposure to outside information. It seems explicit to me that the parent admits to being wrong here.

It would be easy to read your question as "wife, deportation, debt, or all together" == nothing, and in doing so dismiss it. It is easy to see it as "you aren't even willing to sacrifice [all or most of these things] for this?" I would imagine that for most people, their loved ones trump their morals by a wide margin.

If you are asking that question without the parent as context, I would say that it seems like the only distinction between morals and preferences is one of definition.

Pervasive tracking and unwarranted surveillance via ads are a significant component of the problems that online ads have, but that does not make them worse than the ones you see elsewhere. The ones you see in real life have the distinction of being unavoidable except by going to live in either the wilderness or a country that is not yet developed enough to have them everywhere.

I have seen it. I do not believe that this test (or others, yet) compared known placebo treatments to unknown placebo treatments.

My intuition would be that a significant component of the effect is that the patient believes they have been treated. Until we see evidence otherwise, I see no reason to assume that the placebo effect is not weakened by the loss of that component.

Individual people's income taxes cannot be treated this way, because the closest analogy to "business expenses" for a person's lifestyle is their cost of living. If cost of living were deductible it would be highly gameable and ripe for abuse by numerous parties.

That is the thing. Maybe a person could do that if the rules let them, but businesses are already doing it, at scale. I think that either businesses should not be able to do it, or normal people should be able to do it. As for the "low margin business" example, I see no reason for the government to support any particular kind of business over another under a capitalist system.

That is an excellent summary. It was like an answer that failed to produce any questions from me and I feel like I understand it now.

I can imagine system with drag and drop sentence fragments and modifiable variables designed for the construction of contracts. When a document is finished, it would produce a summary of the consequences with as few interpretations as possible, possibly with a toggle for Wikipedia-style keyword linking in the result. The document could then be tweaked until the summary exactly matches what both parties want, at which point the document and summary together become the contract. Although, if such a system were to become widely used, I feel like lawyers will still be used to either discover or introduce any other remotely plausible interpretations that exist in the generated contract.

I was about to say that headphones were in the same place as furniture, where any ratings cannot be trusted, and the only way to guarantee a quality product was trial and error. Maybe the problem space is larger than I realized but I just do not buy enough stuff to notice.

The name is meant to reference an item that serves as an indicator to what stage a task could be at at the time of checking. The word I would have used is "evidence".

This brought back flashbacks of people asking me to do things that required knowledge that only the requester had, using credentials that only the requester had, with support from people that the requester knows that I did not, and so on. I cannot personally fathom what brings people to do this since it seems to me like it is more work to give these sorts of tasks than to do them.

The primary issue with this argument is the imbalance of the situation. There is an enormous difference in the amount of effort it takes to make a false claim (that sounds nice enough for people to believe without evidence) and the amount of effort it takes to refute said claim, especially if the refutation hinges upon mechanics that most people do not understand. In the unlikely scenario that most of the people who listened to both arguments happened to accept and understand the right one, there is still another huge hurdle. The fact is, the short, wrong claim is optimized for remembering and regurgitation. It is easier to remember that than to remember the complicated refutation, or even remembering that there was a refutation. Even in the ideal scenario where all other parties accept and remember the good argument, the person espousing the false claim can simply leave and continue to make the claim. When also taking into consideration the fact that most people do not have the knowledge and eloquence to make the good argument in the first place, it seems intuitive that the bad argument would still easily make its rounds.

I can't tell if that's some crazy shit or if I am old now.