awayyyythrow

Alexander is known for being a bit...chicken. There are very few positions to which he's willing to firmly commit beyond "don't get mad" and "don't be mean", for fear of antagonizing his rather...politically diverse audience. The charitable interpretation is that as a psychiatrist, he's been daily confronted to some of the worst aspects of human life, society and personnality and still learned to sympathize with his patients whatever they might have done. The less charitable interpretation is that he's terrified of conflict in general.

There are no rational arguments for my cause if it involves whether I should exist or have rights. I want rights because I want them. How would a rational argument even work?

One of Alexander's better stories. However, I'd say it reeks of what I'd call Alexanderness:

-The idea that arguments and debates are the most important thing in the world and everyone should do it as much as possible (possibly due to his being terminally online). In real life if you say something other people find abhorrent they'll first go "that's wrong wtf", then if you insist "sure alright go off" then "please stop talking to me". Most people are not, in fact, in a perpetual crusade to prove opppnents wrong. That's because the real world isn't Twitter.

-The idea that both sides have a point and trying to rule out one side is anathema to a well-functioning society. In other words, why can't everyone just get along? Well guess what, sometimes one side is unambigiously right and the other unambiguously wrong. Some disagreements can't be resolved other than through power struggles, such as e.g. when one side's position implies the negation of the other side's rights, identity or existence. We can't have a rational, dispassionate debate about whether I should have rights. I can't argue for my existence, I want it.

-Equivocating all controversial statements as equally controversial. For instance, design decisions about a codebase vs. religion issues vs. presumably something even deeper ('so hateful and disgusting'). Some fights are worth having, some are not.

I'm curious, what do you suggest should be done? Build more mental health wards? Put everyone behind bars? For how long? What do you do once they're released from prison? Or maybe there should be some sort of camps where they could be rounded up and concentratred away from the city? You obviously have something on your mind, say it.

Yeah, how dare people want to sleep in a bed under a roof. So entitled.

The alternative is building houses. When you put people in houses they cease to be homeless. They did it in Helsinki, and it worked: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...

Very simple deductive reasoning actually, I wonder how people did not come up with it yet.

Yeah, most people actually love to be homeless and live in tents. The housing crisis isn't real.

Why should we expect people to have affordable healthcare? Why should we expect people to have enough to eat? Why should we expect people to have rights? Can't we just let people die outside from the cold or something?

Far-right isn't a synonym for bad, aggressive, abrasive (although in practice many people would argue that the two are linked, and that could explain why some people tend to recoil from the term even though they hold similar positions, such as all the people beginning their sentence with I'm pretty left-wing, but... but I digress). Just because a text is moderate and gentle in tone doesn't mean it's not heavily slanted one way or another in content. In this case it's very easy to see the right-wing slant through the cracks of the 'gentle' tone.

I'm relatively comfortable with the English language but I absolutely loathe having to use it every single day. Whether it's the bland style found in newspapers, the opaque style found in scientific articles, the fake let's-pretend-we're-best-friends used by some technologists and younger journalists, or the long-winded and contrived style used by most of HN and reddit and technical blogs in general, all of it turns me off. (No offense, folks, I'm sure I'm no Joyce either.)

I guess it wouldn't annoy me so much if my job and social circles (many of them involving foreigners who don't speak my native language) didn't require me to consume so much of it. There's so much subtlety, nuance and "color" that's lost in a conversation where both participants aren't speaking in their native language. Even if both are relatively good at it.

Then there's the issue of native English speakers who seem to be only very dimly aware that other languages exist and think that everyone speaking their language fluently is a given. (This shapes a lot of current politics, such as language policing or the whole 'pronouns' issue - I'm mentioning it because antirez was the center of a controversy for not changing terminology that's loaded for Americans only). And many native speakers think the less of people who struggle with English, even unconsciously.

I think most of the explanations fail to account for a very important point: music doesn't exist in the abstract but comes with a setting, a context and a community. You don't just listen to music, you experience it. Whether it's an opera house or a jazz club or a rave or a rap battle or a dive bar, all music comes with an associated experience. It can be hard to truly 'get in' a genre and understand why people like it if you can't experience it the way most people who listen to it do.

I think the reason many people get stuck with the music they listened to as a teenager is because their most intense experiences involving music occured when they were teenagers. Then they move on, and if they don't obsess about music, they won't have stronger feelings about the new stuff.

Even music people think is new is actually quite old. I have yet to discover a genre whose origins don't extend at least two decades back (unless you cheat and name an extremely specific subset that sounds like 'hard dark psy tech core' or something)

I notice you have conveniently chosen to avoid answering the other talking points and am choosing to believe out of charity that you don't have time to write an elaborate response.

If measuring something like the visual reaction time of people makes sense, then so too does measuring IQ.

I don't know what you mean by "make sense". To me it doesn't make sense insofar as it purports to put a single number on a very complex concept that no one really knows how to define or agree on a single definition. The traditional "predictor of life outcomes" motte-and-baley fallback isn't satisfactory for most people as it relies on circularity (in our society much of our life outcomes is actually determined by how well we do at tests that are strangely similar to IQ tests) and fails to account for the many, many socially maladapted yet gifted people out there. It's also unsatisfactory as it pretends to capture something from the inner person but outsources its definition to the outer world.

Also, none of that explains how one's IQ test results may predict one's ability to appreciate 'sophisticated music', nor is it clear what is meant by 'sophisticated'.

Except:

-There's doubt that the Flynn effect was real to begin with and isn't just an artifact of a measure that never really made sense to begin with (IQ)

-Plenty of "sophisticated" music is being made right now, perhaps you are not aware of it but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist

-Old people have always hated younger people's music - see the moral panic over the second summer of love, people thinking rock n'roll/metal/techno was satanic etc.

-Most of what people think is youngsters' music (e.g. most electro genres) is actually quite old

Your response is pretty disturbing on many levels I have to say