internaut

The adage 'birds of a feather flock together' is a true one. Our ability to communicate with each other relies most strongly on shared experience esp. with regard to normative behavior, thoughts.

I would not advise you to act as neurotypical but to seek out your own kind. That might not be easily found in collected pools of humans but to take a leaf out of the Major's book: 'The net is vast and infinite.'

How many of us have mentioned an obscure topic in passing on HN, and then been surprised by an erudite observation? Of course this does not always prevail, but it happens with enough frequency that I am convinced for each person there are companions.

To be less academic, if there are conventions for furries, then there are places in the world for you too!

It is frequently noted that geeks do much better at themed events with a purpose than at generic social outings. Less night club, more book club. The more object oriented the activity, the easier geeks get along. If you've been to a Hackerspace you'll know there is a wide range of interesting people at such places.

P.S. Every line cook I've known does claim to be in their own screaming hell.

Did anybody understand where Margaret Levi got this?

"Indeed, the expectation of reciprocity can both reduce and even undermine altruism."

Surely expectation of reciprocity would make the reciprocal loop stronger, not weaker.

As I see it, neurodiversity is more useful if the environment suddenly changes. In a stable environmental niche most forms of neurodiversity are probably a drawback.

For instance (reflecting on your examples) it should be obvious to us that the word 'crime' meant something much narrower several thousand (or hundred) years ago.

Surely we have devised experiments for which the use of the human genome is indeed expendable? e.g. tissue cultures.

We have a positive surplus of intelligent ambitious people in Japan, Europe and America. What we don't have is savings or capital. This malaise is generational, not regional.

I see that. I don't see a lot of urgency in our societies either. Perhaps you have seen this:

https://i.redditmedia.com/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2sV1yY46...

I blame the television and the media, they have sunk the population into a hypnotic stupor.

Have you seen this?

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/199300...

As much as I endorse concepts like Minimalism, Tiny Houses and Ride Sharing for reasons of practicality/economy, it should be abundantly obvious we're getting poorer.

It is not even subtle and a good portion of us are pretending it's about lifestyle choices.

I'll be filing this next to Wired Magazine's "Five Most Dangerous People on the Internet".

No.

If you would like to have a positive story this Christmas, then for Tiny Housers we had some Building Codes people formally include us into their thing. In the future it will be legal to live in Tiny Houses.

http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/green-buildin...

There is another far more terrible weapons system nobody is talking in public about. We should assume this 'space based missile' is a distraction from something so monstrous the public would lose its mind if its existence was confirmed.

I have not, it resides mere feet away on my bookshelf and I shall read it this Winter :-)

I love audio drama, these are the good ones.

Sayer | If AGI ran your space station/life. http://geeklyinc.com/category/sayer/

EOS-10 | Space Sci-fi comedy, great acting. http://www.eos10.com/

Wolf 359 | Space Sci-fi comedy with well executed high drama. http://www.wolf359.fm/

Limetown | unusual conspiracy thriller. http://www.limetownstories.com

Alba Salix | Fantasy comedy. http://www.albasalix.com/

Wooden Overcoats | Competitive undertaking. http://www.woodenovercoats.com/

Tanis | Conspiracy mystery thriller. http://www.tanispodcast.com/

The Black Tapes | Creepy ghost stories. http://theblacktapespodcast.com

Especially Noteworthy:

Our Fair City | my favorite, a work of genius, the highest production values, actually better than the BBC.

We're Alive | entertaining zombie drama horror, terrific use of sound. http://www.werealive.com/

Genre Specific (usually short stories):

Escape Pod | science fiction. http://escapepod.org/ Pod Castle | fantasy. http://podcastle.org/ Pseudo Pod | horror. http://pseudopod.org/

I find the best new material from Radio Drama Revival

http://www.radiodramarevival.com/

These are also good leads:

The Audio Drama Directory | http://theaudiodramadirectory.com/sciencefiction/

The Parsec Awards | http://www.parsecawards.com/

Non-fiction, most of the usual suspects.

ABC's Future Tense 99% Invisible Hardcore History Joe Rogan (guest specific) Radiolab Robots Podcast NPR's Planet Money Green Building Advisor The Building Performance podcast The Tiny Life podcast (on Tiny Homes)

I also listen to Lovecraft when I want to get to sleep (/s).

Lovecratian horror is not what most people think of when they think of horror. It is more existential.

Sebastian Orr does a great narration:

http://www.ourfaircity.com/2011/12/the-rats-in-the-walls-pt-.... http://www.ourfaircity.com/2012/01/part-two/

Inspired by Lovecraft, A Colder War by Charlie Stross is also a favorite.

Are you listening cstross? It is time to write a novel about the evils of peace among the spacefaring. Service guarantees citizenship!

Any interstellar species could be too easily wiped out if the enemy knew the locations of the home worlds, so they would go to enormous lengths to conceal the locations. It is similar to modern war on Earth.

So the flashes in the sky could be enormous depth charges, thrown blind into the abyss to reduce narrow probability counts or ferret out the hidden home worlds.

Since an attack can be total, and come from anywhere, and you can never know if you fully succeeded, the peoples of Glurk-42 had a nervous disposition.

That's the problem with induction and not knowing enough about the greater universe. Things are always fine and dandy for the turkey until Thanksgiving comes.

This is why the spectre of dead civilizations like Rome haunt us to this day.

It's funny how few people want to talk about that.

Happy Christmas Mr Sock.

I see what you're saying but am still not sure the traits you've described are separable from the psychology of men and women. I think the author would have been more balanced had she compared and contrasted 4chan with its opposite, tumblr.

There might be men on tumblr and women on 4chan but it always struck me that tumblr was somehow psychologically female and 4chan was intrinsically male. If you did a genomic survey of their users you would surely find the allele frequency was very different.

4chan can be pathologically cruel while tumblr exhibits every impulse a Victorian doctor would associate with hysteria. It's also interesting how 4chan is self aware they are 'raiding' (for the greater lulz), which I think is the instinct of hunter related genes, while tumblr is ground zero for spreading information about 'Outrage of the Week' and does not consider its participants as part of a mob action even while urging 'somebody do something'. These are very gendered characteristics.

Men and women respond to 'being thrown out by the tribe' differently. To be thrown under the bus is a bigger deal for a woman than a man. That is why tumblr's infamous SJW culture is so often purging their ranks of people who don't totally conform.

On the other side 4chan's raiding parties do indeed target outgroups from their tribe. It is not weird that alt-right has a 'spiritual' connection to 4chan. I don't like the term 'hate group' because it has lost meaningfulness but if they are then it is a broad church where the real requirement that validates you as a member is the extent of how much you dislike the outgroup. In fact you could be a member of the outgroup as long as you despise them enough!

I don't think 4chan or tumblr are evil or good. I think they are simply our human nature. The words are strongly overloaded because of the last western war but I also believe 4chan/tumblr are the embryonic form of the mass psychology that generated the political ideologies of communism and fascism. These are intrinsic parts of our makeup and we cannot really escape them. I treat them as collective survival instincts. Present society is concerned with the elimination of one or both, which is like trying to lift your feet from off the ground with your hands. If we genuinely want a positive future, we ought to be thinking about harnessing these instincts, not obliterating them. Right person, right place.

we need to actually tackle many of the root problems

We have frequently shifting national moods so why is it a surprise our foreign policy behaves as if it has a multiple personality disorder? If one was a cynic they might suggest this was a subversive policy for one system to cause systemic instability outside of its borders.

Right. Even then most corporations think a BA is a shitty filter, before much longer they'll decide to educate bright 16 year olds on their own terms and selection process. Certainly that is what I'd do if I wanted to increase loyalty and employee retention.

I don't know if anybody else visited their website during the election cycle, but it was wall to wall coverage vilifying Trump.

One has to wonder why a politician would pay heed to the words of an organization that evidently hates him.

Brand and Kelly are deeper thinkers than most and it somewhat surprises me that they were blind to the reactionary forces swirling outside the valley's gates. Somebody who focuses on the Long Now has surely understood humankind goes through slow but powerful sociopolitical cycles.

"education" is a euphemism synonymous with college

Peter Thiel has described at length this kind of error

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLJIpBexKhQ

It has always impressed me how doctrinal higher education as a terminal goal has become for the middle class. I personally believe it is utterly worthless for 9/10 of the people going to college right now. The students would be better off doing almost anything else.

There are many ways to answer this. Here is a high level explanation of why we are in disagreement. Instead of explaining 'How' and getting bogged down in the details and worse, trapped by semantics, I shall explain 'Why' I think we differ. Then if you want to get into the specifics we can.

I used to be a Creationist, how the political ideology of Progression thinks about biology is very similar to how Creationists have thought about biological evolution down through the last two centuries.

While both camps see each other as being extraordinarily different, this is not compelling evidence that they aren't related, note the conflict between Shia and Sunni. They see each as being oppositional... Similarly Progressivism and Creationism come from the same source. If you trace back the history of ideas to ye olde England and Germany this becomes startlingly obvious. It is not a coincidence that the phrase 'social justice' is Catholic in origin.

Why this matters is that when Darwin set off his Atom Bomb concerning the Origin of Species, he immediately ran into direct conflict with the Church because the implications of evolution theory contradicted the account of life being formed in Genesis.

Today Darwin's ideas have won out over Christianity. Most Christians believe in evolution theory, and they take the first book of the Bible as not being a literal account of reality. In my opinion this ultimately neutered the political legitimacy of Christianity.

However a descendant of Christianity, Progressivism, continues to not believe in Evolution. Unlike Christianity, it has managed to exert enormous political influence through the education system, especially the universities. It is what has tabooed discussion of human speciation.

This is less than obvious because most students would initially deny that they disbelieve Evolution theory. Then, as it moves further up against their taboos, red lights begin to flash and they begin exhibiting failures of imagination.

There are students that;

- Believe evolution explains the animal/plant kingdoms but not that of humans "there hasn't been enough time for human evolution" (christian variant: humans are special).

- Believe evolution explains human evolution in the past but not the present.

- Believe evolution explains human evolution below the neck only. Here the brain is immutable but obvious physiological changes are fine.

- Believe evolution explains the development of the human brain but insist that nonetheless human speciation is impossible (christian variant: 'microevolution' i.e. small changes up to a limit - The reason for the constrained scope is never explained, only assumed).

None of them want to acknowledge that if evolution is real then humans evolve, and if humans evolve, then logically there could be evidence for different groups of humans. If such evidence existed for the beginning of human speciation the strongest evidence would be found in human population groups which have been separated for the longest period of time e.g. 100,000 years.

As you know science is very dependent on the ability to replicate experiments and make predictions. This is why in universities in the West, this subject is so tabooed there are few scientists willing to stick their necks out by doing those experiments. One of the men who discovered DNA, James Watson, is blacklisted because of some off the cuff remarks about race. If a bollocking can happen to somebody who made one of the most important discoveries in biology, it can sure happen to a less prestigious scientist. It is a tabooed subject because Progressivism is founded on theological roots i.e. the premise of their beliefs was never rational to begin with. The Chinese, who have no such taboo, Christian or Progressive, are making huge strides in biological science because the Progressivism meme is not strong in China.

This documentary 'DNA Dreams' is worth watching to fully appreciate this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dVv5RMwzuo

Look at Moravec's Paradox.

It's probably the most valid result from the research and yet it is overlooked. We'll have AI capable of replacing the middle class before we have robots capable of replacing the working class.

I don't agree/understand Elon's reasoning here.

If we aren’t actually living through a simulation, Mr Musk said, then all human life is probably about to come to an end and so we should hope that we are living in one. “Otherwise, if civilisation stops advancing, then that may be due to some calamitous event that stops civilisation,” he said at the Recode conference.

I don't know why we should hope for that because any civilization in a layer in the stack of sims could be destroyed, which would destroy all nested sims beneath.

In fact you should hope you're further up the stack as much as possible because then the probability of destruction is lower.

This is not uncommon among the upper classes I've known.

FWIW: Here is a gruff internet hug/shoulder squeeze.

This is secular Creationism.

You ought to know that Thinking, Fast and Slow has research in it that did not replicate. If you do some googling you'll observe a lot of people had a much more critical second take.

I believe it was the recent rash of replication failures that ferreted this out, so it is worth checking out in case you adopted false premises accidentally.

There is nothing random about where you are born. This is a false premise. It is about as not-random as it is possible to get.

It is not some majestic yet universal coincidence that people have more in common with those who happen to share the same genes, and less so the more divergence exists.