papeda

From the end of the article:

To come so close to death does not provide a shortcut to wisdom or contentment. It doesn’t answer all your questions or eliminate your weaknesses. I’m fundamentally the same person I was before, but with one big difference. I’m viscerally aware how tenuous our existence is. How you can be walking on solid ground only to find it suddenly disappear from beneath you. The meaning comes in what I do from this point on. I have been given a second chance at life – and it’s up to me to make the most of it.

The article is clear that there was nothing intentional about this fall, but as a tangent, this excerpt does make me think about people who jump intentionally.

This line of thought is a bit ghoulish, but as far as I know about 90% of people who make an "unsuccessful" suicide attempt never commit suicide [1]. There are confounding variables galore here --- maybe it's the toughest cases who pick the most reliable methods; 10% is still way above the population risk for suicide --- but I've wondered if there's some way to give people that "oh, I'm going to die, and I don't actually want that" feeling that is apparently not uncommon [2] without actually hurting them.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/survi...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/13/jumpers

Tangential: as somebody with congenital hearing loss who's worn hearing aids since I was a little kid, the pivot to mostly digital communications has been a serious benefit for me -- even with modern hearing aids, there are many acoustically bad (for me) physical meeting rooms and speakers whom I just can't hear in person, but I can hear just as well as everybody else over Zoom/Meet/Facetime.

Is it pithy? The summary given is "academia sucks, be an entrepreneur". IMO the actual point of the post is "I didn't pursue an academic career, here are the various things I did instead and why I think they are meaningful".

I got a lot out of some posts made by a user named arkades about why the nature of medical reimbursement in the US contributes to physician burnout: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057249

We can compare the stated philosophies of RBG against those of the two most recent nominees and the shortlisted candidates put forth in the past week and see that they're very different. It seems very plausible to guess that, given a large majority, these people will enact these philosophies. No?

Ah yes, wishing for a successor that does not undo your life's work is definitely what I would call "playing politics up until the end".

Paying people to vote is pretty out there. I think we should at least put election day on a weekend. Spread it over both days, even. This feels to me like a relatively easy small step that would really help make voting easier in a way that doesn't open itself up to voter fraud arguments (as far as I know).

Googling "ossification of American policy for a generation" returns one result, this thread.

You can't put in the sky an object visible from everywhere and then ask people to pay (or even just ask permission) to use pictures that include it.

This would be a great super-villain idea for a fun/dumb movie.

I'm confused, what part of her story involves "spoon feed[ing]"?

These low-CO2 countries are effectively exporting CO2 production (e.g. manufacturing) to China, no?

I wish this comment had a NSFL tag at the beginning. I did not want to read that, and it comes out of nowhere relative to its parent comment.

More generally, I think there's a difference between "meditation on brutality" and "misery porn", and that the latter sometimes gets dressed up as the former.

I'm not one of "the people who disapprove of this but who endorse the top down language policing as endorsed by Twitter ", but as far as I can tell, few of those people advocate banning books. I think "banning books" is a specific thing that is pretty well drilled into Western minds as something that evil totalitarian dystopian forces do, maybe because of Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and so on. Twitter, on the other hand, doesn't have any obvious cultural precedents for most people, so different policies for it don't set off the same cultural alarm bells.

It's a little strange to me to use history as the representative for the humanities, because history seems like the most "scientific" one -- there's some truth of what happened, and historians are trying to navigate toward it, figure out how to talk about it, identifies whys and hows.

On the other hand, there seem to be broad swathes of humanities academia that strongly reject the notion of some kind of "truth", e.g. new criticism. I find this strain of humanities work a lot harder to appreciate.

The web of corporate intrigue that powers watchdog groups is remarkable. The people who caught the professors are from the Campaign For Accountability, a "watchdog group" [1]. They pursue this role for a variety of issues. Their work on Google comes from a wider initiative they call the Google Transparency Project. One of the funders of said project is Oracle [2], which has...its own motives for bringing Google down a peg [3].

[1] https://campaignforaccountability.org/

[2] https://fortune.com/2016/08/19/google-transparency-project-2...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America

There seem to be two conflicting lines of thought about the future of advertising.

1) Companies are learning that non-online advertising is not very worthwhile and so are reducing the resources allocated to, say, network TV ads. This has already happened to a large extent to print and radio advertising. This suggests that the future of online advertising is bright.

2) Companies are learning that online advertising is not very worthwhile. They are learning that clicks are a bad metric, that online ads target people poorly, and that customers dislike online ads. This suggests that the future of online advertising is dim.

I'm curious as to what people make of these two positions. Are companies just going to spend less on ads in general?

Where does this 8s number come from? This article claims there's no clear evidence for it: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38896790

supposedly our circumstances only account for 10% of our happiness with 50% being genetics and 40% behavior

Do you have a reference for these figures? 50% genetics seems high.

If this story interests you, here is an engrossing article that ties together modern sumo, Mishima's attempted coup, and a surprising bit of investigative journalism: https://grantland.com/features/sumo-wrestling-tokyo-japan-ha...

The featured article has these "numbers showing opposite".

Wait, where did this become a referendum on libertarianism? Nothing in the parent comment suggests this.

In slight fairness to Aaronson, he doesn't present this as a "universally held opinion of people in tech", as the rest of that excerpt goes to say:

. . . but not (I don’t think) to the tens of thousands who read Scott’s essays and fiction, particularly during their 2013-2016 heyday, and who went from casual enjoyment to growing admiration to the gradual recognition that they were experiencing, “live,” the works that future generations of teachers will assign their students when they cover the early twenty-first century.

So he's pretty much saying Slate Star Codex has fans who will miss it a lot.

(I do agree with you that the comparison is pretty nuts, even as someone who thinks Slate Star Codex has a lot of good stuff.)

May as well ask here, I pretty much only read the weekly Economist to get my news at this point. I think I have their slight biases dialed in at this point. Anyone want to make a case for a different primary news source/argue that The Economist is bad?

For context, I like The Economist because it's mostly unemotional, information-dense, and the magazine comes in a single weekly thing to read.

It depends on how the money gets allotted. The people to whom $5 is most useful are also the people that most advertisers are not interested in targeting in the first place. So if people are compensated according to their value as advertising targets, this seems like it'll be a rich-get-very- slightly-richer program.

The passage you shared is beautiful, but it's not quite registering how the essay evoked it for you. Can you say more?

One thing I take away from the excerpt is that the person we present and feel ourselves as during interactions with others is not exactly the same as the person we are alone. There isn't necessarily an element of deceit to this. Instead, we should pay attention to both selves -- and to me much of your essay is about paying attention to the person we are when we're alone, and being aware of differences between the two selves, without necessarily needing to reconcile them.

This might be described as "a blog post about mindfulness". That description would lead me to expect something trite and bad, but fortunately I enjoyed reading it. It reminds me of the following snippet from Within A Budding Grove:

And yet one did not find in Bergotte’s speech a certain luminosity which in his books, as in those of some other writers, often modified in the written sentence the appearance of its words. This was doubtless because the light issues from so profound a depth that its rays do not penetrate to our spoken words in the hours in which, thrown open to others by the act of conversation, we are to a certain extent closed to ourselves.

(Also, I'm getting some SSL error from the "Tea With Strangers" website.)

Not a pomodoro person, but I really like the idea of a cute mascot helping people get closer to their goals. Good job!

I have heard about "competitive meta" before. What I don't understand is how it's any different than "responding to changes in how a game works"? All of the examples in the link are like this (Magic has new cards, let's figure out how to use them; judo has new rules, let's figure out how to adapt to them; our Ultimate opponent is using a certain strategy, let's try to counter it).

Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands.

I'm confused, why is it easier to get people to line up to follow a private account based on...nothing?

Turns out that a cop on their own is more conservative.

They are? It's plausible to me that a cop on their own is more scared and more likely to take drastic action if they feel threatened.