loki-zen:
nuclearspaceheater:
loki-zen:
snorlaxatives:
me when americans talk shit about america: for real i feel you this place is awful
me when europeans talk shit about america: ok but did anyone ask your beans on toast eatin’ ass???
See I respect this opinion but tumblr hate for beans on toast is problematic.
This has been said before but beans on toast is a poor person food. It is a way in which someone with no time or cooking expertise can make a reasonably balanced meal that most kids will eat for pennies a serving. Shitting on beans and toast kind of feels like shitting on people who need an option like that.
Plus I do kinds feel like it is the world’s prerogative to talk shit about America for as long as America’s actions have massive effects on the rest of the world. For Europe specifically a lot of us feel like the US dragged us along with them into some bullshit wars, and sure our leaders are to blame too but it is literally America’s game that we’re in and don’t want to be playing.
Should’ve left NATO after the Soviet Union fell if they didn’t want to get involved in other peoples’ wars, but I guess being under the massive US nuclear deterrent is too comfy.
But as to the OP, I can say that this dynamic is clearly evident in the Navy. Sailors will talk shit all day about their ship, their chain of command, their class of ship in general, their squadron, the Navy…
…but anyone from outside the relevant circle talks shit about anything in the relevant circle, and it’s, “u fukin wot m8?” This can be actual offense or joking mutual insults (the latter especially between fast-attack submariners and faggots ballistic missile submariners, or between submariners in general and faggots skimmers targets surface sailors.)
I did once, being qualified senior-in-rate myself, call out a New Underway Buddy for picking up on complaining about the boat’s material condition too much faster than he was picking up qualifications w/, “you haven’t been on-board long enough to insult this boat!”
Yeah well the average European citizen alive today did not exactly get consulted about our membership in NATO, you know? Like I wasn’t born, let alone able to vote, when the Soviet Union fell, and even if the question had got put to the public like we were in a direct democracy which I know it didn’t, there would still have been 40+% of people whose choice didn’t get implemented.
I *get* the whole ‘we can talk shit about our thing but you can’t’ thing. But it’s true about like, my games society, or my fiance, or my subculture or my hometown or the North (as in, the geographical/cultural ingroup that exists around the north of England, and tbh this only applies to people from the South of England cause people from other countries don’t care about/understand the North-South divide here).
A global superpower has too much effect on the outside world to be immune to outside criticism.
There’s a difference between “X should be immune to outside criticism” and “when an outsider criticizes X, the first instinct is to circle the wagons.”
(Source: snorlaxatives)
“What we’re talking about here is something called “intersectionality,” which is the idea that everybody carries some form of privilege with them, even if they lack privilege in other areas.”
…Vox.
1. This is a bad way of understanding intersectionality, which is actually really interesting and productive.
2.This really feels like “possessing privilege makes you bad”.
“When a person tells you you hurt them, you don’t get to decide you didn’t.”
Louis C.K. (via sexual-feelings)
It’s so nice that there’s no way anybody could possibly abuse this.
(via dataandphilosophy)
What’s even better is that there’s no way people could, even without intending to abuse it, intuitively move toward an emotional style of greater pain and injury in order to garner discursive power.
(via ogingat)
Of course people can abuse this, just the same as they can abuse literally anything. So this is the argument that proves too much. The point is, if my g/f says, “Hon, that hurt me” – well, it fucking hurt her. End of story. If I’m going down the path “Well, she’s just saying that, cuz X,” then it’s time to break up. We’ve lost any hope of a productive relationship.
Cuz pepole really get hurt and it’s abusive-as-fuck to deny others their legitimate pain, to act like their feelings don’t matter, to act like their feelings are invalid.
You get to feel how you feel. You get to say how you feel. If you say, “X hurts,” then it hurts.
And then we say, “Hey, can I make it not hurt? Can this relationship work?”
(via veronicastraszh)
I agree that in the context of an intimate relationship there is almost no way to avoid following this rule and keep things workable.
(via ogingat)
I will go farther: in personal relationships, this rule should be respected. It’s when people loudly claim extreme pain, to those they aren’t in a repeated game with, in ways that just happen to be politically aligned, and in doing so expect or hope to change the behaviour of others to not mention the topic instead of warning for it, that I get suspicious, and feel less obligated to change my life to better suit their claims. I think C.K. errs by making a general pronouncement. To be fair, he’s a comedian, but reblogging without commentary to me suggests support of the statement.
I suppose I’m the inverse of the standard view on triggers: the less political something is, the more confident I am that the person is sincere.
(Source: classically-incomplete)
“When a person tells you you hurt them, you don’t get to decide you didn’t.”
Please reblog if you read Worm
witchofhope413:
Cause omg I need to follow you
And here’s a link if you want to read it. It’s long but holds shit is it worth it
https://parahumans.wordpress.com
asocratesgonemad:
argumate:
explodingbat:
huh
for ages i’ve been pissed at Less Wrong for
abandoning what i thought was the program (when i first encountered
Overcoming Bias): identifying common mistakes in human thinking and
devising and testing mitigation strategies – making the most of what we
have, like (these stupid meat brains)
but there were just a bunch
of blog posts i didn’t really see the point of, about topics related to
(what i thought was) the program, but kinda dancing around the “but what
do we actually, concretely do about it?” question
hmm
so he’s really been a moral philosopher (albeit a transhumanisty one) all along?
edit: !!!!
i thought “wrong” was talking about mistakes, not ethical wrongness
now i see why er Ethical Altruism is so much of an issue - i thought if was just a useful test case re intuitive ideas vs. what’s actually effective, or something!
man i am a dope
Well he doesn’t want to solve ethics for the abstract joy of philosophy, but in order to enforce it via an unstoppable super intelligence. So I’m not sure if that counts as being a moral philosopher, in the common understanding of such.
Also I always assumed LessWrong meant less biased, due to its origin splitting off from Overcoming Bias.
And I think the fascination with effective altruism is driven by people who are less hung up on super intelligences fixing all the problems later, and who want humans to fix some of the problems now.
But don’t take my word for any of this, it’s just the impression I get.
Yeah, “LessWrong” is intended to refer to empirical/epistemic wrongness. The bias mitigation kind of took a backseat for whatever reason – possibly because it’s easier to do philosophy with no budget from behind a monitor than it is to do the same with cognitive psychology :P
I think that the ethics and meta-ethics are a relatively small section of LW, and only a moderate section of EA (which is focused more on outcomes being debated between utilitarians). The core thing, I think, is still improving human thinking.
more-whales:
So people are talking again about what it means to disagree with effective altruism.
The last time this came up I expressed doubt that you could really separate out apparently contingent facts about the movement (demographics, politics, prominence of certain ideas and organizations) from the near-definitional good of EA-as-a-question (how can we best promote global welfare?).
Keep reading
I disagree on a few points.
1. Why don’t you like 80,000 Hours? It seems like they offer low-priced advice that people think was very helpful, which is suggestive of effectiveness. If they only did good career advice, that would be something. In addition, it’s not obvious that they are harmful.
2. A lot of EAs are students: we’re still making broad career path choices. Local decisions can’t be made until broad ones have been, so it makes sense to talk and think about broad ones first. Also, the things that can be discussed are the broad decisions: other people don’t have my local knowledge by definition, so it makes little sense for me to talk about local decisions particularly carefully.
eccentric-opinion:
Slate Star Codex has become a victim of the Iron Law of Web Design.
I disagree. I rather like the new design.
theunitofcaring:
like, to be clear, I don’t think it’s morally obligatory to support anorexics. There are a lot of people who, for their own mental health, cannot have a supportive healthy relationship with someone who has disordered thoughts around their weight/the desire to lose weight dangerously/scary beliefs about their own body and habits/whatever.
And if you think that it’s just not going to be healthy for you, it’s okay to say to a friend “I can’t be part of those conversations” and if the conversations are turning out to be unavoidable to say “maybe we need some distance”.
What I think is a problem is when people think it’s “supportive” to be there emotionally for your friend only when they’re saying the right things, only when they’re expressing a desire to beat the eating disorder and get to a healthy weight, only when they’re not experiencing distorted thinking. Because that just creates a dynamic where most of our intimate relationships are founded on not admitting (to ourselves or to other people) that we feel conflicted about recovery, that we’ve found mental workarounds that don’t actually challenge our distorted thoughts but which help make us functional, that we actually don’t think of our eating disorder as a separate beast that lunged at us from outside but as a natural outgrowth of our own preferences.
If you say “I can only support you when you’re working on recovery”, what you get is people who will learn, automatically, to lie and assure you they’re working on recovery, and who will have to seek out the actual hard emotional support from someone else.
And if you say “I can only support you while you’re working on recovery, because you expressing your distorted thoughts is an evil and malicious act on your part”, then, congrats, you’ve just given someone with an anxiety/self-loathing disorder something new to be anxious and self-loathing about!
It’s always okay to say “I can’t listen to this”. It’s pretty much never okay to say “how dare you experience this.”
[Epistemic Status: possibly overly charitable towards people who don’t handle mental illness in personal relationship well.] Many people are willing to put in more effort when they see a mental illness as a temporary disorder, like breaking an arm. I think it’s reasonable to say that I can legitimately expect more support from my friends for a temporary injury than a permanent one. The way to tell that my arm is healing is if I’m existing and not actively violating medical orders about how to treat my arm. I think it’s reasonable for a friend who is putting in the effort expected for a temporary loss of arm to be frustrated if I seem to not do what I am supposed to do about my arm.
Part of this is that they see themselves doing work and I don’t appear to be doing any, leaving an impression of unfairness. They might think that by accommodating me, they are incentivizing me to not get better. This is rather paternalistic, but you see it sometimes in anti-welfare arguments, and again has a fairness component. They could think that the length of the injury is now making their initial commitments seem unreasonable.
I don’t think that this is a sensible tactic or model, but modelling someone modelling “saying the right things and working on recovery” as equivalent to “going to physical therapy” gives me more understanding. This tactic might make sense for mental illness that is best understood and solved in a chemical sense: funereal-disease has expressed sentiment along the line of “I know what’s wrong with me, and pills and only pills make it better.” However, this fails when applied to someone who doesn’t regard their condition as necessarily or solely negative.
TL;DR: Activists pushed for people to treat mental illness as equivalent to physical illness, and now competing access needs are biting us.
You may remember the post about just how suggestive some of the China-Soviet cooperation posters were. You may have read Tumblr. But did you know that in China today, the word for comrade is also the slang word for homosexual?
Required Double Majors
taymonbeal:
dataandphilosophy:
Status: More of a fun idea to play around with than a serious proposal.
Largely a reaction to this article.
One of the basic problems facing the humanities is that people don’t want to major in English because the pay is terrible. The article mentions this, and then goes on to discuss whether post-modernism is at fault. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that differences in job markets are responsible for most of the difference in major choices.
So how do you preserve the humanities without impoverishing the poor sops who go into them?
Required double majors, and you can’t do double technical or double soft. If you want to major in philosophy, that’s fantastic! You’ll also be studying math, cognitive science, CS, German and French, or something else that gives you useful job skills. Want to major in statistics? Have a great time! You can study political science or sociology if you want to supplement it or history or English Lit if you want to learn about your place in the world.*
*: A good stats education should do more for your ability to think critically about the average sentence that is intended to be factual in the modern world than your average study of english literature.
Who exactly is supposed to benefit from having technical people do a soft major? The students don’t; there’s a case for making everyone do a broad liberal-arts education, but not for picking a random specialty unrelated to their actual field. Nor do the humanities, as a collective human endeavor, benefit from having a large number of additional undergraduates who aren’t going to do any real work in the field, are operating outside their comparative advantage, and in most cases don’t want to be there at all. To the extent that humanities departments benefit from this, they are just being parasites.
(Note: I completed most of a Humanities & Arts major at a STEM school alongside my CS major, but had to abandon it after a falling-out with the only professor in my concentration.)
I think that there is benefit in actually knowing one thing particularly well, and I’m skeptical of modern attempts to teach small classes on everything.
Required Double Majors
vermithrx:
angrybisexual:
dataandphilosophy:
angrybisexual:
dataandphilosophy:
Status: More of a fun idea to play around with than a serious proposal.
Largely a reaction to this article.
One of the basic problems facing the humanities is that people don’t want to major in English because the pay is terrible. The article mentions this, and then goes on to discuss whether post-modernism is at fault. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that differences in job markets are responsible for most of the difference in major choices.
So how do you preserve the humanities without impoverishing the poor sops who go into them?
Required double majors, and you can’t do double technical or double soft. If you want to major in philosophy, that’s fantastic! You’ll also be studying math, cognitive science, CS, German and French, or something else that gives you useful job skills. Want to major in statistics? Have a great time! You can study political science or sociology if you want to supplement it or history or English Lit if you want to learn about your place in the world.*
*: A good stats education should do more for your ability to think critically about the average sentence that is intended to be factual in the modern world than your average study of english literature.
Hmmmm…. what about people who need to combine two technical subjects (e.g. aspiring bioinformaticians)?
A, combine them into one major, or B, let the grad schools train them. Or, if you want to triple major, you can do that as well.
Of course you can cram anything into a single major (or leave it for grad school or impose a triple major on someone), but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. There are people for whom the sheer breadth of their field(s) is already challenging and you seem to think it is a good idea to bog them down by forcing them to study even more subjects?
I have the feeling this direction of discussion is treating symptoms rather than causes. If you want to allow (let alone encourage) people to go into the humanities you must first remove the economic barriers to their survival along that path.
Supply, Demand, Income. Either increase the demand for humanities graduates (maybe more rigorous programs, with an actual dropout rate?), decrease the supply, or make it so people have less need to work (smaller student loans, perhaps.) Which one?
nihilsupernum:
people who try to define sexuality in some really specific way and claim it’s universal for political purposes are ridiculous
(by which i mean “people who argue that all/none of lesbians are attracted to trans women”, although i occasionally see the same argument for gay men and trans women too. because this is what people care about, apparently.)
it’s almost like there aren’t exactly sixteen permutations of what people like in other people! who would have guessed!
I mean, my favorite is when people accuse others of transphobia for having particular sexual preferences that function independent of the existence of trans people.
Required Double Majors
angrybisexual:
dataandphilosophy:
Status: More of a fun idea to play around with than a serious proposal.
Largely a reaction to this article.
One of the basic problems facing the humanities is that people don’t want to major in English because the pay is terrible. The article mentions this, and then goes on to discuss whether post-modernism is at fault. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that differences in job markets are responsible for most of the difference in major choices.
So how do you preserve the humanities without impoverishing the poor sops who go into them?
Required double majors, and you can’t do double technical or double soft. If you want to major in philosophy, that’s fantastic! You’ll also be studying math, cognitive science, CS, German and French, or something else that gives you useful job skills. Want to major in statistics? Have a great time! You can study political science or sociology if you want to supplement it or history or English Lit if you want to learn about your place in the world.*
*: A good stats education should do more for your ability to think critically about the average sentence that is intended to be factual in the modern world than your average study of english literature.
Hmmmm…. what about people who need to combine two technical subjects (e.g. aspiring bioinformaticians)?
A, combine them into one major, or B, let the grad schools train them. Or, if you want to triple major, you can do that as well.
Required Double Majors
Status: More of a fun idea to play around with than a serious proposal.
Largely a reaction to this article.
One of the basic problems facing the humanities is that people don’t want to major in English because the pay is terrible. The article mentions this, and then goes on to discuss whether post-modernism is at fault. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that differences in job markets are responsible for most of the difference in major choices.
So how do you preserve the humanities without impoverishing the poor sops who go into them?
Required double majors, and you can’t do double technical or double soft. If you want to major in philosophy, that’s fantastic! You’ll also be studying math, cognitive science, CS, German and French, or something else that gives you useful job skills. Want to major in statistics? Have a great time! You can study political science or sociology if you want to supplement it or history or English Lit if you want to learn about your place in the world.*
*: A good stats education should do more for your ability to think critically about the average sentence that is intended to be factual in the modern world than your average study of english literature.
