Replying to
I love how even western artists are finally understanding tengu.
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Type_Spooky
@Type_Other@poa.st
pleroma 2.10.2-442-gb68f13b9-developOccasional effortposter
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519 Following
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Joined January 18, 2021
I'm annoyed by something in the literary world that's a kind of expression of this, when wannabe writers get caught up with "worldbuilding" some fictional setting of theirs.
They spend hundreds of hours ensuring all the maps of their fantasy kingdoms make sense--named rivers, population numbers, tax policies. They'll devote as long to constructed languages no one will ever speak. It's all forms of procrastination, as if explaining enough easy mechanistic Hows will produce the hard What of a story.
Simulating every atom will not get you anything meaningful. Meaning has to be where it starts, and you work from that top down.
An alien from another world could be given Shogun, which has no map showing how Holland, England, and Japan relate to one another, and no explanation of the Japanese language, and they wouldn't be at all confused about what was going on. Turns out you don't need to hold a magnifying glass to the least consequential details in a story.
RT: https://poa.st/objects/0d543f34-0a98-4b58-9956-9d045636f4bb
Quoting
Expanding an idea out of morality into how fact claims work (I should probably just write a book):
I've had to stress something many times that I'm not sure there's a general term for. "Knowing that..." beats "Knowing how..."
Simply knowing that something happens turns out to be much more useful than knowing how. Heuristics beat causal chains.
Knowing "that" some drug reduces heart attacks is the important thing--knowing "how" isn't necessary for it to work, or even to make it. In fact, most drugs don't have known paths of effect to begin with; we just know that taking X is associated with Y happening, and that's useful enough.
A spider has no idea why it builds webs. They just make them, and food spontaneously appears. You can benefit from facts without understanding how they work--that's actually just about everything we do.
We were domesticating plants and animals millennia before learning what genes were; we didn't need to know every microscopic process to benefit from heredity, and we still don't know them to this day, yet breeding works just fine.
Knowing that leeches react to incoming storms let us build the tempest prognosticator. How's it work? Nobody knows! But it sure can predict storms real good. Turns out that's the important thing.
Say a guy with only "that"-type knowledge, gathered from the top down, makes a simple pencil and paper algorithm that's right 90% of the time... Is his method more or less useful than a dweeb running bottom-up "how" calculations on a supercomputer, who tries in vain to simulate the motion of every atom to predict the behavior of a larger system, and is correct no more often than chance? It should be obvious who to put your money on, yet when arguing there's some kind of assumption top-down "that"s aren't real knowledge--aren't good enough--and you need the bottom-up "how"s to not be dismissed.
Shitlibs act as if you can't name every exact step of some effect, that means they can weasel their fake reality into the gaps.
>"You can't name the IQ genes and what they do--all these differences could still be environmental."
1: Nobody demands this level of scrutiny about height. We don't know what "height genes" there are or every exact protein pathway that eventually leads to someone being taller or shorter (it's basically the whole genome to varying degrees and an incalculable number of interaction effects), yet since the dawn of humanity we could already see height is extremely heritable because we know the tendency that tall begets tall and short begets short in spite of other influences.
2: In spite of this, yeah, we do in fact know a lot of IQ-influencing genes actually.
>"Why care about heterosexual monogamy? It's just another tradition."
>"If you can't explain to arbitrary detail exactly how it benefits a child to develop in a straight household seeing masculine and feminine role models interacting, that means your whole worldview is bogus."
Nobody can explain anything to an arbitrary level of detail. We just know it works. At some point you have to accept that a given fact happens, and you don't know why, but you can make use of it anyway. Where the rubber meets the road, knowing THAT it works is the important part. If you ever actually know HOW, that's a fun victory lap, but is extremely rare and probably not particularly useful anyway.
They use this shitty objection to justify everything they want, down to bestiality and CSAM. "You can't explain what makes something lead to agreeably bad results, therefore you have to be okay with us doing it."
Just tell them to go drink bleach. They can't explain what exactly would make it deadly off the top of their head, yet somehow they just accept the fact it's poisonous and refuse to. Curious!
RT: https://poa.st/objects/88ce24ee-958b-4a38-adb1-6d3be0a84d8e
Boosted by @newmodel@shin.mugicha.club
This ADL stat everyone's cited the past year about "far-right violence" is from an NIJ review which literally doesn't acknowledge the existence of left-wing violence. They just use vegan/eco-terrorism as a proxy, so of course that makes it look nonexistent.
The blackest race riots and queerest terror attacks still aren't considered ideologically left-wing. It's that bullshit.
Boosted by @RustyCrab@clubcyberia.co
Uhm, if it's not for white people, why is it called Honky Star Rail?
Replying to
@Rudolf_von_Goldenbaum @Wormwood The idea of ordering a CD to your home so you could play like a dozen songs seems crazy in hindsight now that everything's free everywhere.
Fuentes pretending to gloat about his battery case being "dismissed" is funny when the truth is he accepted a plea deal to pick up garbage for weeks, attend an anger management class, and pay her hundreds of dollars.
Replying to
That's my understanding. Tar in the lungs has proven dangerous long-term, but nicotine by other methods is getting a bad rap because it's psychologically tied to that via cigarettes.
It's probably not harmless, but neither is caffeine. It's getting a lot of guilt by association.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4958544/
>I'm so tired of those low salivary amylase chuds who can't digest potatoes efficiently
Anime women lusting over you is such a hilarious medium to describe mutations.
Anime women lusting over you is such a hilarious medium to describe mutations.
I'd only heard it referred to in our circles as "the 1965 immigration act" without realizing it was also known as the Hart-Celler Act, being sponsored by Philip Hart and Emmanuel Celler.
We got unchecked third world immigration
and lost our identity
to a bill called the Heart-Seller Act?
Is this a joke?
Ahab to Moby Dick:
Political thought that got away from me
Quoting
@Godcast@poa.st Company scrip is technically illegal, but Jeff Bezos would absolutely pay employees in Amazon gift cards if he could get away with it, and the sad thing is most wouldn't mind. When you get off work, just go sleep on a cot in the back, wake up the next morning, eat your Amazon Flakes, and clock back in.
There's this compulsion insecure liberals have with seeming "above" their base instincts--being "above" what makes us human. They project this appearance by treating humans like robots and pretending to not see anything wrong with it.
>SO EFFICIENT 
>DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT EFFICIENCY, BRO?
If they could coat the planet with featureless gray, they would do it just to appear smart.
>DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT EFFICIENCY, BRO?
If they could coat the planet with featureless gray, they would do it just to appear smart.
Expanding an idea out of morality into how fact claims work (I should probably just write a book):
I've had to stress something many times that I'm not sure there's a general term for. "Knowing that..." beats "Knowing how..."
Simply knowing that something happens turns out to be much more useful than knowing how. Heuristics beat causal chains.
Knowing "that" some drug reduces heart attacks is the important thing--knowing "how" isn't necessary for it to work, or even to make it. In fact, most drugs don't have known paths of effect to begin with; we just know that taking X is associated with Y happening, and that's useful enough.
A spider has no idea why it builds webs. They just make them, and food spontaneously appears. You can benefit from facts without understanding how they work--that's actually just about everything we do.
We were domesticating plants and animals millennia before learning what genes were; we didn't need to know every microscopic process to benefit from heredity, and we still don't know them to this day, yet breeding works just fine.
Knowing that leeches react to incoming storms let us build the tempest prognosticator. How's it work? Nobody knows! But it sure can predict storms real good. Turns out that's the important thing.
Say a guy with only "that"-type knowledge, gathered from the top down, makes a simple pencil and paper algorithm that's right 90% of the time... Is his method more or less useful than a dweeb running bottom-up "how" calculations on a supercomputer, who tries in vain to simulate the motion of every atom to predict the behavior of a larger system, and is correct no more often than chance? It should be obvious who to put your money on, yet when arguing there's some kind of assumption top-down "that"s aren't real knowledge--aren't good enough--and you need the bottom-up "how"s to not be dismissed.
Shitlibs act as if you can't name every exact step of some effect, that means they can weasel their fake reality into the gaps.
>"You can't name the IQ genes and what they do--all these differences could still be environmental."
1: Nobody demands this level of scrutiny about height. We don't know what "height genes" there are or every exact protein pathway that eventually leads to someone being taller or shorter (it's basically the whole genome to varying degrees and an incalculable number of interaction effects), yet since the dawn of humanity we could already see height is extremely heritable because we know the tendency that tall begets tall and short begets short in spite of other influences.
2: In spite of this, yeah, we do in fact know a lot of IQ-influencing genes actually.
>"Why care about heterosexual monogamy? It's just another tradition."
>"If you can't explain to arbitrary detail exactly how it benefits a child to develop in a straight household seeing masculine and feminine role models interacting, that means your whole worldview is bogus."
Nobody can explain anything to an arbitrary level of detail. We just know it works. At some point you have to accept that a given fact happens, and you don't know why, but you can make use of it anyway. Where the rubber meets the road, knowing THAT it works is the important part. If you ever actually know HOW, that's a fun victory lap, but is extremely rare and probably not particularly useful anyway.
They use this shitty objection to justify everything they want, down to bestiality and CSAM. "You can't explain what makes something lead to agreeably bad results, therefore you have to be okay with us doing it."
Just tell them to go drink bleach. They can't explain what exactly would make it deadly off the top of their head, yet somehow they just accept the fact it's poisonous and refuse to. Curious!
RT: https://poa.st/objects/88ce24ee-958b-4a38-adb1-6d3be0a84d8e
Quoting
Ryan Faulk's theory on the left-right divide is "CPU" vs. "ASIC" thinkers. In his analogy, lefties are like central processing units--purposeful rationalizers. Whereas people on the right are more like application-specific integrated circuits--operating on unchangeable instinct, unable to explain why they do certain actions or hold specific beliefs.
There is some truth to that in how the "CPU-brained" will demand logical explanations for things the "ASIC-brained" don't question.
>"Who is drag queen story hour hurting??"
>idk... I just think it's wrong
According to him, you can generally tell a CPU from an ASIC person by whether or not they feel it's immoral to fuck a dead chicken.
>CPU: Can you rationally justify what's wrong with it?
>ASIC: idk, it's just wrong.
I had an independent explanation that touched on that, but explained a little more with it: the left are risk-takers who seek to be on the border of acceptable behavior, regardless of where that border is.
There is benefit to having some small number of your population behave this way. Say your tribe has a sphere of acceptable foods. If everybody suddenly tries something new, there's a chance it's slow-acting poison and the whole tribe dies off. It's definitely bad to have too many risk-takers. But if nobody ever tries it, there's a chance you missed out on a highly nutritious energy source other tribes could take advantage of. There is therefore some optimum level of "people willing to push the boundary" who try and make forbidden things acceptable, because they may tap into beneficial behaviors more cautious people would miss out on.
There is evidence for fear levels and disgust responses being tied to political leaning, so "Make everything acceptable" is just currently overtaking more of the population for some reason (jews, microplastics, women voting, whatever).
It explained the early Covid responses, where the right said to be cautious of a deadly virus from China, and the left called them fearmongering racists. But then a few months in everything flipped. Disagreement with locking down the country, belief masks don't do much of anything, and distrust toward a vaccine all became right views instead of left. Maybe that's the right having more accurate assessment of threats (via a more developed amygdala), but there's clearly something major being missed.
The more I thought on it, the more an integrated explanation made sense that explains most behaviors: status insecurity. The left's terrified they might look dumb or low-class, and require constant social validation reaffirming that they're some intellectual nobility. They shun arguments from instinct or nature because such base(d) forms of thinking are for uneducated peasants.
>"You don't want to eat the bugs?"
>"You don't want to sleep in the pod?"
>"You want your walls to have color?"
>"You want your food to have taste?"
>"You want to run in a field instead of on a treadmill?"
>"You care what happens to a fetus?"
>"Can't you see how illogical these objections are?"
>"I've ascended beyond those lesser human compulsions, and think only in terms of thermodynamic efficiency."
Note that it isn't actually true. They wouldn't be happy with these things.
They only need to act like it's acceptable and pretend humans are robots to convince themselves how intelligent and better-than-you they are.
Notice the facade flips when discussing poor, starving, brown third-worlders; they suddenly appear to care a lot about human comfort and dignity. Again, they don't really. It's just switching modes from "acting smarter" to "acting more empathetic."
You even see it in pretentious art and postmodernism. The toilet in the art gallery? The solid walls of a single color? They have to act like those are works of genius and merit, because it signals "If I can recognize this talent and you can't, that means I'm more enlightened and cultured than you."
His CPU/ASIC point hits some of these behaviors, but fails at explaining many others. The best explanation I've come up with is that they're just constantly putting on acts to self-sooth their insecurities. It's a kind of inward-directed signalling theory. A philosophy of cope.
RT: https://poa.st/objects/e9178338-ed55-4037-ad62-17db13ebd77b
Open quoted postReplying to on poa.st
@Godcast@poa.st Company scrip is technically illegal, but Jeff Bezos would absolutely pay employees in Amazon gift cards if he could get away with it, and the sad thing is most wouldn't mind. When you get off work, just go sleep on a cot in the back, wake up the next morning, eat your Amazon Flakes, and clock back in.
There's this compulsion insecure liberals have with seeming "above" their base instincts--being "above" what makes us human. They project this appearance by treating humans like robots and pretending to not see anything wrong with it.
>SO EFFICIENT
>DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT EFFICIENCY, BRO?
If they could coat the planet with featureless gray, they would do it just to appear smart.
>DON'T YOU CARE ABOUT EFFICIENCY, BRO?
If they could coat the planet with featureless gray, they would do it just to appear smart.Replying to
Took me a minute to get what the MGS codec calls were related to but they tied in well, lmao.
Replying to
Consistency is a peacock's tail white people show off to one another with. Across China, Africa, and India it's simply understood you'll say one thing and do another. I'd be surprised to learn if words for "hypocrite" developed organically anywhere else.
Replying to
I think I let a card expire (again 
) so my monthly charge started missing. I'll get that set back up before long. It's not a lot but still, thanks for keeping everything running. 
) so my monthly charge started missing. I'll get that set back up before long. It's not a lot but still, thanks for keeping everything running. Replying to
Unfortunately the bomb cult asks everyone simultaneously, but there's no downside to refusing.
The Fedi is proving itself much smarter than elsewhere.