Slate Star Scratchpad — I got to ban three people from Slate Star Codex...

I got to ban three people from Slate Star Codex today. That’s about half of my List Of People To Ban As Soon As I Can Find A Flimsy Excuse For Doing So. I am so delighted right now.

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nuclearspaceheater

Source: thetransintransgenic

“Being neoliberal is a lot like being bisexual. Everyone hates you even though you’re right.“

Out of context quotes robnost style

I just realized happy : hapless :: lucky : luckless , and it’s given me a lot of hap.

I’m staying in a friend’s room right now, while the friend is away..

It’s really hot. The room has two windows, one on the right, one on the left. The one on the left has a sign on it saying “BEWARE OF BEES” with an arrow pointing up towards a beehive just above the window that always has a lot of bees swarming around it.

My friend says I can open the window on the right. She says the bees don’t care about this one, even though it’s only a meter away from their hive. They just get angry if you open the one that’s directly below it. She’s lived in this room a long time and she swears this is true.

I’m going to open the window on the right. If I die, tell my friend bees are less silly than she thinks.

K: I think I’m missing some context for your story about the eclipse

ME: Oh, that’s a common trope in literature. Some explorer would need to convince the natives of something, and he would know there was an eclipse coming up, so he would claim to be causing it in order to wow them. It’s mostly in fiction, but Columbus actually got it to work once.

K: Oh, that’s clever. I’ll have to remember to try that.

ME: Try it? Are you planning on going exploring?

K: No, I mean if we have children. When there’s an eclipse coming up, then I’ll tell them they’ve misbehaved so badly that I’m going to blot out the sun, and then I’ll tell them I’ll bring the sun back if they promise to be good, and then they’ll never misbehave again.

ME: Remember when I said that, although I appreciate your sense of humor, I would prefer you not joke about child-rearing because I can never tell if you’re serious or not and it makes me nervous?

K: I’m not joking! I had to raise my little brothers, and this sort of thing was basically the only way I managed. At one point they wouldn’t go to sleep at their bedtime, and they would stay up two hours late no matter how much I begged them. So over the course of a week, I gradually set all the clocks in the house further and further back, until they were running two hours fast. Then when the clocks said it was bedtime I would tell them to go to sleep, and they would say no, and I would pretend to be really upset, and then they would stay up until the clocks said it was two hours after their bedtime, which was their real bedtime, and for the next few weeks they were more on-schedule than they’d ever been before in their lives, until finally my parents asked me why all the clocks in the house were wrong and made me change them back.

ME: You really are going to try the eclipse thing, aren’t you?

K: …let’s see how well-behaved our future kids are.

conversations with k

Me: Did you get the new tablecloths? I thought that we agreed to discuss all house purchases before making them. They’re the wrong color and they don’t fit the table at all. I put them on anyway, and if you put both of them together it *sort* of looks okay, but I still think we should have discussed this together.

K: I didn’t get any tablecloths. Maybe you got the tablecloths and forgot about it.

Me: No, I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten the tablecloths without checking with you first.

K: (a few minutes later) Why are the new curtains on the table?

conversations with k

Awkward font choice ruins “my favorite color is glitter” bag.

“For Venkatesh Rao, ‘cryptobourgeoisie,’ ‘Trumpenproletariat,’ and 'avocado toast’ seem to be basic units of thought in the same sense that 'and,’ 'exists,’ and 'for all’ would be for me.“

Out of context quotes robnost style

Met a psychologist named Dr. Godot today, trying to decide if it would be acceptable to sneak into his waiting room and put a book of Samuel Beckett plays on the table.

trickytalks

sci-techuniverse.com

Cassini Just Sent Back Closest Ever Images of Saturn, And They're Incredible

NASA's Cassini probe is plunging to its death. The nuclear-powered spacecraft has orbited Saturn for 13 years, and sent back hundreds of thousands of images. The photos include close-ups of the gaseous giant, its famous rings, and its enigmatic moons - including Titan, which has its own atmosphere, and icy Enceladus, which has a subsurface ocean that could conceivably harbour microbial life.

gray-firearms

YO THAT SHIT BALLER AS FUCK HOLY SHIT

slatestarscratchpad

Since this almost fooled me: the picture above isn’t one of the images. It’s an “artist’s rendition” of what the probe might see later.

Source: fuckyeahspaceship

worldlypositions

Over the Atlantic

I am told that knowing about the planning fallacy and trying to account for it does not avert the planning fallacy. I wonder if this is because people are dutifully trying to shift their expectation of something going wrong appropriately close to 100%, when the actual expectation should be closer to 5000%. Nonetheless, I caught my plane and am successfully moving at six hundred miles per hour above the Atlantic Ocean. The contrast between the ease of this and the ease of moving at half a mile per hour from my bed to the bathroom at the start of this journey feels like a good example of something.

And while a few things have gone wrong, probably more things have gone especially right. Moving my things in a giant suitcase turns out to be much less terrible than lugging them around on my back in a bulging ‘personal item’, as is my usual strategy. Especially because someone else is in charge of the giant suitcase now.

There was no queue to check in, security was easy, my gate was right outside it, separated only by a shop I wanted to go to. I was fairly anxious at the start of the plane trip, but then a nice flight attendant gave me multiple tiny bottles of wine to drink. He also kindly informed me that my airplane food, while dubious in ways, was not dangerous and that I should just eat it, which is something I usually miss traveling alone.

This plane has a respectable selection of movies and TV. As well as a less respectable selection, from which I have mostly selected. I watched ‘Why him?’, a movie portraying a Silicon Valley billionaire boyfriends as a sort of horrifying other species, unable to communicate with or understand normal humans, but ultimately friendly. While I’m not opposed to laughing at the oddities of Silicon Valley boyfriends, I thought it was interesting that for this to work they had to basically make the guy seem really clueless and stupid in ways. Even though most such people are pretty smart. I wonder if the writers are not that familiar with such people, so don’t know how to justify a smart person behaving in laughable ways. But maybe it is just funnier if you exaggerate it to the point that it is impossible to justify.

I watched a TV show about finding strangers who look identical to each other, and getting them together to see how alike they are. If it was a real test roughly as presented, it was very striking. Of the seven pairs they had on the show, one pair were both homosexual night club workers with the same hair style, and another pair had the same first and last names. They mentioned a lot of other similarities between pairs, but those seemed more like what you might come up with if you took two random people and looked for things in common. Or things that would tend to make you either look similar or find each other. However the two coincidences I mention seem surprising. I suppose the show probably just had a lot of such people to choose from, and took the most interestingly similar ones. Which they didn’t explicitly claim to not be doing. But that seems naughty.

I downloaded Instapaper, and have been finding it a surprisingly appealing way to read things (surprising because nothing is an appealing way to read things). Possibly it just seemed appealing because I filled it with things from the archives of Slate Star Codex and The Last Psychiatrist.

I listened to half of a podcast about Alexander Hamilton, who seems to be now permanently classed in my mind as ‘topic of derpy fictional amusement’ rather than ‘history it would be virtuous to know about’. Hopefully I can gradually expand this circle so that the agricultural revolution seems like particularly obscure backstory to Hamilton, nonetheless fascinating to a fan.

The podcast said that Hamilton the musical is about the conflict between being shiny and political, and being straightforward and doing the work you think is important, or something like that. As represented by Burr and Hamilton. I observe that Burr and Hamilton also seem to represent a conflict between waiting for it and grabbing opportunity immediately. Which makes me wonder if those axes are related.

For instance, I wonder if waiting a lot is in general a better strategy in social spheres than it is in object-level ones, because there is often more to be permanently lost. Like, if you say a dumb thing people can bring it up forever, whereas from the perspective of object level inquiry, you can change your mind about it in five minutes when you decide that it is wrong. I’m not sure if this holds for actions more serious than saying things—if you run your company into the ground or burn down your house it may be hard to undo, but you can recover socially (eventually).

That podcast was destroyed randomly, and can’t be recovered because accessing the internet on this plane seems to require the internet. So instead I listened to a third of a podcast about people killing other people. I think some of them were the Assyrians. Some of their killing was especially not nice. That’s all I know, because I only listened to it for like an hour, and apparently Assyrians are not yet catalogued under ‘obscure Hamilton backstory’ yet.

atlantic ocean actual travel

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

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Cassini Just Sent Back Closest Ever Images of Saturn, And They're Incredible

Over the Atlantic