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

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nostalgebraist
nostalgebraist

How much do we really know about how profitable online advertising is?

I’ve heard that advertising in general is not a very scientific field.  One reason I’ve heard is that the whole industry will pick up a fad at once, so it’s hard to do anything like a scientific study of whether it helps competitively.  There seems to be a lot of debate on whether “sex sells” is even true, but advertisers decided it was true en masse at some point, and now we have a lot more sexy ads than we used to.  That sort of thing.

The internet as we know it could not exist without advertising.  Hosting costs money, and most (?) of the time, ads are used to pay for it.  Given how ineffective online advertising intuitively seems – if you aren’t blocking it, it’s usually in your peripheral vision and not even consciously perceived! – there is something weird about the staggering ecosystem of companies and services involved in bringing it to you.

I used to be one of those people who didn’t use an ad blocker on principle, just because there was something magical about the way I could get all of this free content because a bunch of suckers were willing to bet on influencing me subliminally via my peripheral vision.  Sure, you can always whitelist sites you specifically want to support, but I kinda wanted to support the system as a whole.  It was only as ads got worse – as they made websites slow and unusable, as they did more and more creepy tracking of your identity – that I started blocking them.  Which only makes them even less effective.

I can’t think of a single time I’ve bought something because I saw an ad for it online, not counting “in-house” ads like webcomics advertising their own merchandise.  Literally.  I can’t think of one single time.  It’s conceivable that I’m the sucker here because I don’t think I’m being influenced by all these little pictures in my peripheral vision, when really they’re inculcating subconscious brand recognition and stuff.  But … really?  Really?  How much would you be willing to bet on that almost crackpot-sounding theory of subliminal influence?

A lot of companies seem to bet a lot on it.  Should they?  Is is likely that they’ll all collectively come to their senses, the way the all collectively decided that sex sells, and thereby destroy the internet?

slatestarscratchpad

In my experience running a site with ads: people will email me saying they’ll buy a month of advertising for “a trial”. They’ll make me link to their site with an address like www.example.com/?referrer=ssc. Then at the end of the month they’ll tell me that they did/didn’t get enough traffic from me to justify continuing the deal.

I know that my advertising model is a kind of unusual, since it doesn’t use giant agglomerated Google technology, but it at least suggests that companies are pretty on top of things in figuring out how useful their ads are.

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nuclearspaceheater
nuclearspaceheater: “ shlevy: “ thetransintransgenic: “(via (not original source but) ) ” Help I’m somehow authoritarian left? ” Talks a good game about freedom when out of power, but then as soon as he’s in, bam, everyone is enslaved in the...
thetransintransgenic

(via (not original source but) )

shlevy

Help I’m somehow authoritarian left?

nuclearspaceheater

Talks a good game about freedom when out of power, but then as soon as he’s in, bam, everyone is enslaved in the human-flourishing mines.

slatestarscratchpad

I identify with @nuclearspaceheater’s description so hard.

…actually, permission to use that as a tagline?

Source: thetransintransgenic

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
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
nostalgebraist

herbertherbertson asked:

"I hardly ever get properly angry." you know you're low-key Buddhist af, right?

nostalgebraist answered:

I don’t really know enough about Buddhism to say.

herbertherbertson

I don’t know all that much about it either (I took one well-taught class on it in college) but I know enough to know that you independently brought yourself to pretty solid restatement of how bad kharma works and how attachment leads to cycles of suffering more generally.  And more than the specifics, the sort of disappointed boredom with “sin” you talk about experiencing is very, very Buddhist.

imo rationalists and their adjacencies should really look into further into Buddhism.  The core premises–rebirth and the possibility of enlightenment–are matters of faith with not a lot of evidence (there is a little, and what’s there is facinating, but it was never enough to come close to convincing me).  Without them it did not make any sense to even consider converting, for me.  But Buddhist thinkers have spent thousands of years exploring fascinations with psychology and ethics, and a lot of what these educated and literate people thought about (most of it, in the case of the the psychology stuff) doesn’t necessarily rely on those core premises.  It’s been too long for me to remember anything specific,* but I recall reading some very old texts that had remarkably sophisticated theories about the mind–and, additionally, getting the strong impression that it was only the tip of the iceberg and that there was far more waiting to be translated or unmasked from jargon.

(* One exception–Buddhadasa’s approach to consciousness/the self was some very interesting shit once I understood all the jargon)

nostalgebraist

Interesting.  I’ve always wanted to learn more about Buddhism, but I’ve never been able to find sources on it that I enjoyed reading.

Something I’d really like – and this goes for various other religions – is a sense of the religion’s cultural “center of gravity,” the kind of sense I have about Christianity and (more weakly) Judaism.  Like, there are a lot of types of Christianity out there, but there’s enough of a common center that we can casually describe things (attitudes, emotions, moral outlooks, aesthetics…) as “Christian” (or “Catholic,” “evangelical” etc.), and I feel comfortable with this way of speaking.  If someone described a post of mine as “low-key Christian AF” I’d probably know what they meant – or one of 3 or 4 things they might have meant.

Even if some of these meanings might be based in stereotypes, they’re stereotypes that are familiar in Christian circles and that Christians may use themselves.  With Buddhism, even my stereotypes are second-hand.  Each might be traceable to real practice, but might also be an invention of some 1960s mystical self-help writer, and I have no way of knowing.

But if you go looking for writing about Buddhism’s “center of gravity,” you run into the same self-help writers and their ilk.  If you go looking for the most reputable stuff you can find, it’s academic and boring and you’re likely to miss the forest for the scrupulously footnoted trees.

Or that’s been my experience, anyway.  (Recs welcome)

slatestarscratchpad

I’ve really been enjoying Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha, which I think is a little different from what you’re talking about here but still worth a look.

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