ANewFormation

Really interesting stuff - also goes some way to explaining the absolutely massive gatherings you see on Iran on occassion.

As a probably permanent expat with kids, I've been looking for some sort of more social and family oriented culture to raise them, and stuff like that sounds amazing. If we could just pick and choose the parts that each culture excels at!

Though with Alireza I was referring to Alireza Firouzja - a top 10 chess player in the world who also ended up in France like the earlier poster.

Kids and marriage also make it practically impossible to not meet other people.

If someone did a study on loneliness vs fertility rates, it'd probably be a near perfect correlation.

The modern era of Tinder, normalised deviancy, and so on is really setting people up for a very uncomfortable later life. And I say 'later' but it's really the overwhelming majority of your life, especially if you discount your earlier years where we're all just basically retarded.

I'd no idea chess was so big in Iran. Alireza a household name?

Happiness, to me, also seems like such a false goal. Happiness is, and should be, a fleeting sensation.

I think the term we generally really mean when we say happiness is contentedness. Because that is more a state of being than some temporary sensation.

And far from just a semantic difference, I think this opens up an entirely different life perspective because it's much more about controlling your response to things, particularly those outside your control than it is about pursuing some carrot of happiness that will always slip away as quickly as it comes.

The Stoics referred to this state of mind as apatheia [1]. It's not apathy, which has the connotation of indifference, but rather the freedom from one's emotions so you can guide your life without being pulled in a million different, and oft irrational, ways by emotion.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatheia

Many (all?) Japanese schools don't have janitors. Instead students clean on rotation. Never been much into Japanese stuff but I absolutely admire this about their culture, and imagine it's part of the reason that Japan is such a clean and at least superficially respectful society.

Living in other Asian nations where there are often defacto invisible caste systems can be nauseating at times - you have parents that won't allow their children to participate in clean up efforts because their child is 'above handling trash.' That's gonna be one well adjusted adult...

If incumbents would be favored then it stands to reason that total advertising spend would be at least loosely proportional to market decentralization. Yet in America advertising spend has increased many orders of magnitude since the 50s, while the market has simultaneously become dramatically more centralized.

By contrast in parts of the world with relatively negligible advertising, markets tend to be heavily decentralized.

And I think this makes far more sense of you think about it. If you make a soft drink that is rated far higher than Coke in blind testings, or perhaps one that is near indistinguishable in flavor, but cheaper, you stand very little chance of competing successfully. There's a reason Coke spends billions per year in advertising, and it has nothing to do with reaching the three remaining people who are not aware Coke exists.

And yeah without advertising the "free" services on the internet wouldn't exist, replaced by a mixture of genuinely free services, and for-pay. This would IMO be a dramatically better state of affairs. Businesses whose actual customer is not the people using their product/service leads to such dystopic nonsense.

Capitalism would work 100% fine without ads because people naturally compare and contrast options when buying stuff.

All that's necessary is making it possible for people seeking out your type of product to find you. And for revolutionary products, there's word of mouth.

If anything I think capitalism would function better without ads, because I would argue that advertising overall results in less informed customers, especially the modern lifestyle/brand type of advertising that's clearly quite effective at manipulating people.

Simultaneously, pharmaceutical use rates have skyrocketed and continue growing. I'm curious if there is a causal relationship there.

And I don't think this is a positive trend. Teens experimenting with weed, alcohol, and so on should not be encouraged but is, or was, just a part of life. Teens being on antidepressants, prescribed stimulants, and so on is rather quite sad.

You can easily make a sharp/tactical repertoire of sound openings. As black you can play the Najdorf and King's Indian Defense. As white - open sicilian, winawer french, advance caro kann, be3/qd2/f3/o-o-o stuff against modern/pirc, bd3 bd2 o-o-o against scandi. e4e5 is the toughest nut to crack, but the evan's gambit is generally sound - Kasparov even beat Anand with it. Against the petroff you can play Nc3+o-o-o stuff.

That should just about cover everything!

But yeah, one thing you have to do to really start improving alot is to always assume your opponent will play the best move. Hope chess is how you ruin your own position!

Scientists are not superhuman, even in the golden era of science it was Max Plank that remarked, 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' And things have rather worsened since his era.

It's not science that really changed anything but rather humanity freeing itself from bias and opening itself to having a discourse and debate on practically any issue, without consequence - accepting all the discomfort that that entails.

But such eras are brief and can fade rapidly. The Islamic world was once a global leader in the sciences. Algebra = al jabr, Arabic numerals, alongside countless contributions to astronomy and other fields. Oh but how fast that candle of learning can be snuffed out when it becomes inconvenient.

Or money.

This misses the context that Raoult alone has published more than 3000 papers and is one of the most highly cited researchers in his field. Take the combined sum of all the IHU authors and it's likely in the tens of thousands.

This is also why people increasingly believe whatever they want. Nobody is honest, everything is framed in the most exaggerated ways - which then makes it easy to undermine, and there's mass corruption everywhere on top of all of this especially in covid related stuff where you have geopolitics, politics, and hundreds of billions of dollars in profiteering stewing in one giant, and quite toxic, pot.

Ok so you went back a day, saw the ongoing sky high readings from multiple sources which you were apparently trying to claim didn't exist, now acknowledge they exist, and now you want to claim they don't mean anything. Ok.

You sort of people are so weird.

The motivation there is money and time, not an aversion to labor.

Imagine any job paid as much as software. What would you do? For many of us the answer would be far more labor intensive - I prefer construction a million iin times over software, but software pays a million times better.

So our economic system coerces us into these sort of broadly sedentary behaviors, because that's where the money is.

There's also the endorphins that start firing when exercising or the general sense of euphoria that lssts for hours afterwards. These are evolutionary mechanisms that directly motivate strenuous exercise.

This is definitely one of the most absurd articles I've read, but only because I think the author convinced himself that it was a reasonable take, rather than the more typical trolling for clicks. 100% cognitive dissonance.

You need to go by date, not whatever pages are. When I made that post, levels were around 400 which is dangerously high.

There is a debate on the meaning, but one that has not yet made it's way to the Supreme Court who will ultimately decide.

The nuance that you run into is that legal opinion defining what 'subject to the jurisdiction of the US' means (from the 14th amendment) was made in 1898, but at that time the border was relatively open.

Immigration restrictions started amping up exponentially in the 20th century, especially amidst the world wars. It seems unlikely that the court would have ruled as it did in the context of these new laws.

The Expanse also had fun with this bit. It's a nice little easter egg because I think most people think Mormonism is just another typical Christian branch.

I agree with the uniqueness of consciousness. Obviously no entity poofs into existence imagining itself adding two numbers when I execute that operation, and I don't think this changes whether one carries out 1, 10, or 2^1000 operations.

However that doesn't preclude 'my' version of the simulation hypothesis. Imagine you were in a full body VR sim from the moment of birth, that artificial reality would likely simply be reality to you, yet your consciousness would remain. So all that's fundamentally required is some tech to temporarily block all past memories before entering the sim.

I couldn't agree more, but with one exception. I tend to heavily indulge the simulation hypothesis, but the nuance here being that it's not necessarily just an arbitrarily simulated complete reality.

Our lives do an unbelievably good job of teaching us endless unteachable lessons. What if life as we know it is, for instance, little more than a day's lesson in another reality? Or a day of a gaming? Perhaps a test of character for some sort of role? There's no reason to assume time, and life expectancy as we know it, are universal truths. Even within our own reality the rate of the passage of time is variable.

The only problem I have with the simulation hypothesis is it being turtles all the way down. Imagine you pass from this world only to 'awake' in another. How does the exact same simulation argument not just apply yet again? It seems fundamentally unfalsifiable and circular, but I suppose that is standard for any explanation of life.

If society ever developed along the lines proposed, which is highly improbable to begin with, then speaking of humanity as a whole is a complete nonstarter.

We'd naturally fork, because that future sounds like a dystopic hellscape to many (if not the overwhelming majority).

And indeed once we reach the point of being able to reliably colonize other planets, large scale splintering (both physical and cultural) will begin near immediately. You'll have libertarian planet, Islamic planet, even the Mormons will finally have their planets! And so on.

And the people who want to sacrifice their bodies to go enter the machine will certainly have their own little slice of the universe as well.

I do challenge you to show me the law stating that the military cannot engage unidentified and non-responsive potentially hostile vessels breaching controlled airspace, let alone with full authority from the CIC. That's just about the dumbest talking point ever.

Though even if such law exists, which it doesn't, then like any law in modern times, or even increasingly the Constitution, if the political establishment deemed it inconvenient then they would simply ignore it, and make up some lies.

And on that note, they are now acknowledging that they are indeed drones. The 'its just airplanes' lie lasted about 5 minutes. These people seriously hold the public in contempt.

A web search will turn up a bunch. Here's one - https://www.gmcmap.com

Check any radiation map to see what's probably happening. Parts of New York, in the vicinity of the sightings, are showing extremely high radiation levels.

Its probably just drones searching for the source with the secrecy aimed at trying to avoid a mass panic.

By good I mean having a small number of good friends rather than superficial relationships with large numbers of people. That should be a false dichotomy of course, but in reality it seems to often hold.

In other words - I'll ensure my chlidren have a small group of kids to regularly play with, ideally in the same neighborhood. Who cares what the other kids are doing?

This sort of stuff is ubiquitous in cheap more ruralish areas. Negligible crime rates are also important, and once again something you'd be more inclined to find well outside the city.

The ostracization is a strawman. A few good friends (or even just one) is, imo, going to provide far more fulfillment than a million digital friends.

And when living in an appropriate place to raise children (playgrounds, etc near housing) it's super easy to meet other parents. And, in my experience at least, a rather large percent are also against 'digitizing' their kids.

Making friends the old fashioned way, and not just for your children.

It's also the mother of creativity. Endless relatively high quality entertainment is one of those things that sounds amazing at a distance but has probably just been an overall significant negative on society.

Just think rationally - in one case you had completely harmless weather balloons, and the government completely freaked out, scrambled fighters and even recklessly launched missiles at them.

Here you have supposedly car sized drones operating, in large numvers, in high risk areas and the government response is nonexistent. Nearby flights have not even been diverted as they do when there's the slightest security risk in an area.

Magnus played 5 world championships, with 3 against players of his generation. In those 3,he only managed a plus score once - against Nepo who was more than holding his own then lost one tough game and went on his notorious monkey tilt. The other two were drawn in classical.

Magnus is, by a landslide, the best tournament player (probably ever) but the world championship for classical is very different than a tournament, and his results there have not been anywhere near the level of his tournament performances.

And Magnus has also stated that he believes he has peaked. Basically - he was going to imminently lose, and I think he wanted to go out undefeated. Notably the one player he was willing to play, Alireza, was the only viable contender who he would expect to have been an overwhelming favourite against.

Also in terms of legacy, the max number of world championship victories is 6. He stopped at 5.