150 karma · joined January 4, 2012
Given the demographics of the site and people's explicitly stated experiences, it seems plenty of the people disagreeing have had experiences similar to yours.
This is a domain that I've also put a lot of thought into over the years, so I hope something succeeds. And some things do. Keep in mind that Wikipedia caught a lot of flak for being unreliable or impossible at first, but nowadays they have a robust editorial process for contentious subjects that I'd consider the gold standard for any such practical applications on the internet.
At least the iBuyers like Opendoor provide a service whose value I can see, even if it might not apply to every individual. Having someone else take on the hassle of dealing with shady vendors and house showing, repair negotiations and flaky buyers, while letting me move out cash-in-hand whenever I want? I get that.. especially after experiencing my good friends hit every one of those nightmares themselves, ending up having to waste thousands on AirBnB's after contractor issues left them without either home for months.
Basically they are saying that, in a probabilistic outcome, we are comfortable acknowledging that a venture may encounter somewhat random danger, but are uncomfortable acknowledging that they may encounter somewhat random fortunes.
I still like my job, but it's nothing like the passion I felt when I built games. Still, I don't think that passion is enough to justify the strain it would put on my family through financial risk, not to mention my work/life balance (or in this case, work/slightly less work balance).
Since it was the same then as now, I suspect it may continue to be. After all, it's a job with inherent joy for people who want it, and those tend to have the luxury of materially rewarding workers less. Much as bars can basically pay bands little to nothing in order to have live music, because there's no shortage of people wanting it just for the inherent joy, I imagine game companies will continue to have a pool of creative technicians willing to work for less. Maybe the higher barrier of entry to learn tech work will change something one day, but it doesn't appear to have done so, so far.
We really need Ranked Choice Voting, I really think these polls affect the actual vote tallies at the end of the day.
Meanwhile, the people who were bold enough to actually talk about their more individualized interests got my attention and resulted in some great conversation and dates, even if they didn't result in relationships.
I fell into the trap in my 20's of being generically appealing. I did very well in the 'dating' market, had attractive partners, married a particularly beautiful one. Then I realized that 'success rate' meant squat other than a minor ego boost, and I was stuck with a person attracted to generically appealing me and not ME. And physical attraction fades.
Luckily I got out of that situation, started representing myself accurately, and I live in a large enough city to be able to find at least some women online who do the same. The conversation, dates, and relationships have been SO much more rewarding, because the people connect with ME and not a generically appealing version of me.
I think being generically appealing does build confidence, and confidence is important. But hopefully redpillers and all the generic profile creators online can eventually see the value of specificity.. and attracting quality over quantity. I think it'll breed a lot more happy relationships.
I do worry of course (because I'm a parent and that's what we do), that this time together creates a gateway for games that are less fun and productive.. the ones that mainly feed on compulsion loops. For instance, I picked up Pokemon Go in order to add a little fun to nature walks and park visits, but slowly the walking aspect has faded away and the compulsive collecting has stayed and that worries me. But again, everything worries me, who knows :) At this point I think just being sure to rotate activities regularly hopefully keeps any one experience from dominating.
..Sold!
I think the same case could be made for placing more emphasis on funding replication -- instead of thinking 'we learned it, why revisit it?', you're checking if it's actually valuable information worth spending more on, or just a fluke.
In case you don't grok the difference, the difference is that a relatively flat decade followed by a huge temperature jump will have the linear regression line for that decade be higher than the actual temperature, because the of the later jump. This is what is (likely) happening now (and what happened in 77-86, and 87-96). The most popular theory as to this seems to be that the heat is stored in the deep ocean, and then releases in a burst into the surface atmosphere.
Which takes me to my second point, that even with your interpretation (which is generally the interpretation of the graphs used to make the 'no warming in 15 years' argument), the graphs being used are surface temperature, and don't include ocean warming. As I mentioned above, including ocean temperatures shows a rise even in static decade temperature, without even involving linear regression.
If you'd like a source, the intended interpretation of the results are all in the IPCC reports, most of which have (reasonably) short summaries. http://www.ipcc.ch/
In addition, the "flat temperature" argument itself only uses atmospheric temperature and not ocean temperature (which is another huge heat sink). Combined ocean and atmospheric temperatures still show a heat rise, even with the other natural environmental factors pushing a cooldown.
Even after using all the known tricks for cherry-picking results, p-hacking, and the like, there exist much-abused FDA 'fast track' options for getting a 'needed' drug out before the science is confirmed, and quite often the science never gets around to being confirmed. Even big-name drugs like Tamiflu have been shown later to be no better than generics at best and completely useless at worst.
The "or control" doesn't tell you exactly what the false positive rate is, but at least it sets the upper bound at 3%.