This will not be tolerated.
586 karma · joined May 17, 2016
I'll be in the HNchat.
This is curious because a self built Tiny House is very affordable. You can build one of these for less than 10k: https://www.tinyhomebuilders.com/images/products/simple-livi...
This is important because any social housing policy designed to decrease poverty requires a large amount of 'buy-in' or goodwill by the residents or it shall fail.
There is of course the question of land for THs, but that thorny issue has already been overcome by most Tiny House people in a variety of ways I won't list here, although I admit it is a serious concern.
I went in search of a black person who lived in a Tiny House. She had immediately understood the nature of the question and said a bunch of things on the subject, what stood out is that you might be able to sell the idea of being frugal, minimalist, eco-friendly, outright home ownership i.e. autonomy, practicality and economy to the majority white population that makes up the Tiny House movement e.g. poor students and downsizing retirees, but selling the same ideas to the black population is a very difficult sell.
http://tinyhousetrailblazers.com/2016/07/where-are-all-the-b...
She said while many of the whites are coming from the suburbs i.e. been there, done that, the American Dream for blacks remains to have a big house with its associated trappings. That is when they know they have 'made it'. It follows that a re-imagining of the American Dream is necessary for the black population, just as has been happening for the people in the Tiny House movement, but different.
Where I don't concur with Miss Pearson, is that I think this is regression. For individuals it is a good adaption, yes, but the net affect on a society is indeed regression. Big Questions need to be asked about why that's happening.
There are very few Renaissance men (and women) around today. I've met a startling number of people who spend time online but never encountered Wikipedia, there is also very large number of university students who have no interest in reading. This goes to show it is not about access to information or elite institutions.
That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It is probably more worthwhile because fewer people are doing it. One prominent example among ourselves is Gwern, he is a great example to us. A lot of the most interesting threads on HN are where the discussion is regarding something not obviously connected to programming, such as woodworking. The most famous AMA in Reddit's history was a vacuum cleaner salesman, which was fascinating and bolstered my regard for Redditors as a healthy if fractious community with a native curiosity not evident on most social networking sites. In my opinion the best people have a mixture of useful values from different social classes - working, middle, upper. LessWrong has an expression parallel to this I'll paraphrase as 'hold your identity loosely'.
If anybody feels like they're stuck in a rut, unmotivated to be 'curiosity-productive', check out 'Japanology' on Youtube. Peter Barakan could make anything interesting. I always get a lift after watching his documentaries.
If you examine the history of the British you'll find their architecture e.g. Georgian, was inspired by archeological digs and ruin sites in Italy. A lot of it bears obvious elements from ancient Greek and Roman temples once you stop to examine them.
The Federal and Colonial styles in America are similarly inspired, obeying rules of symmetry last evident on a civilizational scale during the Roman Empire.
It is not just architecture. The education system in Britain and America was originally based on the methods used by the Romans e.g. logic, rhetoric. It is not a coincidence that we use words like curriculum, syllabus. I can tell you it is pure joy to read some Latin works, they are so interesting and clear to read in a way I don't get from a newspaper of 2016 A.D.
Our political systems are deeply informed by the thoughts of the Greeks and Romans. The founders of America were particularly concerned about the failure modes of democracy that concerned ancients such as Plato and Cato, which is why in three days the electoral college is about to vote in the next President.
The reactionaries and conservatives in the West have always held the downfall of Rome up as a warning to present society of various failure modes, some of which are moral decline (corruption), lack of moral fibre/spirit/courage, subversive religions and civil conflict from non-assimilating ethnic groups.
Recently I've seen papers saying there is good evidence that Roman literacy rates were much higher than we formerly imagined. That certainly influenced how I thought about stagnation and decline. I am certain that humanity periodically goes through 'Year Zero' Resets that cause them to forget almost everything. If you'd like to have the pants scared off you, read Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies.
The problem is that terrorism leads to sectarianism, and sectarianism leads to civil war. Northern Ireland is an excellent example of this paradigm and it has been replicated in Syria.
Many people believe the same threat exists in Europe esp. France.
Perhaps a smart person is a rebel roleplaying as a conformist. In a game theoretic sense you get the most advantage without the penalty. It is one explanation I suspected but haven't seen for why contradictory traits might be expressed by somebody in or close to power.
> A conformist would mimic what the professor sees and pick his right one.
Less Wrong calls this 'Guessing the teacher's password'.
It's the art of mimicry. That there is no penalty for this in the education system is an indictment.
> Often it's a D student who knows the material the best
Even most A students will agree with you. There is an argument made by Alfie Kohn that grades should be abolished.
A huge portion of Muslim men are named Mohammad or some derivation thereof. There are notoriously few people called Mohammad who are not Muslim so the false positive rate isn't going to be very high.
If you wanted to start your database you would simply pick up a phonebook.
It isn't, this is the executive part of the government.
That aside misgivings and thoughts of bad faith by the opposing side are not special phenomenon.
I remember when Obama got in, Fox News got a temporary (1 year?) ban attending the whitehouse press conferences and panicking gun owners were making the cost of ammunition soar. He also has had a tendency to intervene in partisan issues, albeit most presidents are a little guilty of that.
Before that G.Bush was going to put all the atheists into Jesus Camp according to the websites I was visiting then. This later turned out to be preposterous. An imperfect president but not a totalitarian one.
A president/king is in the position where he has to balance power among multiple parties in order to accomplish a task. Even the likes of Saddam Hussein were in the same position.
Many people in Western society feel bored, miserable and lost. That's what is behind many of these conversions to Islam. It is first and foremost, a crisis of higher purpose and if it cannot be turned to a productive output it will likely metathesize into something worse.
I don't mind people doing this at a private university, but I think it questionable that we accept this at public universities. Imagine most economic programs were taught by Moldbug about Ludwig von Mises's doctrines.
Who else?
The evidence is that many people on the other side of the isle are more than comfortable submitting articles from Daily Kos, Huffington Post and Salon.
It's the recent BBC Sherlock that really took the biscuit though. Sherlock Holmes could not be less interested in solving crimes when it is a proto-feminist movement murdering men. Great job guys.
My hypothesis:
1. Counterintuitively, bad economic circumstances don't lead to chronic stress. People in countries with objectively terrible economic conditions are not more stressed or unhappier. It is simply: 'life'.
2. Caveat: Bad economic conditions do cause chronic stress where the media is projecting an illusion of rising success and wealth for the average person. This is because large numbers of people begin to feel left behind, even though most of their 'successful' peers are probably in debt to their eyeballs. Chronic stress is caused by the constant reminders in the form of fraudulent statistics, advertisements and social conditioning by fictional television shows that cause them to compare their circumstances to largely imaginary ideals.
My solution, which sounds drastic but I believe it to be meritorious, is to ban television (but we can keep the Nature channels). I believe a large number of social ills shall mostly disappear once this is accomplished.
Supporting evidence:
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/03/fijian-girls-s...
Interstellar strikes a nerve with myself also. I take the dysfunction theme seriously because we are in a Stagnation. There's a thoughtful essay on the subject by the science fiction author Neal Stephenson. He also wrote a book based on it. Surprising few people are aware of that.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/fall2011/innovation-starv...
It didn't just slip under HN's radar because of the temp ban on politics, my search results show Congress website, Wikipedia, Infowars and some forums. "Quiet" is understatement.
That there is jack shit from any media outlets hints that maybe a state order has gone out.
Otherwise I have to believe the major media has no interest in a law explicitly about #fakenews when they've been bitching about little else for the past two weeks.
I've never heard anything like it. Highly creative and matches the show's sinister plot perfectly.
And the media wonder why they've lost credibility.
Sure, I'm not really knocking what you're doing, it's just that there's a point at which you start to think "Wait, I've heard this before". Perhaps you become a cynic. I think it was the multicoloured light bulbs for the low low price of 200 dollars 99 cents for a pack of three that did me in. https://imgflip.com/i/1fqj14
> All of your ideas would be great but the technology isn't affordable it mature enough for consumers currently.
I don't really understand why it has to be so expensive. It's so expensive it's easier to roll your own magic mirror or whatever. I know the raw ingredients like sensors are cheaper than ever.