lukas099

Is there any value to state lottoes as a containment strategy? Like, letting people gamble via legal, approved channels weakening the black market and therefore the mob?

> The rationalist community is most definitely not exclusive.

I agree, and didn't intend to express otherwise. It's not an exclusive community, but it is a community, and if you aren't in it you are in the out-group.

> The problem isn't differing opinions, the problem is that they disregard actual expertise and try ham-fisted attempts at "first principals" evaluations of a subject while ignoring contradictory evidence

I don't know if this is true or not, but if it is I don't think it's why people scorn them. Maybe I don't give people enough credit and you do, but I don't think most people care how you arrived at an opinion; they merely care about whether you're in their opinion-tribe or not.

So we've come to the difference of opinions, which is that your definition of slavery excludes those convicted of a crime, while others' doesn't. Not a very interesting point to debate on.

In my opinion, we still have slaves in the USA. (In prison, as explicitly allowed by the 13th Amendment)

> The Black community began using the word Juneteenth for Jubilee Day early in the 1890s. [1]

I thought it was a neologism until I looked it up. Turns out, I'm just white.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth

This is vibe-based, but I think the Rationalists get more vitriol than they deserve. Upon reflecting, my hypothesis for this is threefold:

1. They are a community—they have an in-group, and if you are not one of them you are by-definition in the out-group. People tend not to like being in other peoples' out-groups.

2. They have unusual opinions and are open about them. People tend not to like people who express opinions different than their own.

3. They're nerds. Whatever has historically caused nerds to be bullied/ostracized, they probably have.

On the other hand, bio is the branch of science with a single accepted "theory of everything": evolution.

Last I looked into it, the tire companies were looking at making rubber from dandelions, somehow. Seemed like it would be great if it actually became viable.

I think they mean they don't emit a "natural" orange (like an orange flower) that is really some kind of sum of many wavelengths. I could be wrong though.

Yes, I should have added 'bullying' to the 'dissing' explanation. It was certainly that too.

I don't think it's auto-censorship as much as language changing. For me, 'retard' is 99% associated with my friends dissing each other as kids, and 1% associated with 'delay'.

M$ used to be an appropriate name for Microsoft. It still is, but it used to be, too.

But that’s making your simulation deliberately less interesting, no?

> Attributing that to a divine intervention is the most probable explanation.

You lost me here. It seems humans have a predisposition to believe in divine beings, so this just sounds like taking human biases as a basis for truth. What's wrong with saying, "I don't know?"

This reminds me of what Jordan Peterson does, which is to define "God" as something that we know exists. He defines it as the fundamental value upon which other values are built; you define it as consciousness.

I've always thought arguments like these are unnecessarily applying a term loaded with human conceptions and biases in a way that doesn't shed any further light on the thing it's applied to. Like, what do we gain by defining "God" as consciousness? Why can't we just say "consciousness"? And is it worth the added confusion that when we say "God", we now don't mean what most people think "God" is?

The only reason I can come up with to do this is discomfort at saying, "I don't believe in God."

The gods in different cultures aren't just named differently, have different properties.

To me, calling the unknown "God" is imposing a term loaded with human preconception and biases in exactly the place you don't want those things.

To quote the philosopher Hank Hill, "Yeah, yeah, I know, everything is one way, then it's the opposite."

Yes. Who are these people paying for jobs that don't do anything, and why are they more concerned about "keeping people busy" than their own profits?

I never thought either of them was a shoo-in, especially Harris. Was that really a consensus?

The surname thing was extremely common even outside of sports at my high school.

Hell I’d take a pub. Bring back the neighborhood pub.

> But the overall problem isn't cars, it's individual traffic in densely populated areas.

I disagree; it’s cars.

My take was that other animals didn’t exist either, in the story.

Experience of encountering things that were previously unknown unknowns would teach it of the general existence of such things.

Sounds like every group of people ever, when viewed through the biased sample of “people who post”.

It’s a belief about a great future change, but there’s nothing supernatural or totally implausible about it. And it doesn’t sound like they were preaching it as the absolute truth, but were open that it was just their belief. Also, no social rites or rituals mean that despite them telling it to people who didn’t care to hear it, I am not convinced that their belief was very religious.

Also, “As a teenager” implies more self-awareness than you seem to give them credit for.

Yes, it was the same with nukes, each side had to build them because the other side was building them.

Pretty sure Kagi’s users are disproportionately software workers by a large margin, though.

Move fast and break kids