Hacker News Reader

montefischeron In Poland, there is a LARP group that roleplays as contemporary Americans

Casual boxing rings in forests at night with suit-and-tied refs seem to belong more to the old, weird America of Desolation Row than the worn out Walmartland of today.

montefischeron My students cheated... a lot

Would things like this still occur if a person's educational history data were treated like their medical data under HIPAA? It is the cleanest proposal I have seen for decoupling education from careerist motivations.

montefischeron Persist or let it go: a study of entrepreneurial decision making

I like to use short metaphorically, outside of financial contexts. For example, the decision to own guns is short civilization, as others have put it.

You may be interested in prediction markets for study replication, where you can a real (financial) short position against bad studies: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-p...

montefischeron Persist or let it go: a study of entrepreneurial decision making

Agreed. The American cultural conception of entrepreneurship includes delusion, failure, unethical behavior (recent TV series come to mind).

Scientists and possibly medical professionals are still intuitively treated as rational and correct. Just think about how people shorting consensus medical or scientific opinion are treated in popular media / society compared to those criticizing entrepreneurs and capitalists.

montefischeron Success determined by ability to speak, ability to write, and quality of ideas

I believe that a crucial component of rigorous college education today is the acculturation into an ability to sell, spin, etc. absolutely anything into a persuasive, confident, narrative delivery --- putting the BS in bachelor's degree, one might say.

montefischeron Southern thought, islandness and real-existing degrowth in the Mediterranean

For those interested, Ivan Illich wrote a series of books criticizing the modern approach to healthcare, education, transportation, gender etc. from a perspective that might be called "degrowth" today. A great introductory essay on Illich (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/05/the-corruption-of...) was published recently in American Affairs. In my experience, the power of a single personality passionately committed to an idea is usually a better introduction than an academic survey article. Illich was a radical and none of his ideas come with batteries included, but exploring his ideaspace was an invigorating experience for someone who had hitherto only pitched his tent in the libertarian technocapitalist suburbs of the mind.