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Kirk was being criticised by Ms. Rachel, who used a section of Leviticus ("love thy neighbour") to push back on Kirk's assertion of homosexuality as a sin. Kirk's response to Ms. Rachel was that merely a few sections later, the same Leviticus says that gays should be stoned to death.

That's a way for him to win an argument over the Bible's view on homosexuality, not a way for him to endorse the notion that gays should be stoned to death.

(And most importantly, literalists assert that that laws of Leviticus were repealed by Jesus, so even if he were a literalist Christian, the straightforward interpretation is that he does not endorse stoning gays, since Jesus repealed that law)

Tribalism is awful for societies. There’s a reason Russia put so much effort into amplifying it in the west.

The owner decides the rules.

We don’t need to step back and work out the fundamental nature of sex and gender in order to have a functional conversation about them.

I don’t need to provide a definition of a chair before I can tell you that ones with three legs are more stable (“but what is a chair? what is the exact definition? aren’t some of them tables? aren’t some three legged chairs less stable?”). We just don’t have to do this. Do you do it for chairs? Or just gender? Why? Does it help feminism or trans rights to interrupt a conversation about male mental health with a semantic rabbit hole?

As for your second paragraph, there very much are studies showing the correlation being described, and they’re very easy to find. It would have been far more constructive to actually ask rather than suggest it’s an “assumption” — or even better, to research it yourself.

You /s, but when I quit the internet completely, I did become a voracious reader of books. I also spent hours practicing piano. And I went to bed on time.

Like you I also have diagnosed and untreated ADHD. But at this point it feels like it's a misdiagnosis and I'm simply incompatible with the internet.

I do think you need to define 'comprehension' in order to be certain. A statement fitting the form of "it doesn't comprehend, it just X" is incomplete, because it fails to explain why X is not a valid instance of comprehension.

TV use was higher in the 2000s than it was in the 1980s/1990s. TV viewing hours steadily rose from 1949 until finally peaking in 2010.[1]

But when TV finally peaked in 2010, did overall screen time go down? No. It kept going up.[2] Obviously, this is when the masses went all-in on smartphones, social media, and the internet.

Screen usage basically never went down. It has only gone up.

So I only see anyone getting tired of smartphones and actually using them less if they've found something more addictive to replace them.

[1] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/3FzEghXwS-KkIYu1KwG-YyHh... (from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...) [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-free-time-became-scre...

That's a big part of why they're cool.

Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music.

I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds.

Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.

You could argue that Harrison and Starr always deserved some of the writing credit, since they often determined their parts, and I wouldn't actually disagree with that -- though Lennon and McCartney were kinda control freaks, so I'm not sure how much leeway was actually given. When they started bringing in extra instruments, again, there is arguably some extra credit to be given to Martin and others, but Lennon and McCartney were still strongly directing what was to be played.

For what it's worth -- and this is going to get me hated even more than my popstar-skepticism -- I don't really like the Beatles that much. But it's transparent that they did more than Taylor Swift because they were specifically and precisely writing the melodies for the instruments being played.

Sophie was an example. I didn't see it necessary to talk about all the artists involved in PC Music to make the point that the producers on the label pioneered the sound.

Look at the credits for her albums. She had producers and writers credited on every single song. This IS a lot of help. You're acting like she just did a couple of collabs with AG Cook and that's it. She had many different people helping her on the actual composition and production of every single song.

This is the point being refuted -- that the popstars are geniuses responsible for carrying the burden of their rise. It's mythology. The reality is that they bring performance skills and charisma to the table, some non-awful lyrical skill, and then the lion's share of actually making the music work is done by producers and writers. They would be nowhere without the producers. The producers would be nowhere without the popstars. But it's the most common poptimist mistake to confuse the popstar's charisma for the producer's mastery.

If you're writing for a guitar and voice, then you've basically got a song, but pop music is built on sometimes hundreds of different instruments and effects.

Charli XCX, like nearly all popstars, was propped up by the producers and writers who shaped her sound and composed large parts of the music. Producers have been there the whole way. In particular, her blowing up was highly influenced by the stylistic direction, composition, production and sound engineering of people associated with the PC Music record label. The statement that she had good enough taste to have been around these people is rather unfair -- she was around artistic innovators like Sophie, yes, but THEY are the ones that pioneered the sound.

The most common refrain is that popstars often write their music. This is misleading: they write the lyrics, suggest a general vibe, and some rough melodies or chords. And even this is a stretch many times. They are not composing or producing the music in any larger sense, and this is the pivotal part of actually making music.

One famous exception that comes to mind is Grimes, who largely actually /makes/ her own music. She rarely seems to get credit for this.

This is not to say that vocalist popstars don't bring a lot to the table. They do. But what they bring to the table is incredible performance skill and charisma. I think poptimism has gone too far, to the point that we think the product was responsible for creating itself.

E minor gives you the exact same amount of options as C major. The options are just shuffled around a little bit. You literally get the same amount of notes in either, just a slightly different set. It isn't any more complex. Listeners aren't going to notice a difference, except one will probably sound happy and one will probably sound sad/angry. The "acceptance volume", to use the blog author's term, isn't any different.

At best, it can change things a little bit for some instruments. For example, with a vocalist, their voice can only go so high. They might be able to hit up to a high C, but not even higher up to an high E. If you're in C major, that's great, the vocalist's highest note (C) is the 'home note' which sounds great (playing a C in C Major makes the song sound like it's 'finished'). If you're E minor, the 'home note' is E, and as mentioned they wouldn't be able to hit that note. So you wouldn't really be able to 'finish' on a high note.

Ultimately, I doubt the author is a musician. It was a strange example to make their point.

> iPhone immediately caught on like wild fire.

> I'm not saying there won't be users, but it's a much smaller population.

The facts say you're wrong about this.

The adoption rate for the iPhone was slow. There were only 1.4 million iPhones sold in its first year,[1] whereas there were 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users in its first year.[2]

ChatGPT is not niche, and is not a 'much smaller population'. Right now it has 800 million weekly active users. That's how many iPhones were active in 2017. Are we to say that iPhones were a niche in 2017? It's how many smartphones in general were active at the start of 2012. Are we to say that smartphones were a niche in 2012?

[1] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...

[2] https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/

[3] We can go deeper on this data, but these are generally accepted figures, and I have seen no figures that agree with your statements

The frustrating thing is, back when computers were "silly" and "not ready", the type of person you'd now find on Hacker News saw it as an exciting impetus to build a new world. With virtual reality, all I see is a collective eyeroll. It's honestly tragic. This is a burgeoning medium, a new form of art. For most of human history, people didn't get to experience that even once in their entire lifetime. And the response is cynicism.

The only explanation I have is that we are so inundated with stimulus, so overwhelmed with entertainment, that we no longer feel a drive to build a new form of it. We're all drugged up on social media, and can't see the potential of a new medium even when it's literally right in front of our faces.

"Transphobia" is not the same as "damaging societal perceptions of transgender people". My colleague is transphobic. He hasn't damaged societal perceptions of transgender people, because he doesn't have a massive platform. Charlie Kirk, who I agree is transphobic, went one step further and actually impacted large groups of people's beliefs.

Your assumption that I was minimizing the damage he did with my wording is the opposite of correct; I was using that wording to express that the damage he did was worse than simply being transphobic.

Please do not assume the worst of me.

With that said, the person asked how Charlie's quote could stoke violence, and then you invented a significantly stronger, more inciteful quote (something Charlie didn't say) as an answer for why it stoked violence.

This is not a response that will convince people of your position. I'm not sure on the best way to do that, but I believe it starts by staying clear about what was actually said.

Reducing this to the naturalistic fallacy is inappropriate.

Notice the commenter said "most likely". He's using a heuristic. When we are working with incomplete knowledge (e.g. lack of studies on phenoxyethanol), naturalism is a useful probabilistic heuristic because we are /generally/ adapted to what was in our ancestral environment. It's also a useful heuristic to defer to things we have a significant amount of understanding of (olive oil) than things we have little understanding of (a concoction invented in the 2010s).

When we say "natural", by the way, we are approximately referring to what humans adapted to by natural selection. Eating large amounts of cyanide isn't "natural" just because it's in nature; that's semantic confusion.

No one objects to saying a zoo animal should be eating its "natural" diet, and that its enclosure should represent its "natural" habitat, because this is a generally true useful heuristic. Maybe the apes are going to be healthier if you put them in a VR headset with Half-Life: Alyx and feed them protein shakes -- where's the research? -- but I'm not going to put that on equal footing until the research is out. Until then, I'll go with naturalism.

There are artificial things that are very good for us, such as vaccines. But we know this because we have sufficient research. When we don't have sufficient research, heuristics like naturalism are going to give you better results on average.

>The pantheon of capricious gods living on mount olympus? Harvesting the sweat of wrestlers to use as treatment for genital warts?

He said they got "some" things right. It's implied that they got a lot of other things wrong.

Go watch any long-form interview with him, such as with Lex Fridman. It becomes rather clear that he wants to be more like how Steve Jobs is seen by the wider public: as an innovator and pioneer, not as a power-hungry moneymaker.

I'm 5'3" and haven't needed to take 'drastic measures' to find women interested in me, both in real life and online. I would say that the majority of women 5'4" or under don't consider my height a dealbreaker, even if it's a disadvantage (which it definitely is). Yes, taller women are another story, but the average height of a woman in the US is 5'4".

So why does my experience differ with the conclusion you've drawn? My guess: I have a pretty good looking face, a reasonably fit body, and I'm a musician. In other words, height excluded, I'm above-average in attractiveness. And that's evidently enough to take away the whole dealbreaker thing, if it existed in the first place.

I know it's an n=1, but your statement is so profoundly certain that an n=1 is enough weaken it.

I can score a 100% accuracy rate by predicting things that everyone knows are going to happen (humans will still exist in 2025, the sun will rise in 2050, etc.). A futurist is not useful when they are merely accurate, but when they are accurate about events that no one else expected.

It is inappropriate to compare someone like Kurzweil to Caplan. Caplan is just trying to be correct. Kurzweil is trying to make predictions about black-swan events -- the things people don't see coming. These are different ballgames, and the ballgame of predicting unexpected events is inherently more difficult.

> There is no contradiction here; the correlation you think you see is not causation.

You're doing literally the exact same thing. You're pointing to chemical differences in people with depression and saying "there, that's causation! it has nothing to do with lifestyle or life events!". Consider that the chemical differences that result in depression could be caused by lifestyle factors and life events (and it's undisputed that these things cause chemical differences).

> You misunderstood. Daylight regulates mood. Sunlight can cure depression; it does not cause depression.

No, it's you who misunderstood me. If sunlight cures depression, then our basic actions in life are the issue, i.e. our lifestyle is a low-sunlight lifestyle (something very much in conflict with the environment our brains evolved in).

You simply haven't given enough evidence to back up your confidence on the idea that depression isn't caused by our actions in life, or life events. Yes, brain chemistry is involved, we know that. But our actions and experiences affect our brain chemistry. So you're going to have to work a lot harder than you have to rule it out.

The most I can see you saying is that the start of the causal chain (life events) doesn't matter because you only care about the end of the causal chain (brain chemistry). But this is a wildly different statement to saying that actions or life events aren't part of the causal chain, which you appear to be asserting.

You're basically saying "getting shot doesn't kill you, bleeding to death does!"

Do you have any evidence for this? This contradicts some studies I've seen on the matter, for example, one where 75% of chronically depressed patients reported clinically significant histories of childhood trauma.[1]

Not to mention that your second cure, sunlight, is literally an example of things we've done or events in the outside world (i.e. time spent outside).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677006/

The availability of prolonged solitude to practice an instrument is an aberration in human existence. Modern humans, and the historic rich, do not represent the wider experience of human existence. Unless you think compelling musicians are also an aberration in human existence, I personally believe a wider perspective is needed.

~

As an aside, here's an article with Dave Grohl and Ringo Starr talking about how they never practice alone: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/dave-grohl...

GROHL: Well, I remember we talked about this. I think we were talking about practicing. . . .

STARR: I never practice [laughs].

GROHL: Nor do I! Because I don’t like playing alone. I only like playing when there’s music.

STARR: I’ll play with you all night, but on my own, after two and a quarter seconds, I’m like, “Ugh. That’s not what it’s about.” When I’m doing shows, and people hold up their little seven-year-old: “This is Tommy. He loves you, and he’s taking drum lessons.” And I always say, “I hope he’s not taking too many!”

The article essentially suggests that considerable solitude is required to really take one's writing to a higher place. That might be the true, or it might not be true, and it depends on how we define 'good writing'. But we can agree that it's not so easy to dismiss.

On the other hand, the title plainly states: 'creativity requires solitude'. That's a clear-cut statement. And it's extremely debatable. Not to mention that Rilke never even said that.

Yes, I'd agree that all professional jazz musicians have spent considerable time working on their craft alone. That doesn't detract from what I was saying. Professional jazz musicians aren't the only type of people who do jam sessions, and they're not the only type of compelling artist.

In fact, even if every single artist in the world had spent considerable time studying alone, that doesn't necessarily mean it's required. The fact is, every single piece of music theory, every single thing you can read from a book or hear from a record, every single practice session, can be done in a group. It may just be that people prefer not to do that, or don't have the resources to do that.

If I understand correctly, your belief is that the art of 'highest value' is created in a vacuum from the approval of others. That's okay. However, for myself, and usually for most others, the most valuable art is simply that which brings them the greatest joy.

When it comes to creating art, I receive the greatest joy when I'm also giving others joy. I'm much better able to give others joy when I consider their tastes. So I take my own (actually quite extreme) desire for experimentation, my own sense of aesthetics, and find where that overlaps with people's tastes. It's a hybridization. Not top-down, or bottom-up.

My argument is that most people, being essentially prosocial, gain the most fulfilment when they incorporate the tastes of others. And sometimes, our value system can make us feel less fulfilled. In this case, I believe that the value system of 'ignoring the approval of others' makes most people feel less fulfilled.

Simply put, it's like sex: the best sex is simultaneously self-focused and other-focused. I view art exactly the same.

That's a loneliness epidemic. Whether or not rich people isolate doesn't contradict this.

[1]: https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/loneliness-in-america [2]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/23/7986764...

Civilization is highly alienating and dislocating, but we evolved in an environment in which we were near-permanently embedded within a tribe (or village) of people we knew extremely well. Strangers were relatively rare.

Rilke confused his alienating environment for a fundamental truth.

But not necessarily. Some musicians exclusively learn to play through being taught and jamming with others. I admit it's rare, and even as an extrovert it's not true for myself.

However, for a more damning condemnation of this "creativity requires solitude" viewpoint, we only need to venture into the world of improv theatre. Almost everyone in improv is unleashing non-stop creativity, but they've almost never practiced improv alone. It's the total counterpoint to this unnecessary association between artistry and isolation.

Highly extroverted artists exist. They rarely create alone. They rarely practice alone. I urge people to acknowledge that this is a worthy way to be a compelling artist, rather than acting like the preference of the introverted artist is the only worthy way of doing things.