nostromo95

I'm sure this aesthetic relativism holds up under argument, but this is an 'anti realization' that:

-Reduces explanatory power (if Moby-Dick and 50 Shades are the same, why has one been lauded for 100 years, minted the careers of countless academics, etc.?)

-Makes the world less interesting

Pension funds have a different time horizon / cash flow needs than individual investors (namely, they need to meet their liabilities every month) and so are going to have a more conservative asset mix (read: lower expected returns w/ lower volatility) than your average S&P500 index funds.

For example, CaLPERS has ~45% of their assets under management in debt / real estate.

>You can't evaluate how good of a writer someone is unless you already know what they are trying to explain.

I object to this premise.

Trivial counterexample: Is it impossible to evaluate the quality of a novelist because we don't have a common understanding of the plot of a novel until after I've read it? Clearly not.

Even in a post-modernist literary paper you can still judge the writer's cohesiveness of thought and clarity of argument.

Edit:

>The correctness of the content is subjective. If the correctness of the content is objective, and mutually understood, then any confusion added during the writing is bad writing.

I also don't understand how post-modernism comes into it. Is talking about the theme of insanity in Hamlet any more objective/correct than writing about the influence of race in Moby-Dick? If so, how?

Tehanu is my favorite in the series; I'm sorry you feel that way!

> And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment.

Two people with a long-standing attraction having sex after a life-or-death experience seems completely natural to me. Your framing of them having sex BECAUSE Ged killed a man is a misrepresentation of what happens in the book.

Would you mind quoting a source?

You might be a non-native speaker, but the title is trying to say his works evoke a darker America rather than that being a work he's written.

Yes but the only way repeated cooperation can be maintained is if players can “punish” defectors by also defecting for a certain # of turns (thus making the PV of breaking ranks and defecting < keeping cooperating for every player).

SBF’s situation is different in that the game ends as soon as someone defects.

However, in Montaigne's essays he often doesn't have a clear thesis at the beginning of the essay. You are reading his (magisterial) thinking transcribed onto the page.

The OP gestures towards a thesis ('here's why society's championing of cleverness is bad') and then spends paragraphs meandering around it.

Charitably, I think what OP was getting at is that there was no pressure to arrest / prosecute Shkreli quickly because his actions hadn’t in actuality physically or monetarily harmed people, unlike, e.g., Theranos.

> A high % of the people in your company primarily care about vision, goals, and priorities. To them, that is a strategy.

Would be nice if the author defined what he thinks “strategy” is. It’s not obvious to me that the above is not strategy.

In general in business it seems the concept of strategy is whatever people need it to be in order for them to feel smarter than their coworkers.

You got me—funny thing is I took a couple analysis courses in school so I should have been more careful making such a strong statement.

Essays by Montaigne. The best way I can describe Montaigne is it’s like talking to a brilliant, compassionate best friend.

AFAIK "standard distribution" is not a defined mathematical term; usually it's shorthand for standard normal distribution.

Can't comment on intelligence distributions.

Any symmetrical distribution will have the mean equal the median.

>am I using that reference right?

Looks right to me! Although interestingly it’s unclear which book / Book you’re referring to, as the expression comes from Exodus 2:22:

“And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”

Literally that’s the point of the article.

Truly those squirrels were blessed.

I did some work at a utility company a few years back where I had access to a database of every historical outage across the system along with such info as the diagnosed cause.

Thousands of outages were caused by “Wildlife (Squirrel)”—more than once it crossed my mind that this file was the last record of those squirrels’ lives on Earth!

That’s a good point.

I was imagining some sort of anonymized records database—turns out you can look up specific names which I agree yields some undesirable outcomes.

Invasive to whom?

I'm certainly not going to be feeling outraged by medical records disclosure when I'm dead. Do with me what you will when I'm gone--I care more about my experience when I'm alive.

“We are I know not how double within ourselves, so that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” -Montaigne

Agreed.

Playing through Elden Ring made it clear to me how impressive Breath of the Wild was in retrospect. Even without any meaningful awards (or because of?) the exploration in BotW is just so much more memorable and dynamic.

Yes I do mean exactly that. It's entirely possible for both these things to be true:

- Everyone believes that if they and everyone else had a 32 hour work week, they'd be happier

- Everyone stays at 40 hours per week when given the choice of independently moving to a 32 hour work week due to social / economic pressures

In this case a government law helps everyone coordinate to get out of a local maximum.

Seems like we're mixing up couple things here--(a) the level to which a government represents the people and (b) the powers that a government should have.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the government is--in its ideal essence--just a way for a population to collectively enforce compliance with / contribution to a social good.

I don't think it's controversial to say that if 100% of people wanted a 32 hour work week, the government should probably pass a law mandating that. Separately we can argue about the tendency for the aims of government to diverge from the aims of the citizenry or there being a slippery slope, but the "legitimate role" of government is representing the people.

Eh whether government should have the right to do this takes a backseat to the fact that the government is the only way we can do this.

The government is the only coordinating mechanism we have to enforce something like this, otherwise everyone is playing the prisoner’s dilemma.

Montaigne often talks about this, but something that's true about virtue is that you can't disconnect the action from the motivation.

Often what on the surface appears like virtuous fortitude is actually obstinacy and lack of self-awareness / imagination!

Well, (a) just because they invested in Coinbase, which does crypto, doesn’t mean they have as much confidence in crypto as they have in Coinbase—betting on Coinbase is a bet on the volatility of crypto + Coinbase’s ability to win, not a bet on the price of crypto, (b) you have to pay taxes in dollars, (c) their investors probably want dollars.

Well despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.

You are definitely misinterpreting the metaphor...

‘Shape’ != personal identity or ability. Shape is the sum of the work someone does (in fact, a triangle—if that even has any meaning over a circle in this framework—is a perfectly acceptable shape bc it’s convex and simple).

If one of a manager’s jobs isn’t to coordinate what work everyone does I’m not sure what you think managers do.

They sleep for 13 hours a day?