125 karma · joined October 23, 2017
I'll see your contrarianism and raise you an ad hominem.
https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242...
As badly as these buildings suck, they at least make a gesture at a humane world.
Christopher Alexander tried to warn us.
And doubly unfortunately, even the gathering of experimental evidence is subject to this problem: funding is denied for politically incorrect studies, the methodological problems found in all real world experiments are emphasized in the studies we dislike, ignored in studies that confirm our biases, etc.
I appreciate the moral sentiment, and to an extent I even feel it myself, but being a denialist is not an answer. We need sane, sober and humane discussions about public policy dealing with the increasingly uncomfortable results coming from the genetic research community.
We don't focus enough on positive eugenics: getting smart, non-violent and conscientious people to have large families. Right now we do the opposite: smart folks feel all sorts of pressures to have a small or no family due to careers, the expense of elite schooling, the environment, etc. The opening scene of Idiocracy nailed it.
It is reasonable to look at soft negative eugenics, such as offering free, voluntary sterilization for reduction of prison sentences for violent crimes, but getting smart folks to have more kids is far more important.
All the more outrageous in an industry that likes to wear the mantle of empiricism.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/
Granting the validity of many aesthetic criticisms of over the top skeuomorphism, it will be a good day for users when the fashion-chasing flat ui era is over.
It was there.
I think "From Bauhause to Our House" is more important because we can survive a period of terrible art: most people will simply ignore it and when it is over you can throw most of it into the dumpster easily enough.
Unfortunately we are not free to ignore the work of architects, and correcting their mistakes will take us centuries.
The core problem in the mating world is that the middle of the female attractiveness curve is having sterile sex with the top of the male attractiveness curve and then failing to pair bond with the middle of the male attractiveness curve. This is due to female hypergamy coupled with male promiscuity, arising from the dynamics of male and female reproductive constraints.
Again, my concern is that if unstructured wealth transfer is treated as a panacea, it will end up having compounding dysgenic effects that outweigh whatever short term individual benefits come of it. This will, in the not very long run, make poverty worse.
It isn't saving me any karma since people can't be rational about this topic, but I'll stress again that I think we should help the poor for moral reasons.
[1] - It is important to specify adult intelligence, because interventions do appear to help childhood IQ, but this effect fades into adulthood and eventual life outcomes. This is why there was a lot of excitement around Head Start initially, but it has failed to produce the large changes in society that was hoped for.
See The Neuroscience of Intelligence by Richard Haier for an overview of the current consensus in intelligence research.
We should help poor and less intelligent people for moral reasons, but it is unlikely to improve intelligence in the poorer population and, if the aid is structured dysgenically, it will serve only to compound the problem.
I get infinity.
It costs infinity to build a startup.
The issues with the latest macbooks are real and severe, but running windows or linux, even on nice hardware like an X1, remains a sufficiently annoying and disruptive change to stop people. We can all hope that eventually this will change, but as of right now I don't see a forcing function.
However, the article doesn't even rise to my low expectations: it boils down to a freshman-year philosophy major's denial of free will, smeared across various aspects of life. Fine, whatever.
But we have NO OPTION but to treat people as if they have free will, since we have no free will in the matter. And, furthermore, talking and writing is pointless, since we have NO ABILITY to control what we think.
Unfortunately, the author can't choose not to write. I must say, I have no option but to wish sincerely that he could.
On the other hand, if you enjoy the surprise of financial crises every decade and major currency crises every five decades, you can continue listening to modern economists.
Historically, however, debt has been social nitroglycerine, which is why Christianity outlawed usury and Judaism had a 50-year debt jubilee built into it. We will relearn this lesson eventually, but in the meantime our bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire.
"Economic division was built into USD: you either pay interest on Treasury bonds, or you live off it."
https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3531_60/wake-up-light
It also dramatically improved my depression.
Wealth redistribution is inevitable at this point, ideally in the form of debt jubilee but, given the political power of the banking class, more likely via something more chaotic.
The problem to solve is distributing economic viability more widely across the country and then building more cities and towns in the density that supports family formation and doesn't dehumanize the occupants: single family homes on 5-12k square foot lots surrounding walkable commercial districts.
Allowing our population to naturally stabilize by restricting immigration would help too.
https://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/HF3531_60/wake-up-light
The usability of this model is terrible, but it changed my life, allowing me to get up consistently before 7AM without being groggy. Surprisingly it was the "sunset" feature that fades natural yellow sunlight light into a deep red that really helped by allowing me to fall asleep consistently when I wanted to.
I can't guarantee it will work for everyone, but it made a large difference in my life.