seph-reed

Much the opposite. Yours is the belief which every war has been fought over: the belief that you know what's good and bad, or right and wrong.

I am in no way saying we shouldn't pursue it, or do our best. But simply admitting that we could be wrong is the first step to catching our own mistakes.

Being aware of our own ignorance is important. Extremely so. And failing to see it is a far greater source of peril than "depart[ing] into theoretical/philosophical mode"

But compare that to someone who has no critical thinking skills at all.

Further, at least some people will be clever enough to use critical thinking on their own beliefs. Maybe some will only use it to further entrench, but not all. And it only takes a few amazing people to push society forwards; that's all we've ever really had.

> I can know that all the carbon we dump in the air and the general carelessness with which we treat the planet on a large scale are extremely detrimental to our civilisational wellbeing.

You really, really, really can not. For all you know, the impending doom of climate change could be the chaotic event that stops us from going full nuclear.

Or perhaps humans are bad fruit, and our form of space colonization is filled with rape, torture, and slavery. Perhaps it's better humans die.

One really, really, really can not know.

Hopefully, anyone who had taken even introductory critical-thinking would recognize what was going on there and throw the article out.

If the worry is, "this is one more way to convince non-critical people of things," I'm pretty sure that's a lost cause to begin with.

For the sake of not being an over-confident, fledgeling sentience ape; the complexity involved in the question of "is this good or bad" are absolutely, overwhelmingly complex.

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If you wanted to truly answer such a question you have to:

1. Be able to perceive multiple timelines in their entirety and

2. be able to convert those entire timelines into some comparable values

From where we stand, both of those are impossible, and whatever cascading effects may come from any action are completely invisible. We simply do not know the long term outcomes of our actions, and rarely can prove even short-term causation in the first place.

There's an ocean between:

- "I did x because I thought it was the right thing" and

- "I can tell what's good or bad in the world"

That's a good thing.

Having a giant political flamewar about how critical thinking should work has good potential to result in mutual destruction.

If you really play it out in your head, critical thinking is pretty hard to abuse because it tends to lean away from blind trust.

Every trick that could be taught to get people not to trust your enemy, is one less way you can take advantage of them yourself.

What if -- and I know this is a crazy idea -- but what if there was some sort of metric beyond popularity by which things were reported? Maybe even decided?

For instance: if there was a free online study (in person test) "critical thinking" series of classes, where you could become accredited as a person who knows at least the basics of how lying works, statistics can be manipulated, science is hard, etc, etc, etc... if you had that credential, it could be included in stats.

"While 85% of people say they're really worried about X, only 12% of critical-thinking accredited citizens consider it something worth focusing on."

Do you ever feel the impulse to "ctrl-f" when you're at the grocery store?

Imagine the feeling of going to reach for something, and accidentally just envisioning moving your arm. Might be like "stepping into air" when you're almost asleep.

Really, really like it. My one thought so far:

- it would be nice to not have to use Google for search.

I'm glad someone else feels it.

I gave it a shot, and once I got the algorithm to recognize me... it was addictive, but fake as fuck. Nothing really felt like it had love in it. And as much as I tried to push the algorithm towards educational content that actually taught me something new, it could only really show me silly "life hacks" that were clever, but I'll probably never use.

The "minority status" stuff seems fine in the grand scheme of adult world... people are fairly predictable passed a certain age (based off generation/origin). The generalizations obviously punch down on people who never really fit in with their "political identity", but misfits have never had it great.

With kids though!? It's so misguided. You don't know who they're gonna be.

This is a toughy.

People who don't believe in covid vaccines -- for instance -- are living in a world of anecdotes, untrusting of easily manipulable data.

But it's where we're at. In a world where you can't trust the data and your friends are addicted to consuming propaganda, what the fuck is truth?

A better title might be:

> Staggering US wealth inequality heaps long-term harm on to low-income children, minorities most affected

It would say everything there is to say without throwing non-minority low-income children under the bus. IMO, children are a bit too young and malleable for racial-identity profiling. They have insane amounts of potential for change, and putting them in racial boxes seems in poor taste.

I switched over to ElementaryOS for my movie/music/games/3d-modeling/video-editing/daw machine a bit ago.

It's pretty, and it (mostly) "just works." I legitimately believe this project is on its way to eat Windows and Apples pies.

Worth watching the progress of: https://elementary.io/

As a competent developer of user interfaces, I'd consider working for Microsoft career suicide.

It would look bad on my resume. And given how much of a mess it is, it sounds like a terribly stressful job. I think any dev who doesn't see those red flags (or care about them) is very, very likely incompetent.

Honestly, even they weren't it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. It's fairly incompetent to take a job that people believe is for incompetent people. Unless you totally turn shit around, which obviously nobody has.

They show this cycle infographic in the article:

https://profectusmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/tabrrok5...

I think one very, very crucial but taken for granted aspect of this cycle is "Natural population growth occurs."

It's stated as though this is inherent, and should be considered immutable. I disagree, and think that population growing beyond its capacity is not a symptom of capacity so much as growth.

When I gain weight, I don't blame my jeans for not fitting.

In my case, you basically just take some code like this:

    const renderEl = flex("UserList", [
      label("User", ["Alice"]),
      label("User", ["Bob"]),
    ]);

In NativeScript, you would have these functions create those types of UI elements. For web, they'd probably produce divs and spans.

Ofc, there will be certain elements that are native only, or require really special stuff to create.

I'm a solo developer, and I have a project that totally can do it. I've done the proof-of-concept in an afternoon, but am mostly focused on web stuff atm.

Granted, it leverages NativeScript, but it's really not that hard once you have that.

Is there a photo of what he's talking about anywhere?

> you could reasonably expect to create a confusing enough (though not identical) NFT with an earlier timestamp

The timestamp is the block-chain, not what's written on the document.

> Yes, but as a buyer, how do I know the difference?

As it stands, you'd have to know who you were buying from fairly well. Just as you would with a physical art piece (which could be also be a fraud).

Personally, I'd make sure that the image being hashed was also hosted somewhere only accessible through official means.

For instance, I'd have the louvre host the image denoting the NFT as ownership on their official website, then tweet them to make sure they weren't just hacked, and wait a few days to confirm.

But all of these issues are more related to what NFT's are now, vs what they may become. There are definitely ways of solving these issues.

Though I still don't see why any non-official NFT would ever be of any value.

> Then there would be two NFTs with the exact same "proof" in them. Which is the real one?

The one that came first. Are you really that invested in claiming knowledge on this subject? If so, how could you not immediately grok that this would be the answer?

> For example, that contract could be nullified or invalidated by a court opinion

Or it could be not. In which case, it would be embedding proof. Your argument hinges on the idea that something is impossible yet requires special circumstances to make it so, while my argument is that something is possible and gives an imaginable scenario for it.

if you hike more than 6 miles from any given trail-head, there will still be people but they usually aren't the kind to have their phone out.

if you start from a place without reception, doubly so.

> NFTs can't embed proof that they were created by anyone

NFT's aren inherent proof, but they can embed proof (if it exists).

If I took a photo of an idable, signed and noterized document stating that "the owner of X NFT is the owner of Y real item," then made that photo into an NFT, that would be embedding proof.

NFT's really confuse me.

Take the Mona Lisa for example: if the Louvre were ever to make their own NFT (perhaps with some embedded proof it was them creating it), wouldn't the "stolen" one suddenly lose all value?

I get NFTs from the perspective of "proof that you were first person able to claim a thing because you made it," and that having value. But claiming other peoples stuff seems like it's just going to correct itself.

I think the people this effects the worst are those who don't subscribe to either party, or the idea of a "one-dimensional political spectrum" in general. The dominating political "sides" are full on ideologies at this point, and if you don't worship their sacred cow: you could only ever be the other side in their eyes.

So the price for not falling into the two-party trap is that you have to just keep your mouth shut in all situations, lest you be ousted.

Anecdote: all of my friends who very much aren't falling for this two-party nonsense have had a common experience of being called Trumpers, Leftists, Anti-fa, Rednecks, and every other slur one side throws at the other. I'm not sure if it's a real litmus test or not, but I start to worry now when I've been getting too much of one and not enough of the other.

I strongly believe that it is possible.

Basically, there's an arms race between any democratic system and the people who live within it. We haven't updated ours in ages, and it shows.

I'd like to see more people talking about "liquid democracy." It too would be just another tit-for-tat in the arms race of corruption, but so it goes.

The beast we're trying to cage is us, every bit as clever. So we must be every bit as clever in how it is caged.

> dark pattern

Just to get the concept a soft introduction, there are people saying we should switch to the term "coercive design."

The reasons for it are fairly obvious, and I'm dubious about the degree to which some prioritize these things. But overall, "coercive design" is actually pretty descriptive, and I figured it's better coming from me than someone who likely consumes a lot of rage-bait and "dunking" fantasies in their free time.

I highly, highly recommend Elementary OS. https://elementary.io/

It's the only OS I know of that's remotely close to MacOS in terms of aesthetic, and with Proton I can play pretty much every game on Steam.

Try Elementary OS. They have a sweet pay-what-you-want model, and the UI is really nice. I'm always surprised how many people overlook it, given that it's IMO the only OS I know of with a nice UI that can play games.

https://elementary.io/

> it has been my experience that people blame a polarized environment for their own poor behavior though

I've seen a lot of both, and I think you should be very, very worried about your perspective on this.

There is an overwhelming amount of uncomfortable truths which people are hostile towards. Especially when those people have a narrative; narratives almost always being ideologically over-simplified and therefor in conflict with reality.

If you want a really easy one, I recommend looking into the statistical "math" behind the 75/100 wage-gap. It still blows my mind that one is not allowed to point out super faulty math, and that many people still hold that number to be truth.