• 5 Posts
  • 138 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I’ll admit I did get a kick out of the “don’t panic” dashboard.

    But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):

    I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.

    It’s backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can’t afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!

    Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!




  • How nice it must be to never ponder how large humanity is, and how each and every person you see outside has a full and rich interior and exterior world, and you that only see a tiny fraction of the people outside.

    Personally one of my “oh other people are real!” moment, was when our parents (along with my sisters) took us on a surprise ferry trip to England (from France) and our grandparents that—at least as far as kid me remembered—we only ever saw in their home city, were waiting for us in Portsmouth, and we visited the city together (Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is quite nice btw).

    I knew they were real, but realizing that they weren’t geo-locked, made me more fully internalize that they had full and independent lives, and therefore that everyone had.


    How about people here? When did you realize people are real?














  • Also a subjectively bad one at that—given his america-brained position on wanting to maintain a single executive not that suprising but:

    • Why do you even need to default to winner-take-all?
    • Under winner-take-all dont you inherit most of the downside of FPTP? Sure there might be less wasted votes, but doesn’t actually make harder for 5% parties to get representation, since dominant parties have less of an incentive to negotiate and/or coallition build. (Though I guess subjective given Yud’s apparent dislike of many party working together in a coalition)
    • For a “runoff” system, the STAR system has the dubious distinction of allowing the condorcet loser—a candidate that would lose 1 vs 1 matchup against every other candidate in the field—to win, because a very enthiusastic minority can give a bunch of 5-star ratings.
    • At least FPTP has simplicity going for it, and not trying to arbitrarily compare not completely informed star ratings from voters.