BingoAhoy

Yes I agree with you and Descartes the only thing we can be certain of as conscious observers is we exist.

But I moved on from moderate uncertainty leading to a default of skepticism.

Some actions have very predictable outcomes even if they aren't guaranteed. with those I like to use the vernacular that implies certainty. That's how I feel about nuclear exchange. But I don't associate the probabilities of expectation of nuclear exchange and invasion as conditional upon each other. A surprise outcome in an invasion of a nonnuclear non-nato state wouldn't lead me to feel a nuclear exchange probability suddenly becomes inverted similarly.

Because countries have invaded others during nuclear times. That should come as no surprise to a student of history even if many didn't expect Putin to in this particular instance.

But the pressing matter is would Putin use nukes? Would he use nukes if it means easy escalation to a mutual exchange where him and his country would end up as ash? Nah I don't believe he would unless some development allowed him to nuke with impunity.

You thought Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine. I had other opinions.

Russia isn't going to nuke anyone. It's a gambit to make NATO pause and slow down their reaction.

History is full of nuke threats and no follow through (well except 2 incidents).

Money is fake, it's an abstraction made of cheap throw away goods (what money is printed on) used as a representation for real resources. I personally wouldn't count it as relevant but it does buy access to what is relevant.

I would add to your list, some of the finite resources I can think of that's wasted here is labor per human per year. The labor of those boat builders. It's an opportunity cost type of waste.

Stephen King was an English major. Word art, literature, helps people advance cognitively.

English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated.

Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.

I've always been curious about who's winning the lionshare of the pie of these gluttonous institutions. Is it administrators? they're an easy scape goat. Does it fund more research, so presumably the PHDs and their research assistants?

"Big tech permabanned me and doesn't mind false positives"

Isn't this often the case with humans minus the algorithm making the decision? Many times of the few times I've been in trouble, with HR, the law, or whatever authority you realize doing things that seem bad but aren't actually bad is almost as dangerous as doing something actually harmful because turns out humans aren't very good judges of ambiguous cases in low information environments.

Even when not ambiguous humans by and large don't have a good grasp of what is or isn't moral. And they typically show a large lack of empathic ability for how their actions will effect others.

This isn't unique to coders. Various successful writers have also reported the same issue. They only have a few super productive hours a day.

Is it too pessimistic? Human history is filled with empires dominating their weaker neighbors, culling many of them (though not all), for the INgroup's self interest (it's also useful to keep subordinates around to do the menial labor). Even the less ruthless of these "imperialistic" entities such as the United States have a outstanding record. The native Americans can pay witness.

Not to mention what we do to animals. I read during just Superbowl Sunday 500 million chickens are slaughtered for the delight of eating chicken wings in the living room. If animals are nonconscious entities that don't suffer akin to robots then no harm no foul, but that is quintessential mass-scale devouring of another.

Both you and the parent could be correct. I see a lot of spurious speculation in various forms but only certain speculation is more likely to get downvoted. Case in point the speculation surrounding the motivations of some unknown anonymous poster downvoting the grandgrandparent based off of extrapolating from other downvotes elsewhere.

I feel similarly. The art is amazing and really sucks you. But that perhaps is it's downfall, overfocus on aesthetics and creativity rather than gameplay. David Jaffe the creator of God of War mentioned that the lead developers of the game were creative people rather than people that have the qualities of finishing things up. Forget his exact words, but that was the gist of it.

Yes. From personal experience I've found people who readily offer "you should" fail to adequately investigate and listen to comphrehend important contextual factors and differing values. These might determine what is situationally positive or negative.

Advice that I've usually found more valuable was formatted as "here's an option and here are the possible pros and cons". These people also did more listening than 'should-ing'. They also didn't have the audacity to tell you what is best, which is implied by 'should', because they weren't in your shoes and neither completely informed of the context so how would they know what's best?