citadel_melon

Most people outside of SF have never heard of Y Combinator

Reminds me of the task “don’t think of a pink elephant.” The first thing you do is think of a pink elephant.

The solution is to land on what you want your audience to do in the affirmative. For the pink elephant you can say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant: put your mental energy into imagining Mikey mouse riding a surf board.”

Similarly, here we can say something like “If you’re feeling suicidal, do x.” I’m not sure what x should be. Maybe call a hotline. I would have to think more about it, but the point is that landing on an affirmative action in this manner will offset the “pink elephant” effect.

I had aphantasia and then taught myself to see images too.

It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.

People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.

Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.

Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.

Would you mind sharing your thoughts more?

Public unions are fine as long as there is a counterweight.

What do I mean by a counterweight? For example, the MLB owners hold a monopsony over hiring pro baseball athletes, but the athletes have their own monopoly via the MLBPA. The result of this bilateral monopoly is that MLB players get better compensated than most other pro athletes. Of course the MLB is private, but I’m illustrating one type of counterweight.

You can have a similar system for public prisons requiring public unions, and Norway found a creative counterweight. Norway unionizes the prison correctional officers, but they also allow incarcerated people the right to organize; this allows them to negotiate wages, safety, and education programs. This provides a nice counterweight as prisoners have an incentive to advocate against correctional officer bloat/waste so those resources go to inmates, while correctional officers have a symmetric interest to keep prisoner bloat at bay. This is because they are ultimately competing for the same (finite) state budget.

Accordingly, giving prisoners more rights to advocate for themselves solves many problems of having a public union, while ensuring that budgets stay capped and tight. Conversely, the private sector tends to lobby aggressively to suppress prisoners' rights to maximize shareholder value, which permanently destroys this counterweight mechanism.

Premised on this counterweight system working, public prisons may not be sufficient to keep prisons humane, but they are likely necessary part of the solution.

Taxes on income is not usually what people mean by capital controls. Usually they’re talking about free flow of capital between currencies.

But even by your unconventional definition, Norwegians have it easy compared to US citizens.

The US demands those renouncing their citizenship to “sell” (a deemed sale) their assets and pay capital gains. If you move abroad without renouncing your citizenship, you still have to pay income tax.

Can you share your work?

Trust but verify

Is there a valid reason to ban a book? On one hand, I agree there are books which are dangerous. But usually the most dangerous ones are one’s that are more innocuous. I think Catcher in the Rye is dangerous as I have seen grown men misread Holden as a hero to look up to rather than as a flawed mis-socialized man child. On the other hand, I have seen people go too far the other way and say that this book proves that everyone who rejects authority is just a bitter, poorly-socialized man baby. How painfully common these two misreadings provide me reason to ban my children from reading this book outside of my supervision.

However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.

Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.

Do you track your daily macros/calories and have you done progressive overload strength training continuously for 5+ years, logging your workouts?

I find most people will usually hyper optimize things like buying supplements and wrist trackers that have little p-size effects before optimizing things like muscle mass and macros/calories that the scientific literature actually says have sizable effect sizes.

The problem is most people don’t realize how short disc media’s lifespan is.

Books it’s very obvious when it’s deteriorating or molding, hard drives and such are not to a laymen.

You are playing the doors/wheels game naively because you have already overly qualified your definition of what is a door and what is a wheel without realizing it.

Have you considered for example if ball bearings wheels? Are gears and sprockets just notched wheels? Do cabinet doors count as doors? Do windows count as doors? Do microchip logic gates count as doors? What about pet flaps? Heart valves? Etc etc.. One’s definition of wheel/door can not account for these and countless other grey areas while still being useful.

Maybe one can strain oneself to find a definition that works like how people strain themselves to find a definition of sandwich that includes hoagies but disclude hotdogs, or one can just work backwards from one’s crude definitions and misclassify many objects.

Regardless, there is no right answer if there are more doors or more wheels. The question is too vague. Something that may be possible to answer is a more qualified question like “are there more human-sized doors or wheels for human transportation.” But again now the question is not our original question. And even if we were satisfied with just answering this more qualified question, we would have trouble answering it without a lot of money or making bad assumptions like the distributions of doors/wheels in a given house is uniform across all cities/towns/suburbs/houses etc..

Determining whether Europe or the US is more diverse is like asking the question: “are there more doors or wheels in the world?” To answer such a question, you need to over qualify your definition to the point where the final answer is meaningless and thus doesn’t act as a useful premise for any argument. Maybe there exists a perfect definition of diversity that would be useful, but still in this unlikely case, the question would require so much non-existent data that answering it would be exorbitantly expensive.

Respectively, anyone who claims to know if the US or Europe is more diverse is making as fallacious of an argument as someone saying that they know if there exists more doors or wheels in the world. In both examples, they likely over-qualify their definitions. If they somehow aren’t overqualifying their definitions, they certainly do not have the necessary data to back up their claims.

Europeans (and oftentimes Americans themselves) tend to underestimate American diversity.

Even on this AC issue where I would admit that there is less national variance compared to the EU. Yet still, about 90% of the US has AC but there are places like San Francisco where only 50% of buildings have AC. In Berkeley California only 20% of buildings have AC.

Again, on this AC issue I admit has less variance than Europe has, but that builds my point if anything. On other issues Americans can have much more variance than your premise implies. Have you considered the life of an Utah Mormon (who may use food rations in lieu of kitchen furniture) is drastically different than a kid growing up in the Bronx (who may have grew up playing on public outdoor courts and have radical independence since middle school because of the MTA)? Have you compared a rural Appalachian’s lifestyle and culture to that of a SF big tech worker? North New Jersey full of suburban white-collar workers who would have trouble understanding southern New Jersey full of farms who have annual festivities where they compare tractors and catch greased-pigs. I find that even “coastal elites” from SF and NYC — people groups who should be most ideologically/socially aligned due to their shared economic statuses, ability to travel, and many points of cross contamination/communication — don’t fully understand eachother’s drastic ideological and lifestyle philosophical differences very well. Moreover, within just one borough of one city there can be drastic diversity in between its townships: NYC Queens having much more diverse townships than any particular borough in Europe.

Europeans who rely of the premise that America is not diverse I find to be just as dumb as the average American.

Maybe we can each get assigned an AI government goon to look over our shoulders 24/7. Maybe each neuron in my brain will have their own subagent goon. Each mitochondria gets their own subagent government goon. The government will perfectly model my every move. They will perfectly model the smell of my asparagus piss aroma.