djaro

It usually does because other people are also intelligent beings that are usually trying to have a good life and succeed in whatever area they're pursuing. Whatever field it is - earning money, becoming athletic, becoming a musician, becoming a good cook, becoming a good writer or public speaker - there are uncountably many people with a strong desire to succeed in that area and a subset of those that have dedicated their lifes to it.

Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.

Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.

I feel like there is a big overlap between being against common sense and believing you are better / more intelligent (more "rational" perhaps?) than other people. For me, at least, gaining a bit of humility / being a bit more down-to-earth about being a person like everyone else has made me significantly more likely to just pick the common sense path as a default.

The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.

If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.

Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.

This is also caused by the decline in social activity and community. People in the past didnt have this problem as much because they had tons of trusted family members, friends, neighbors, who also had children and could thus look after theirs for an evening.

and the law says food must be safe, and to attract buyers costs must be similar or lower than the competition.

Of course in a cynical view companies only try to "generate profit" but usually generating profit is tied to providing some sort of service or product, and people like to buy good products

I'm reminded of an interaction I had with a non-technical user. They knew ChatGPT can translate text, and so, to remove spelling mistakes from their (Dutch) text, they would first ask ChatGPT to translate it to English and then ask it to translate it back to Dutch. Mind-blown when I said "you can just say 'fix the spelling and gammar', no need to translate"

This is the level that many non-technical users are operating on.

I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes and/or the most negative opinion on North Korea. There can simultaneously be a somewhat wealthy educated upper class in the capital (which would have little incentive to escape), and a very oppressed lower-class.

North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you can't do that with uneducated starving peasants who are eating rats.

Yeah, the idea that North Korea is putting on a country-sized Truman Show for the handful of tourists seems a bit bizzare to me. Of course they will keep tourists in the better, richer areas, but at the end of the day it's a real country with over 25 million people. Even if it's poor and totalitarian, like any other country that size it has big cities with an upper class of wealthy elites, it has a class of highly educated scientists who likely have a high standard of living (they produce working ICBMs and nuclear weapons after all).

I feel like due to popular portrayal, many people have an almost cartoon-like view of North Korea as "the dystopian totalitarian state" as it's portrayed in like, 1984 or something, forgetting that it's a real country with 25 million real normal people, and that there are just certain things a country has to do to keep existing.

Even with Russia, everyone understands that Putin exists in a balance with military leaders and oligarchs and has to keep them happy. But with North Korea, people are so caught-up in the one-dimensional view of Kim Jong Un as the supreme leader, that we forget a simple fact: one person cannot manage the entire military and all the industry in a medium-sized country, and inevitably there will be other high-ranking people that have a lot of power and a dictator has to keep them happy to stay in power.

Theres a lot of American military bases inside the EU that could be turned into craters within 24 hours. And even if Europe decides to not retaliate violently and simply says "you have 24 hours to leave the continent", thats still a lot of material and arms lost.

When you travel to a different country, you have to follow their laws, even if you didnt vote there!

Which is fine, inside the US. But when Americans leave the US, they are no longer under US law, theyre under the law of whatever country they enter. Which means, if the country acknowledges the ICC, any American in that country falls under it. Just like a tourist in America has to follow American laws.

The problem is that "the owner can simply become a worker" doesn't really work like that because they likely sacrificed career advancements, education, time, saved up money, etc.

If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.

If you go on Amazon and search "100,000 whys", you will find page after page of essentially the exact same book. Presumably because asking some AI model "give me an idea for an educational book aimed at children" gave that answer.

I just asked ChatGPT to generate me an educational book title for children, searched the first result it gave me on Amazon, and found a book titled exactly that published a couple of months ago.

LLMs converge towards expected text which makes them really bad at creating novel interesting ideas when given essentially no information. You have to create the unique part yourself.

Flashpoint Archive now has around 200K flash games that can be downloaded and ran locally. Im sure this is nothing compared to what used to exist but basically anything of note is in there

But Ukraine and Palestine are, which is where the crimes are being committed. When you enter a country, you are subject to their laws, not those from your own country.

Besides, any argument regarding new technologies that starts with "well Socrates was against writing..." is bad because the new technology is not writing. Even if Socrates didn't have any real arguments and was simply hating "because it's new", that would have no connection to whatever technology you're making now. People have hated both good and bad developments. People have hyped both good and bad developments. Pointing at Socrates and saying "see, he was against writing" doesn't work because someone else can simply point at the steam-powered car or zeppelin or one of the countless other technologies that did end up going nowhere.

On a similar note, any argument along the lines of "well, the elderly have always thought the new generation was getting worse, just look at Socrates saying the youths have no manners" or something. Besides the fact that Athens did fall and lose its entire overseas empire right around when Socrates was old, and he thus may have had a point, it's also just... possible for things to get better or worse? New generations are growing up under completely different circumstances with different technologies, of course Gen Z and Gen Alpha will be doing better in some areas and worse in others than Gen X or Millenials.

Both arguments fall into the fallacy of "you are criticizing A. But 100 years ago, someone criticized B, and they were wrong" which is just like... yeah A and B are not the same thing. Young people 2000 years ago are not young people now, even if Socrates 2000 years ago was wrong in criticizing the youth of Ancient Athens, that has no bearing on modern arguments. Even if Socrates was wrong in criticizing reading, that has nothing to do with modern criticisms of social media, crypto, AI, video games, etc.