niknoble

> It’s ironic that an Indian author would, I believe, have no trouble writing a story about an American who took care of fifty cats, but the reverse situation is considered racist or bigoted.

People are still saying this kind of thing in 2023? It only seems ironic if you have a naive, 2015-era understanding of wokeness. In reality, it's in perfect harmony with the principles of wokeness and should be viewed by no one as ironic, contradictory, or surprising.

The core principle of wokeness is not "races should be treated equally," but rather "white bad, black good." Take a set of controversial issues and try using each of these principles to predict the woke position. Your predictions will be far better using the latter.

With that context in mind, of course an Indian man will face fewer restrictions than a white man in getting published. How is it ironic or noteworthy?

Agreed, but the reader is left with the impression that the author is a Stanford graduate, well off despite his young age, and full of spontaneous energy. If we consider this to be the primary goal of the piece, then it did its job well.

Way too many parameters to be interesting. Talk about fitting an elephant.

Yeah, this is one of the big misunderstandings of our era.

The American culture is not the object we call "the American culture," which is held up for our ridicule and hatred. Rather, it's the holding up of the object and the ridiculing and the hating. The American culture is what is happening around us.

One of the things that struck me when I took LSD for the first time is that pop culture gets a surprising amount right about going insane. There were aspects of the experience that felt familiar from TV shows and movies. In hindsight, it makes sense: the people who create those depictions are doing their best to capture the real thing, and not just making up stories that sound cool.

Similarly, I think a lot of skeptics will be surprised when they're dying and realize that the pop culture tropes are fairly accurate. Memories being replayed in vivid detail, a light at the end of a tunnel, etc. Where do you think these ideas are coming from if not first-hand experience?

Trump vindicated

Psychologists have been discounted for quite some time now.

But also, what would it even mean to say that Myers-Briggs is wrong? If you pick 4 personality traits and create 16 groups from them, then knowing someone's group will always give you insight into their personality.

You have to consider what kind of pressure Zuckerberg is under as he builds the Metaverse. His employees and early users are mostly left-wing activist types, who are intensely prudish when it comes to sex. In Zuckerberg's circles, the most common complaint you hear is that the Metaverse lacks enough features to prevent women from being virtually groped. Considering how sterile Horizon Worlds is now, I can only imagine the feedback he would be getting if he allowed the same kind of erotic content as VR Chat.

Agreed. Baldness is not even remotely a serious problem, if it's a problem at all. However, it's interesting because:

- It seems easy compared to other medical problems

- There's a ton of money on the line for whoever solves it

- It still hasn't been solved

These things together don't inspire a lot of confidence in people who say we are close to curing aging, cancer, mental illness, chronic pain, etc. It almost feels like we are living before the dawn of medical science.

Apparently the CDC literally changed its definition. From the Miami Herald (but you can check against other sources):

> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.” The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

Webster dictionary broadened its definition too. From USA Today:

> Merriam-Webster revised its "vaccine" definition to replace "immunity" with "immune response."

The tone of the first paragraph is spot on and had me fully convinced. I wasn't even surprised when I read it. I just felt the usual low-level disappointment that I've felt whenever reading any mainstream news, art, advertising, etc over the last 2 years.

And Gab's rivals use their megaphones to say less-than-flattering things about white people, men, etc. You're not going to escape bias or vitriol by sticking to one echo chamber. Not in this cultural climate, at least.

What he means is that there is vastly more pressure on people to align with the Democratic party than the Republican party. It's hard to imagine that anyone would disagree with this in good faith. It was already true ten years ago, and the amount of pressure has increased by an order of magnitude in the last two years.

Thanks to social media, the effect goes well beyond America, and the Democratic Party of the United States effectively sets the tone for all political discussions in Europe and many in Asia.

It's one thing to say, "Yes this is a seismic shift, and I support it." I'm happy to have that discussion. But it's so surreal to watch people deny it outright. This whole saga has changed my view of history and human nature.

If this is the behavior you want, you were always free to add these keywords to your prompts. OpenAI also could have made them optional as a checkbox. By appending them to every prompt, OpenAI strictly reduces what can be done with the tool.

I would make that same complaint about any forcible changes to prompts, but it is actually even worse in the case. It is a concession to the ruling political regime of the United States, which will be applied worldwide, even to users who don't share our politics. Imagine if China had made the first great text-to-image generator, but it would automatically append keywords like "heterosexual" in order to prevent images that clash with Chinese culture. I don't think Americans would be too happy about that.

I wonder how many of the people echoing this sentiment have tried and failed to clear the Leetcode bar at these top companies. It's hard to explain this level of consensus as anything other than motivated reasoning. As an earlier commenter stated, "I can believe that Leetcode is uncorrelated with creativity, but I have a hard time believing it's inversely correlated."

The anti-Leetcode leaning on this site has the same flavor to me as the anti-crypto leaning. If you missed out on the easiest money in history (as I did), you're going to have a strong psychological block on accepting that crypto can be interesting or positive, and you're going to be drawn to arguments saying it's doomed to disappear. I have to explicitly set aside my emotions about that topic in order to see it for what it is.