@somervta helpfully linked my post about LIs on agentfoundations.org, MIRI’s forum for technical discussion, and it’s getting some comments over there – here’s the thread if you’re interested
(I didn’t link it myself because you can only register there via Facebook and I didn’t want to do that)
Puns are the only form of word play I have ever heard among high energy physicists. What is it about puns they find so satisfying and why are other kinds of word play so unrecognizable to them? When I am doing fieldwork, physicists occasionally ask why I have no sense of humor: they notice that my laughter at their puns is feigned. It is always a relief to return to anthropology territory and another kind of word play where I am reputed to have at least the normal amount of wit. Reader, remember that puns bring together meanings which should be kept apart, a kind of verbal incest. These acronymic couplings physicists make are clever only to those who think that speech and writing, like bodies and minds, ought to be kept apart, that appearances are false and hidden meanings are true. These puns directly contradict what all science and engineering students know should be kept apart.
It turns out that what is sexy and what is cute are machines and software, but not all machines and software can be called sexy or cute.
To reveal the root causes of these tensions and animosities, Patai and Koertge present an incisive analysis of the self-defeating ideological games feminists play in colleges and universities, among them IDPOL (identity politics), WORDMAGIC, TOTAL REJ, and BIODENIAL, an extreme form of social constructionism.
But he need not have been afraid! The great suction-process of cosmogonic matter – always waiting to drain up in its huge, blind, clay belly, these rapturous overtones of its foster-children – was soon at work, sucking up the spilt drops of his happiness.
For a start: places that have universal healthcare, free college, well-protected workers’ rights, and low income inequality.
I didn’t use to be such a socialist*, but I’m more and more frustrated with perky news about how the stock market is going up up up! …and meanwhile most of the people on the ground are being overworked and going into debt just to survive. A big imposing GDP means nothing if hardly anyone’s getting to enjoy it.
I think the only areas where the US is really exceptional are cultural influence and military power. On the other hand, I don’t really want one country to have a monopoly on either of those, so, eh. Still, I gotta give points for them.
We’re not low-tier, low-tier is somewhere that basic healthcare isn’t available to many people. Here it’s available but you’ll go bankrupt. That’s mid-tier.
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*used loosely, I didn’t do the reading, etc etc, get off my back, you know what I mean
I agree with most of this but most instances of free college are terrible, because most instances college are terrible. The solution to “people need to get in debt to a pointless, depression-inducing waste of time to get a job, despite the fact that college in no way prepares them for a job” is not “taxes should pay for aforementioned depression-inducing waste of time.” It’s finding a way to stop jobs requiring this ridiculous nonsense.
I accept that subjects like medicine, nursing, law, engineering, primary education and CS do actually lead to jobs and I support government subsidy of training people in these fields (at the very least it should be free for those from poor backgrounds.)
But humanities degrees are a goddamn con, and taxpayer subsidies for cons won’t give anybody back the wasted years of their life.
I think philosophy and literature and culture are important. But college is actually not that good at teaching people about these things.
One of the things about higher education that makes me angriest is that it instilled in me a fear of books which I am struggling to get over.
Words, phrases and topics most distinguishing high and low scores on each Big 5 trait drawn from the Facebook posts of 75,000 volunteers.
“Metasecond” or “ms” is assumed to be a metasecond, measuring Metatime.
Third, all the clusters identified by the algorithm accord
very strongly with the background knowledge of the expert
who designed the survey and identified which variables were,
e.g., “coping” variables, and which were, e.g. “depression”
variables. The sole exception is that COP6 reliably clusters
with depression variables, rather than with other coping
variables. According to [7], COP6 is the respondent’s
reported degree of agreement with the following statement:
“I feel that stressful situations are God (high power)’s way
of punishing me for my sins or lack of spirituality”. We leave
it to the reader to decide whether it is plausible that this
item could cluster with depression indicators, rather than
coping indicators.
Ran the wrong causal inference method by mistake and it was very uninformative but surprisingly pretty