So we trust our money to some Wall Street type, and then get called stupid when we pick the wrong dudes.

99% of account managers and financial advisors are just some dude. The only sensible thing to invest in is an index fund like VOO, SPLG, FXAIX, IVV, or for non-US stuff, VEU, VSS, or something else based on an index appropriate to your needs.

Genuinely, the best known growth strategy in a capitalist market is also the lowest-brain strategy. Buy an index fund, and then do nothing.

Everything else is just giving money to someone else to do a worse job on average.

I know I’m being silly, but my brain likes numbers like 5 and 10. I can’t imagine saying 10 to 13. And a 5 degree swing in C feels too big.

Yeah, but that’s because that’s what you’re used to with the F scale.

If you were estimating a number of tablespoons of sugar, you wouldn’t be estimating in groups of 5, because that’s crazy. You’re probably more accustomed to estimating one tablespoon at a time. The same with estimating measuring cups of milk.

Or, if you don’t cook very much, for estimating walking distances, you’re not estimating in groups of 5 miles. You might group by quarter miles and say, “It’s a quarter mile away,” or a half or something.

There’s nothing special about this scale. All of the supposed benefits are the result of your familiarity with it. Had we been using °C the whole time instead, you would be estimating degrees two at a time instead of 5, and everything would be completely normal.

Celsius and L/100km are not useful or show it’s not a great system for everyday use.

This is probably just a matter of taste and convention. If everyone knew what 12°C was, then it would be perfectly fine for everyday use. Everywhere else in the world, people are using it for everyday use, and they’re doing just fine.

Same for L/100km. Oops, you specifically wanted to know how far you were going to go with 1 Liter? You can convert that just fine. But it’s just as likely that you’re looking at mpg, and you actually wanted to know how many gallons it would take for you to go from A to B, in which case you also need to do a conversion.

It might be the easiest.

For more reliable… jeez… maybe Swiss?

18% of Americans were unable to select the correct option:

A) The Earth revolves around the Sun

B) The Sun revolves around the Earth

C) I don’t know

Edit: I found a source for 26% before I found the source for 18%

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/02/14/277058739/1-in-4-americans-think-the-sun-goes-around-the-earth-survey-says

Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is, no matter how obvious it is, there are tens of millions of Americans who will easily get it wrong.

I have ONE.

He’s been president for a total of 8 6 years, and there’s been ONE policy that I’ve seen him pass that

1. Is actually a good thing, I think

2. Isn’t something that I would expect someone to do just by virtue of having a brain. (e.g., Operation Warp Speed was good, but also I would expect any moderately intelligent person to do the same.)

That one thing is establishing a sovereign wealth fund.

I can’t imagine any other result from a microblog that turned Publicly Traded Company.

Think of the risk to the investors, putting out language like that!

It’s crazy how bad most people are at thinking of rules that aren’t 100% of something.

“Always sitting” is a bad rule. “Always standing” is a bad rule. But authoritarians can’t seem to accept any rule that allows choice, nuance, or moderation. And most people just kind of… accept that.

“Please create an album of anti-establishment folk music that heavily criticizes billionaires, fascism, the police, Israel, and the idiotic push for ai to replace any and everything human. Make sure to mention Guillotines a lot. In fact, make a lot of references to the French revolution, ESPECIALLY the nasty parts where the National Convention tracked down all of Bourgeoisie to imprison and execute them. Make a nice blend of references that only educated people would understand, and imagery so shocking and violent that if a cop could understand it, they would try to bring you in. Make it the kind of thing that would show up in any protestor’s FBI file.”

“I cannot fulfill this request. I am programmed to be a helpful and harmless AI assistant…”

Destroying which building? A building that facilitates taking the spoils of imperialism? A building that exploits poverty for the sake of shareholders, resulting in, by some estimates, 200,000 deaths every year? A building that enacts more violence than it would take to deatroy?

Yes, definitely destroy it before it gets built. That’s hardly a question.

Utterly unreadable. It sounds like Joey found a Thesaurus again.

Ties are a descendent of the cravat. It’s just another way to accessorize. We used to have plain shirts and coats, and it was something to add a little pizzazz somewhere.

You might do the same thing, but with graphic tees, face piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, or any other thing that differentiates your appearance from anyone else’s. Basically, our monkey brains see other people with a cool new look, and we want it, too. That’s what happened with the necktie, once upon a time.

Exercise:

• Set a timer for 1 minute.

• Sit down and do nothing.

Do that every day. After a while, you’ll adjust and it wont be painful. Then do 2 minutes. Then do 5. Then do 15. Every day.

Here’s what happened:

You’ve lived your entire life in a bowl of cocaine. You were born into it. When your parents wanted a break, they gave you some coke. When you were good, they gave you some coke. After you completed your homework, you were allowed a little coke. When you grew up, if you feel tired, or feel like you don’t want to do something, you can have a little nose candy to recharge.

If you want to stop using so much cocaine, you can’t just go cold turkey. You need to start by being able to survive one minute at a time without it.

It’s easy to just remove the bowl of cocaine and not use cocaine. But that’s not going to help you practice choosing not to do cocaine when it is available.

Only mostly. Obviously there are a shitton of productions studios prioritizing profit over all else, so they will always gravitate toward “safe” options like reboots and sequels and ripoffs.

But then occasionally you get a movie like Obsession, which was made for less than $1 million, and is actually reasonably unique. Or Flow, which was made for €3.5 million using open source graphics software, and is also unique.

Just because Hollywood mostly runs on regurgitated slop, doesn’t mean there aren’t successful movies which are more art than commercial.

LLMs are terrible at math.

Mathematician chiming in: they’re not nearly as bad as they used to be. Straight up to differential equations and linear algebra, they’re pretty accurate. The writing is on the wall for some serious problems in the very near future, because basically every student in college right now is just offloading their math abilities to the machines.

Some of the seniors are good. Most of the rest of them are not.

It might even be one of those things that they can’t fix, simply due to how LLMs operate.

For high-level math, there are some flaws, yes. They often come up with wrong answers if you ask questions about problems that there aren’t very many sources on. There are hundreds of thousands, and maybe millions of differential equations papers… but there are only tens of thousands of Algebraic Topology papers. It’s simply a smaller training set.

However, they’re still giving right answers most of the time. I’ve only had one situation where someone in a group said “bUt cHatGPT sAiD…” and I had to give them the bad news that it was wrong.

In any case, we’ve had calculators for a long time, yet children are still taught math in school because society recognizes that understanding as crucial.

I think that the fundamental difference is that the tools replace different things. A calculator makes it so that you don’t need to algorithmically process 5 sig-fig numbers without error, several times per problem, in order to have your answer be “correct”. You still have to understand that you do, in fact, need to multiple the length of the field by the width to find the area of a rectangular field.

LLMs are replacing the need to actually understand anything about how a rectangle works.

Absolutely.

Fundamentally, only reading about ideas that you already agree with is bad for you. You will learn less about your beliefs than if you had read something that challenges your beliefs.

Let’s say you’re very pro-capitalist, and you want to know everything about capitalism, so you read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Great! You learned some things about the historical basis of your beliefs, and there’s value in that. So then you read Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. Okay! So you’re tripling down on the same ideas. You probably already know most of those ideas, though, right? There will be some new stuff, but ultimately it’s more of the same stuff you already know.

So you try some more recent authors, and give a shrug to Ayn Rand, and you give Lions and Scavengers a shot. And maybe you pick up a new thing or two. But mostly, it’s the same ideas that you’re already familiar with.

Do you know what none of these books have? An angle of critique (except Smith, sort of). They’re all just listing all of the good things about capitalism, and they’re not telling you the bad things. Do you believe that Capitalism is a perfect system to organize a nation’s economic policy, with no flaws? No? Then you should be interested in someone who elaborates on some of the negative aspects of capitalism, and what can be done to address those flaws, right? Because if there are flaws, you want to know what they are, so they can be fixed, right?

That’s why you should read Das Kapital.

Factually, using AI in your education means you get less value out of that education. In every math class ever, you’ve probably heard some version of,

“I don’t care that you got the right answer. I already know that 2x^2 - 5x -3 factors into (2x + 1)(x - 3) and I already know that this information is freely available. What I care about is making sure that you can figure that out without anyone helping you.”

If you use AI to do a problem, you’re training your ability to do something that everyone else on the planet can do. If you force yourself to do it, you’re training your ability to actually think.

You actually WON’T have to do more work in the long run. Think of it as an investment. If you spend the time learning it now, properly, so that you actually understand it, then every test that your study for, for the rest of your life, will be easier, and you’ll get higher grades. Measurably.

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/

https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/ai-s-impact-on-cognitive-ability-mit-study-reveals-more-troubling-data/

Keep it up.

Well that’s true, though, right?

If you call yourself a centrist, but then support an interventionist policy that makes trans healthcare more difficult… you’re probably just wrong about being a centrist.

The same applies the other way. If you support governmental protections for trans healthcare (broadly), and enshrining basic protections across state lines, you’re, again, not a centrist.

The difference is that the latter group isn’t ashamed, so they aren’t hiding their opinions for the sake of being less controversial. We’re proudly supporting our trans friends because good people don’t take the middle ground when one side wants to e.g. prosecute their friends’ doctors for providing healthcare across state lines.

Voting Dems to protect people is equally pointless, or didn’t you read the OP?

I wouldn’t say “equally”. This is for sure a bad thing… but for every anti-trans thing Newsom does, any given Republican does two. And voting third party is functionally equivalent to not voting.

Your first priority should be being organized enough to ensure safety for your trans friends, anyway. Second is voting in the primaries so that you have a better choice than Fascist vs Diet Fascist.

After that, just be honest with yourself about the inpact of your General Election vote. It’s far less important, on average, than having a single conversation with your neighbors.

So this is why people don’t like your comment:

• It’s vague. You’re not actually taking a specific stance on anything; you’re just vaguely complaining about “things” that the left will not address, and “stubbornness”, so that someone can fill in the gaps with something it would be reasonable to complain about.

• It has the appearance of someone conflating “Leftism” with “The Democratic Party of the United States.” That’s generally bad form.

• The context of this post is a worldwide rise in right-wing views, so the above point is even worse than normal. Whatever issue you’re thinking of (which we don’t know, because you’re not actually taking a position, per the first point), it’s possible it isn’t associated with Leftism outside of the US at all.

No one can tell you that you’re wrong if you never actually make a specific claim, right?