Banthum

23 ms·

151.
by Banthum 9y ago
Never? Not ever? Not even 1% of the poor? Not even one person? The absolutism of your statements makes it clear that you are convinced morally of your arguments, not factually. You believe intensively in what you're saying because yo
152.
by Banthum 9y ago
There's a good statistical analysis of the declining work ethic in some classes of white Americans in Charles Murray's book Coming Apart. I recommend the book. It's not directly about this mainly, but the work ethic decline i
153.
by Banthum 9y ago
I'm sure there are extenuating circumstances in many cases, yes. Why is it so unacceptable to think that they are simply humans, like you and me, with agency and power over their own choices, with responsibility for the outcomes of the
154.
by Banthum 9y ago
I doubt anyone thinks all failure is a result of bad work ethic. Of course much is due to mental illness, disability, etc. But a huge proportion of poverty stems from bad work ethic. Some of the places in the USA with the highest underemp
155.
by Banthum 9y ago
And let's not even get into the Boston "Celtics"...
156.
by Banthum 9y ago
“There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.” I'm aware that this isn't a nice thing to say, but are you really disputing that the sentence stands alone as a fact?
157.
by Banthum 9y ago
>"engineered to simply keep people in the hole once they through misfortune or carelessness slip up" This seems like a pretty extraordinary claim made pretty casually. What would motivate someone to intentionally prevent poor
158.
by Banthum 9y ago
The reason we normalize everyone believing a corpus of core texts is not because we think those core texts are smarter than anything else that could be written or will be written. It's because to organize a huge number of people, one m
159.
by Banthum 9y ago
To be clear, I was talking about culture festivals (as an example of a public gathering). Not just any random day in the city.
160.
by Banthum 9y ago
I consider movie trailers a net gain. Not if they go too long, but a few good trailers can cue you into good films to watch. Then there's advertising like, "This restaurant is at the next highway stop" which just gives you us
161.
by Banthum 9y ago
I wish the West would learn from them. In Tokyo these days, you can go to a culture festival and not have to see police stationed every block with assault rifles and flak jackets. They're watching and learning from us, that's for
162.
by Banthum 9y ago
It's not that many individual portions of the policy are liked. It's that individual presumed outcomes are liked. The problem is that outcomes come bundled together, often in undesirable or unexpected ways. Almost everyone in
163.
by Banthum 9y ago
Lots of reasons for this. Actual generally-applicable critical thinking ability is an exceptionally rare skill. So rare that I think it'd be damn difficult to find faculty who could even start teaching it. I don't think most facul
164.
by Banthum 9y ago
Oh, we'll tolerate it. We'll definitely complain, but nobody's actually going to put any skin in the game. There won't be any significant embargoes, much less military action. Then, some years down the line, we'll m
165.
by Banthum 9y ago
This comic is really pernicious because it frames free speech as just a quirky law that restrains the government. That's like saying honesty is just about not breaking perjury laws in court. In reality, free speech and free inquiry are
166.
by Banthum 9y ago
I've always got mixed feelings on stories like this. On one hand, it's a heartwarming story of a man breaking through barriers to achieve success from desperate beginnings. Kind of an American dream story, really. But if everyone
167.
by Banthum 9y ago
The problem is there's really no way to see determine who has the capacity to do what this guy did, until after they do it.
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by Banthum 9y ago
I did have that thought! But most likely these are all several characters in Chinese.
169.
by Banthum 9y ago
"If you antagonize one class of people, you reduce their willingness, as a group, to cooperate with authorities." The question is whether this effect is stronger or weaker than the gains you get from profiling. The middle solution
170.
by Banthum 9y ago
First thing is, people worried about terrorism aren't really worried about terrorism as it is now. They're really worried about what terrorism and ethnic conflict will be like in a few decades when, for example, Muslims are majori
171.
by Banthum 9y ago
But terror attacks aren't out of your control. For example, on a policy level, Japan never has them. They just don't immigrate any of the religious group who might commit terrorist attacks. So it's a non-issue. And on a perso
172.
by Banthum 9y ago
Good to reference Black Swan, but Taleb would call these events gray swans, not black swans. A true black swan is something that's basically inconceivable before it occurs. It is outside the mental model used to evaluate outcome probab
173.
by Banthum 9y ago
To be fair, communism doesn't last anywhere.
174.
by Banthum 9y ago
An undocumented immigrant? So she was legally in the country, but with paperwork incomplete? Or a refugee? Oh no, they mean illegal immigrant - in this case, someone who violated the law to make more money. Got it. Every time I see the term
175.
by Banthum 9y ago
No, there is no single universal neutral standard of cognition. Memory tasks are different from mental rotation tasks, which are different from emotion-reading tasks, etc. But, it turns out that performance at a huge variety of sub-tasks is
176.
by Banthum 9y ago
Question for anyone who knows. In a world where we have mines many kilometers deep, which do get abandoned from time to time, why is it so hard to get rid of nuclear waste? Can't we just pack it at the bottom of an ultra-deep mine, col
177.
by Banthum 9y ago
It's hard to reason intuitively about long time scales, because nothing is fixed any more. Usually we imagine technology, demographics, culture, etc to be fixed with respect to our decision-making, because most of our decisions are ver
178.
by Banthum 9y ago
Wow, quite an accusation! Is there any actual data source on this, or is it just a narrative you prefer?
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by Banthum 9y ago
Border guards were doing this stuff long before Trump was elected, and it was never a significant campaign issue one way or the other. Stop trying to make everything about Trump.
180.
by Banthum 9y ago
Eh, I think the net boomed without needing online shopping. Lots of people were and are using the Net 99%-100% of the time for non-shopping purposes. The net boom drivers were: -Email -Funny cat pics/videos, etc. eBaumsWorld etc -News&

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