ranprieur

8 ms·

61.
by ranprieur 7y ago
What people call "hard work" is two different things. One is the puritan work ethic, forcing yourself to do shit you don't feel like doing, day after day, to achieve some goal. That may or may not lead to a better life, but i
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by ranprieur 7y ago
Gaiome by Kevin Scott Polk, about the potential for highly ecological artificial worlds in space.
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by ranprieur 7y ago
None of these examples are about being good, exactly. They're about being a good fit for another thing.
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by ranprieur 7y ago
Depreciating currency would help, or permanent negative interest. Then the default behavior of wealth would be to shrink, rather than grow. The deeper problem is that wealth is power, and power can be leveraged into greater power. I can&#x2
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by ranprieur 7y ago
Missing from this post is anything about whether the piano player is enjoying the process. The subtext seems to be that we should force ourselves to do hard stuff, whether or not we like it, so that other people will admire our skill. When
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by ranprieur 7y ago
This is why Consumer Reports doesn't take ads. In any ad-funded review platform, corruption is inevitable. And we could solve it with a simple (but difficult) law: that review platforms may not receive any income from whoever they&#x27
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by ranprieur 7y ago
IQ is not intelligence. IQ is a number determined by a culturally biased test. The most likely reason scores are dropping, is that test-makers are not keeping up with changes in culture. People are 2019-smart and getting lower scores becaus
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by ranprieur 8y ago
> Each time they would laugh afterwards, like they were just playing around, or like it was a big party or something. Terrorists in TV and movies are never like this. They're always super-serious evil, like Voldemort, like nobody ev
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by ranprieur 8y ago
I agree that popular music was better in the old days. But that's just because the rise of indie labels, and then the internet, have enabled the more creative artists to thrive on the fringes, instead of having to compete for mainstr
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by ranprieur 8y ago
If employers are looking for a radical utopian reform, I'd rather see them do away with the interview. Interviews slant hiring toward personal charm, and toward the cultural uniformity of the workplace, at the expense of competence.
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by ranprieur 8y ago
If we're in a simulation, it's almost certainly not a computer simulation, but some technology that we can't even imagine, any more than cavemen could imagine computers.
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by ranprieur 8y ago
Do not fixate on particular goals, but practice broadly scanning for brief opportunities.
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by ranprieur 9y ago
> we'll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp. But different brains are good at different things. There will never be a line where everyone can grasp everything on one side, and no one can grasp anything on the other. If one
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by ranprieur 9y ago
Popular American storytelling is centered on something even more precise than conflict. It's centered on the question of which side is going to win. Not only fiction, but even reality TV, always has to trick us to make the conflict see
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by ranprieur 9y ago
Supporting your family is not a third kind of motivation. It's totally extrinsic, because you get more money for doing the job than not doing the job.
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by ranprieur 9y ago
The aesthetic argument is weak, because it doesn't make sense to talk about anyone but us having an aesthetic perspective. Mars is beautiful? Fill those canyons with life and make it even more beautiful. The stronger argument is: look
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by ranprieur 10y ago
I think it's obvious that some of the descendants of today's games will be art. Comparing games to movies is a distraction. The important thing is to compare games as they are now to games as they could be.
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by ranprieur 10y ago
This is a terrible puzzle. I'm glad I didn't rack my brain for hours looking for the "flash of insight" when all I had to do was be reminded of the 50 move rule.
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by ranprieur 10y ago
"If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not strictly needed." In other words, bullshit jobs: http://web.archive.
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by ranprieur 10y ago
Could we make a drug that makes everyone highly susceptible to the placebo effect?
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by ranprieur 10y ago
They should just legalize squatting.
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by ranprieur 10y ago
You kill procrastination by making everything fit in a meaningful larger context. This is much harder than making it fit on a calendar.
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by ranprieur 10y ago
Some of those jobs look more fun than any jobs I could get now.
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by ranprieur 10y ago
I don't quite see his argument that this is a ponzi scheme. Wouldn't that mean, if a city stops growing, the whole thing collapses and the streets fall apart? It seems more like parasitism, where the urban core is burdened with su
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by ranprieur 11y ago
This makes some important points but misses a big one: The authorities become concerned about people not paying attention, when the things they want people to pay attention to are not interesting.
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by ranprieur 11y ago
This whole debate seems philosophically sloppy. The rate of return on capital investments, the pace of technological change, the disposable income of ordinary people, and subjective quality of life are all different things that are only loo
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by ranprieur 11y ago
Economic inequality is harmful when it results in centralization of power, where decisions are increasingly top-down and made by a smaller number of people who are more out of touch because they're more insulated by wealth. This leads
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by ranprieur 11y ago
You can't be betrayed if you weren't promised anything. Users simply have no power inside the system.
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by ranprieur 12y ago
Eh, it could be worse. At least the clickbait is mostly "Look at this cool thing" and not "Look at these bad people doing these bad things. Outrage!"
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by ranprieur 12y ago
Both videos are lame. Lots of shots of people riding around being all inspiring, and almost nothing about how the wheel actually works to absorb shock.

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