The arguments made about wanting to protect the children/babies and those with cognitive impairments are well meaning, but I think misguided. The bottom line is that the world has been put in a shit situation and you can't fix it. Encouraging blue is encouraging an increase in the likelihood that all the truly nice and wonderful people that would would actually follow through on a blue vote for altruistic reasons wind up dead. And that doesn't seem like an altruistic position? It seems more like self-martyring. Well meaning, but actually making the likelihood of a bad outcome worse.
You think it's easier to convince everyone to pick red than 51% of people to pick blue?
If you think it's possible to convince everyone to vote red then it's certainly possible to do the same for blue given how much lower the threshold is!
This is absolutely possible and realistic.
Imagine a scenario where public polls were taken and it showed 95% support for blue? Would you still be out here calling 95% of people martyrs? Blue is an absolutely winnable propoganda game!
gpm's point is that it's a collective action issue. And even if one individual can't fix is, we can with a movement. And we SHOULD care about things like this. We're fairly familiar with these: big problem, only solved if enough people do a thing. But in general, almost all collective action problems we face are ones where either:
a. every incremental actor improves the overall picture with their individual choice (however small, even if it takes a threshold to be "solved": think, recycling, vaccines)
b. every individual actor actor's choice has no _direct_ impact until some threshold is met (maybe voting?)
THIS situation, however is very different: every individual choice for blue makes things WORSE up until the threshold is met. And not just a little, but a LOT worse. That's not normal collective action territory, so we shouldn't be assuming the same kind of reasoning. The stakes of missing the threshold are not "aw shucks" or "keep trying, there's more chances later!" The stakes of missing the threshold are "everyone who cares about the threshold is dead."
I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?
> I can't think of anything IRL that falls into this category?
I suppose: People on one half of a standoff standing down when the other side will also stand down if everyone on the first half does. Not exactly a common problem to see outside of movies... but in principle it follows a common pattern. An individual lowering their guard is bad (if it ends up in a fight), but if everyone lowers their guard we get to avoid the fight.
> Bursting from their enormous lungs at over 300mph (483km/h), a humpback whale's blow can rise up to 7m (23ft) into the air.
Pick a lane BBC.
But this is great news. Also the fact that whales "transport huge amounts of nutrients across the globe" (linking to [1]) is fascinating. The role of whales in sucking up critters in one place and pooping them out elsewhere being a fundamental dynamic that drives global ocean ecosystems... just chefs kiss
It's not just the BBC, it's the UK as a whole. Miles per hour or deeply entrenched for speeds but for measurements we use meters. The same for weight, we weigh people in stone but we weigh everything else with grams.
Apparently they also measurably affect the vertical water mixing. Fish need dissolved oxygen to breathe, so they don't normally venture past the thermocline. And their fins are also vertical, so they don't cause a lot of vertical water movement.
But whales routinely dive deep, and their tail fin is _horizontal_ and it creates powerful updrafts.
Another organism that affects mixing is apparently jellyfish.
My parents used to measure us in feet and stones. I still know my height in feet, because it hasn’t changed in decades. My weight, unfortunately, I could only tell you in kilograms.
Is it also their policy to botch the significant digits? 300 mph is obviously a crude estimate. Converting to 483 km/h implies an unreasonable degree of precision.
I remember reading about whales returning to an area they hadn't been in for decades and people were worried about them eating all the local fish, but in fact their faeces enriched the local ecosystem from the ground up, leading to more fish. It's a bit like the counter-arguments to the lump of labour fallacy.
How we measure things in the UK has been dragged into political debates (Boris floated the idea of forcing supermarkets to list weights in pounds and ounces "again"). So critical thinking or sane decisions are out the window on this front.
Although there is some logic to keeping miles per hour for road speed limits as there is a big cost associated with updating all the signs and associated "documentation".
An organisation like the BBC have to make sure to use imperial measures (as well the one most people actually interact with), otherwise Reform voters have a meltdown.
It’s not cost, it’s culture. Nearly every other country, including the vast majority of the commonwealth has managed to convert to metric distance. The UK and the US look like geriatric reactionaries, who refuse to change, not because they can’t, but because they won’t.
You can literally | together every street address or other string you want to match in a giant disjunction, and then run a DFA/NFA minimization over that to get it down to a reasonable size. Maybe there are some fast regex simplification algorithms as well, but working directly with the finite automata has decades of research and probably can be more fully optimized.
this is essentially the gist of https://how.complexsystems.fail which has been circulating more with discussions of the recent AWS/Azure/Cloudflare outages.
> I sent a note about these Easter eggs to Scott Corley [the game's developer]. He said that he had recently pulled out the game to show the marriage proposal to his son. But he’d forgotten the code and couldn’t make it work! He and Melissa did indeed live happily ever after.
We got around this by keeping the same number but swapping the months out. Started dating in August, actually got legally married same month, but the ceremony was in October all of the same day. I used the cheat code of familiarity to never forget.
“Have” is the word you are looking for, “has” isn’t grammatically correct. However, “had” in past tense is also correct, as it refers to the fact that they were born in the past, it does not imply (as you seem to be saying) that the children aren’t alive anymore.
we already do have plants that produce (sort of) high-energy-density liquids for us. So if you want gas to be as expensive as maple syrup then... sure. :)
Your argument is essentially that emergent properties don't exist. It's like saying "there are no such things as waves in water, just individual water molecules." Individuals are the water molecules, and "society" is the blanket term for the emergent properties that happen when a lot of people are together. The phenomena are real and have real effects and impacts. Intrinsic and environmental factors affect the system: hydrogen bonds between water molecules (intrinsic) creates the emergent phenomenon we call "surface tension" and wind (environmental) creates waves. So too in people: intrinsic attributes of individuals and connections between them as well as environmental factors affecting entire populations create emergent effects that can be observed and studied.
I suspect you mean to appeal to the recognition that, unlike water molecules, individual humans have free will and agency and the ability to make choices completely independently. I suspect you abhor the notion of 'groupthink' and excuses for behavior that are underpinned by concepts of culture and social constructs. And there is truth to these ideas, but as with most things, they are helpful as part of a broader model, and not as a totalitarian view of human behavior. We are complex creatures, in complex systems; to ignore the tendencies of our emergent behaviors is as risky as turning your back to a rough shorebreak, believing all the individual water molecules will simply be rational and choose not to hit you, only to be engulfed in a wave that really does exist.
I like your comment. Don't agree with your comparisons, but you write in a way adding to the discussion and bringing understanding.
In lack of better comparisons from myself, Santa Claus does not exist. As a concept and an idea he of course exists and has real impact on what people do and what they feel. But part of growing up is differentiating between what is real and what is lie. Enlightened adults shouldn't believe in "society", while still being aware and updated of the possible threats from people who believe in it.
Another example: "Courage" is an abstract idea, but also a very real description of acts by some people. But we all learn when we are kids to not let another kid manipulate us into doing something by saying "Do it or you're a coward!". Even kids learn this early.
Interesting. I don't think I follow your examples, but here's my attempt to read it: It sounds like you may be using the term "real" to be mean specifically something like "tangible." Like, Santa isn't tangible because he's a fictitious character. Courage isn't tangible, it is a term that refers to an idea. It can't be isolated, bottled. And likewise, society isn't tangible either. To reference my earlier example "emergent properties" isn't tangible. Like "courage," it is a term that refers to an idea. Many things can be described by it. And the specific issue you (maybe?) take is with ascribing causality to non-tangible things, in some sense. For example, "emergent properties" didn't knock me over at the beach, a wave did. Or, the answer to "how did you defeat the dragon?" isn't "You had courage," -- it is "You stuck your sword through it's heart which ceased blood circulation and killed it." Those are the tangible actions that led to the outcome.
And that is true and a useful analysis in a lot of circumstances, like when you're asking questions of "how?" To take this back to the ancestor comment, if you're looking at "how did this wheelchair ramp get built?" you can describe the chain of events from the creation of a law to the construction of the ramp and all the individuals involved along the way making decisions and doing actions. And that is a good and useful analysis. Some tangible entity called "society" is not involved in that chain. And I think that might be your original point. And yes, that's accurate, in that kind of analysis.
So now, take that chain of events, and multiply it by, I dunno, a very large number; hell, infinity. Every outcome and the chain of individuals and actions that led up to it. How do we study this? How to we increase our understanding without having to treat every single outcome and every chain of events completely independently? You probably see where this is going already... :) We could treat every possible combination of coin tosses as an infinite set of independent events. What someone flipping a coin 10 times has to do with someone flipping a coin 1000 times isn't anything tangible - the flips, the individuals who make them, and the outcomes are independent. So... shrug and move on? Nope. We study probability. It helps us describe WHY - if 1000 people each flip a coin 1000 times, most will have a near 50/50 split heads/tails. Probability isn't tangible, but it certainly is real.
My revised argument then is: society is a concept like probability. It is like probability distributions that come from an ever-changing sea of individual opinions, predispositions, and actions. We can measure certain parts of it at points in time and review historical outcomes, and develop theories about why certain patterns are more common, certain outcomes more likely, and use this to enhance our decision making and understanding of the behaviors and tendencies of large groups of people. So to say "society isn't real" is true in the sense of tangibility, but also myopic - and like saying "probability isn't real, there are only outcomes."
Quite the opposite. As a niche becomes saturated with competition, user acquisition costs rise to approach the level of the highest margin player. If you want to have a sustainable business it behooves you to have better optimized margins than the competition.
what I found fascinating is that the effect is maintained even when you're not focused (like lens focus, not attention focus) on the circles. If you let your eyes relax their focus to a point beyond the screen, the blurry circles maintain the illusion.
And bonus points if you find the focal point where a third circle is in the middle which is a composite of both the left and right circles, and... it doesn't move. I don't know how to better explain the effects of letting your eyes wander out of focus and the artifacts it creates in your vision, but I'm sure someone will get it.
Feels almost normal on the left/right moving ones, but when the grow/shrink stage comes my brain has no idea what to do with the arrows. The arrows looked like they were both pointing in and out, sometimes flipping between them really fast.
Somehow the right side is slightly out of focus, but the left is sharp. I think I had each eye at a different focal point. Is that possible? lol
It sure is. It’s also quite interesting that i have to get very close to the screen to create that third circle, but then can get quite far without loosing it, even when looking at the right or left circle.
