MTGAP
7mo ago
This is how I interpreted it:
- Strength makes it easier to attain excellence.
- But strength does not particularly care about excellence. Strength only produces excellence as a side effect under certain conditions.
- If strength is widely denigrated, then the only way for strength to make itself look good is to be excellent.
- Therefore, we ought to denigrate strength, to force it to be excellent.
a stupid move because the characters that comics fans know and want are Iron Man, Captain America, and so on.
I think the issue was a bit different:
- Iron Man, etc. became popular because of the MCU movies. Back when Marvel was broke, they sold off the movie rights for all their most popular characters (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic 4, Hulk), and Iron Man and Captain America were the most popular out of the ones they had left.
- Captain America wasn't even popular in the first 2 movies he appeared in. I remember in the Honest Trailer for The Avengers[1], they called Captain America "no one's favorite character". He only got popular after The Winter Soldier came out because that movie was really good.
My point being, the MCU could have been just fine without Iron Man and Captain America. They made those characters popular, so they could have done the same thing again—introduce some new characters to the film-going audience and make them compelling. The problem wasn't that they brought in unknown characters, it was that they didn't make those characters compelling.
[1] This is a tangent but re-watching this video reminded me of how when they switched from their old narrator (who does this video) to the new one, tons of people complained that the old one was better. Which was crazy to me? The "new" narrator (not really new at this point, he's been doing it for >10 years) sounds like an actual movie trailer narrator, the old one sounds like a guy who can do a decent impression of a movie trailer narrator.
MTGAP
1yr ago
But there is no actual way to identify them, unless you switch to SAT only admissions.
This statement sounds weird to me? "There is no way to identify them, unless you use the extremely obvious and easy method to identify them."
MTGAP
1yr ago
Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available.
How does this work as a practical matter? How are modern people able to read a 1400-year-old version of Arabic?
MTGAP
1yr ago
Agreed that professors often overreach by compelling certain types of belief. But on my reading, the legislation is overly broad:
compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.
Suppose an economics professor has an exam that compels students (on penalty of getting a worse grade) to express that, in a hypothetical all-else-equal scenario, minimum wage increases unemployment. This is certainly a political belief (minimum wage is a controversial political issue), but I'd say it's fair game for an economics exam.
(The "inherently superior" wording is a bit weird, if you say political belief X is true and not-X is false, is that equivalent to saying X is inherently superior to not-X?)
MTGAP
1yr ago
This is a total aside but I find it curious what does and does not get labeled NSFW. I'm not criticizing you or anything, you're following standard norms, but I find it weird that a stand-up bit without swears is "SFW", and a stand-up bit with swears is "NSFW", even though the actual thing I'd get in trouble for at work isn't the swearing, but the fact that I'm watching stand-up while I'm supposed to be working.
Or, like, pictures of women in bikinis is "SFW", but pictures of topless women are "NSFW", even though I'd be ~75% as embarrassed to be caught at work looking at women in bikinis as at topless women.
MTGAP
1yr ago
The Jar Jar one always got me. I kept hearing people say Jar Jar was a racist caricature, but I couldn't figure out what race he was supposed to represent. Not a very good caricature if I can't even tell what it's caricaturing. (I think he's supposed to be quasi-Jamaican? But he really doesn't seem Jamaican to me.)
MTGAP
1yr ago
And yet I still don't know what the sanctions actually were. Deleting text messages that are pertinent to a case is destroying evidence, which is a crime, right? So the people who did it are going to prison, right? Right?
MTGAP
1yr ago
while the kingdom most coded as Chinese is more similar to white people
Which kingdom are you thinking of? My guess is Shinovar but I'm not sure
MTGAP
1yr ago
So...their fact check is that they can't fact-check it?
(To be a little more charitable, there's definitely a difference between "I don't know because didn't look into this at all" and "I don't know because the information is not available".)
MTGAP
1yr ago
This is kind of like JRR Tolkien's critics claiming that orcs are meant to be black people or Asians.
I'm not sure how to articulate why I don't like this kind of reasoning, but I think it's something like this:
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Trait X is widely regarded as bad.
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People want to portray ethnic group A as bad, so they associate group A with trait X.
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A fiction author wants to make fictional group B look bad, so they associate group B with trait X.
It doesn't follow that the author is trying to associate group A with group B.
MTGAP
1yr ago
I bought some glass straws for my house and later replaced them with plastic because they were too hard to clean, but the glass straws were much nicer. They feel better to eat with, like the difference between a metal fork and a plastic one. The rounded end of a glass straw felt nice on my tongue.
MTGAP
1yr ago
At one point they introduce Reed Richards in another universe, who was announced as the smartest man on their planet, a board member of the Illuminati that led the planet from the shadows. When faced with a life or death battle against an extremely powerful sorceress, he tries to talk her down in person after she annihilates about a brigade of their combat robots! What kind of retard would do that when he's only got the power to be really stretchy? Can't he talk to her via telecommunications or something? Call in an airstrike or use some kind of standoff attack? Research her capabilities and find a counter? Or perhaps coordinate the other combatants so they deal with her in a coordinated way rather than being defeated in detail, one by one?
IMO the problem isn't so much that the writers aren't smart enough, it's that they aren't trying. They've already decided that the plot needs to go a particular way, so they write characters' actions to make the plot go that way. If characters took initiative, they would derail the plot, so they must not be allowed to be too clever.
MTGAP
1yr ago
How are they $400 short? Money is fungible. If you seize a guy's money and then "lose" some of it, pay him back out of the police department budget.
Of course they're never going to do that, but they could.
MTGAP
1yr ago
(I realize I'm very late to this thread)
"Rape" is absent because it's not on PornHub. If you search "rape" on PornHub, you get this message (abridged for brevity):
Warning: Your search could be for illegal and abusive sexual material, including non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) or image-based sexual abuse (IBSA). Actual or staged depictions of coerced or non-consensual sexual acts or the use of a person’s likeness without their consent is not permitted on our site. If you are the victim, or have personal knowledge that an intimate image/video has already been shared on our site without consent, you can report it via our Content Removal Request Form, or to the police. Additional information regarding victim resources can be found through the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.
At least the message is better than it used to be—IIRC last time I looked, if you searched "rape", you'd get a message telling you to seek therapy.
MTGAP
1yr ago
I’m no statistician, but the holes in this methodology are truly incredible. Not to mention the use of BMI, which is a hugely stigmatising metric that fat people have asked people to stop using FOREVER.
This was my favorite comment. It implies that either
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BMI does not correctly measure obesity, in which case it wouldn't be stigmatizing toward fat people because it isn't correctly identifying them
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BMI stigmatizes fat people, which means it correctly identifies them, but having a high BMI somehow brings some additional stigma that merely being fat doesn't
MTGAP
1yr ago
Can you elaborate on "interruptions"? I know about most of the things you mentioned but I don't know about that one.
MTGAP
1yr ago
I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach The Sun and 4 years to reach the nearest star.
Sounds like you are treating the baseball as the size of the earth's orbit around the sun, rather than the size of the sun itself. But that would give you an answer that's too small rather than too big so idk how you got your answer.
So 8 minutes to 4 years is one ratio, and baseball and the sun is the other ratio.
I am confused about your reasoning here...are you calculating (4 years / 8 minutes) * (radius of baseball / radius of sun)? That would give you a unitless value, not a distance. I think you were using the wrong values in your calculation but I can't tell what you were using.
MTGAP
1yr ago
Same with the Mandarin word for "a big number" being translated as 10,000 (IIRC it literally means 10,000 in Mandarin).
MTGAP
1yr ago
Shakespeare lived around 1200 or something? Maybe 1930? 1600 BC?
Related to this, I'd often heard the fact that the time between Cleopatra and today is shorter than the time between Cleopatra and the building of the pyramids. I found that surprising at first, but then more recently I learned that Cleopatra was a contemporary of Caesar (i.e., she lived around 0 AD). At which point the fact became obvious to me—the pyramids are 5000 years old, Cleopatra lived 2000 years ago, of course 5000 - 2000 > 2000. My confusion came from "ancient Egypt = 5000 years ago, Cleopatra is ancient Egypt, therefore Cleopatra = 5000 years ago". Not sure if this makes me dumber or less dumb.
MTGAP
1yr ago
octopuses evolved 500 billion years ago
According to the 15 seconds I spent on Wikipedia, octopuses evolved 155 million years ago, so you can't even fix it by flipping a bit
MTGAP
1yr ago
My Fermi estimate of (1) before looking at the answer:
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Proxima Centauri is 4 light years away
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Speed of light is 300 million meters
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There are 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds in a year
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The Earth is roughly 20,000 km thick. idk how big the sun is but maybe 100x bigger (by length) so let's say 1 million km
-
A baseball is roughly 0.1 m
Therefore the scaled-down Proxima Centauri would be a distance away equal to
4 light years * # seconds per year / size of sun * size of baseball / meters per km
= 4 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 3e8 / 1e9 * 0.1 / 1000
= 3784 kilometers
I didn't do (2) because I didn't see it until after I looked at the answer for (1).
MTGAP
2yr ago
men and women actually commit rape at fairly comparable rates.
I don't have an informed opinion about this, but I find this strange for two reasons:
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It's pretty well-established that men commit more violent crimes than women in general.
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It's pretty well-established that men like sex much more than women in general.
Given these two facts, I'd predict that, not only do men commit much more rape than women, but the male:female: perpetrator ratio for rape would be even higher than for other violent crimes. The data appear to suggest otherwise. What explains this unexpected result?
(My best-guess explanation is that the CDC data is wrong somehow, but I haven't looked much into it, and I don't know why it would be wrong.)
MTGAP
2yr ago
I think it's pretty common for creators to have inconsistent output or to not understand what makes their own work good. A few other examples that come to mind:
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Jane Austen thought Pride and Prejudice was her worst book
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Paul McCartney believe his more recent work is much better than The Beatles
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The Wachowskis have made a few fantastic movies (The Matrix is my favorite movie of all time) but most of their movies are crap
But I have no clue what allows some creators to consistently produce good work, and others to be occasionally genius but inconsistent.
So by this logic, the government should require all drivers to install sleep monitors and then revoke the license of anyone who sleeps for less than 7 hours a night?
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