erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
6d ago
During the Vietnam War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara developed a strategy based on objective, quantitative measures such as body counts and kill ratios. The infamous Project 100,000 was based on the idea that a soldier was a soldier (compare, a calorie is a calorie) and that the Army could get the warm bodies it needed by recruiting literal retards.
America lost the war.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
We're in the land of, "Well, you want to learn calculus; let's take a look at your grades in algebra and trig. Here's a reasonable estimate of about how much effort you're going to have to put in. It obviously won't be trivial; it'll take some work to learn calculus. But you can do it if you put in approximately this amount of effort. [And oh by the way, here are a bunch of strategies to help.]"
I don't think the average person can pass the AP Calc exam even if you offer them a billion dollar reward and let them take 5 years of full-time prep.
Your expectations would be wrong. Empirically. From personal experience and the experience of many many many other people. I think you just lack the personal experience to be aware of what it's like. Do you actually personally know anyone who has just done it? Just tracked their calories, lost some weight, then proceeded to eat at maintenance after? Have you spoken to them about their experience? Or are you just guessing in your expectation?
When I was in college, I somehow got it into my head that it would be a good idea to do ROTC, so I spent all summer dieting and exercising to lose weight. I never quite reached the army height and weight standards for my age, but I got close, losing a ton of weight. However:
- I did not do it by calorie counting; I did it by a combination of low-carb, weight lifting, and running.
- The routine proved impossible to maintain once classes started.
- The second I stopped, the weight came back.
Anyway, I ended up dropping out of ROTC to focus on math, but that didn't work out, either.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
If you can borrow enough money against your expected billion to quit your job and literally redesign your life around being thin, and are willing to do so, my best guess is that most people can manage to keep the weight off for 5 years. But I expect the required measures to be extreme; exercising for several hours every other day, chugging water all day to kill hunger, moving to a cold climate to burn more calories maintaining body temperature, eating bland food like Soylent and MealSquares, avoiding social occasions like birthdays and weddings so that you are not tempted to break your diet, etc. In the worst case, they might have to move to an isolated rural area in Alaska to avoid just driving down to the Walmart for a snack raid. It'd be something like a medical residency, where you endure four years of hell in exchange for a greatly improved rest of your life. And, of course, I expect the weight to come roaring back as soon as the 5 years are over and return to a normal life.
In 2025, a normal life makes you fat. It shouldn't take an extraordinary life to avoid being fat. And, for most of human history, it didn't. Sometime in the last few decades, something changed such that ordinary levels of exercise and satiety and willpower simply aren't enough anymore to avoid being fat. Since most people do not have the slack to redesign their entire lives around being thin, a realistic solution to the obesity epidemic needs to involve either identifying and removing the orange soda or inventing some kind of orange soda antidote. Telling people to just consume less calories than they spend is a useless distraction, like telling an adult who counts on his finger to just study harder for the AP Calc exam.
I hate to do it, but I'm going to go back to the math example. Suppose you were wanting to learn math. Perhaps some relatively higher-level math that only a relatively small percentage of people in the population know how to do. Suppose that the second you asked about it online, before anyone even had time to give some advice, folks were swamping the discussion with claims that it's actually impossible for most people to learn said math; after all, we can just look at the low percentage of the population which has currently learned it! Sagan, that would be a trainwreck every single time. I find this example extra funny, because it's not uncommon for math professors to seriously say things like, "You don't so much learn math as you get used to it." Doing math is also uncomfortable for a lot of people; people do get frustrated and upset when trying, and it is even true that a solid number of them just quit trying. But if every online discussion on math was swamped in the same way online weight loss discussions were, I'd probably be stuck just sighing and saying that you're going to have to just find someone offline to help you or put enough shibboleths in your initial inquiry to ward off the throngs of derailers.
Imagine that, for some reason, wanting to learning calculus was as common as wanting to lose weight (perhaps an eccentric billionaire has promised $100,000 to anyone who can pass the AP Calc exam), but that mathematical talent remained as low as it is our world (where, after we spend 13 years force-feeding everyone math in an attempt to get them to at least understand algebra, it turns out most people cannot deal with negative numbers or division, let alone variables, and top out their mastery of mathematics at memorizing multiplication tables; i.e., 3rd grade). However, the masses were not willing to accept this, and flooded message boards asking for advice on learning derivatives, purchased index cards with terms like "critical point" on them, etc., despite conclusive empirical evidence that the vast majority of people who attempted this failed.
It seems like the very first thing that should be said in such discussions is that most people are not capable of learning calculus, and that if you failed geometry in high school you are probably wasting your time. Specially when it became obvious that OP could not tell the difference between 7-3 and 3-7.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
We tried not having commissars. It doesn't work. It's a power vacuum ready and waiting for one side's commissars to move in. And nature abhors a vacuum.
Liberalism is a unstable pipe dream. The side that wants to win always beats the side that wants to be left alone. Someone's ideology is going to rule. All you can do is decide which side you'd rather see in charge and support it.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
Nobody brings up CICO as merely an underlying physical mechanism. The implication of CICO is always "therefore, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and it's your own fault that you are fat".
People who are against CICO are not denying thermodynamics; we are disputing that this is in any way a practical guide to action. It's like saying "the way to get rich is to earn more and spend less".
erwgv3g34
11d ago
I talk to quite a few "Daily Kos grandmas," and they're fascinating to listen to. They have no memory of what they used to believe or interest in what they may come to believe, only a sort of endless present of affirmation and social discipline crafted to maximize their donations to radical groups.
Orwell really had the normies pegged. The sheep switching from "Four legs good, two legs bad!" to "Four legs good, two legs better!" in Animal Farm and the party members not noticing the change from Oceania being at war with Eurasia to Oceania being at war with Eastasia in 1984 probably struck a lot of us as an unrealistic caricature, but, no, that is genuinely what normal people are like.
Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it:
Ninety nine percent of the people The Cominator wants to kill change their beliefs when official beliefs change, and never notice that their beliefs have changed. When we are in power, they will believe what we believe, and never remember ever having believed anything different.
Tangential: I always been fond of St. John's advertising slogan for its great books curriculum: "The following teachers will return to St. John's next year: Homer, Euclid, Chaucer, Einstein, Du Bois, Virgil, Augustine, Aristotle, Washington, Woolf, Plato, Tocqueville, Austen, Newton, Cervantes, Darwin, Mozart, Galileo, Tolstoy, Descartes, Freud."
I may not agree with the exact selection of names (Freud was wrong about everything, Du Bois is a diversity requirement, etc.), but I really like the notion of just reading the best books written by the greatest thinkers and writers on a given subject instead of using a random textbook and listening to lectures by a random professor.
My list would be a lot more modern (for basically the reasons given by Eliezer in "Guardians of Ayn Rand"), but the basic idea would be that it is better to learn evolutionary biology by reading Dawkins or physics by reading Feynman than by reading an overpriced $100 textbook.
Related: I just watched Interspecies Reviewers (NSFW), which IMDb sums up as "From elves to succubi to fairies and more, Our heroes: Stunk, a human, Zel, an elf and a hermaphrodite angel named Crimvael are here to rate the red-light delights of all manner of monster girls".
It's way, way better than it sounds; a perfect mix of sexy, comedy, and worldbuilding. I have never seen such a cultured anime in my life.
For the fucc, vote Succ!
erwgv3g34
18d ago
Yeah, both sides were going to fuck up the economy, so I ended up voting on social issues, where Trump was the clear winner.
erwgv3g34
22d ago
My immediate question would be 'Why do you need to spend half-a-million on a house?'
...because that's what houses cost???
I open Zillow for my city and I see the following listings:
- $470,000, 4 bds, 2 ba
- $474,900, 2 bds, 2 ba
- $465,000, 2 bds, 1 ba
- $459,950, 4 bds, 2 ba
- $485,000, 3 bds, 1 ba
These aren't McMansions; they are completely normal suburban houses in South Florida.
Even empty lots are going for a quarter mil, not 100k.
There is a reason millenials are waiting for a housing crash before buying our first house.
The classic Disney villain death is for the bad guy to fall off a cliff after getting into a final fight with the hero.
It's the best of both worlds; you get to see the hero defeat the villain in a climactic battle, the hero gets to show how good and noble he is by sparing the villain's life, then the villain dies anyway in a way that keeps the hero morally pure.
See Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, etc.
erwgv3g34
23d ago
I got tired of accidentally destroying my laptops and got a renewed Dell Latitude 5414. It's been working pretty well so far.
Alternatively, you may want to buy a used Alphasmart Neo for distraction-free writing.
The second half of Wind Waker is pretty good. Basically, you are given a goal (collect the 8 plot coupons and restore your weapon to full power) and absolutely no direction on how to accomplish it. It's up to you to sail around the 50 islands that make up the game map exploring landmarks and talking to people and doing random quests until you eventually get rewarded with a treasure map revealing the location of a MacGuffin shard or manage to get into the two dungeons you must clear to upgrade your blade.
People hated the exploration phase so much that Wind Waker HD gave you a fast sail and reduced the number of steps needed to complete the game, but I really liked it.
erwgv3g34
30d ago
Progressivism is a universalist religion; "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere", "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". They don't want to experiment with letting states ban gay marriage or allow firearms for the same reason Christians don't want to experiment with letting states allow abortion or reinstate slavery; it is wrong, and it is evil, and it must be cleansed from the face of the Earth by fire and steel.
As @Capital_Room put it:
There is a certain kind of person for whom moral disapproval and the drive to intervene are one and the same thing, inseparable. To them, a lack of a burning need to stop a thing is proof that you don't actually disapprove of it. It's the classic stereotype of the D&D Paladin played badly: "see evil, smite evil." They are constitutionally incapable of shrugging and saying "none of my business." And the Blue Tribe is full of them.
Consider every missionary of an evangelizing, expansionist faith who has set out to convert the heathen — by fire and sword if necessary — because it's their duty, it's the right thing to do, and it's for the heathen's own good. If you have the One True Faith, the true set of Universal Human Rights, the Objectively Correct Morality, then you have a duty to spread and enforce it everywhere you can.
Why fight the Red Tribe? Because if you don't, you are complicit in every wrong they do. If you let the Red Tribe keep being transphobic rather than try to stop them, then the blood of every trans kid in a Red Tribe area who commits suicide is on your hands. Like Kendi says, you are either actively anti-racist, or you are racist. It's one or the other. You are either fighting evil, or you are evil.
Why does the Blue Tribe hate the Red Tribe? Because it's in their nature to hate anyone who fails to share their values. Because this need to be a moral busybody, a crusader, a Social Justice Warrior, is a core characteristic of the Tribe, woven into their culture (and probably also a non-trivial amount of genetic predisposition).
Why does the Blue Tribe continually attack the Red Tribe, trying to force them to convert, or otherwise eliminate the "Red culture"? Because they're fundamentally incapable of not doing so. They can't stop themselves, and thus they will never stop.
erwgv3g34
30d ago
Money is fungible. If you give a Camden gangbanger $300 in food stamps, that's an extra $300 he has for a Saturday Night Special.
Alan Turing was famously chemically castrated by 1950's UK.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Reminds me of the Charity Centers from "Down And Out In Christania" by AntiDem (and, less optimistically, the terrafoam projects from Manna by Marshall Brain).
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Obligatory link to Gwern's outstanding review of McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War:
It’s not well-known, but one of the most consistent long-term sponsors of research into intelligence has been the US military. This is because, contrary to lay wisdom that ‘IQ only measures how well you do on a test’ or book-learning, cognitive ability predicts performance in all occupations down to the simplest manual labor; this might seem surprising, but there are a lot of ways to screw up a simple job and cause losses outside one’s area. For example, aiming and pointing a rifle, or throwing a grenade, might seem like a simple task, but it’s also easy to screw up by pointing at the wrong point, requires fast reflexes (reflexes are one of the most consistent correlations with intelligence), memory for procedures like stripping, the ability to read ammo box labels or orders (as one Marine drill instructor noted), and ‘common sense’ like not indulging in ‘practical jokes’ by tossing grenades at one’s comrades and forgetting to remove the fuse - common sense is not so common, as the saying goes. Such men were not even useful cannon fodder, as they were as much a danger to the men around them as themselves (never mind the enemy), and jammed up the system. (A particularly striking non-Vietnam example is the case of one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever, the Port Chicago disaster which killed 320 people - any complex disaster like that has many causes, of course, but one of them was simply that the explosives were being handled by the dregs of the Navy - not even bottom decile, but bottom duo-decile (had to look that one up), and other stations kept raiding it for anyone competent.)
Gregory’s book collates stories about what happened when the US military was forced to ignore these facts it knew perfectly well in the service of Robert McNamara & Lyndon Johnson’s “Project 100,000” idea to kill two birds with one stone by drafting recruits who were developmentally disabled, unhealthy, evil, or just too dumb to be conscripted previously: it would provide the warm bodies needed for Vietnam, and use the military to educate the least fortunate and give them a leg up as part of the Great Society’s faith in education to eliminate individual differences and refute the idea that intelligence is real.
It did not go well.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Try pitching it to BRAVE Books? They are an explicitly conservative and Christian children's book company.
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
If you are a single young man who is willing and able to fight, you are probably fine. If you are married with a wife and kids, do you really want them around those people?
erwgv3g34
1mo ago
Never ask a man his salary, a woman her ago, or a white nationalist his girlfriend's race, as the meme goes.
On the other hand, Asians are honorary Aryans, something I can only aspire to.
Have you ever tried Ground Control? It's a little old, but I really liked it. Very story-heavy. Focus on formations and maneuvers with a small number of pre-deployed units.
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