felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
1d ago
The energy in the wind scales as the cube of the wind speed. It looks like it ought to be the square of the wind speed, because kinetic energy is one half m v squared. But what is the mass here? It is the mass of air passing the wind turbine, so that is proportional to the wind speed.
This makes intermittency a huge problem. When the when is blowing at half speed, you only get one eighth of the energy. Imagine planning for low winds by over provisioning by a factor of two. You have built twice as many wind turbines as you need for a day with the designed for wind strength, expecting that you will make it through low wind days without black outs. But when the wind strength dips to 79% of design nominal, you are already down to half power, taking up the entire margin provided by over provisioning. The wind drops to 78% and you have to start shedding load :-( Or at least drawing on storage.
I keep seeing critics of wind power asking "what do you do on calm days?". That is a bad question. It leads to boosters and critics both worrying about the occasional calm day when the air is still. But we need to worry about the half strength days. And those are common place days when the wind is still blowing and we expect the turbines to turn and the electricity to stay on.
A credible wind power system would have eight fold over provision, and weeks of storage. The occasional day when the wind is above design strength all day would be a cause for celebration: we have captured a weeks worth of energy in a day! And we could start feeling that we had a secure energy supply. We are nowhere near facing the challenge of intermittency nor the expense of intermittency.
felis-parenthesis
4d ago
That is a destructive question. The tradeoff between profit and treatment is discussed ad nauseam. The gradual accumulation of treatments that extend life, without restoring its quality, and are expensive, is painful to think about. So we don't. But we need to, and the profit question helps us procrastinate and never get round to the uncomfortable issue :-(
I frame it with an equation life-span = health-span + grim-span. Modern medicine is extending the health-span. But for every extra year of health-span, we get three or four years more grim-span. (3? 4? I'll admit that I'm guessing wildly. I just don't want to follow my grand-mother and my parents down the care-home, dementia-unit, nursing-home, route.) Expensive grim-span.
We are well down the road of nibbling away at the quality of the health-span with taxes (or insurance premiums) to pay for expensive medical treatments. When do we say: there is a cash limit. That is a scary thing to say. Perhaps I will fall ill, find out that there is a treatment to save my life, find out the cost is over the cash limit, and get told "sorry, you'll have to die". Maybe the cash limit will be low because I decide to opt out of insurance for expensive treatments, enjoy spending the money I save, and die when my luck runs out.
There are two battles. One is around opting out. If I opt out of paying for the more expensive treatments for others, and therefore (by fairness) for myself, can I change my mind when I fall ill? Obviously not. Can I still whine about it, or must I die quietly? The other battle is about the future. More expensive treatments are coming. When is the breaking point when the money runs out?
Returning to the profit question, the British National Health Service (the NHS) is funded out of general taxation and free at the point of use. Do we Britbongs escape the profit issue? We should, because the NHS is a non-profit. But it doesn't work out like that. At constant funding there is a tradeoff between the wages of doctors and nurses and treatment. At constant funding, higher pay means fewer doctors means less treatment. Alternatively there is a tradeoff between funding and taxes. The politicians in charge need to keep in touch with fluctuating public sentiment. What will get them re-elected? More taxes and more health care? Lower taxes and scandals about people dying waiting for treatment? Perhaps the warning sign of the impending breaking point is no-one can get re-elected. The low tax politicians cannot get re-elected because of the deaths. The health care spenders cannot get re-elected because of the taxes.
We need to learn to memento mori least we build a world in which we spend our lives working long hours in health care, before eventually falling ill and taking a very long time dying, kept alive by the strenuous efforts of many younger people.
felis-parenthesis
13d ago
Official government webpage https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ehlers-danlos-syndromes/
felis-parenthesis
25d ago
One complication is the Golden Rule and private autogynephilia. Let me start with a three way sub-classification of private autogynephilia.
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Repression It would be so easy to buy a dress on line or at a thrift shop and dress up and blush. No! That would be wrong. One makes ones mind a battle field and victory is not giving in to temptation.
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Binge and Purge One gives in to temptation, dresses, make-up, maybe even a wig. Then one gets disgusted by what one is doing, and throws them away. But a year later one does it all again.
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Limited, private indulgence One gives in to temptation. Release turns into relief, and one puts ones cross-sex items away, in a suit case or a drawer, knowing that one will be tempted again, and indulge again. But also aware that the over-all effect on ones life is negative. Without turning ones mind into a battle field, one tries to avoid temptation and leave off for months or years.
The Golden Rule is often written as
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
All three classes of private autogynephile see autogynephilia as a misfortune. It takes them away from seeking a girl friend or a wife. It takes them away from sublimating sexual impulses in other, satisfying alternatives. Yet it is so horribly unrealistic. They are a bloke, not a girl; autogynephilia involves fighting a war against reality and reality always wins. And they cannot expect any-one else to join in and humor them.
What would they have others do unto them? They hope that others will refrain from encouraging them. No "woman of the year" for a man. No "Stunning and brave" for a man. No inviting a man to use she/her pronouns. They hope to avoid cultivating and strengthening their fetish. They don't want to get outed. They don't want to have to say "please stop talking about positively about transition, because I'm both tempted and sure that it would work about badly for me." It is the same as when the ex-alcoholic is invited to go for a drink. He doesn't want to reveal his private past and he doesn't want to be cajoled.
And what then does the Golden Rule command them to do unto others? They see it as partly idiopathic and partly social contagion. They keep it private to avoid contaminating others. They oppose publicity and encouragement around transition. This is rooted in compassion for those with autogynphilia. It is a net negative for them. As best they can judge, it is a net negative for others. They wish to avoid harming others by encouraging the fetish, just as they hope that others will avoid harming them by validating and encouraging their fetish.
felis-parenthesis
30d ago
Human social lives are vicious. Watch your back. Alice has a dishy boyfriend Bob. Carol is jealous. Carol goes 4B and tells Alice how wonderful 4B is. Alice gets persuaded to break up with Bob. Bob is back on the dating market. Carol hooks Bob while maintaining the 4B charade around Alice.
Yikes! I've swallowed too many black pills. Any-one know the antidote?
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
You are right to press me on whether my corruption scenario has ever actually happened. My gut feeling is no, never. But the past few years have wrecked my world view, and I fear that I am old and have been left behind while the world changes.
Back in March 2021 I had the Astra-Zenaca mRNA vaccine for COVID. How dangerous could it be? I knew that the messenger RNA would cause my cells to produce the protein that the snippet coded for. Scary! But I knew that that is what happens in a viral infection, and what happens when you take a "weakened" vaccine. Indeed Edward Jenner's original cowpox vaccination for smallpox is doing the same thing; spoiling the host for the smallpox virus by getting host cells to produce a shared protein and getting the host to produce anti-bodies to it. I was a science enthusiast and marveled at the invention of mRNA vaccines.
I saw public health as a nerdy area, and took it for granted that traditional standards of safety and efficacy would be upheld. I was disappointed. The https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths dynamic had played out while I wasn't paying attention. The blot clots and myocarditis problems would have lead to the swift withdrawal of the vaccines when I was young; but the world had moved on.
My current understanding of how the world works goes something like this:
It is year N and Mr Blackpill has noticed that the incentives tend towards corruption. He claims that year N is already corrupt. It isn't. Mr Blackpill is undaunted; he claims that dynamics created by the incentives are fast acting and predicts that year N+10 will be corrupt. Nope. Mr Blackpill has complete faith in his reasoning and in human avarice. Year N+20 will definitely see a corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill is wrong again.
Eventually year N+30 arrives and with it a big corruption scandal. Mr Blackpill was right in the end. Worse, it turns out that the corruption is entrenched and hard to root out. It has been going on for fifteen years. Mr Blackpill was right about N+20. There are a variety of forces that tend to hide scandals and when they break out into the mainstream it turns out those in the know had been complaining, correctly, for many years.
Returning to adding versus topping up. I see the language here as one of those forces that tend to hide scandals. Ecbatic not telic. I don't know whether we are in year N, year N+10, or year N+20. Mostly I don't know because I'm not in the business. But I cannot know by reading the newspapers. People complain about fluoride being added to the water supply and I'm left to guess that they mean topping up. If there was a scandal of the kind that I speculate about, adding, not topping up the news reports would say much the same and the I wouldn't be any the wiser. It would be the year N+20 situation, where there is corruption but still ten years to go before the facts break into mainstream news.
At the end of the day, my guess is that there just isn't enough money in water treatment to attract the avaracious, and the potential for corruption goes unrealized. But the clumsy language, that stands ready to hide it if it ever happens, still give me the ick.
the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
And this is an extraordinarily bad idea.
I'm aware that I completely lack the common touch, so it is best that I defer to your expertise here. I would be interested if you had any ideas on how to push back against the confusion of adding and topping up.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
But the language of "adding" rather than "topping up" has erased the concept of already has enough fluoride in it naturally. The idea is missing from the discourse. Lots of ordinary people have naturally occurring fluoride in their drinking water and have no idea that it has always been like that. Dr Nerd's third attempt at making his point will make not make sense to those people and they will ignore him.
We can tell that the idea of already has enough fluoride in it naturally has been erased from the discourse, simply by listening out for the missing follow-up questions. When some-one is on the media, arguing against fluoridation on the grounds that the recommended level is a health hazard, the interviewer questions them. The obvious line of questioning is "What about places with naturally occurring fluoridation? Do you advocate removing it? How? Are the health problems actually showing up? There have been multiple life times for them to appear!" But the obvious questions don't occur to the interviewer. The concepts have somehow gotten erased :-(
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
In the particular case of fluoridating water, the ruling elite had a good story. Scientists knew that naturally occurring levels of fluoride varied from place to place. Did it matter? They did the epidemiology thing and decided that less than one part per million made tooth decay noticeably worse. More than four parts per million caused dental fluorosis, but nothing else showed up strongly with natural levels of fluoridation. So topping up fluoride to bring low fluoride water up to one part per million seemed super safe; lots of people were already living with 1ppm. And had been for their entire lives. It was a rare case where we have data (albeit epidemiological) on all cause mortality, due to pre-existing "natural experiments".
... without facing widespread riots or resistance is just insane ...
Your confusion is the result of a garbled account of events. That is bad in itself, but I want to make the case that it is important to say that "topping up" and "adding" are different and that the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
First I will offer paradigms of "topping up" and "adding" and then make my case that things can go horribly wrong if we tolerate people confusing them.
Topping up Measure the level. If it comes in at 0.5 ppm, add enough to increase the level by 0.5 ppm. Measure again. If it is in the range 0.9 to 1.1 ppm declare victory. If outside that range, find out why, and adjust appropriately.
Adding Don't bother measuring, or if some-else has measured, just ignore it. Add enough to increase the level by 1 ppm. Continue to fail at measuring and be smug that the level is at least 1 ppm because our addition guarantees that out-come.
Now picture a town debating water fluoridation. Why? Well, Mr Bad Guy hopes to get kick backs from the contracts for fluoridation equipment and chemicals. He persuades his fellow citizens to top up fluoride levels at public expense. They vote for it. Mr Bad Guy sets it in motion. The measured natural level turns out to be 1.3 ppm. There is nothing to be done. No contracts, no kick backs. Mr Bad Guy looks around and notices that nobody is watching. He arranges contracts for equipment and chemicals to add enough fluoride to increase the levels by 1 ppm. He pockets his bribe money. Fluoride levels increase to 2.3 ppm. Mr Bad Guy feels safe. No-one will notice 2.3 ppm and if he falls under suspicion for corruption, he can always say that he misunderstood.
Later Dr Nerd measures the fluoride and checks the records of the old measurements. Dr Nerd is unhappy about the waste of public money, or about the dangers of fluoride, take your pick. He tries to "blow the whistle". But what language does he speak? If he uses the vernacular he complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply and we shouldn't be doing that, we should instead be adding fluoride to the water supply [sic]. Nobody understands his point. So he switches to Nerd-speak and complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply when we should be topping up; very different. Topping up is free! But the towns-folk don't speak Nerd-speak, so Dr Nerd still fails to make himself understood.
Talking about topping up fluoride levels using the word adding is bad. It covers up corruption and is why we cannot have nice things.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I enjoyed that rant. It was very horseshoe. Douglas Mcgregor is right wing, and he also says that we are ruled by the donor class.
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
I find the claim that Trump is antisemitic confusing. I try to visit enough different forums that I get an idea of the breadth of opinion. The places that approve of Hitler often call Trump the Zion Don and think that he is owned by Jews. For example: https://communities.win/c/ConsumeProduct/p/199OTqPFyM/why-havent-you-voted-for-zion-do/c
felis-parenthesis
1mo ago
If a young Englishman scores highly on IQ tests they will likely be admitted to a three year degree program and complete it successfully. Sitting their final exams, they will be recalling material learned at the beginning of their course, three years earlier: success depends on having a retentive memory. Retentive for years. But the IQ test only took an hour or two; no chance to probe multi-year memory retention. How does that work?
One idea is that IQ tests are probing for a healthy brain and a low mutational load. It is still a little unclear why the genes that help with rapidly solving little puzzles should be the same ones that boost memory.
I could imagine that sustained selection based on IQ test will eventually break the correlation of test performance and long term memory. In a dozen generations, say 2323 or 2384, there may be a crisis in University admissions. Too many students are really sharp mentally, but they forget their course work after 6 months and end up failing.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
I fed "desublimated higher culture" into Google and found this conversation, Marcuse's book and
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 5 already displayed.
Trying Bing.com
There are no results for "desublimated higher culture"
Check your spelling or try different keywords
Typing
"the pleasure
into Google gets me various autocompletions
The pleasure principle Geometrie De La Mort TV series
The pleasure principle Studio album by Gary Numan
Clearly the phrase once had cultural cachet.
It gets worse. Wikipedia has articles on Pleasure principle and Reality principle. I want to be one of the cool intellectuals, who is down with these sophisticated concepts. How can I do that when Wikipedia puts their vapid triviality on public display :-(
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Singapore and Hong Kong. Small, densely populated islands of prosperity.
Maybe also where a huge number of people want to live in the center of a special city, so Washington or London.
Perhaps New York (meaning Manhattan Island) ticks both boxes.
But maybe Washington, London, and New York combine natural housing crises with manufactured housing crises based on rent controls and restrictive planning laws.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
The issue is that there are two distinct dangers in play, and to emphasize the differences I'll use a concrete example for the first danger instead of talking abstractly.
First danger: we replace judges with GTP17. There are real advantages. The averaging implicit in large scale statistics makes GPT17 less flaky than human judges. GPT17 doesn't take take bribes. But clever lawyers find how to bamboozle it, leading to extreme errors, different in kind to the errors that humans make. The necessary response is to unplug GPT17 and rehire human judges. This proves difficult because those who benefit from bamboozling GPT17 have gained wealth and power and want to preserve the flawed system because of the flaws. But GPT17 doesn't defend itself; the Artificial Intelligence side of the unplugging is easy.
Second danger: we build a superhuman intelligence whose only flaw is that it doesn't really grasp the "don't monkey paw us!" thing. It starts to accidentally monkey paw us. We pull the plug. But it has already arraigned a back up power supply. Being genuinely superhuman it easily outwits our attempts to turn it off, and we get turned into paper clips.
The conflict is that talking about the second danger tends to persuade people that GPT17 will be genuinely intelligent, and that in its role as RoboJudge it will not be making large, inhuman errors. This tendency is due to the emphasis on Artificial Intelligence being so intelligent that it outwits our attempts to unplug it.
I see the first danger as imminent. I see the second danger as real, but well over the horizon.
I base the previous paragraph on noticing the human reaction to Large Language Models. LLMs are slapping us in the face with non-unitary nature of intelligence. They are beating us with clue-sticks labelled "Human-intelligence and LLM-intelligence are different" and we are just not getting the message.
Here is a bad take; you are invited to notice that it is seductive: LLMs learn to say what an ordinary person would say. Human researchers have created synthetic midwit normies. But that was never the goal of AI. We already know that humans are stupid. The point of AI was to create genuine intelligence which can then save us from ourselves. Midwit normies are the problem and creating additional synthetic ones makes the problem worse.
There is some truth in the previous paragraph, but LLMs are more fluent and more plausible than midwit normies. There is an obvious sense that Artificial Intelligence has been achieved and it ready for prime time; roll on RoboJudge. But I claim that this is misleading because we are judging AI by human standards. Judging AI by human standards contains a hidden assumption: intelligence is unitary. We rely on our axiom that intelligence is unitary to justify taking the rules of thumb that we use for judging human intelligence and using them to judge LLMs.
Think about the law firm that got into trouble by asking an LLM to write its brief. The model did a plausible job, except that the cases it cited didn't exist. The LLM made up plausible citations, but was unaware of the existence of an external world and the need for the cases to have actually happened in that external world. A mistake, and a mistake beyond human comprehension. So we don't comprehend. We laugh it off. Or we call it a "hallucination". Anything to avoid recognizing the astonishing discovery that there are different forms of intelligence with wildly different failure modes.
All the AI's that we create in the foreseeable future will have alarming failure modes, that offer this consolation: we can use them to unplug the AI if it is misbehaving. An undefeatable AI is over the horizon.
The issue for the short term is that humans are refusing to see that intelligence is a heterogeneous concept and we are are going to have to learn new ways of assessing intelligence before we install RoboJudges. We are heading for disasters where we rely on AI's that go on to manifest new kinds of stupidity and make incomprehensible errors. Fretting over the second kind of danger focuses on intelligence and takes us away from starting to comprehend the new kinds of stupidity that are manifest by new kinds of intelligence.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Democrats are the real racists = Democrats R the Real Racists = DRRR = DR^3 = DR3
Wait, you might not be asking how the weird abbreviation works. You might be asking why people believe that Democrats are racist.
I think that the change that has happened in my life time starts from the position that Black underperformance is due to anti-black racism from whites. End racism, replacing it with meritocracy and Blacks will thrive and do just as well as Whites.
After forty years of disappointment, the new-Democrat anti-racist position is that blacks are inferior, so meritocracy condemns them to an inferior position in society. Therefore meritocracy is bad and must be rejected in favor of racial quotas to ensure that blacks are given equal outcomes to whites. new-Democrats don't word it like that. DR3 is that claim that that is what they mean and it is really racist and bad.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
It would be more focused to target buy-borrow-die by expanding the definition of realization to include using the asset as collateral for a loan. Buy for $100, take out loan for $90 secured on asset, no tax liability. Notice that the asset is now more valuable. Convince lender that the increase in value is durable. Take out another $90 loan secured on the asset. Now you have realized $180 so a $80 gain becomes taxable, and you have money (the loan) to pay it without having to sell the asset.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The significance of your observation depends on your causal model. Usually the fall into tyranny is treated as exogenous: it is just as likely when the civilians have guns as when they are disarmed. Eventually it happens, and if the civilians have guns we get to see if they can shoot their way back to freedom.
I prefer to add two upstream stages. Before you can have a coup or a tyrant, you need that kind of person in politics. Once in politics they scheme and calculate. Perhaps the civilians have been disarmed by a well meaning predecessor. Now the would be tyrant's calculation is whether the police and the army will kill on his behalf. Perhaps the civilians have guns. How the calculation is whether the police and the army will take incoming fire. Some will die. Dying is a bigger ask than killing, and I anticipate the would be tyrant biding his time, waiting for a better opportunity that never comes.
But upstream of that is the question: does the would be tyrant even go into politics? Some-one who grows up in a disarmed country may see his fellow country men as sheep to be sheared and enters politics hoping to transcend electoral politics and become Lord Protector. Some-one else, growing up where civilians have guns sees less chance of grabbing ultimate power and probably ends up following a different path through life. Perhaps he aims to become very rich, by up newspapers, and then to half-rule from the shadows, using the media to shape public opinion, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but never at risk of being shot.
Perhaps the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment is pointless because the guns never get used. I think that the lack of organized insurgency shows that the second amendment works better than expected, shaping who goes into politics. The guns are never used because those with ambitions to be tyrants find others paths through life.
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
There is a maxim for writers: show, don't tell
show: I rushed over and helped myself.
The reader learns from the hurry that the person was hungry, just as though the reader had seen the unseemly haste himself and inferred the hunger.
tell: I was hungry as heck.
Aaargh! Don't "show then tell"
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease.
The situation is darker and bleaker than that because of the third option: social contagion.
In Scotland, drug overdose deaths have soared to over a thousand a year in a country/(region of the UK) of merely five million. There is a big concentration of deaths in Dundee. The dynamics are rather like a contagious disease. How does social contagion mimic the in-person spread of an infection disease in the internet age? Junkies in Dundee are not going to Glasgow to buy their drugs; it is friend of a friend stuff with-in Dundee. The need to pass physical drugs from hand to hand creates geographically local dynamics.
But I'm old. I'm already familiar with the heroin cycle. Heroin is really cool. The fluffy cloud happiness of the high. The don't-give-a-fuck charisma of the users. The bodies piling up. And piling up. The rising part of the heroin cycle doesn't last. You don't introduce any-one younger to heroin use after your own funeral. And the occasion itself puts a damper on the whole scene. Soon heroin gains the evil reputation that recreational use deserves. "Nobody" uses any more. But every year, Mr Nobody grows a year older. Eventually the young people, who won't touch the stuff because they saw what it did to those ten years their senior, are no longer young enough to be at risk of starting. Those young enough to start, look to those a little older and see neither use nor warning signs. Some of them work out for themselves that heroin is fun. They tell their friends. The cycle closes and heroin in cool again.
I came of age during a low point of the heroin cycle, so I never tried it. But the micro-foundations of the cycle were evident in parallel matters. Things spread by word of mouth and from hand to hand. Friends warn against some things and endorse other things.
He was 35. Which brings my comment to the edge of the abyss. Back when needle sharing made Glasgow the AIDS capital of Europe, the prognosis for a heroin addicted was to become addicted around 20. Use for ten years. 50% die. 50% hit rock bottom (or just age out) and quit. 35 is old for an addict. Now that AIDS is treatable, the prognosis is probably better. Now that fentanyl is on the scene the prognosis is probably worse. I'm not keeping up with the statistics and don't know how it balances out. When some-one dies of drug addiction, we bury an "innocent victim". His "friends" in the drug scene play the role of his personal angels of death. And walking my comment over the edge of the abyss: did he take his curse to the grave with him, or did he manage to pass it on before he died?
I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
Is it as complicated and impractical as introducing technology and organizational systems from the West, or is there hope?
Fixed that for you. Deirdre McCloskey has a trilogy on why the industrial revolution happened in the West rather than elsewhere.
I've only read the reviews but have got that impression that in her telling it is all about subtle stuff, like Bourgeois Dignity. There are lots of other theories, but it seems very common to admit that things came together in a way we don't understand and which only transfer to other countries, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, now China, for other reasons that we don't understand, and with their own distinctive twists, which also will not transfer.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
The positives have to be weighed against the negatives.
The anti-immigration position starts with endorsing the claim that when Chopin moved from Warsaw to Paris, that benefited the French, and when Marc Isambard Brunel fled France and ended up in England, that benefited England. What makes it the anti position is the additional claim that you can tell whether Chopin can play the piano; you don't have to admit half the population of Warsaw to get the musician. And you can tell that Brunel knew about civil engineering; you don't have to admit any Jacobins to get your tunnel under the Thames.
So no, you don't have to weigh positives and negatives. Let the positives in, keep the negatives out.
The core of the pro-immigration position is "You cannot tell whether Chopin can play the piano. If you want the positives, you have to accept the negatives, so weigh them and choose."
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
It may be called hyperbole, but it isn't. Look at how it works
Contrast the example from up thread
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads literally explode.
with this alternative
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching them become literally annoyed.
It doesn't work as emphasis because "annoyed" is not itself hyperbole so asserting the literal truth of it falls flat. Had one written hyperbolically
I've mostly gone from being a pedant to finding great amusement in deliberately provoking pedants and watching their heads explode.
then one can add shock value with literally, until your listener realizes that you are piling hyperbole on top of hyperbole, literally double hyperbole. Eventually listeners identify the figurative use of the word "literally" as a double hyperbole. Then they think the figurative use is like telling a joke, and then when nobody laughs, repeating it, but louder.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
One of the dank failure modes of social media obsession is reading and re-reading one's own comments.
- comments that are up voted generate feelings of being valued and understood
- comments that are down voted generate feelings of superiority: those poor fools are not on my level!
- all comments generate a reassuring feeling that at least one person on social media is writing sane comments
Picture the scene in a weeks time when Whining Coil succumbs to the temptation to re-read his own comments. Soon he reaches a big post about how bad all this is for his health. That gives him the opportunity to turn off his computer and play with his dog. That is in line with his goals:-)
The most scary damage is that universities have been training young people in how to do science. The replication crisis, while bad in itself, also shows that the universities have actually been training young people in how to do science wrong. How does that damage get undone?
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