I've been neglecting various things since this was posted trying to find the right words to respond to it, but I think it's time to cut my losses. I appreciate your following up and clarifying your position in the face of the downvotes and dogpiling.
Just art and short fiction. It was a personal hobby, not a business or anything, and I'm not rich.
Edit: I'm confused about the point of this line of questioning, but also don't want to derail the thread further.
twodigits
1mo ago
I'd say "producing fetish media" to be as broad as possible. Mostly hiring people to draw and write stuff, and discussing and developing project ideas with other people. Wasn't really looking to make the thread about myself.
twodigits
1mo ago
I briefly thought recently that the comment sort order bug had been fixed, but it looks like it's still there. Viewing a top-level thread with the "Old" setting selected, older sub-replies appear first; but viewing an individual reply thread under the same setting, new replies appear first. Is it in any kind of queue to be fixed anywhere?
twodigits
1mo ago
As someone who recently came to the same realization, but still hasn't fully come to terms with giving up a fairly enjoyable and rewarding hobby, I'm crossing my fingers for a high-quality debate either here or under @Primaprimaprima's potential post.
twodigits
1mo ago
Appreciate the research. I could try to find out who supports it and sign up with them, but I don't like the phone very much to begin with, so it might be better to write it off.
I briefly got excited, thinking that if it's just a regional issue, my Cingular Flip/TeleEpoch M3620 might still be usable. Unfortunately, it seems to be dead; it just shows a blank white screen when turned on. Guess I'll have to try shopping.
twodigits
1mo ago
Appreciate the research. Still seems like it'd be simpler and work better to just use two phone numbers, unless there's some reason that it wouldn't work. A flip phone seems strictly better as a pure communication/organization device than an awkwardly hacked smartphone. I realize that I should be open to the possibility that I don't really want what I think I want; but I don't see a very compelling case.
Of course, I'm comparing an actual smartphone to a hypothetical flip phone, and I could have an inaccurate idea of what's actually available. But that's why I asked for advice.
twodigits
2mo ago
Would separate SIM cards not work? The idea I had was to have an occasionally-on smartphone for regular things and an always-on flip phone for critical things. Sort of the same use case as a house phone.
I currently have an Android phone. It has a toggle for Wi-Fi and one for 4G connectivity, but I'm not aware of one specifically for "Internet" that still allows calls through. Not sure how that would differ substantially from just closing and reopening the Web browser. I guess it could be an easier way to toggle email notifications, but I can't see it meaningfully reducing the "onlineness" that I'm trying to get away from. Am I misunderstanding something?
twodigits
2mo ago
Never mind 2G. The Nokia 2720 Flip that I bought a while back advertises 4G and Wi-Fi, but when I tried a T-Mobile SIM in it recently, I got a message saying that "this phone is only partially compatible with our advanced network"; and I wasn't able to make a call or send a message when I tried.
I'm unconvinced about the benefits of T9. Multi-press typing always made more sense to me; this sequence of presses produces this character, predictably and reliably, with no guesswork needed in either side. I guess time will tell.
twodigits
2mo ago
Sounds far in the opposite direction of what I'm looking for in compactness and convenience/ease of use; but will keep it in mind as an option.
twodigits
2mo ago
Does anyone here know anything about "flip" cell phones, or any advice or meta-advice for shopping for one in the US? I've been thinking for a while that it'd be nice to be able to turn off my smartphone for "offline" time without being cut off from anyone who might need to reach me.
twodigits
2mo ago
What's the reasoning behind requiring users to vote on all posts on the Janitor Duty page before submitting their votes? Sometimes I don't want to read a particularly long post, but it seems misleading to vote "Neutral" and imply that I read it and found it of neutral quality.
twodigits
2mo ago
Probably just don't want it as much as I want to believe I do, then. Many such cases.
twodigits
2mo ago
Provided, presumably, that you can accurately identify the "belief(s)" that a book "advocates for", and identify an adequately entertaining book that advocates for the opposite(s), without "accidentally" picking one that argues so badly that it only reinforces your prior beliefs, or one that disputes minor points while reinforcing the underlying assumptions; and without "coincidentally" finding that you don't have the spare time to read anymore.
twodigits
2mo ago
Sometimes I wish I were better at reading things "for entertainment" without worrying about what beliefs or habits of thought I'm absorbing. Idk.
I hope it's not encouraged for third parties to jump into survey/top-level-question threads to tell responders how wrong they are. That would be a major deterrent from posting in those threads.
I don't remember exactly what I was originally going to say; but I hope that some of the following is relevant.
"Why does anything exist" seems like an obvious dead end. Something that doesn't exist can't be the cause of something that does, so if everything that exists (or existed in the past) needs a causal explanation, you just have an infinite regress. Figuring out what exactly one means by "exist" can be useful, but I can't see how that would point to anything like "the existence of God", rather than something like "the word means different things in different contexts, and in other contexts it doesn't mean anything".
Does reality follow orderly laws, or do we develop laws to model regularities in reality? A reality has to have some kind of consistent behavior for anything to inhabit and observe it, but ours is also full of disorderly and unexplained phenomena. From one perspective, we should expect to find ourselves in an orderly reality because it's a simpler hypothesis, and we should assign simpler hypotheses higher priority than more complicated ones. From another, we assume that our reality is orderly because it's a simpler hypothesis, and simpler hypotheses are easier to work with.
You say "nothing comes from nothing", but we generally don't think of math as "coming from" or "going" anywhere. It's just inherently, timelessly true, independently of any particular material reality. Iterative functions and sequences have initial values or states. The universal dovetailer function, after a sufficiently large finite number of steps, inevitably produces a finite universe containing you.
Are you not sure that other people have supernatural conscious existences? What would you consider evidence for or against it?
"Conscious" is also another word that seems to mean different things in different contexts, but that seems like a tangent. I don't know why creatures sleep or why we experience it the way we do.
twodigits
2mo ago
Never read Blink, but it sounds pretty typical.
It seems like the conventional understanding these days is that being a "charming Chad" is a central part of most jobs, medicine particularly, rather than an optional extra distinguishable from "competence". (As famously expressed by Zunger, and frequently discussed in relation to House previously.) Don't feel like arguing it myself, though.
Thanks for the article link; I read it and passed it on. I had this one in the draft of my reply to non_radical_centrist:
Should we stop believing Malcolm Gladwell? - Knight Science Journalism @MIT (archive)
It's conceivable that I meant to suggest it to you as either being or having a link to the one that you were remembering.
twodigits
2mo ago
Appreciate the response.
I don't remember the book as clearly as when I'd just finished listening to it, but I feel like you could reasonably view it as using the Bland case as a case study for a more general message/phenomenon. Which isn't to say that the title represents it well, or that I could make a good argument for the relevance of all the different topics/claims that the book tries to tie it to.
At times it seemed to be building toward something like "people are too complicated to perfectly understand, so don't get overconfident". But it always seemed to revert back to "this situation seems complicated, but let me explain everyone's exact thoughts and motivations". Similarly, lots of "here's the popular idea about this, but isn't it a little too neat and tidy? Let's look deeper", but then its own narratives end up exactly as reductive/simplistic/superficial.
I feel like the point about Harry Markopolos was pretty clear in the end. The "praise" was just the front half of the "but"; "you think you want a guy like this in your corner, but you don't".
I was pretty skeptical about the narrative about body language. There's probably a book's worth of material in how people are influenced by exaggerated screen acting as it forms an increasing proportion of their "social" experiences; and another's on broscience in police and intelligence training. But I have a hard time taking seriously the idea that facial and body "language" are pure social convention, and that there are no universal involuntary responses to things. Maybe I'm overgeneralizing from The Blank Slate, or being overly credulous toward it?
I feel like the book was conflating "these ways of evaluating people can produce false positives" with "evaluating people is completely impossible". In some places it almost seemed like it was leading to autistic supremacism; "the en-tees think they have these rich nonverbal communication channels and intuitive faculties, but they're all pure delusion", and so on.
I skipped the chapter on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Overall, I may have ended up biased against the book's value instead of for it. Like Malcolm watching the arrest video, I still get angry rereading or remembering parts of it, and remembering the anxious faux-earnest tone that they were read in. That's probably not a good sign. Still, I'm starting to question the value of this kind of single-perspective book generally.
One thing I did appreciate somewhat was reading about how embarrassingly obvious Amanda Knox's innocence was, years after seeing the crowing over Less Wrong "getting it right" and how it proved the superiority of their methods.
I'm passingly curious whether you ended up making the post on policing.
twodigits
11mo ago
Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?
twodigits
11mo ago
Is anyone here familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know? Is there a high-quality review anywhere that summarizes what I should know going into it? I understand that Gladwell has a bad reputation around here generally; is there a good general summary of his offenses to help me keep an appropriately skeptical mindset?
I realize that there's probably some irony in worrying about being biased toward excessive trust in someone who's writing in part about how people are biased toward excessive trust.
twodigits
11mo ago
Can you speak plainly? Are you saying that only people currently in the filter should comment on it?
twodigits
11mo ago
I thought that Substack was ACX threads' substrate. I also thought that ACX was always on it, and that the "move" was from the Slate Star Codex domain to the ACX Substack. I wasn't following things closely at the time. Thanks for clarifying.
twodigits
11mo ago
Approving a comment "eventually" doesn't mean much when it doesn't appear as a new comment. It just hides the fact that the comment was hidden.
My first thought was "damn, no replies in five days, you must have really struck a nerve with that question". Then I remembered that I was reviewing old threads, and yours wasn't here the last time I looked. Scratch another notch on the new-user filter's barrel, I guess.
(I do not have children.)
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