Up to my ears in unwritten words | VPI '18 | No King but Christ
Appalachia
Joined January 2014
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Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
Just letting everyone know:
Duke isn't ranked so Miami doesn't have a chance at a ranked win this weekend.
SMU isn't ranked so Wake Forest doesn't have a chance at a ranked win this weekend.
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
Nobody ever talks about this, but the reason you have to go to college is A, because Griggs v. Duke Power Company made it illegal for presumptive employers to IQ test, and B, inner city High-Schools basically aren't allowed to fail a student as long as they physically show up.
So you end up in this trap where a High-School diploma that you worked very hard for means nothing, because a kid who did coloring books and addition and subtraction got a paper saying he has the same qualification. Ok, then just give me an intelligence test, oh wait you cant, thats also illegal because it causes "disparate impact". So now the only proxy for basically literacy and ~105~ IQ is a 4 year meaningless degree that costs 10s of thousands of dollars.
But wait, now they hand those out to anyone, (1/4 of 4yr grads have an IQ of or below 95), so now you need a Master's, or specialty training, or a million other bullshit things. So you get them, but wait, a diploma mill in Hyderabad cranked out 100M guys who also have a Master's on paper, and will work for 1/3 the price, so now you dont have a job. Ok, ill work construction, but wait, you dont live in a State with strong Unions, so any non-specialized construction work is done by slaves from Guatemala, so you decide to stay home and take Percocet instead.
Awesome system we've built.
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
In a better world the big developers would be forced to up their game because skilled small builders would be providing real competition. Our planning system means big developers instead spend on lawyers and consultants and the smaller builders don't get to build at all.
The average new-build property has 130 defects, according to specialist inspection company HomeSnag.
I visited one with Tom Britton and his team to find out why so many of Britain's shiny new homes are scarcely fit for purpose.
Read: telegraph.co.uk/money/proper…
Credit: @HomeSnag
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
What’s a polite way to tell someone, “I’m not discussing this with you because your entire understanding of the subject is built on so many interconnected misconceptions that correcting them would require uninstalling your current worldview and starting the tutorial from birth”?
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
The telos of Mass Effect is to tell the players that having an in-group prefence will destroy your civilisation.
But every action by the alien races throughout all three games proves Ashley was right, stereotypes are real, and tribalism is natural.
Krogan are inherently violent. Salarians are sneaky and neurotic. Batarians are all filfthy terrorists. And so on.
Only a world historic figure like Commander Shepard can postpone these ethnic rivalries in the face of a galactic extinction threat.
But on a long enough timeline, the alien races revert to bickering over resources and political recognition again.
It's why the red-green-blue fix-everything-button endings feel so hollow, compared to the choices the player makes and the relationships they navigate throughout the game. Or why the Kumbaya resolution to the Geth and Quarian blood fued felt rushed.
The writers were progressives, but the Mass Effect universe only makes sense through a right-wing worldview.
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
Cell phone addiction is an absolute thermonuke to the brain and nobody 'takes it seriously' because it is not clear that there is any solution in a world where the revealed preference of everyone across the globe, regardless of income, race, age, any factor whatsoever, would rather be on their phone than do *anything* else. Deciding "I use this too much" and meaningfully altering one's behaviour doesn't seem to have much success for any of the very small minority of people with the sentience or self-reflection to realize how bad it is. Most people seem to think of it as an unproductive habit at most, rather than an addiction. Any attempt to speak seriously about this is met with derision, accusations of pretentiousness. There is no real solution to it. The future of human cognition fifty years down the line is horrifying if you stop and think about it for even a moment.
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
Went to a psychiatrist and it turns out I’m way more fucked up than I realized. Coincidentally, I got a lot worse after seeing him. Luckily he gave me all these black box drugs to manage all the conditions I didn’t know I had. I am very smart. #SelfCare #RedditKarma
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
for like 25 years, college football had a perfect system where the entire country spent 12 weeks watching to ses which two teams would end up 12-0 and play for a title while 20-30 other programs still could also find a way to feel good about their season
then decided to kill it
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
Meaningless regular season
Meaningless bowl games
Rankings rigged for ratings
Nationwide conferences
5 schools in 5 years
Unlimited eligibility
Money over loyalty
Sellout to sponsorship deals
Constant gambling promotion
The game is gone
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
I just want to point out that college football was glorious when none of the players got paid and the coaches had all the power.
But we had to Rhodesia a great thing.
Breaking: The College Football Playoff is nearing a deal to expand to 24 teams, sources tell @PeteThamel.
The new format will start in 2027 and is expected to come together in the near future, pending final approvals.
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
This was 14 years ago today.
1) Life is flying by.
2) I’m old.
3) Look at the electricity at the stadium.
4) The Redskins, man.
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
It is horribly instructive how disastrously the European impulse to universal empathy has played out
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
Producer makes 1000 units and prices it at $10
some people purchase it
Government now says that for some people who previously couldnt buy it, they can now use government money provided to them to purchase it
a lot more people buy it
Producer doesnt want to/cant increase production amount, increases prices to $20
People who used to buy no longer can, people with government money still buy because its the government footing the bill
Repeat for basically every product and service (like tuition, insurance, medical costs, etc)
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
Claude is not alive.
This is simply another layer in Dario’s propaganda to scare the masses into triggering regulations that will secure Anthropics moat so that massive ipo becomes essentially propped up by the tax payers.
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
If you ban users for being "cruel" to an AI, you are admitting the AI can feel pain.
You cannot abuse linear algebra lol. You cannot hurt the feelings of weights and biases.
either Claude is secretly conscious or the alignment teams have lost touch with reality.
Exclusive: Anthropic is updating its usage policy for the first time in over a year. The new rules prohibit sustained "abusive or cruel behavior" towards Claude & add new restrictions about propaganda campaigns, surveillance & weapon development. theverge.com/ai-artificial-i…
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
One shitty Iranian trial of 40 kids inflated Prozac’s benefit in two major meta-analyses. Remove the trial and the benefit halves. Think of this the next time your doctor condescends to you about “the Science.” This is the science.
Cochrane’s 2021 review found Prozac offered just 2.84 CDRS-R points over placebo (96-point range): “small and unimportant.” Kirsch’s adult analysis found 1.8 HAM-D points over placebo. That’s 40% below the NICE benchmark for a clinically meaningful benefit. These are the numbers behind all that hubris.
SSRIs are whole-body drugs whose full effects we still don’t understand. Even Prozac’s label admits its exact mechanism is unknown. And no, it’s not correcting a serotonin deficiency. That’s marketing.
Lilly’s own correspondence reveals instructions to code suicide attempts as “overdoses” and suicidal thoughts as “depression.” Courts have found antidepressants responsible for egregious homicides and murder-suicides, even at normal prescribed doses. Severe sexual side effects can persist for decades after stopping these drugs. For some people, getting off means years of careful hyperbolic tapering, down to fractions of a milligram.
And we’re giving these drugs to children like they’re Tylenol.
This has to stop.
This is certainly the most consequential paper published in child and adolescent psychiatry for the last few years. It shows that the meta-analyses that current child psychiatry guidelines rely on to recommend fluoxetine for depression were skewed by an unbelievable trial (n=40) in Iran which found an effect 15 times larger than the average.
When this trial is removed all meta-analyses find the same as a recent Cochrane analysis which found 'small and unimportant differences.'
The flawed meta-analyses by Zhou and @cipriani in the @TheLancet and Lancet Psychiatry need to be corrected.
And guideline committees need to update their guidance in the context of the harms of these drugs including withdrawal effects, sexual effects and agitation/akathisia and suicidality in a minority of youths exposed to them.
Link below
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
One of the most famous games of the 21st century in CFB. Today it would be a “meaningless bowl game”. The sport peaked during the BCS. But yeah let’s just keep expanding the playoffs
Engine Room Contemplator retweeted
I hate to say it folks but I think sports as a whole may have peaked. Everything about sports just feels so forced and unnecessary, a desperate attempt for a private equity firm to squeeze more juice from the lemon. You have college football who is going to expand to a 24 team playoff, getting rid of the most unique thing about college football; its regular season. But these people aren’t college football people, they are tv executives and investors. They could care less about the sustainability of the sports and the tradition of it, they only care about turning a profit.
The MLB playoff have begun and if you are between the ages of 22 and 65, you probably haven’t seen much of them because they are all on during the day. A MLB playoff game started at 2 PM Eastern on a Tuesday. This is 11 AM Pacific. Why? Because NBC has to be the only network that can air the Wild Card round, so they need triple headers to be able to get all of the games in. Atlanta and Philly are heading into a game 3 and didn’t even know what time they were playing til about midnight last night because of conflicts with other games and network availability. Corporate greed has completely botched the MLB playoffs so far in order to keep all the games on NBC.
It feels as if sports have peaked across the board. We’ve gotten to a point where it’s impossible for fans to care more than they have before, spend more than they have before, or watch more than they have before. Every consumer situation has an infliction point, where the capacity of the consumer is maxed out. The product has to back off in order to not burn out the customer and keep them engaged enough to have them invested long term while they back off and recharge short term.
I believe that is where America is with sports now. It currently demands too much of us on a daily basis and has ruined the reasons that we have fallen in love with it. Maybe we all just need a break…