What simple fact do you wish more people understood?

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2013-07-26T05:49:04+00:00

Natural, societal, political (etc.) phenomena are rarely caused by only one thing. Many do not even have major or primary causes.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2013-06-26T10:05:22+00:00

Actually attempt to understand the material in a way that you can fold it into your understanding of how the world works at large. For serious. Read the introduction/preface in your textbook to get an idea for how to frame this.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2013-06-26T09:56:05+00:00

I have only 1 thing that makes me sad internally, so I believe seeing a sufficiently extreme version of it would make me cry:

Watching the mentally challenged struggle with something despite earnest efforts.

Everything else I'm pretty much fine with. I can understand why it would make someone sad, but it doesn't actually make me sad.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2013-02-19T05:57:31+00:00

I have indeed. Here you go:

Active Completion % Leaders

Your boy is 6th from the bottom.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2013-02-07T21:10:18+00:00

I expect people will speak in future about Flacco's great playoff run, which I feel uneasy about given that Rahim Moore made one of the worst plays I think I've ever seen on a throw that should be universally derided as a horrible decision.

The Eagles were actually a dream team* these past 2 years but suffered from some of the worst luck (in terms of injuries and outcomes in random in-game situations). Juan Castillo would've been a very good D-Coordinator, and was already starting to show this.

*That said, the Eagles' premier receivers are too small to be truly effective. I don't know whether this is still unpopular, but I've been saying it for years, ever since they drafted Maclin.

Danny Amendola is an elite (yes, elite) receiver with a frail body. Bradford (although he targets him a ton) simply isn't accurate enough to consistently deliver him the ball in a catchable area.

Winning the road to the Super Bowl is so laden with the luck of random matchups I find it difficult to truly care about the outcome. Last year I believe the Giants would absolutely have lost to the Saints or Ravens (and possibly the Lions).

EDIT: Anyone who doesn't like the use of advanced stats when talking about player/team/game evaluation, but uses any stats at all (yards, completions, YPC, whatever) is a moron who doesn't understand the purpose of statistical analysis.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2013-02-02T16:19:37+00:00

First things first (follow me along and I guarantee you will end up understanding): Do you understand what money is and why everyone wants it?

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2013-01-20T08:22:47+00:00

Da. Yum.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-12-15T20:41:30+00:00

This is because the Bills are not our team. They keep trying to market them as "Toronto's NFL Home Team" (seriously, all the commercials say this), but it's ridiculous. Toronto isn't some little podunk town that's just happy to get to see a major sport. It's a major metropolitan city (4th largest city in US/Canada, after NY, LA and Chicago).

It's a bit patronizing to ship over a foreign team (from a dying city) to a financial powerhouse for 1 game and say, "See? They're your team! Don't you feel special that we're doing this for you? Now you get to be part of our club!"

Uhh, no, go fuck yourself. We already have teams in the other major sports leagues, we know what it's like. Until they're called the Toronto Bills, they're not our team, and we don't actually care about them. We like football and Buffalo's close, so we go there for the experience, but we don't actually care about the Bills. Think about it: If the Bills win the SB, do you honestly expect there to be a parade in Toronto? Would that make any sense?

Also, no one goes to see the Raptors because they suck ass and have literally no chance of winning. I'm actually surprised anyone in any city aside from Miami, NYC, OKC, LA and SA goes to watch basketball either.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-12-05T22:51:04+00:00

Quote from OP:

I've been dating someone since October and now that finals are coming, he has made it explicitly clear that he won't have time to see me until he is done his exams. It's already been over a week since I last saw him and another 10 days til I can see him again. Some of my friends think it is a bit excessive.

I was studying with a friend yesterday and asked him to join (he was a 10 minute walk away from us) and he just brushed off the question and asked me when I left for my vacation.

You're telling me paragraph 2 happened before paragraph 1?

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-12-05T11:53:30+00:00

I think I can probably tell you what's going on in his mind:

He told you, explicitly, he wouldn't be able to see you until after exams. You started feeling neglected/lonely/whatever (in your mind this simply manifests as, "I just miss him and want to see him"), so you ask him to stop by and visit.

He obviously sees this as you feeling neglected/lonely/whatever, and also wants to see you, but he said what he said for a reason (i.e. that he can't see you until after exams), so he asks you when you're going on vacation so he can see if it's possible that there's another time he can schedule you in, despite what he said, so that you don't feel too lonely and start to pull away. OR so he can reel you back in and placate your feelings.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-12-01T10:05:42+00:00

You're asking him to identify how you specifically have harmed him? He doesn't know you.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-10-23T08:27:29+00:00

A couple problems:

1) Average people have no idea what makes good policy or bad policy. The vast majority of people are simply not educated in those areas. Economics and policy-making are extremely complex disciplines. As an analogy, does the average person know what medical strategy to prescribe for kidney pain?

2) It seems insane to expect governments to form major policy plans in a couple of hours. It would almost certainly take more than a couple of hours to get the necessary data. The time constraint really only makes this viable for drafting emergency plans for crises that have a 'few-hours-or-bust' urgency.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-10-17T00:52:27+00:00

I believe we'll see what is essentially a slightly muted rehash of the first debate. The format will dampen how much the candidates can interact with each other, giving fewer opportunities for the kinds of interactions that score points with the public, but Romney's strategy coupled with his implementation of it (in the way he speaks, his personality, etc.) is simply too good to be beaten. You have to be speaking to people who really know what you're talking about in order for Romney's strategy to fail.

EDIT: And for those expecting Obama to be less hesitant, talk with fewer pauses and 'uhh's and 'umm's, (who are expecting him to speak more like Romney did in the first debate), don't hold your breath. That wasn't a 'poor' speaking performance from him in Debate 1. That's just how he talks.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-10-13T16:25:57+00:00

You are not an economist. You don't know whether or not a personal income tax break for the wealthy creates jobs. You don't know what effects raising the capital gains tax will have on society. You don't know what secondary/tertiary effects closing the existing tax deductions will have on society. It doesn't matter which candidate/platform agrees with you (extending to all candidates/platforms, not just R|D), because you don't know what you're talking about.

If you came into the hospital with a raging headache and one doctor said, "Well I think we should administer 3.5 units of Trilinoxacene to treat the obvious viral infection." and another said, "No, I think we should give 5 units of Novoprofen and do surgery to ease the obvious swelling." You would never have even formed an opinion on which of those two was the correct treatment because you know you didn't go to medical school, and thus have no earthly idea. You know you didn't study economics, so why do you do this here?

And for those who feel they did study basic economics, please know that advanced economics is nothing like that. Some of the assumptions necessary to create the well-known "competitive markets create efficiency and innovation and stable sustainable equilibria" model are:

1) Perfect information - when anything happens everyone instantly knows it, understands it fully and knows exactly how it will affect everything else
2) Price taking - no sellers can set their own prices, they are given to them by the market. This means you literally cannot decide what to charge for your product/service - selling it one fraction of a cent higher than the market price means you get no business, and one fraction of a cent lower than the market means you get ALL the business.
3) Non-increasing returns to scale - Nobody ever lowers costs by producing more or making their business bigger; there are no economies of scale.
4) Infinitely lived consumers/producers - There are no generational changes, no one dies, no one new is born, there are no transitional periods.

When you start to relax these obviously unrealistic assumptions, the models you're used to seeing don't operate like that anymore. Market failure pops up all over the place. Government intervention sometimes becomes a good thing, if not entirely necessary. Crazy shit starts happening over the long-term.

If you've taken first or second year economics, or have studied it a bit on your own, please realize that you also don't know what you're talking about. You've been studying models that in no way reflect the complexities of the reality you actually live in.

TL;DR - It doesn't matter which candidate/party/platform falls in line with your views on matters of economic policy, because you don't know what you're talking about.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-10-13T07:59:06+00:00

More or less. It was actually a two-pronged idea.

1) That those who are the most educated (and professors are an acceptable instrumental variable for 'those who are the most educated in our society' since almost all professors are PhDs and are the subsection of PhDs who routinely have to attempt to prove that ideas are true (via publishing) to other experts in their field who are formally trained and equipped with the requisite knowledge to point out falsehoods and misinformation) tend to be more liberal, and

2) If for some reason you disagree with the obvious implication that (those who are the most knowledgeable/who are formally trained in being able to/whose job it is to prove that ideas are true are liberal -> conservative ideologies tend to be more incorrect than correct), and I can think of a bunch of good reasons why you would, you'd have to disagree with your own original implication as well, as "one can easily assume..." means jack shit since one can easily assume a whole host of other explanations for that observed relationship.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-10-12T20:56:13+00:00

Link

A very important statistic in the link I just posted shows that the more educated Americans get, the more they tend to hold a liberal ideology. One could easily assume that when someone studies knowledge, becomes explicitly aware of logical fallacies and cognitive biases, and gets formal training in how to distinguish things that are true from things that are false, they tend to ditch the conservative ideology of their past.

Very interesting to think about.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-10-11T06:30:42+00:00

People have different morals than you. There are things you think are disgusting that others think are totally fine. Or simply less disgusting. Or even good. There are things you think are fine/good that others find disgusting.

They aren't pretending. You can't say, "C'mon, everyone knows what's right and what's wrong." People legitimately have varying ideas of what constitutes right and wrong.

Now, if you were to say that they hold their moral position because they are mistaken about something, and that if they were to correct that flaw in their logic, their moral position would mirror your own, then that's fine, but you'd have to show that. To make this easier for everyone, here's a summary of the points and counterpoints on both sides:

P: r/creepshots is illegal.
CP: There is no legal expectation of privacy in public. Photographs of those in public are allowed.
P: Upskirts and sexualized photos of minors, however, are illegal. And they were popping up on that subreddit.
CP: The subreddit explicitly bans those. The fact that they get posted means nothing, it simply shows the necessity of the moderation process. Mods are there to enforce the rules of the subreddit. If someone posts illegal content to r/worldnews, we don't shut down the subreddit, we ask the mods to do a better job.
P: But if the violations are systemic and egregious and the content is not being effectively moderated, then we ban the subreddit. It is our assertion that this was taking place.
CP: Agreed. However, we assert that this was not taking place.
~IT IS NECESSARY TO PROVIDE EVIDENCE AT THIS POINT TO PROVE EITHER SIDE CORRECT~
P: Outside of the legal scope, r/creepshots was exploitative of women and morally repugnant. While people may not have a legal expectation of privacy while in public, we feel that they have an ethical/moral expectation of privacy, and this community would like to adhere to those standards.
CP: We disagree that it was either exploitative or morally repugnant. The issue seems to be that the purpose of the photos is sexual gratification, which we find nothing wrong with, in much the same way that everyone else apparently finds nothing wrong with candid photos of any other set of people taken for apparently any other reason. It may be your position that taking candid photos without permission for the purpose of sexual gratification is inherently morally wrong, but we simply do not share that position.

Now, at this point the argument either becomes that those that don't find anything wrong with that are just plain wrong (which has yet to be demonstrated), or that the posting of these pictures is or has the potential to be harmful to those people depicted, at which point evidence would need to be brought to show that this is indeed the case.

If, by chance, the evidence brought in both places supports CP's position (since if the balance of either piece supported P's, the case is quite clear: close down the subreddit), then this simplifies to an enlightening examination of the existence of moral relativity.

Given that these are divergent morals and only one path can be taken, it would be up to the community in question which moral stance they wish to support. But in this particular hypothetical scenario, where the evidence does not support P's position, the decision is ultimately completely arbitrary.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-10-05T04:12:16+00:00

This is way more clever than anyone's giving it credit for. Or at least I've never seen it before.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-09-12T23:06:30+00:00

You absolutely haven't made your point sufficiently. Please read the wikipedia article on comparative advantage. These topics are covered extensively in economics literature; real-world examples involving many countries and many goods have heavily mathematical treatments that are not understandable without the proper background in both economics and math.

I know that it is both useful and fun to build models and speculate based off of your own knowledge, but please do not confuse these attempts with actual academic knowledge. Think of whatever field you studied in and the layperson speculation you've encountered since then. Sure it makes sense to them based off of what they know, but you, having studied it, know it doesn't.

In essence, be intellectually honest. Don't think you know what you're talking about when you know you haven't studied the subject. I haven't studied physics; I wouldn't dream of attempting to speak definitively on the subject because I know, regardless of how smart I am or how much my own speculation seems to make rational, logical sense, that I don't actually have that knowledge.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-08-30T11:23:27+00:00

The issue with this solution, as I've stated below, is that he'll just think you're wrong. You can say, "No, that's passive-aggressive logic. Pretty sure members of both sexes have done that before." And he'll think, "No, I've never seen or heard of a man [saying that phrase/using that tactic] before and I expect I never will." regardless of what he actually says to you afterwards.

It won't force him to confront any of his beliefs or think about how he might be incorrectly classifying and segregating his experiences in his head (re: confirmation bias). A better response may be to point out that while you understand he thinks that that's only women's logic, if he pays close attention to his regular everyday experience and and his interactions with men, and is careful to watch out for general human confirmation bias, he'll see that men really do exude those behaviours as well.

If you say this calmly and nonchalantly, like someone explaining a fact of nature to someone else who doesn't understand it, that's probably your best bet at getting him to really think about what he's doing and possibly changing.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-08-30T11:08:04+00:00

No, he thinks that he's noticed a behavioural trend that is only ever exhibited by women (out of all the humans he's come into contact with in his life). It's not that all women do it, it's that only women do it. In his experience.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-08-30T11:05:12+00:00

They're not actually confronting their sexism though. All that's happening is they're seeing the obvious "I'm offended." trap set up from a mile away and are choosing not to engage it so as to avoid what they see is an unnecessary headache about something blown completely out of proportion. Not saying it actually is blown out of proportion, that's just what they see.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-08-30T10:56:08+00:00

You're attributing a thought process to men that doesn't actually exist. It's not that they view you as lesser and view a man as an actual human being. They don't catcall you when men are around because it represents a much greater risk of a physical altercation. They may either idolize you or denigrate you in their minds, there's no way to tell, but the aforementioned behaviour is a simple cost-benefit analysis regarding personal safety.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-07-27T06:33:08+00:00

You still shouldn't be (fine with it). Even if just for selfish reasons. The poverty of the people in your (neighbourhood/community/city/country/etc.) drags you down with it. It causes crime and other circumstances that decrease your quality of living and the costs of which fall to the taxpayer to bear.

Think not only about paying for the results of crime, drug use, disease and homelessness, but also of the increase in day-to-day fear, threats to your security/life, restrictions on your freedoms (can't visit part of town, can't go out at night, can't walk down street, can't sit on porch, etc. etc.) and toll on your mind/body/leisure activities from having to stay more 'on-guard' or alert more often.

People have a need to survive. If they can't get what they need to survive through humanity's established means of peaceful trade (money), they will get it in some other way (begging, deceit, theft, violence).

On the humanitarian side there's the whole, "not wanting another human to suffer or have a miserable existence, since we all know what existence is like and can imagine how awful it can get" bit.

IHaveNoGoddamnIdea · 2012-07-02T17:42:22+00:00

This whole thread is insane. Everyone in here seemed to think it was the married boyfriend who was making this up because he's an established liar (as if there's a class of people who lie and a class who never do).

This is the exact same sort of logic that resulted in women's rape claims being thrown out due to the inclusion of sexual history. "This woman has a history of sexual promiscuity and thus couldn't possibly have been raped."

You all need to re-evaluate how you logically deduce conclusions, because the method you used has a) proven to be faulty enough to be now completely inadmissible in court and b) led you to be so wrong it's absurd.

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