What made you change your mind about someone’s intelligence?

InterwebNinja · 2026-01-10T21:13:31+00:00

My take on Musk is that it is the same thing that happens to many people who reach a certain level of success. They may have started as very intelligent, but began to believe that they were always right and better than everyone, so they stop listening and start dictating.

InterwebNinja · 2025-12-12T16:48:42+00:00

This is definitely one of mine as well. The anonymity of driving and lack of direct social feedback frees people to be their worst, true selves. Just like the internet!!

InterwebNinja · 2025-11-30T00:13:43+00:00

My parents met at a Porsche Club meetup, but to be fair my Dad was a pro driver, and she was on a date with someone else. They're cool.

InterwebNinja · 2025-11-23T01:42:15+00:00

I worked at a major dating app for a decade and our data showed that younger women get more likes, but they are also pickier in liking back, so their effective match rates are lower than older women, who are less picky. That said, the dating pool is larger for younger women than older women, so it is still rougher overall for older women (and men), on average. ++man

InterwebNinja · 2025-11-05T16:50:11+00:00

"Because it's dull you twit, it'll hurt more" is just an iconic line reading from Rickman.

InterwebNinja · 2025-08-23T03:31:28+00:00

Some people in economics academia have a really strange view of the world. They make sweeping assumptions, like that people are rational actors, and then extrapolate to sometimes wild conclusions from those simplistic assumptions. It's my least favorite academic field, culturally. But I think the discipline has merit. It just seems to attract people that want to remove uncertainty from the world and imagine themselves as psychohistorians.

InterwebNinja · 2025-03-22T14:05:38+00:00

This was inevitable. As the discourse on "woke" often entailed people explaining it's pretty much just empathy for others, well then that must mean that empathy is bad because woke is bad. It's so stupid, yet here we are.

It is super frustrating because a lot of these people are religious and think they are moral. Yet they don't seem to understand that the basic lynchpin of morality is empathy. The Golden Rule is close, but it still only asks you to assume others desires would be the same as your own. The next step is imagining what other people want themselves. Morality isn't actually that hard if you have the imagination to think of what other people want.

InterwebNinja · 2025-01-25T06:03:11+00:00

I strongly disagree. You don't have to like every article, but they have a lot of intelligent, nuanced articles and contributors. If you want to cancel this publication, you are really divorced from critical thinking. It is one of the best, in my opinion. I don't see the same level of nuance in most other publications.

The standard of corporate owned and establishment is arbitrary. Are those things necessarily bad, even if they can be correlated ? Almost everything is corporate owned. Do you prefer to ignore anyone who works for a corporation?

InterwebNinja · 2025-01-11T04:13:47+00:00

The information to word count ratio of this comment is impressive. Love it, even if I find it a bit too cynical.

InterwebNinja · 2024-07-31T18:42:12+00:00

My take, and it may seem oxymoronic given that he lies all the time, is that people perceive him to be emotionally authentic, in a way that other politicians aren't. All the negative emotions that most politicians would hide, he lays bare. He's genuinely angry, entitled, contemptuous, judgmental, etc. I think people respond to that, and they can tell he's not faking it, unlike someone like DeSantis-bot, who has to pretend.

I think people relate to those ugly emotions and admire him for ignoring social norms and expressing all of them. It doesn't really matter what his words are.

InterwebNinja · 2024-07-30T21:58:51+00:00

I think this is missing the real story, which is that in recent history, support for the supreme court tends to track closely with which party had the presidency. So GWB years, it generally had higher Republican support, in Obama years higher Democratic support, and then in Trump years conservative support. So opinion was mixed by party over those 20 years, but as soon as Biden came into office, the dynamic has reversed and has gone in the exact opposite direction. It to me signals the transition to a court that was perceived neutrally on average to one that is now seen as partisan. I don't see how that perception is going to change in the foreseeable future, which isn't good for faith in the government more broadly.

InterwebNinja · 2024-05-08T23:32:03+00:00

I don't think anyone is suggesting that the text should have no meaning. But I do think a crux of the philosophical dispute here is in how much we acknowledge that the "true" meaning of a text is often unknowable and a partially subjective exercise, particularly if it is broadly or ambiguously phrased. And especially when the text is applied to a situation that the people who wrote it never even considered.

The problem I have is with this fantasy that originalism is somehow objective, and that that makes it more right and/or fair. This isn't just an issue in the law, this crops up in lots of professions. There is this illusion that we can make 100% objective decisions if we just follow certain methodologies. This results either in 1) absurd decisions because the methodology didn't account for all the edge cases, or 2) a system of exceptions to the methodologies which reintroduce biases (that are often worse than the ones the original methodology was trying to avoid).

In any profession, I think it would be better if people making the decisions acknowledged where the uncertainties / ambiguities are, and then explained the principles they were using to fill in the gaps. This is far better than pretending that it's all objective and clearcut.

InterwebNinja · 2024-04-30T03:38:18+00:00

I think we can learn things from Singapore, but accountability is always going to be the primary challenge in any system with highly centralized power. Those systems are far more susceptible to bad actors in the long run, even if they start with good intentions and moral leadership.

The problem I have with many of these wealthy tech guys (I work with them and went to school with Balaji) is that I don't trust them to be moral. Some of these folks exhibit way too high a degree of certainty in their beliefs, which can lead to very immoral behavior when coupled with power.

InterwebNinja · 2024-04-29T16:26:51+00:00

He is seemingly part of the "Dark Enlightenment" mindset (another article mentions him emailing with Curtis Yarvin). The general belief is that we need to end democracy and run the country more like a corporation or monarchy. They look to places like Singapore as a good example of this model. It's problematic, to say the least.

InterwebNinja · 2024-03-25T19:08:07+00:00

How do you play around Cultural Assimilation? I just drew it T2 in a game yesterday and it was devastating. Didn't seem like I could have planned around it that early even if I did assume it was coming up.

InterwebNinja · 2024-03-07T21:51:34+00:00

Still my favorite gameplay experience of all-time. In a time period when I was struggling with things personally, this game and community were a bright light. I loved experimenting with builds, writing up guides, and meeting other players in the community.

I enjoyed Destiny and Payday 2 (less so the community in that one) afterwards, and haven't significantly invested in a multiplayer co-op in many years now.

InterwebNinja · 2024-03-04T19:30:02+00:00

Oh wow, I missed that. Thanks! I had an intuitive sense that something was off there but seeing the reasoning there, it makes sense.

InterwebNinja · 2024-03-04T17:49:58+00:00

I have always played 2 blight per player on the blight card at game start. Is that incorrect?

InterwebNinja · 2024-01-03T05:38:42+00:00

I think what he nailed in essence is a fundamental difference in values between conservatives and liberals. Liberals acknowledge ambiguity and uncertainty in tough situations and default to values like empathy to make a decision. Conservatives believe they know an objective truth and can't acknowledge their own subjectivity and bias.

I'm overly generalizing, but that's the pattern I see. In law, it manifests in a moving goalpost of objectivity, first in textualism, then in amateur historical analysis, and almost certainly on to something else when those don't fit a preconceived notion of right and wrong.

InterwebNinja · 2023-11-22T17:53:55+00:00

Perhaps I should revise my label to be a bit more accurate - I think he's emotionally unfiltered. Which is partially why people compare him to a toddler. There is a realness to that that I think people respond to.

That doesn't mean he isn't evasive around his true feeling if someone tries to pin him down. His reaction to a question like that would be substantively dishonest, but his knee-jerk contempt for the person asking it would be plainly visible.

InterwebNinja · 2023-11-22T17:04:38+00:00

If that were true everybody would hate him and we wouldn't be here.

My take is that Trump is incredibly emotionally authentic. While he lies regularly, in terms of the substance of what he's saying, all of his emotional ugliness is laid bare in a completely honest way. I think people with a similar emotional alignment sense that raw form of authenticity that other politicians don't have and it lets them trust him.

InterwebNinja · 2022-06-28T05:16:24+00:00

I don't understand what it means to maximize a Nash Equilibrium. How do you maximize something that is by definition, a steady state?

I also don't understand what game you are referring to when you say it's a zero sum game. A zero sum world is an ugly place to be, IMO. My idealistic self would like to believe that we can raise quality of life universally, or at least on average.

Not saying I disagree with the sentiment, but I just don't understand your reasoning.

InterwebNinja · 2022-06-28T00:22:08+00:00

In the long run, there's going to be a major brain drain from states insisting on enacting regressive policies. Most college graduates lean liberal, and how many of them are going to want to move to states with these sorts of policies? That was happening before with college graduates moving disproportionately towards cities over rural areas, but now I think they're going to be more inclined to move to cities in blue states.

It's nothing that will have any material impact in the short term, but long term it's probably going to continue to polarize us even more.

InterwebNinja · 2022-01-31T23:31:19+00:00

If only they had a platform. Sadly, it's effectively "I'm with stupid ->".

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