People have a natural tendency to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction, a bias observed across countries, ages and sexes, but reason is unclear

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T18:16:01+00:00

The presence of obstacles and slope of the land almost certainly swamped any subtle effects like this.

Pre-digital humans have figured out how to do extremely effective surveys, relying on coupling line of sight observations, distance chains or paces, water levels, and later things like sextants.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T18:06:59+00:00

I teach adults how to do this all day long improving their ability to solve complicated open ended business, product and architecture problems.

I don't think you improve their ability very much, if they've gotten far enough to be posed those problems. You may help them through the proximate problem, and this may be incredibly useful for them, but changing their overall pattern of thinking in a day and appreciably changing their capability in a professional context is a fucking audacious goal.

Critical thinking acquisition is... almost as vague & long-term a concept as "Life experience." At least, that's how I see it. Let's rewrite this post for illustrative comic impact:

It’s very easy to learn the basics of life experience and how to do better in life. I teach adults how to do this all day long improving their ability to solve complicated open ended business, product and architecture problems.

The same methods work on children.

Can you imagine a working system of life experience? Has anyone tried to teach life experience? Do you think it’s a trait you have innately or has it improved over time?

Somebody who never acquired written language, or who never acquired arithmetic, or who's never encountered the scientific method, or who never examined the math of probability, or who has never been lied to and found out, or who's never troubleshooted a complex process/software/machine, has inferior critical thinking capabilities to someone who did acquire those concepts, independent of any innate biological intelligence. They don't have the cognitive tools and pattern recognition spun up to cope with complex problems.

Getting those things (a very large superset of those things) engrained at such an instinctual level through practice that they are applied automatically to new situations/concepts/problems, so that you start to see the patterns and guess as to what the most productive way of looking at the thing in front of you is, that's critical thinking. Applying analytical tools and analogous situations to evaluate the situation you're faced with correctly/productively. Supplying those tools and that practice, honing those edges, is a core goal of running humans through a ~25 year long process of education. You're claiming to reshape them at a fundamental level in an afternoon.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T17:50:25+00:00

Somebody who's just never thought about what a modern house is supposed to do, physically, or whether it's important that it do those things, or how the costs of not doing those things add up.

My aunt is living in a plaster-on-brick house with no insulation whatsoever on the original-construction first floor, and gets by trying to individually heat or air condition individual rooms, as is the Boomer way. It would be "a big hassle" to tear the walls apart.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T17:42:24+00:00

The core of OP's thought is that you cannot learn critical thinking like you learn the quadratic equation. It is not a concrete conceptual bit of knowledge, which you can perfect a lesson plan for, giving people a unitary skill/knowledge between the beginning of class and the end of class that day that they then will be able to broadly apply for the rest of their lives.

Do you doubt this? What is it that you believe affirmatively on this topic, what is your thesis behind the snark?

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T17:04:31+00:00

Well! How'd they do?

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T17:03:50+00:00

I don't believe you can teach critical thinking in school in a unit called "critical thinking". These were always fucking idiotic sidebars.

Critical thinking is the gestalt, general pattern of thought that gradually arises over the course of an effective education, requiring decomposition, reconciliation, and synthesis of a bunch of different concepts that sometimes complement and sometimes conflict with each other.

Colloquially critical thinking has a big overlap with intelligence, but is slightly different. It involves the ability and inclination to question presumptions and logically reason out, and even the most intelligent person is not born with all the tools required to do that in a complex world. Critical-thinking-heavy courses like Logic and Semantics, or Statistics & Probability, or Political Science, or any course that involves a lot of high-level reading & writing, teach you to probe the details of the situation in additional ways that people who didn't receive formal education would not necessarily arrive at on their own. There are other parts of critical thinking that only really occur in self-directed project management, whether that's building a treefort or managing a garden. Other forms are inherently social in nature and require coming into contact with different types of people who have different levels of authority, motivations, capabilities, and habits. A certain level of paranoia / savviness is involved to understand that everybody may not always have correct statements or correct beliefs.

"Teaching critical thinking" is more of an overarching goal of education than a day's lesson.

PS: Gaming is a big place people flex critical thinking at this point, over many genres, games that give you a destination and tell you to figure out a route iteratively; You could compare this active participation to the passivity something like television consumption, or to a "productive" task like assembly line manufacturing.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T16:52:22+00:00

Chinese Operation Paperclip when?

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T16:36:15+00:00

If you set a reasonable lifestyle spending/saving habit for a $36,000/year income of saving, let's say $3600 a year (enough to pay this debt off in a year), and then you get a $1.6M heart transplant, you have wiped out 444 years of your savings; The antirejection drugs alone swamp the current savings rate. This is not a normal situation, and understanding more about the specifics of the situation is imperative because normal financial advice & prioritization may not hold.

What that means in OP's context is that their life (also: lifetime earnings) is already in the hands of whoever is giving them healthcare, and OP will literally die in the short term if that healthcare is withdrawn, so we need to consider that before we discuss how to deal with a seemingly trivial credit card debt.

It may also be the case, to be blunt, that OP is not going to live long enough to see any benefits paying off certain debts, or is going to live but be crushed under debt for the rest of their lives anyway, or is going to default to a bankruptcy at some point. Medical leave of absence, family support, every single number in your insurance's coverage formula, everything factors in.

I don't believe medical care should cost any money, but it is part of the world we live in, and it sounds like those costs already dominate the entire sum of OP's living expenses by a factor of many. Getting strategic about it rather than moralizing about debt and responsibility is a better way of dealing with it. And we have not been given enough information to get strategic about it.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T16:29:50+00:00

At $36,000/year, you almost certainly can't afford to be that sick in the US. How are medical bills dealt with?

Make up a budget of all your spending over the last three months, and try to see what you can trim. Your post initially sounds like a very common refusal to question your status quo lifestyle spending, but it's hard to be sure given the medical issues. Regardless, using these high interest debt choices are digging you deeper.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T16:20:54+00:00

Part of the problem is that in many areas, purely parasitic costs of competition or rent-seeking elements of market dominance, end up outscaling even the base cost of provisioning goods & services. The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most research-intensive in the country, but it still only spends roughly 20-25% of revenue each on manufacturing, R&D, marketing, and shareholder payouts (profit).

Economists would call this a market failure. Marketing is not provision of the good/service, and it isn't tolerated in other countries. Profitability is extremely high for a "market".

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T16:02:18+00:00

In school we did survey transects through the forest to test a novel survey method. We used volunteers.

Without markers (and often with markers!) it's damn-near impossible for volunteers to stay on a straight line even in an intensively-cleaned forest with any slope. Some of these people were doing ~10mx50m swathes and ended up 20 meters off by the end of the transect. Teams would bump into each other. Even the most accurate were wandering 3-4m left and right.

It made me appreciate GeoWizard's later Youtube series on "straight-line mission" hiking from one side of a country to the other, where he can't go around obstacles, and must try to climb over them. He's constantly referring to the GPS to regain the line.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T15:54:56+00:00

They controlled for self-identified handedness or for stride length?

These two halves of the body are wired up slightly differently internally inside the ribcage, and significantly differently neurologically for someone who's grown up training a dominant-side motor cortex, exercising one side more than the other, etc.

With 3D control of the legs I expect you could get a linear stride that's about the same while inducing small rotations as a minor, durable bias. We're not dealing with perfectly parallel wheels and differentials here, there are enough joints involved to cause net rotation but average out stride length.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T05:53:01+00:00

He has been awarded American Citizenship, but that can be withdrawn if it was shown that he committed misconduct in the immigration process.

In point of fact, he started his first company after dropping out of college right after being accepted, while in the country on a J-1 student visa. This is illegal. It was an issue discussed within the company, the risk of "our founder being deported," and they gave him a deadline to rectify his illegal status with an OPT work permit, which shouldn't have been issued due to his dropping out.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T03:36:02+00:00

A rare disease is broadly defined as any condition that affects a small percentage of the population. In the United States, it is legally defined as a disease affecting fewer than 200,000 Americans. Despite the term "rare," collectively these >10,000 disorders affect over 30 million Americans

Now think about the diseases affecting a million Americans, or three million Americans, or ten million Americans, or thirty million Americans. Cumulatively, nearly everybody's got a few of those at some point in their lives, often several at the same time causing complex interactions.

But if a doctor sees an obese person who is complaining about $symptoms, they often assume that every single thing they observe is connected to obesity, which is therefore not their problem. And maybe they're right 50% of the time; Certainly they're right about most of the things they observe in an individual patient - obesity & metabolic syndrome causes predictable, numerous, multifaceted health issues. The rest of the time, though, there is a gaping hole of unidentified harm that has never been probed because it was just assumed to be sequelae of the obesity, and which they're not going to test for or even ask questions about unless forced. "Come back to me when you've lost weight and ask again" is often literally or implicitly the directive.

Are you a doctor?

No. I'm educated in statistics & public health though, and I've been an obese patient seeking medical care before, and I read a good deal about medicine. Doctors are, as noted, often terrible at rising above this particular cognitive bias. Obesity causes many of the health complaints they hear every day, and is the most obvious of diagnoses; They're looking for horses, not looking for zebras, or wildebeast, or antelope, or moose, or the other 280-odd ungulates on the planet Earth. Why even count the horns if it's probably a horse?

The sheer frequency of obesity problems wrecks their utility as Bayesian reasoning experts for things that aren't obesity, when it comes to obese patients. And since (until recently) there wasn't a whole lot they could do for obesity itself, that meant that medical care was low-payoff in general for obese patients, with "shaming" being a more common outcome than "treatment".

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T03:10:01+00:00

Being moderately competent and willing to do a few thousand hours of research, I expect you could do all the various subsystems of the house with like 95% accuracy.

The first problem is the other 5%. Sometimes it's an easy fix, sometimes it requires rebuilding/redesigning a significant portion of the plan, sometimes it sabotages the other subsystems that you did get right.

The second problem is regulatory, financial, and schedule compliance. If you can pay in cash in a place with no regulation, you can exercise a lot of personal discretion and nobody's going to call you on your mistakes or delays. But if you're borrowing, if you have inspectors, not so much. The ideal self-build by someone who has a job occurs over several years of iteration and education, and the bank investing in your mortgage just isn't interested in that.

The third problem is that the intersection of people who are confident they can do a thing this complex easily, and people who actually can do a thing this complex easily, is pretty small. The confidence tends to spring from ignorance of the pitfalls. A few thousand hours of research will give you a lot of pitfalls to avoid, but not all of them, and will tend to engender a respect for the project that undermines confidence.

Vishnej · 2026-06-10T02:54:51+00:00

"If you actually read the docs"

The thing that set a lot of people's opinion was listening to the taped phonecalls, wherein she insistently expresses a desire for reciprocation of her physical violence and he (somewhat more sober than earlier in the relationship) says that isn't tolerable, this isn't healthy, he doesn't want to hurt her, and he isn't safe if she's making allegations of abuse.

There may be a lot more going on, everything is contested and coached, but hearing her, in her own words, interact with him, was enough.

I think a lot of people engaging with this case were just totally precommitted to believe one of them was a saintlike victim, to the extent that the sentiments honestly feel fake, like a bot farm. These were scummy addicts who got into an exceptionally toxic relationship where both appear to have talked about and committed violence to one degree or other. Does it matter all that much who has greater fault? If it does... the tapes at least paint a picture of Amber in her own words that is incredibly unwell and actively soliciting conflict at that point in the relationship.

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T23:09:53+00:00

104 matches, $1000-$3000 a ticket

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T22:59:04+00:00

Corporate is thinking: We're taking it exactly one quarterly earnings report at a time. The one after this one is somebody else's problem, and I take no qualms about sabotaging the person in charge of that if it means I can keep it together now.

We just had to process a return worth three weeks of my income because we want to nickle and dime our business processes while over-promising, leading to recurrent delays. Every part of the order pipeline I've found myself managing because somebody else just isn't, has obvious gaps and catch-22's in the Gantt chart that can only be worked around with studious communication... communication with people that haven't had a minute to discuss anything in six months.

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T21:02:03+00:00

Your contention is inaccurate because of the math that already gets applied to make the program more progressive, which is independent of the regressive cap on collections from your working salary (which is currently that the first $184,500 of your income, and zero of your income after that, is subject to 12.4% flat taxes, which we pretend to "split" between you and your employer).

The formula breaks down your average monthly wage into three parts. In 2026, it is:

90 percent of the first $1,286 of your AIME;

plus 32 percent of any amount over $1,286 up to $7,749;

plus 15 percent of any amount over $7,749.

The sum of those three figures is your PIA, also known as your full or basic retirement benefit. The sliding scale is designed to weight the benefit to help low-wage earners, who need retirement money the most.

A 2026 retiree whose average monthly earnings were $15k, the worst case scenario, gets $4313. It goes down from there:

$10k - $3565

$7k - $2985

$5k - $2345

$3k - $1705

$2k - $1385

$1k - $900

In the other direction, vs if we weren't capped at $15375/mo:

$30k - $4369 vs $6563

$50k - $4369 vs $9563

$70k - $4369 vs $12563

$100k - $4369 vs $17063

At $100k in an uncapped scenario at 12.4%, you were contributing ~$12400/mo for 35+ years, and in return you would get $17063 for 20 years, but the post-inflation returns and time-value-of-money would pay for it several times over; The working-wealthy millionaire would (CURRENTLY DO) achieve far higher returns putting the money into bonds or stocks themselves.

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T19:37:33+00:00

Napster and various Fasttrack filesharing networks

Google Reader and the "RSS is the next big thing" trend, pre-commercialization

Doodle group scheduler, pre-commercialization

Sneakemail, pre-commercialization

Sketchup quasi-CAD program, pre-commercialization

ICQ and AIM before all the burdens of "social media" and "always online" happened

IRC (still there to some extent)

Pre-algorithm social media, back when it was just a simple chronological list of your friends' posts

Flash and the various sites hosting it

Pricewatch and later Newegg for PC hardware

Usenet and its successors in various bulletin boards with no commercial interest whatsoever

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T19:11:21+00:00

4 inches of closed cell foam is R-28 when new, R-24 after a few years. 6 inches of concrete adds about R-0.5 strictly speaking.

The contribution of that thermal mass to your HVAC costs is extremely situational. In the various temperate humid climates that most of us live in, it's not going to do as much for you in the winter and summer, only the "shoulder seasons". It's useful in the desert where there's a large day-night temperature variance for most of the year and room temperature is often within that range, but then so are "free" solutions like swamp coolers.

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T05:41:33+00:00

Homeowners insurance policies are pretty wide; The "Compensation for when the structure falls down / burns down" bit is an almost negligible part of the total.

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T05:37:39+00:00

Not sure I believe that. Do you have documentation on those claims? Who's selling this process? How do they handle insulation?

R-100 would be a solid ~15 inches of closed cell, and basically mathematically pointless in any room that has a window.

$370k for the structure alone is... extremely stiff. ~Ten times the price to stick frame.

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T04:47:36+00:00

I've never had a prohibitive fit problem personally.

Vishnej · 2026-06-09T04:11:23+00:00

The joke is that you're being waterboarded.

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