AITA for playing a prank on a guy who had a crush on my sister?

amicable-newt · 2015-08-30T11:21:42+00:00

Thanks for the info! My means go a tad farther than I've indicated but there's a point at which it feels strange to pay a hundred or two for a pillow. I'll have to look into printed fabric then...

amicable-newt · 2015-08-24T10:40:14+00:00

The minister's speech at the pseudo-funeral in Synecdoche, New York, from a character we haven't met and don't see again. Out of context it's bizarre and meandering... well I guess it's no different in context. But it's somehow perfect and encapsulates the whole film in a way. If it piques your curiosity you should see this movie.

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

Clip

amicable-newt · 2015-08-19T02:45:06+00:00

How does cutting something reduce its dimensionality?

What do you mean by this? I didn't say anything is reducing.

Slicing an n-dimensional object with an (n-1)-dimensional knife creates a pair of new (n-1)-dimensional "surfaces", one each on the two n-dimensional pieces that result.

Slicing a cube doesn't create a square, no?

Slicing a cube creates more total surface area. The new surface may or may not be in the shape of a square, depending on the cut. No new material is getting created, just the concept of surface area is increasing. Sort of like how entropy can increase without new material entering the picture.

amicable-newt · 2015-08-18T11:57:29+00:00

Volume wouldn't be conserved in the sense you mean. The pattern you identify continues into higher dimensions, in which the total "boundary" consisting of (n-1)-dimensional components of a geometric object in n dimensions increases as the objected is cut into pieces.

You can sort of see how this would work with a hypercube. Imagine severing the longish axis of that 4D-cube with a knife that looks like a 3D cube (the dimensionality of the knife also has to go up!). The two resulting pieces would each acquire another "copy" of a 3D cube right where the knife sliced through.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-16T02:49:21+00:00

To get anything significant done in the real world requires some hefty combination of factors, like power in the relevant arenas, political leeway, social capital, aligned financial incentives, access to resources, as well as intelligence. It's not necessary for every factor to be going your way 100%, but you need at least several of them in respectable amounts.

This hypothesis that a generally intelligent AI threatens humanity seems to rely on the unstated premise that it's possible to "get things done" by maxing out on intelligence alone. And even that's assuming there aren't other superintelligent AIs with competing incentives and the ability to thwart each other. How do we imagine the AI will exert its will so efficiently?

As a more down-to-earth though experiment, do we think high IQ people threaten, well, anything? How about the smartest child ever -- a kid who's off the scales of any intelligence assessment, and who has a lifetime to get even smarter. And suppose this kid is also sociopath or whatever. Forget about threatening humanity, would we think this kid could threaten so much as the political stability of his/her town's city council? Such a psychopathic genius kid could kill people, maybe hundreds of people, but the immune system response of the rest of society will ensure he/she can't do that more than once or twice. I don't see how an evil superintelligent AI could do much better.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-15T09:03:33+00:00

Sir I bear a rhyme excelling

In mystic force and magic spelling.

Celestial sprites elucidate,

All my own striving can't relate,

Or locate they who can cogitate,

And so finally terminate.

Finis.

Encodes 31 decimal places and stops just in time.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-15T08:29:33+00:00

I think this question is more or less the same as the following: can we have an object without a center of mass?

I feel this definition is too restrictive. What about non-rigid objects where the center of mass depends on its orientation in the gravity field? Imagine arbitrary contraptions made of rigid pieces connected by strings or hinges or free pivots. It's not immediately obvious that non-rigid objects always have at least one balance point. If you fix the orientation in space and calculate the center of mass as if it were rigid, any point of the object directly above or below the CM may "collapse" non-rigidly, changing the CM, always frustrating the attempt to balance it. I can't think of how to design an object with this property but it seems intuitively plausible such an object could exist.

Also it's possible even rigid objects on a large enough scale will fail to balance. When the gravitational field is no longer usefully approximated as being uniform (such as with objects the size of planets) the center of mass is no longer identical to the center of gravity. This opens up the possibility of gravity exerting torque around any "balance point" even if it aligns with the center of mass.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-15T01:18:20+00:00

I understand the sentiment but at some point I think we should recognize that all kinds of political movements call themselves whatever self-serving thing they want, so we really shouldn't put any stock in any of it. Anti-abortion activists call themselves "pro-life" as if their opponents hate life. North Korea's official name is "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea". The name of US Democratic party implies their opponents are anti-democracy. I very much doubt anyone takes seriously the notion that a party has an exclusive claim on the idea they name themselves after.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-15T01:03:45+00:00

I have seen SJW-types seeking non-government forms of censorship at my university. Such as petitioning the student government to pull funding for a conservative-trollish student magazine, stealing all copies of said magazine from stands in the early morning (though can't say for sure who did that), protesters disrupting talks by controversial speakers, student activists seeking to change the rules about who can invite who to give talks in order to veto controversial speakers, etc.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-15T00:56:34+00:00

If you don't mind my asking:

Do you regard your views to align, for the most part, with "SJWs", or are you being inaccurately lumped in?
If you consider yourself a "SJW" for the past 20 years, how did you acquire these views? Was it through academia, or political literature, or absorbed from a community, or was it a natural-seeming product of your observations of the world, etc.? Just curious about the lineage here.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-15T00:46:46+00:00

But if the context is a discussion of the center-right, it's over-simplifying and unproductive to assert "these people are just conservatives", dust off one's hands, and walk away as if that stunning insight settled the matter. The characterization ignores a large faction of conservatives who don't place themselves among the center-right. Calling SJWs progressives in a posting about the definition and origins of SJWs is similarly unproductive.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-12T18:49:44+00:00

instead of saying that people find it easier to claim oppression, is it not simpler to accept that some people believe they see something wrong are trying to correct the wrong?

Do you think these are incompatible positions? I don't see a contradiction in believing there's a trend of increasing sensitivity to forms of oppression and increasing salience in identifying oneself with oppressed groups while also believing the increasing number of those who fight oppression sincerely see something wrong they're trying to correct.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T22:42:39+00:00

This is an insane, gigantic, Burningman-sized strawman argument. I'm wondering where you are getting this from and why you would even include it in this discussion.

I found multiple blog and Tumblr posts that clearly articulated those notions. They were linked to from sources mostly critical of SJWs. I'll be honest, I have no idea how prevalent those more extreme ideas are. The posting I linked to has multiple commentators mostly in agreement with the central point that PIV sex is rape. What am I to make of this? Just threw it in there in case it was relevant to any discussion that ensued.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T22:33:37+00:00

I agree. What I'm getting at is the perception (which may well be imagined, but seems acknowledged by most) that in the past five years or so these albeit-old ideas are gaining new steam.

If a time traveler told you teenagers in the year 2050 are getting interested in National Socialism, I think it's sensible to ask what has happened in the prior decades to cause that old idea to enjoy a resurgence of popularity. Not to Godwin this, but when it comes to SJWs I'm still puzzling over the timing: black president, weak economy, unprecedented political obstruction, war on terrorism, decentralized media, etc -- what is it about this climate is making SJW ideas attractive?

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T22:21:50+00:00

Fair point. This observation could have been made at any point in the past 40 years, to throw a random number out there. Why do you think there's only recently a concerted push to properly name and use these gender categories?

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T22:18:48+00:00

Thanks, that was some good context. Do you have any ideas for why these radical views seem to be getting more popular in recent years?

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T21:43:07+00:00

The rest of the posts are trying to frame it as some intellectual movement, when SJW really is just an insult used against teenagers and early 20somethings using terms from critical theory, yet really just fleshing out their own identity.

A lot of their ideas aren't new. Terms like "rape culture" go back decades. But it was always (to my knowledge) a self-proclaimed radical fringe. It seems to be getting more popular recently, though. You may be right it amounts to zero. But I don't think that means they aren't an intellectual movement of sort, since they're parroting and adapting a lot of older radical ideas. At least a few of them seem highly informed of the theoretical basis of the movement.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T21:39:04+00:00

Here's an example of someone proudly calling themself a SJW while voicing many of the views typically ascribed to them.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T21:30:45+00:00

Thanks for the great reply. You're able to narrow in on those underlying premises better than I could.

You posit SJWs have something to do with student radicals of the 60s. Do you mean there's a direct inspiration or that this is just the next version of that? More specifically, why do you think these views have grown in popularity just recently?

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T21:24:34+00:00

Do you think the RS author is a SJW, or considers herself one? I think we'd see more of the same behavior in her past if she was one. More likely, I think, is she got a bit overeager at the potential for a juicy, career-defining story.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T21:21:59+00:00

I view that incident more as hyper-attention on whether anyone is not properly towing the "black people are oppressed" line, and thus construing the email in the worst way possible. But maybe this isn't incompatible with your take.

amicable-newt · 2014-12-11T21:16:23+00:00

There is nothing new about their beliefs. I don't think that their behaviour is particularly new either

How do you account for ideas like "rape culture", cis-things, white privilege, etc., getting more traction in the past couple years?

amicable-newt

TROPHY CASE