Experiment 29A

@kitten_beloved @cremieuxrecueil Suggests there are readily observable correlates. Someone once told me he could tell my baby was smart by how she laughed. He seemed like a fairly sharp young man to me

@cremieuxrecueil I'm a little shocked this isn't more correlated with IQ

Interesting: If you have people sit down and watch one-minute clips of other people, they can guess how smart those people are with a correlation of r = 0.39 on average And there's a little moderation by how smart the judge is: -1 SD judges average r = 0.36; +1 SD judges, 0.42

@QuetzalPhoenix Could be related to westerners spending more time away from family

The entire western world developed while drinking wine and beer pretty much through the entire day, it makes sense that it would develop a culture where people feel socially anxious all the time and are susceptible to drugs, sobriety was never in the cards

@oldyzach When it came out my favs were Uni and Gaians because I was science-obsessed. But now I prefer Santiago: "Men and women work harder knowing their children are safe and close at hand, and never forget that, with children present, parents will defend their home to the death!"

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - the question is - what is your choice of faction and why? I'm counting on a lot of comprehensive answers, as usual.

That’s an exaggeration, because Disney isn’t doing anything about copies in circulation I think it’s reasonable for the owners not to want to publish Michael Jackson, and reasonable for others to disapprove of that choice

@feelsdesperate Profit margin is mostly a function of capital requirements per revenue, because ROI tends to equilibrate. But even with low capital requirements, there can still be room to reduce labor costs

Grocery stores have been ‘solved.’ They’ve been solved. Anything with a 2% profit margin is solved. Maybe you could wring some more efficiency on an industry level with improved logistics but that’s going to an incredibly complex technical endeavor above the pay grade of municipal government. That’s why the ‘public grocery stores’ are such a good example of Dem Soc silliness. They’re a political set piece with ~0% chance of any net public benefit and an extremely high likelihood of wasted resources and opportunity costs.

@SandyofCthulhu The question springs from a misguided pacifism. Defensive warfare is necessary for survival, but sheltered people don’t understand

Whrn I was in college, my friend and I were sitting in the cafeteria discussing our favorite wargames, and three girls in the next booth asked us how we could love and glorify war. This was back in 1974. Caught by surprise, our defense was the lame “Yes war is bad. This isn’t war.” I’d do better today but hey I was only 29. Improve on my argument please.

@mr_scientism Suggests it’s the only way to do it. Too many guiderails and it’s not a proper education

Universities being terrible and students having to organize their own education seems to have been a common situation throughout history.

@MemoryMedieval I was being flip, of course, but it is also interesting to see other moves in the game. I don’t know anything about the one in that example but it sounds like he was very high status, which allows you to get away with more

@experiment29a In a way. Brantome discusses clever ways to avoid silly/superficial duels.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of dueling (or risking one's life) for honor. Very common now, so I will elaborate. In an honor culture, your honor is not merely "pride" or "vanity" but your social currency. It's how you move about your peers. How you get employment. How you eat. How you provide for your family. Honor is not merely superficial vanity. Losing your honor could cost you your next meal (or any meals thereafter). In some cases it may be superficial but in some cases it may be a matter of life and death, so far as your continuance in that society is concerned. This is why doing something dishonorable would lead one to be killed or exiled. In effect they are the same consequence but the point is that without sufficient honor, in an honor culture, you would find yourself unemployed (or unemployable), exiled, or dead. To impugn another's honor is quite literally to come between a man and his money (or his meal). These conflicts had social weight and consequence beyond "vanity". Now, this isn't to say that the dueling culture couldn't have gotten a little carried away. Brantome didn't think so but we don't exist in warrior cultures anymore so this concept of honor is foreign to us. The ultimate point here is that to think of dueling in warrior societies as simple vanity is a horrible misread of the time and place and terrible misunderstanding of an honor culture.

@kitten_beloved They were complaining about lazy students in cuneiform

This is how it's been for decades If I was lucky in a typical 30-person discussion-format class, there would be two other people besides me and the prof capable of talking about the material Oftentimes it was only one other person Sometimes it was just me and the prof

@Italian347 Gilgamesh was king of Uruk, one the biggest urban centers at that time But Enkidu was from the wilderness. The unlikeliness of the pairing may go along with real-life rarity, but those people could at least imagine such a friendship

The oldest tale that survived to the modern day is primarily about 2 men with no ties of blood becoming best friends

@witte_sergei Feed the rules to AIs and have them play each other

I need nine guys to commit to 1,500 hours of playing time with me so we can achieve the first successful play through of this game. Apparently it’s the longest board game ever made and has never been fully played, even by the playtest group at the publisher.

@ben_j_todd Nature isn’t even in harmony with itself

We imagine hunter gatherers living in harmony with nature. But just 5 million of them drove more than half the world's large mammals to extinction.

@DylanoA4 Earlier (screen and print) writers drew on their experiences of life. Today’s writers have mostly experienced school and entertainment

Old books are better because they sprung from a culture where reading, not watching, was the predominant mode of leisure. That not only meant authors were well-read and thus better writers, but that their readership was well-read too, so authors could expect more of them

@MausRicochet Given the term “old maid”, I’m sure this has been a thing for centuries But there probably has been a recent decline in places to interact naturally with potential mates

This is what I’ve noticed with more introverted/conservative friends as well. They were simply never asked out. I’m 39. The stories I hear from my boomer parents are like night/day to us. My dad in particular made it sound like he asked anything with legs out.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone — and finding that that’s okay with them ~writer Alain de Botton

@HiveFleetHodag Apparently people project a lot, and Americans have practically zero tolerance for casualties

the US operates on a sort of video game logic where if we destroy X thing or kill Y person we’ve completed the level and the other team has to stop playing and we’re not quite sure what to do when the FLAWLESS VICTORY message doesn’t pop up on the screen

@dollarsanddata Some educators call it the hidden curriculum. Should be a scandal that PMC kids know that stuff out of the box and schools don’t bother to educate others

A lot of this comes down to poorer kids just not knowing what to do. I didn't know that I had to apply for an internship in the WINTER of my sophomore year to get a sophomore summer internship to leverage into a junior summer internship to get a full-time offer senior year.

@benlandautaylor Best I can tell, there were both heavy and light chariots and they probably functioned like heavy and light cavalry, but I have found only scant information. Even their actual battlefield impact is very unclear

It's wild how we we know that chariots were THE dominant weapon in ancient warfare for many centuries but historians don’t agree on how you actually FOUGHT from a chariot, and there's no satisfying account of how it’s better than just riding a horse besides being rad as hell.

@SandyofCthulhu When I was a kid I imagined the Thieves’ Guild as a big building with a nice storefront and a prominent sign

The Thieves' Guild was created because of Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar series. Leiber's city of Lankhmar was created to be an ancient corrupt crumbling hidebound heap, where EVEN THE THIEVES had a guild! It was a parody - a mockery of crime and ancient tradition. It was taken by TSR and turned into a standard feature which of course is hilarious. It also was made to overlap somewhat with the modern concept of organized crime. But yeah a Thieves' Guild is so funny to think about.