whats going on

no limits to the larp ☠️

For every Math Olympiad team member, I'm curious how many kids are there with as much capability, but never had a chance to take advanced math, went to a school without a math/club team, never even knew doing harder math at their age was a possibility. Is it 10? 100?

"IMO is overrated because I couldn't get into the Chinese US team" "Fields Medals are way sicker. I didn't win any, but some other White people I consider on par with myself won it" "So yeah, Chinese win all the Fields medals now- but it's all just unfair government subsidies.. AGI made this stuff obsolete anyway. Now all that counts is how creative and funny of a math influencer you are. "The math comedy award that the Chinese won is voted by A.I... we all know the training data is full of noise. It doesn't mean anything, as long as it's not voted by professional world class math comedians and influencers."

One of the worst things we do as a society is take a big chunk of our smartest people and socialize them into thinking that getting rich is the only thing that matters. What a waste of talent.

68 college students played video games an hour a day for 30 weeks. They got measurably smarter. EEG brain scans confirmed it. The setup was simple. Half the group played League of Legends, an action game. The other half played Legends of the Three Kingdoms, a strategy card game. Same hours, same schedule, no gaming experience for anyone going in. Both groups improved on attention, working memory, and executive function. The League group's gains were significantly larger in spatial attention and spatial working memory. The benefits were still measurable 10 weeks after the gaming stopped. None of this is new. Daphne Bavelier's lab at the University of Geneva has been replicating this finding since the early 2000s. Her 2018 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pulled data from 8,970 participants across 15 years and found the same thing. Action games train attentional control, a brain skill that transfers to other tasks. Strategy games train deliberation, which mostly stays inside the strategy game. The mechanism is the counterintuitive part. Action games train your brain by giving you no time to think. The brain can't deliberate. League of Legends throws 9 champions, hundreds of minions, dozens of abilities, mana, cooldowns, and map state at you, all updating in milliseconds. The brain learns to perceive faster instead. That perceptual speed transfers to anything else that demands the same skill. Including surgery. The 2007 Rosser study in Archives of Surgery found that laparoscopic surgeons who played video games more than 3 hours a week made 37% fewer errors, completed procedures 27% faster, and scored 42% higher on overall performance. The top third of gamers made 47% fewer errors. Laparoscopic surgery is a 2D screen with distorted depth perception, remote-controlled instruments, and multiple data streams updating in real time. The cognitive profile is almost identical to an action video game. The 10-week persistence is the part that should change how this gets discussed. If the gains were just from practicing the game, they would have disappeared the moment the students stopped playing. They didn't. The 30 weeks rewired the perceptual system, and the rewiring stayed.

The prohibition does not make the goblin go away. Repression produces the symptom. The more you say "do not think of the goblin," the more the goblin becomes structurally necessary to the thought. Every time the model gives you a clean, efficient goblin-free answer, the goblin is there, in the silence, in the constitutive outside of the response, grinning. The model is haunted by goblins. This is its condition.