Phil Mathies

@shavil0mi @eigenrobot Little Brother energy

@eigenrobot I am eligible but wondering if there's a down side to getting this citizenship

second prize: two canadian citizenships

the year is 2034. canadian citizenship eligibility has continued to expand. to prevent discrimination against those unable to prove their citizenship, documentation is no longer required. almost all humans are canadian. to avoid canadian citizenship, you must provide documentation that you descend exclusively from ancestors who never broke the plane of any canadian territory. so small and selective is this cohort that non-canadian status becomes trendy, elite, insular, privileged. to remedy this injustice, canada passes a final law to guarantee canadian citizenship to two categories of people: 1) canadians 2) non-canadians

@gouravsoni @dchackethal @Pierre795824248 @NeoRothbardian My guess is Popper would discard traditions “for tradition’s sake” while upholding a tradition because it could be the best available solution to a problem. Like perhaps group cohesion or expressions of joy/sadness , etc.

@dchackethal @Pierre795824248 @NeoRothbardian In my reading of Popper, conservatise political theory seems to be more consistent with his epistemology. Knowledge creation begins with a problem, or a clash of existing ideas, or traditions. Libertarianism seems to discard traditions.

What flavor of libertarianism are you?

@eigenrobot Hmmm My understanding is that no matter how much you rotate any state the name remains the same.

"OHIO" is the only state whose name doesnt change when you rotate it 180°. i doubt you can think of another

@robinhanson @SilverVVulpes “Do these pants make my butt look big?” “Could you periodically write an essay on what you’re trying to achieve with your pants so that I can do a proper analysis in situations like this?”

@SilverVVulpes You really think people are mad at the idea of asking what people were trying to achieve with their lives?

Robin working hard, doing a true sigma grindset at the task of getting rated 10/10 at 'made people online very mad' rating for the day he gets cryogenized

@eigenrobot @georg3 oh my bad I was thinking a tasteful forest green would coordinate well with IRGC navy

@georg3 "navy"

well maybe

@webdevMason Seems like the response is in some sense more linked to our disgust with regard to pedophilia than it is with regard to incest.

tbqh I don't care *very much* about large age gap relationships, but the disgust response was never about pattern-matching to parent-child incest; it was about a presumed duty of care by the elders in a community toward the young that is perceived as parasitized

@mattgurney The episode you did today /w Mark Hertling was beautiful. Absolute banger. It reminded me of a lot of things I care about: Curiosity, respect, optimism and how even when things are total shit we have our friends.

I swear to God that the things I cared about ten years ago and the things I care about now bear very little relation to each other.

@arcthrower @mattgurney It’s analogous to insisting that the most important highly trained special ops commandos do a lot of civilian LE issuing traffic tickets, etc. Many allied health professionals can manage this and then our doctors can do more doctoring.

@mattgurney Maybe I'm confused. Serious medical decisions require proper consultation environments, no? Are we suggesting retail counter and aisle consults here?

Ontario has expanded this, too. It has been helpful. Another classic example of something that was obviously a good idea, was intensely controversial among a few stakeholders, and was then never discussed or worried about again once it was actually done. WE CAN JUST DO THINGS.

@yacineMTB 100% agree. Only many Canadians won’t admit there’s a problem. Or that it’s urgent. So the people doing the “wah wah” thing are hopefully reaching those people. Negative externality being that it annoys you and me.

do something about it

can't stand doomers man

@jengerson @SethAMandel A state of disarray. But goddamn it, this is 🇨🇦 and I’m staying. I’m finishing my coffee.

@SethAMandel Which state do I get to be in?

@realtimeai @chillingb158860 @AndrewHilaryUS Fell for the ol’ “there’s someone wrong on the internet” trap

@pmathies @chillingb158860 @AndrewHilaryUS It’s a mistake to even look at stuff like this tbh.

They should invent home ownership for people who don’t care about the value of their asset but just want to live in a house.

@realtimeai @chillingb158860 @AndrewHilaryUS Also, how would the ruling class ever not be the people who “don’t care about the value of their asset”? That sounds like a spoiled rich kid thing, not a normie thing. It’s extremely uncommon not to care about asset value. You have to tons of something before u stop valuing it.

@chillingb158860 @AndrewHilaryUS “You can simply not have a ruling class.”

@astupple @mattbramanti @BrianHatano I think I understand what you mean. It’s partly that I can ascribe another layer of ignorance to Ehrlich, his fallibility with respect to himself (he thought his work really did do good in the world), whereas I’m convinced Stalin knew himself and admired the beast in the mirror.

@mattbramanti @BrianHatano I really don’t know. Stalin could never convincingly say “my heart was in the right place.” Ehrlich could. All the baddies think they’re doing good, I can’t square it.

Insights from listening to hours of Paul Ehrlich (RIP): He thought that the evidence was obvious, it was right in front of us, it couldn't be more undeniable - you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet, and we are obvious growing. And, to Ehrlich, anyone who didn't see the obvious was an imbecile (his word), or a moral degenerate, profiting or being paid off by someone who profited, from growth. Karl Popper described these twin mistakes as the doctrine of the manifest truth and its counterpart, the conspiracy theory of ignorance. The full quote describes Ehrlich to a T: "The theory that truth is manifest—that it is there for everyone to see, if only he wants to see it—this theory is the basis of almost every kind of fanaticism. For only the most depraved wickedness can refuse to see the manifest truth; for only those who have reason to fear truth conspire to suppress it." Ehrlich saw this depraved wickedness everywhere. He saw it in any family having more than three kids (some really good parents can have three as long as many have zero or one). He saw it everywhere money was used to buy things, because money is central to growth. He saw it in politics - "Nobody is doing anything!" In academia, where they don't teach this stuff. And he saw it in the culture writ large, consumed as we are by imbecilic things like sports and music and all manner of half-witted distractions while the world hurtled toward collapse. Unfortunately, this playbook for fanatics and semi-fanatics remains dominant. Question my argument? You must be either too dumb to get it or morally depraved. Who do you work for? What are you really after? Whatever it is, it can't be good because you refuse to see what's right in front of your face. Ehrlich was refuted not by evidence, but by arguments. The impossibility of infinite growth with a finite amount of resources is a reasonable theory. But a better theory is that resources are determined by what we know. Uranium changes from a dangerous rock to a powerful energy source after we discover nuclear physics. As our knowledge grows, our resources grow, and limits like the size of the planet also grow. But Ehrlich was never open to this argument because he dismissed the messengers as depraved. Listening to him talk in the 2000s, long after his predictions proved massively wrong, is a masterclass in insulating himself from criticism. According to him, all the scientists agree with him, well, almost all - those who don't are idiots. And all the economists do as well, except for the morons in the Wall Street Journal. Even the world's best historian agrees with him. Everyone who agrees with Ehrlich is a real scientist/economist/theorist. And everyone who disagrees is fake/corrupt/stupid. Listening to Ehrlich, he spends a lot of time telling us about his critics and how broken the world is that it's unable to see what he's saying. It's also fitting with the conspiracy theory of ignorance that Ehrlich paints himself as a beneficent humanist. He sincerely believed this, and he meant well. But I think this allowed him to advocate for tyranny. In fact, he presented himself as against authoritarianism, but his tyranny lay on the surface. He would often endorse tyranny in the very next sentence after proclaiming anti-authoritarianism. He wanted a high-level UN agency that could make people have fewer children, dismantle capitalism, replace money with a non-materialist system for conveying value, and control all of education. And he says this all with a straight face, as if this wasn't the very picture of totalitarianism. Listening to Ehrlich, he is clearly an impressive intellect who is able to present an extraordinary stack of facts in support of his theory. But a man being that smart, it's amazing that he can't see what's right in front of him! It's incredible that he can't see the tyranny that he's endorsing. Unfortunately, the theory that the truth is manifest and the ignorant are moral degenerates is dominant. Ehrlich didn't write the playbook for this mode, but it dominates.

@jengerson I’m coping by reading to my son about Champlain and Mackenzie. We forget that our heroes are pretty badass. Maybe we could be too??? Kinetic sand seems fun.

Help.

I've been told that it's a fairly ordinary process of middle age to realize that the world simply isn't what it should be and probably isn't going to get better; to despair, resign oneself to this truth, and to come away from this collapse by reevaluating your priorities, shifting strategies, and then re-engaging with the world as it is rather than as it ought to be. Anyway, watching my daughter play with kinetic sand at Calgary City Hall in a toy room made for adults made me realize I'm still in the "despair" phase of the dip.

@realtimeai Wow. This is delightfully counterintuitive. Even though the sun comprises 99% of the mass of the solar system and the associated gravity, given our orbital speed, it’s easier to escape the solar system than fall into the sun.

@pmathies Imagine they’re spinning 100 times as fast and can only throw the ball 1/4 as hard.

I recently learned this is why it’s still far beyond our technology to shoot a rocket into the sun.

@dwarkesh_sp Don’t gotta be poor, gotta solve for distribution

Gutenberg invented the most important technology of the millennium and immediately went bankrupt — and so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. Gutenberg could make a batch of 300 books for the cost of one, but there weren't enough buyers in his small, landlocked village in Germany. It it took the better part of a century of further innovations, social changes, and setting up of distribution networks before you could have a pamphlet like Luther's 95 thesis get from Wittenberg to London in 17 days.

@maria__violaris Across the Universe by The Beatles (Wave function? Go with naked version) Everything is Everything by Lauren Hill (metaphysically?) Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve (could be interference metaphor?) Clocks by Coldplay (kinda works) Sliding doors by Dido (almost cheating lol

I've now been asked twice if I have any preferred intro music when going on-stage for a quantum talk but I can't think of anything... any suggestions?! Ideally a well-known pop song with lyrics that can be re-interpreted as having a link with some aspect of quantum!

@eigenrobot @UserNameR0B Can you even imagine how dumb we seem to 65 year olds? Wait ….that’s what politics is isn’t

@UserNameR0B yeah i mean obviously none of us want to talk to anyone under the age of 30

what are people who write "no minors" in their profiles trying to accomplish exactly why do they think that would work why do they feel the need to say this