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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • It’s the difference between “We must be on God’s side” and “God is on our side”.

    When the Iraq war kicked off, there was a priest at my parents’ church that spoke out against it (as he explained it, “love your enemy” is one of the most challenging things Jesus asked of his followers. It doesn’t mean “forgive someone that cuts you off in traffic” it means literally whoever your enemy is, you must love, care for, and protect them, even if it means self sacrifice or dying to do so). Attendance at his sermons dropped by 60 or 70% for years. Eventually I think people started to come around, but he died before there was widespread sentiment against the war. I’m no longer religious, but I miss that priest.



  • When you account for inflation, oil prices today are in line with oil prices in the early 2000s. The price is too low, and the risk is too high for massive infrastructure spending that would extract more oil from Venezuela to be worth it.

    Possibly, green energy technologies are now on a trajectory to overtake fossil fuels altogether - and they are already a factor in driving the price of fossil fuels (and therefore the profitability of many wells and mines) down substantially. If that happens, the long term value of Venezuela’s oil reserves, without suitable infrastructure already built for extraction, could be close to zero.

    In line with small government ideals, the best thing to do is let companies decide whether and how much to invest, but that won’t be a headline worth showing off. So Trump is trying to make $100B happen, and believes that that (alone) will restore the Venezuelan economy to the way it was.




  • The language of the post says something that cannot be (meaningfully) derived without a control group of people that didn’t experience a counterpoint: “… the situation of being a young woman alone at night in a subway station being enough to generate the sense of fear.”

    As I understand it, everyone in the study experienced all of that in combination, so any subset of those things may have been enough to generate a sense of fear: being alone, being at night, being a young woman, or being on a subway station.

    The common objection I see is that everyone feels fear alone on a subway station at night, so the statement is misleading. That matches my personal experience, so I also see that statement as misleading, regardless of any work done by the study.




  • Also, if you put the same wine in different bottles, they pretty reliably prefer (and describe the rich complexities of) the more expensive bottles.

    I knew an audiophile that believed the government had top secret technology for additional audio channels in surround sound setups, like 17.7 or something. I tried very hard to explain how you can buy an off the shelf 128 channel recorder/playback device, and have as many channels as you can feasibly buy and set up, and the reason a lot of media was recorded in 5.1 was because a 5.1 setup was considered at the upper end of what people would be willing to pay for. He moved his target in response, to now the government has top secret 1000 channel audio equipment.

    I don’t know what the equivalent of the wine world is, but I hope never to meet it.





  • I was raised religious, and fell for the whole “porn makes you unable to form real, properly attached bonds with another human” thing. Then I started reading the scientific background of that stuff, and - while you definitely can damage your ability to form strong relationships with porn (or just about anything else) - that made me far more porn positive.

    Maybe this is just me, but I actually watched/looked at far more porn when I felt deeply ashamed of doing so. Now that I’m OK with it, and it just feels normal, it’s comparable to a tool I have access to.




  • In set theory, sets containing an infinite number things are relatively easy to describe. For example, “All the counting numbers” is a set with an infinite number of things in it.

    Many sets with an infinite number of things have a one to one correspondence to each other, meaning that we can describe a function that takes elements of one set as an input, gives elements of the other set as an output, and spans both sets - no element is skipped on either side.

    “All the even counting numbers” has a one to one correspondence with “All the counting numbers”. You can look into Hilbert’s Hotel for a good demonstration of how this works.

    Not all sets with an infinite number of things correspond with the set of all counting numbers, because some are fundamentally bigger. This difference in size doesn’t happen just once (e.g. there are countably infinite sets, and uncountably infinite sets, and that’s all we need to know), there are actually an infinite number of sets of progressively bigger infinite numbers of elements.

    Because this is a confusing mess, we needed a way to keep track of how infinitely big each infinitely big set is, and the aleph cardinalities are the preferred way to do that. Any set with cardinality of aleph zero (aka “aleph null”) has a one to one correspondence with any other set with cardinality aleph zero. The same is true for every other aleph cardinality. Two sets of cardinality aleph thirty seven have a one to one correspondence with each other.

    Anyways, busy beaver(tree(aleph omega)) is the biggest number.