Parroting Christopher Hitchens: what is presented without proof can be dismissed without proof
Mutations that have a real impact on the RNA of the virus are incredibly rare. Most random mutations and errors replicating don't produce any meaningful change in the virus and you have to get very unlucky for a deadly mutation to happen.
We should stick to scientific rationalism even if it has limits. There has been too much opportunistic fear-mongering and questionable decision making playing advantage off the back of a natural virus.
This thing obeys the laws of physics, kills people in a particular pattern and can be managed with scientific tools we have had forever. There is simply no need for everybody to be hysterical yet again, when the science of the virus can be so easily spelled out for the masses.
But noo, we have to have a boogeyman to build a network of cultural changes. This particular mechanism of hijacking a natural disaster for control is embarrassingly transparent.
If I say there's gold buried at certain coordinates, that's also true independent of whether I prove it. The point is that the quote is a heuristic that works because most of the by the time you hear that claim, most of the statistical work has been done, hidden in the premise in a way that skips your intuitions a bit (the kolgomoroff comolexity of my phrase is a lot higher than yours, even though they're of about the same length, even though the number of bits needed to verify each is about the same).
>that's also true independent of whether I prove it.
This is so different from my point that I'm not sure how it relates.
I am confident there is literal treasure near to where I live, because I've seen very convincing evidence of dredging from multiple sources. In my mind, it is proven. But, I'm not acting on that because I don't find it worthwhile.
On the other hand, if a stranger told me there was a police traffic stop in a particular direction, I'd probably take a detour - even if there was a complete lack of proof.
Proof doesn't guide my action at all - I don't require a burden of proof in order to act.
Burden of proof is a legal concept, not a philosophical one.
You're acting based on your priors and new evidence. You have a high prior for police stops existing in general, and a low one for people randomly lying about it, so a stranger saying there's one that way is compelling evidence to you. You have a high prior on the existence of treausure nearvy, but a low one of the existence of treasure worth the effort of finding, so me telling you you could get rich quick isn't compelling evidence to you.
I'm saying you're taking as if it were some sort of ontological model or normative rule of discourse, when really it's a verbalisation of a heuristic you've already admitted to using. You're using something like 'burden of proof' as an algorithm, even if you consciously reject it as a verbal tool.
> But noo, we have to have a boogeyman to build a network of cultural changes. This particular mechanism of hijacking a natural disaster for control is embarrassingly transparent.
It might be a side-effect in many local politics right now (never let a good crisis to waste), and many of them act incompetent (or maybe they're always incompetent but now we see it clearer when they're in the spotlight), but I don't think that was the point GP was making. It also assumes a conspiracy of actors that want to change the world by "building a network of cultural changes..." (Occam's razor)
The 'conspiracy', i.e. the organised group, is the media coupled with a grassroots authoritarian ideology that pays it to keep reporting as 'pleases' it. Just lots of individuals and institutions acting according to their memes and incentives, no (non-obviously existing) cabal needed.
> can be managed with scientific tools we have had forever
The most important ones aren’t even particularly scientific. If you’re feeling ill, stay home. Wash your hands. Don’t hang around elderly or other vulnerable.
But these are simple and require no exceptional growth of state power and usurping of the right of free people to exercise their labor.
All these pro-labor types have no problem making scientists, politicians, etc. your effective boss.
Rich people deciding they must micromanage their doltish compatriots.
It has a Wanted system like GTA. The comparison is accurate.
Most character skills are damage addons. If you don't pick assault rifle, your going to have a pretty slow time. Crafting is pointless, augments are just another skill tree.
'The way it's meant to be played' was the same apologetics we got with No Man's Sky on launch. Like three people wanted to play NMS as an empty grind-a-thon in a chill atmosphere that goes nowhere.
Cyberpunk failed to finish development. We all know it, why the rub?
Friends are close enough you can tell them the stuff that bothers you and distant enough that they can comment without being directly involved.
This brings so many advantages and one of my favourites is the sense of putting the world to rights. When you have good friends you can calibrate a justified sense of where you're going and what things ought to be without having to commit to learning it the hard way.
Frankly Ford should of had the conversation in the article with a friend, he would likely derive a more satsisfying answer to his premise.
He repeats his own woe too many times and goes on about his over-thinking about friendshop. Just go to a pub and socialize, why does it have to be a reminder of your childhood betrayals, or your crippling loneliness? Everybody has their own story, if you listen for two minutes people say incredibly interesting things.
This guy dumping his life story on page 1 makes a friendship a very short affair. Friends gradually reveal themselves to each other, for a bunch of reasons. But it makes the friendship last a long time and gives you time in the moment to reflect and enjoy the difference each shared story makes on your life.
Do people reject their own instinct for friendship??
Content sells the tech. The tech makes the most money though.
Microsoft is 1 tril bigger in market cap than Disney. Strange to use a Bill gates quote and then discuss Disney films.
Nintendo as a company makes more money on selling consoles, than on Zelda.
The article touches on this and could expand on it. No new tech launch is going to work without content, so in that sense it is king, but the money is in the tech.
> Nintendo as a company makes more money on selling consoles, than on Zelda.
In revenue or profit? It’s kind of definitional that there’s more revenue from the console than the game given that for any console you need to purchase on average ~1 game at most and a game is worth far less than a console. However, it’s my understanding consoles are generally loss leaders, priced at or below cost in anticipation of profit driven by sales of content.
In 2017 Nintendo sold roughly $257 of Switch hardware for $300. 40 dollar profit. They might have increased the margin since then.
A $60 game is sold to a retailer for $38-45. The publisher takes 20 of that (nintendo in this case) and the advertising & developer take the remaining 20. So nintendo probably takes 40 dollars profit from first party games like Zelda.
Margins on consoles used to be lower, $10-20 and they'd make $40 on the controller sales. The joycons on the switch cost 45 to make and sold for 50. The margin is back into the console as a whole again.
Digital sales on ingame items are likely close to pure profit.
It can't though. Books, printing presses, etc. are all forms of technology. Good content can't as easily propagate and proliferate without the infrastructure created by the tooling that supports the activity. You might be inclined to state that this belabors the point of being specific about modern Web technologies, but still - the medium is the message. They are still linked even if the underlying technologies change.
The Iliad and Ramayana were using the most cutting-edge information technology of their time, and spreading with the backing of the extant political regimes.
They were not competing with TikTok, CATV, and Disney.
Well, good tech can propagate even further and wider.
Nobody cared/cares (where nobody=very few) for the Iliad or Ramayama on the other sides of the world that created them.
But technologies created on each side quickly reached the other side or spread all over the globe. This includes primitive technologies which we tend to forget they are technologies like agriculture, the wheel, iron forging, etc.
"Content" has a pretty broad definition. In a social network, "content" is people (and what they post). In a search engine, it's documents (and what's in them). In an app store, it's apps.
If there was nothing worth reading online, no one would use Google. If no one was posting anything interesting on Facebook, it would have no users. If there were no apps worth using on the iOS store, iPhone wouldn't have nearly as big a market share.
You're looking at content in a very narrow definition. A database is content, as is a casual conversation with your friends.
>"Content" has a pretty broad definition. In a social network, "content" is people (and what they post). In a search engine, it's documents (and what's in them). In an app store, it's apps.
If we stretch the definition beyond any meaning, or to mean "input" or "data" in general, then sure.
Usually by content we mean news, music, videos, movies, writing, comedy, commentary, etc. though.
Not apps, office documents, or people's social messages...
>You're looking at content in a very narrow definition.
Me and most people using the term. Perhaps you're looking at it in an extremely wide definition?
Less formulaic now? Pop music is becoming more repetitive. [0] People like Max Martin producing an amazing amount of hit pop songs leads me to think it's more formulaic.
I guess it would depend on how you sample the music (i.e. from the top 50 hits playlists, randomly, by streaming number, by sold copies, etc.) and where you establish the baseline, and again how you compute forumlaic.
So if you are comparing top hits today with experimental rock of the 70s, and measure it in variance of chords, timbre and vocabulary. Yes it would be easy to show how music is becoming less varied. However if you establish the baseline during the late classical era (and limit your self to western music; as is often done) I’m sure you will find music today to be more varied.
If you sample randomly and make sure to include all of the experimental genres I’m sure you will find music today more varied then ever, and even if you go by top sales (and make sure you include music from around the word) I sure you might find that music is just as varied as it was back in the 70s.
Then there the question of how you measure musical variance. It is easy enough to do it by measuring (among other) the chord progression, or timbre, or proportion of the chorus, etc. but when people do this they often undermine many genres of music (e.g. minimalist music of the 80s and 90s) or hip hop, etc.
Max Martin is also a fantastic musician, originally a singer (this is arguably the most important part of pop), and has a deep understanding of music. From a harmony standpoint, his stuff tends to be a bit more interesting than most pop tunes. The dude is beast.
Yeah I agree there's a barrier between the endless eight ball of streaming songs and the music you've downloaded onto your computer. Once you've plucked a song from the internet and put it into your collection it becomes reliable, you know why you saved it and what playlist it belongs and what activity you want to pair with it and what frame of mind you were in when you saved it.
Streaming/youtube is so ephemeral, even with history and playlists it's difficult to remember what you found so groovy about a piece when it could all be gone tomorrow. I rarely develop a fixed memory of a song until I've saved it.
I don't see where justice comes in. That's between friends. Companies expand and governments adjust them.
Banana republics are born from broken governments, which brings negative outcomes to the people. Governments that close off to the corporate world lack capital growth.
Companies don't spread values into other countries anymore than invading armies of yesteryear. The life and death that comes with corporate money is what it is. They may reveal underlying values and profit off them. Corps may discover certain business is not desired, but corporation values won't change the country.
The only values companies need to care about is the ones that will get them kicked out of their host country, or are shared worldwide.
There's a certain lack of credibility in this complaint when the space race and a great source of global unity was found in the moon landing off the back of the Saturn V. The Americans had the choice to erase werner von braun from significance and instead chose to benefit on a grand scale from his slave-built knowledge.
You're right Von Braun is part of the past now. He's apart of the Usa's past. It's difficult to hear complaints about his nazi past, long after all the hard choices about what it means were already made.
VB's work is inexplicibly stamped into space flight and trying to get rid of that influence now, is like having your cake and eating it too.
Many other fields have this same problem with terrible people making foundational contributions. The usual compromise is to rename phenomena that were named after them, not name any new things after them, and let their name drift into history. The history of the field is there for anyone who wants it, but it is just that - history. They are not venerated going forward.
If you want to make the case that this field should be forced to bear von Braun's name as a stain, I guess that's a somewhat interesting idea but I think it would have the effect of improving von Braun's legacy rather than forcing spaceflight to reckon with its past.
I would let the things he did sit with is name and prevent future things being named after him.
White-washing your past after you make billions off the back of slaves he killed and his work, is just a little too much sting to bear. I don't think you should be 'forced to bear his name as a stain'. It's just reality for what your space agencies did and hiding it isn't a valuable addition.
I don't think higher order communication between adults is that simple either. There's a lot of inference and deriving from implication that is prone to error.
The cat hasn't developed the same kind of talent for stringing words together, but has managed at least a couple of abstract things like 'mad' as a general unhappy word and 'where (item)' when looking for something.
