A week ago Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine. I think if there is a lesson to be learnt, then that some things we thought are certain really aren't that certain.
Actually I didn't. But everyone else did, even though Russian troops were surrounding Ukraine. Now Russia is under much more pressure than Putin ostensibly anticipated. They wrongly published a victory piece after just a few days into the invasion. Also they 'made' a referenadum to station nuclear weapons in Belarus. So, I wouldn't be so sure is all I am saying.
Yes I agree with you and Descartes the only thing we can be certain of as conscious observers is we exist.
But I moved on from moderate uncertainty leading to a default of skepticism.
Some actions have very predictable outcomes even if they aren't guaranteed. with those I like to use the vernacular that implies certainty. That's how I feel about nuclear exchange. But I don't associate the probabilities of expectation of nuclear exchange and invasion as conditional upon each other. A surprise outcome in an invasion of a nonnuclear non-nato state wouldn't lead me to feel a nuclear exchange probability suddenly becomes inverted similarly.
Because countries have invaded others during nuclear times. That should come as no surprise to a student of history even if many didn't expect Putin to in this particular instance.
But the pressing matter is would Putin use nukes? Would he use nukes if it means easy escalation to a mutual exchange where him and his country would end up as ash? Nah I don't believe he would unless some development allowed him to nuke with impunity.
I didn't expect them to invade that quickly. I thought it's just a gamble by Putin to get concessions. What's his endgame? Keep an occupation or install a puppet government?
Money is fake, it's an abstraction made of cheap throw away goods (what money is printed on) used as a representation for real resources. I personally wouldn't count it as relevant but it does buy access to what is relevant.
I would add to your list, some of the finite resources I can think of that's wasted here is labor per human per year. The labor of those boat builders. It's an opportunity cost type of waste.
Stephen King was an English major. Word art, literature, helps people advance cognitively.
English is an unowned cultivated intellectual property that greases communication which greases all other human endeavors. I think its underappreciated.
Not all education needs to advance the frontier, much of it is about maintaining what we've already claimed and passing it on to new generations.
I think it's a quite good argument, and at very least one that doesn't rely on colleges literally producing a larger number Stephen Kings, as if something about the quantity produced could matter at all (really curious how you even arrived at that counter).
Regardless, creative writing is but a subset of the discipline of English, if not an entirely separate department in a lot of schools. Most of it is studying what has already been written, making connections and forming articulations that understand our human world.
If you see the study of any humanities at all as only possibly measured by what success you gain in the domains of social status or notoriety, then I wonder if you apply that same rubric to STEM fields? Please be mindful that just because you dont know about something, doesn't make it dumb, bad, or pointless. At the very least, don't wave away so simply an entire discipline!
Future authors don't need a college program to "...study what has already been written, making connections and forming articulations that understand our human world".
They can do this by reading books. There are even books of criticism that help you learn about other books.
I've always been curious about who's winning the lionshare of the pie of these gluttonous institutions. Is it administrators? they're an easy scape goat. Does it fund more research, so presumably the PHDs and their research assistants?
They are an easy target, but I would argue justifiably so. My ( supposedly non-profit mind you ) university had a president, who paid himself a salary in line with regional bank's president; he was kicked out. Current one is paid less but still high 6 figures. And this is not some prestigious university, where you could reasonably argue he really, really deserves it, because he is running it so well.
I don't know a full answer, but I believe we can start with administrators and work our way through the system. Something has got to give. This system cannot stay as it currently exists.
"Big tech permabanned me and doesn't mind false positives"
Isn't this often the case with humans minus the algorithm making the decision? Many times of the few times I've been in trouble, with HR, the law, or whatever authority you realize doing things that seem bad but aren't actually bad is almost as dangerous as doing something actually harmful because turns out humans aren't very good judges of ambiguous cases in low information environments.
Even when not ambiguous humans by and large don't have a good grasp of what is or isn't moral. And they typically show a large lack of empathic ability for how their actions will effect others.
Yeah, I'd say "whether humans are involved" isn't actually a good metric for whether abuse detection is fair / avoids screwing you over.
A better proxy would be "how much the company spends per user to detect false positives". Whether it's human oversight for each case, or engineering time spent fine-tuning algorithms to exclude known false positives, the more the company spends, the less it's going to screw you over.
(In practice, companies want to spend very little, which is why you get underpaid Mechanical-Turk workers and slapped-together detection systems.)
Is it too pessimistic? Human history is filled with empires dominating their weaker neighbors, culling many of them (though not all), for the INgroup's self interest (it's also useful to keep subordinates around to do the menial labor). Even the less ruthless of these "imperialistic" entities such as the United States have a outstanding record. The native Americans can pay witness.
Not to mention what we do to animals. I read during just Superbowl Sunday 500 million chickens are slaughtered for the delight of eating chicken wings in the living room. If animals are nonconscious entities that don't suffer akin to robots then no harm no foul, but that is quintessential mass-scale devouring of another.
Both you and the parent could be correct. I see a lot of spurious speculation in various forms but only certain speculation is more likely to get downvoted. Case in point the speculation surrounding the motivations of some unknown anonymous poster downvoting the grandgrandparent based off of extrapolating from other downvotes elsewhere.
I feel similarly. The art is amazing and really sucks you. But that perhaps is it's downfall, overfocus on aesthetics and creativity rather than gameplay. David Jaffe the creator of God of War mentioned that the lead developers of the game were creative people rather than people that have the qualities of finishing things up. Forget his exact words, but that was the gist of it.
Makes sense, the game is 10/10 on all counts w.r.t art (architecture, music, character design, story, modelling), but relatively poor in terms of the 'business logic' of the game (the systems for gunplay/stealth/police/levelling etc are all average/poor).
Yes. From personal experience I've found people who readily offer "you should" fail to adequately investigate and listen to comphrehend important contextual factors and differing values. These might determine what is situationally positive or negative.
Advice that I've usually found more valuable was formatted as "here's an option and here are the possible pros and cons". These people also did more listening than 'should-ing'. They also didn't have the audacity to tell you what is best, which is implied by 'should', because they weren't in your shoes and neither completely informed of the context so how would they know what's best?
History is full of nuke threats and no follow through (well except 2 incidents).