My Dinner With André

Nobody is talking to Hegseth because Hegseth is talking to everybody.

I think it’s because music enhances the ability to remember accompanying songs, which helped human groups preserve fitness-enhancing oral information.

That makes sense—being raised by ChatGPT might be marginally better than being raised by Sam Altman.

Thanks! I hate it.

It sounds like they’re tracking people by state of birth, but how do they account for people who move to different states? They could just exclude them from the study—but mobility probably correlates with wealth, which in turn correlates with longevity.

Retailers order more plastic bags when their inventories fall below a certain level. If you reuse a bag, their inventories will last longer and they will order bags less frequently; and manufacturers will reduce production due to the decreased demand.

They’d have to prove they created the god in question first, which would undermine every other claim they made for it.

Words aren’t isomorphic to their dictionary definitions—words had commonly-accepted meanings long before the existence of dictionaries. Dictionary definitions are just an attempt to come up with a heuristic for identifying things as instances of the term in question, but they’re never perfect—and the real-world usage is ontologically prior.

If the dictionary definition of sandwich fails to distinguish cakes from sandwiches, it’s just an imperfect definition (like all definitions are)—and we can leave it at that.

In the limit, all data is either destroyed or made public—privacy is always temporary.

If life is an experiment, and there is a measuring tool

So that’s what keeps causing our wave function to collapse!

Our Father, which art…
…uh…
…which art should we cut funding for next?

How does that compare to the growth in size of the overall code base?

They’ve got to do something with the cows once they’re too old to milk.

How would they enforce this, if they can’t identify the people violating it?

That’s one of the main exceptions mentioned in the article:

Under the proposal, law enforcement officials would be exempted from the mask ban if they serve on a SWAT team or if a mask is necessary for medical or health reasons, including to prevent smoke inhalation.

But I can see the claim of “health reasons” being abused.

Sure… but everything that’s been trending steadily upward over the last 50 years correlates with everything else that’s been doing the same.

To suggest causation, we’d need to find differences in rates of sunscreen use between locations, and see if that correlates with local differences in depression rates (after controlling for other confounding factors, etc).

1 877 Kars 4 Kids

I think it’s more likely that you need to be able to empathize with someone in order to recognize when they’re being empathetic, and you empathize most with the middle class.

Why are you assuming that the fundamental goal is a stable society, rather than (say) a society that promotes the welfare of its members?