Back in the old BBS days, we didn’t slice ‘n dice human conversation into tens of thousands of rigidly-defined topic bins. We just… talked to each other. The categorization came later as the teeming masses got online, and large forums became unwieldy.
Lemmy is still small, and the slice ‘n dice approach doesn’t work. Just find a community that’s general enough, and post about the things you like.
You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection....
I had a number of thoughts, and realized that the common factor in my examples is this: Large numbers. Like, really large numbers. I read on Lemmy yesterday that parrots can count to 17, and I’m not convinced that humans can do much better. Maybe close to 1,000 at the far outer limit, but that’s really it.
Lots of humans deny evolution, saying that there’s no way that we evolved from the same ancestors as other primates, but we think that the pharaohs in Egypt ruled a really, really long time ago. So while we can see changes pile up down the generations even in our lifetimes, we have a hard time extrapolating that to such timescales as 12 million years since the last common primate ancestor. Our little primate brains can’t even begin to conceive of it, much less the ~180,000,000 years of the Age of Dinosaurs.
Lots of humans deny climate change and pollution, saying that there’s no way our small consumption can affect a planet so big. We just have no intuitive understanding of how eating a hamburger, or burning a gallon of gasoline to get to work, scales to 8 billion of us.
And let’s not even get into wealth inequality, except to say that surveys regularly find that humans can’t even begin to conceive of the magnitude of the wealth gap.
Hey, that’s just not true. Sure, the name of my state is Wisconsin, but we also have names based on “What it was called by the French, but pronounced wrong,” like Beloit (“buh-loit”), Butte des Morts (“boo-da-more”), and Lac Courte Oreilles (“la-coo-der-ray”).
without being able to unplug or replace any cables
Oh! Oh! Here’s where I get to bring out one of my favorite terms, which I rarely get to do: Foramen ovale.
Short version: It’s a hole in the fetal heart that allows blood to bypass the (non-functioning) lungs. It usually closes up at birth. God found a way to re-route cables upon deploying the system into production.
In 2000, I wrote a Linux device driver that “decrypted” the output of a certain device, and my company, which hosted open-source projects, agreed to host it....
MacOS and iOS have Darwin as their base, which is really a mutt. Apple started with the NeXTSTEP kernel, which was a mix of 4.3BSD and Mach, then folded in some FreeBSD, other open source components, and some in-house code.
It’s Android that uses the Linux kernel as its base, and the millions of phones makes it a juicy target.
As a natural pedant, I have to point out that that’s not quite true. Decades ago, people talked about global warming (due to the greenhouse effect) because we feared that it would lead to major climate change.
Then, it led to major climate change. Now we talk about that. Global warming is still a thing, it’s just the effects have upstaged it as a topic.
The Xcretion says that less ice “is consistent with” a weaker jet stream, which does not imply a casual relationship. If A causes B and Y, then B is consistent with Y; or, more accurately, we can produce a useful model of the system that includes both less ice and a weaker jet stream, and have it be internally consistent.
I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them....
It’s not wrong, but spectacularly unhelpful. I mean, a brain surgeon has to be confident to go cutting into somebody’s head, but clearly that’s not enough, right? Confidence as a romantically-attractive quality is a very particular (and peculiar) performance. Going to a party 110% certain of one’s own value, sitting in a corner with a confident set of one’s jaw, and silently waiting for the ladies to form a queue is…
…sufficient, apparently, because you just to be confident.
And not me directly, but some years ago when my friend and I were both desperately seeking work, and running up against the “you need experience to get a job to gain experience” conundrum. His mentor told him to stop being so precious, and get a boring corporate job with a pension, maybe one that would pay his law school tuition. It wasn’t a thing yet, but wow, it would have been the perfect time to reply, “OK, Boomer.”
Here’s the catch: When we say “wealthy” or “financially successful,” those are really squishy terms. One person may mean the attorney down the street bringing in a cool quarter million each year from her practice. Another person may mean billionaires.
The linked study mentions correlations between IQ and earnings in the 5 figure range for the highest IQs. Wealth inequality is so out-of-control, the curve so steep, that the highest IQ people have an annual earnings advantage in the dollar range of what the super-rich collect in mere seconds.
The billionaires would need to have 5- and 6-digit IQ scores for the correlation to hold up. Bill Gates does seem pretty smart, but not that smart. Jeff Bezos seems slightly above average. Maybe. Elon Musk has an IQ above room temperature, for sure, but clearly not by that much.
So, given that wealth inequality is so stratospherically high, I read these memes as complaints about the super-rich, not your cousin who owns a large plumbing contractor business.
He was VP of a hedge fund, and assigned the project of investigating the potential of online commerce on the nascent Web by the company. He did so, and concluded that there was enormous potential, but after his report, the company decided to pass on it.
Clearly, he was right about the potential. If he’d been better at his job/more persuasive, D.E. Shaw & Co. would have invested in the Web, and he would not have had reason to leave and start Amazon.
You say that, but there’s the anachronistic nautical slang “soger” for an inept or lazy sailor. It came from the soldiers assigned to British navy ships, who did not participate in the sailing of the vessel.
It’s possible that people think of Gouda as that stuff which comes in the standardized, plastic-sealed block of rubbery cheese that most American grocery stores carry. That is bland. One might mistake it for the Monterey Jack next to it, were the labels switched.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still happily eat it, but yeah, real Gouda has flavor.
deleted_by_author
What's the simplest thing humans are too dumb to grasp?
You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection....
Inspiration (startrek.website)
I mean where are the zipties keeping things secured? It's a mess (startrek.website)
Here's all the source code
In 2000, I wrote a Linux device driver that “decrypted” the output of a certain device, and my company, which hosted open-source projects, agreed to host it....
Why? Are we not doing enough? (file.coffee)
by fedidb.org
Hmm... what to say ? (sopuli.xyz)
Venus by Tuesday (lemmy.world)
They caught us (feddit.it)
Seriously spends $80 to drive 20km.. (lemmy.ca)
What is the most unhelpful advice you have received?
I’ll go first: “You have to have children when you’re young,” told to me when I was in my late 20s, with no desire to ever have kids, and no means to support them, by someone divorced multiple times with at least one adult child who does not speak to them....
Get Bread Get Dead (lemmy.ml)
What the hell! Let's all just go crazy! (lemmy.world)
It's funnt because it's true (fanaticus.social)