I think people spend less time have long conversations with people that they trust, which are best space for nuance and exploring ideas honestly. If you’re messaging on social media, or even writing articles for blogs or publications, there’s a whole bunch of incentives and barriers that push people away from nuance.

I understand being angry or disappointed at Chomsky or anyone else for being involved in this horror show. I don’t think anyone is saying we should “preserve his good name” or ignore any terrible things he did or condoned.

But if you respect his work as a linguist (I don’t, I think he had a good insight, but is extremely overrated and his disciples cling on to his ideas in a very unscientific way) you can do that while disliking him as a person. If you agree with his political analysis, you can do that even if he murdered someone. His moral failings don’t change the content of his work. If Epstein was actually a great financier (rather than just a crook and blackmailer), and that’s something that you care about, then sure respect his finance skills.

If someone’s personal failings upset you, and that spoils your enjoyment of their work that’s completely understandable. There’s books and music that I can’t hear the same now I know more about their creators. But you’re not under a moral obligation to hate the art because the artist is awful. And as the original commentor said, in the modern world it’s becoming an essential skill to cultivate.

A survey or poll is different from a vote. You’re right that unless we ask every single person in a group we don’t know precisely how that entire group would answer. But this irrelevant, being able to establish patterns in smaller sample groups and extended them to larger population is one of the the cornerstone of science and knowledge.

An engineer needs to know how much weight a specific size and shape of lumber can safely take. They can’t test the indvidual beam to breaking point and still use it. So they test other similar sized pieces of wood, under similar conditions, and generalise. This can be done well, or done poorly, depending on how well they can isolate confounding effects.

So with a survey, if I just ask 100 people I know, it’s would be a decent survey of the beliefs of my social circle, but it would be a poor survey of national beliefs, because my friends are not a balanced representative sample of the wider population. That’s why most polling / surveying uses methods to try and achieve a sample that is actually representative. When done well, these ensure the survey respondents correspond to the demographics of a population (gender, education, religion, location, health, etc).

Obviously this approach has its limitations, and can be done poorly, but there’s a bunch of research and evidence for what methods help achieve more accurate results. Saying “this poll can’t be accurate because they didn’t ask me” is like saying “I don’t know if the sun will rise tomorrow”. You’re right, we won’t know for sure until we actually see it rise, but we can infer from past events and confidently predict the likely outcome.

If you want to say “this survey isn’t accurate because it uses an older demographic model that has been shown to be ineffective at representing contemporary attitudal choices” or “this survey is inaccurate because it only controls for age, race and gender, but didn’t account for patterns of social media usage which are highly relevant” that’s fine, that’s engaging with the methodology. But if the problem is “they didn’t ask everyone so it’s wrong” it really seems like you don’t know how surveys works.

There’s lots of architectural guidance, building codes, etc. normally linked to number of people in the household. But it’s all pretty damn relative, both culturally and individually.

When I lived in the city, I was pretty comfortable with a small appartment, because I spent a lot of time out of my home in cultural spaces. Now I live in the country, and in city-terms our house is gigantic for just the two of us. Netherthless, we’re continuing to convert old out buildings into more space because the demands on our home are much higher and we have lots of unused space.

Not only do we live there, but we’ve got jobs that involve a lot of remote working, and it’s also a building site/workshop as we renovate and make our own fixtures and furniture. Plus, because it’s more remote, we want guest bedrooms and extra space so that guests can come and stay for a while without feeling cramped. Then we’ve got animals, who bring their own clutter, and we also want to create a guesthouse that we can rent to tourists. Even without those extra requirements, we choose to sleep in adjacent, but seperate, bedrooms because we have sleep issues. And I know that is a crazy luxury that we wouldn’t have been able to afford in the city, but when space is cheap, there’s no real reason not to.

I know that my example is pretty extreme, but everyone’s needs are different. I have friends who basically live in one room and love that, because everything is within easy reach and they don’t want to have guests. But I know it would be depressing and claustrophobic for others. Sharing an apartment with four adult strangers is a different experience from a family home with four children.

I think there can be rules (you can’t claim something is a bedroom if it’s smaller than 6sqm) but there isn’t a one size fits all solution.

As I understand the proposal, it’s currently voluntary and comes with some sort of pay, so it could be worse. But I am fully skeptical that this is the intended end result. Once you’ve got the infrastructure in place and it’s ‘normalised’ it’s a much smaller step to move from voluntary to mandatory.

Similarly, paying 18 years old 900€ a month for “volunteering” isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s obviously going to be a much bigger incentive to teens from poorer families. And I can very much foresee the stripping of unemployment benefits from young adults, arguing that if they aren’t in education and can’t find a job then they should sign up for the military.

It’s the case for all dishwashers I know about. It’s not that weird if you think about it. When people wash dishes by hand, they often wash a bunch of dishes in the same basin, with the water becoming increasingly dirty. Depending on how dirty and how much they care, they’ll change the water occasionally. Then they’ll give everything a rinse in clean water to get rid of soap. (obvs people do dishes on a variety of ways, but this is pretty common in western cultures.)

Dishwashers are the same, spray the same hot soapy water over the dishes for a while, until it’s dirty and most of the solids have been removed. Then drain and wash again with clean water. The soapy stage is about removing dirt, but the sanitising comes afterwards with the hot rinse and drying.

I feel like I have a very different experience of YouTube than most people on here. UBlock on desktop and Revanced on mobile means no ads / sponsored bits, which is absolutely essential. But I also don’t have a problem with the dreaded ‘algorithm’.

I don’t know if it’s the kinds of videos I watch (nothing political, or popular) or just not being in the US, but I don’t get recommended AI slop or crazy propaganda. I just looked through the Home feed the app, looks like half of it is channels I’ve subscribed to and most of the rest is channels I’ve watched recently but haven’t subscribed to. There’s a couple of videos from channels I don’t reconognise, so they could be weird slop but that’s not the vibe I’m getting at all, and if I clicked and they were I’d just tag it “Don’t Recommend this Channel”.

Disapproving of YouTube because it’s an evil hegemon makes sense. Supporting alternatives is great (I pay for nebula, even though I end up mostly watching the creators’ videos on YouTube). But I’m always curious about why other people seem to have such a terrible experience of the algorithm.

What’s a change that your government or society could make that would improve things for the people of Egypt?

I love the idea of solo rpgs, but I don’t have the attention and discipline to actually play through a game on my own. I’ll read stuff, but it’s hard to actually “start the session” and keep playing rather than get distracted, or be indecisive and just not really get going.

Yeah, flying around Europe / UK can be pretty damn cheap if you book in advance and with a low cost airline. Normally it ends up costing more, because if you want hold luggage that’s another £40, and if you want to sit with your friends that’s £15, etc.

But if you’re traveling light it’s often cheaper to fly to another country than take train in your own. Which isn’t great…

And the single video that isn’t a “Sponsored” ad is still from Red Bull, and basically an ad.

I’m assuming you know how surveys work? If you’re genuinely interested in their data sampling methodology, you can easily find it on the website of the company that conducted the survey (who are named on the infographic).

I’m not making any big claims about YouGov and their reliability or freedom from bias, but this isn’t just some random unsourced poll, so props to whoever made the infographic for bothering to include a source.

Important story, horrible situation. Definitely not “mildly infuriating”

Really depends on what you want from a job. Does good mean high pay? It’s generally rare to have high paying jobs with low entry requirements, but ICE seem to be throwing money around if you’ve got no morals and abnormal low levels of empathy.

If good means ‘good for community’ or ‘fun’ or ‘doesn’t involve speaking to too many people’ the answers will be quite different.

Intresting! If anyone has unpaywalled version I’d like to read more.

I do think it’s odd that a billionaire has basically payed to have his own vice-president (I don’t think many people would argue that Vance was an obvious choice apart from as a puppet of Thiel) and that billionaire is overtly apocalyptically bonkers, but the press barely cover it.

I’ve seen mention that Thiel had been discussing the antichrist in lectures. Butt with all this talk of AI bubbles and the insane amounts of money being funneled into the industry, here’s a extremely rich and powerful man, who has basically groomed the VP (alongside all the other influence his wealth gives him) who is making wild messianic claims about AI and accusing any opposition to it as the work of Satan! That’s insane!

Imagine that when Bush was trying to get support for the invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld was going around giving lectures on the Crusades and the role of Isreal in the Apocalypse. Sure, there was and is support for stuff like that in fundamentalist evangelical churches, but it wasn’t the avowed belief of the inner circle of the US government. And if it was, I don’t think Britain would have gone along with a literal holy war. Is that really the stage we’re at? I use to read about the 3rd Reich and finding it implausible that they were actually making policy decisions based on a invented hodgepodge of occult nonsense, but now it’s starting to be believable.

I’ve never tasted gatorade, so it’d definitely be a wild stab in the dark. Be intresting to test though!

Nice to see a new game, but I don’t see what it adds compared to cluesbysam. Did the tutorial and today’s puzzle and it seems like there were a few mistakes.

Same as most of the other commentors, this isn’t something I’ve noticed. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, so it would be helpful to hear some examples. I feel like most of the time people here are pretty supportive / helpful, but maybe I’ve got a skewed perspective?

I think a lot of people just didn’t understand the context. It maybe says something about the people I interact with regularly, but I haven’t heard a sexist / racist / uncomfortable joke in person for years. Once I stopped hanging out with teenagers, it pretty much took care of itself.

Understanding the context, and knowing that lots of people have to spend time with assholes, i think it’s good advice. But it isn’t that surprising that, without any context, lots of people don’t assume she’s talking about a specific type of problematic joke, sincs there’s not really anything in the text to suggest that. In which case it’s pretty sociopathic advice.

Various freelance / project based work would probably come close. I know that jobs with short deadlines and big changes of focus have been manageable, while I’ve never lasted long with regular week after week of ongoing or repetitive tasks. Stuff like theatre / arts projects, or even some types of construction involves working really hard for a couple of weeks until something is achieved, and then doing something different.

My current job teaching at a university almost hits the sweet spot, because I only ever work six weeks before some sort of holiday, and there’s big vacations in between semesters. But coordiating the same class over a 12 week semester, even with a half term week off in the middle, is a big challenge to my willpower. About halfway through I start to check out and everything starts to fall apart.