lambdaphagy (u/lambdaphagy)

lambdaphagy commented on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost nbcnews.com/politics/poli... · Posted by u/jnord

timmytokyo · 25 days ago

I see very little evidence for this abundance of American "common wisdom". If anything, America has always had a deeply anti-intellectual vein running through it, whether it was the Scopes monkey trial, the Know Nothing Party or what you see in the present political scene. Higher education, especially the affordable kind at public universities, has been a bulwark against the paranoid delusions that often dominate societies that revere superstition and "common sense" over reason, empiricism and humanism.

lambdaphagy · 25 days ago

The Know Nothing Party had nothing to do with anti-intellectualism per se. It was a secret anti-immigration party whose members were required to say they “knew nothing” of the group if asked.

lambdaphagy commented on Our babies were taken after 'biased' parenting test bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/binning

AlotOfReading · a month ago

Despite the dictionary definition of the word, "indigenous" is more often a statement about the relationship with the state than a statement on cultural or geographic continuity. The Sami have a very different relationship to the Nordic governments than other Fennoscandian groups.

lambdaphagy · a month ago

Yeah, that's precisely what I'm objecting to-- smuggling in assumptions about the relationship between Sami and other Northern-European populations by using a term that implies that Scandinavians aren't native to Scandinavia, at least as much as any human population is native to anywhere.

In particular it obscures what is fundamental to the conflict, which is state/settled vs non-state/tribal, not one group being native to the land and the other being some sort of outside occupying force.

lambdaphagy commented on Our babies were taken after 'biased' parenting test bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/binning

bossyTeacher · a month ago

> What is happenning in denmark that allows this process to exist?

Surprised at your reaction. It is well known that several of the Nordics have historically have fairly questionable processes when it came to the indigenous people. Eugenics sounding processes given the euphemism word "assimilation process". The Sami people are still suffering from the legacy of these processes in Norway and Finland. This is no different than the Canadian whitening policy via cultural assimilation via one way adoption, one way intermarry, residential schools, etc. Australia had the same thing. Virtually, every colonised country where the colonised population wasn't wiped out right had similar processes on them.

I think people on here often have an overly rosy views of the Nordics due to the surveys ranking them as the happiest people in the world.

Let us remember that this is the same country that has guetto laws defined as places with less than 50% western people. And yes, the Danish word for "guetto" was in the official documents and it actually only got removed 4 years ago

lambdaphagy · a month ago

Referring to the Sami as "Indigenous" in contrast to the Scandinavian and Finnish peoples seems pretty tendentious. All three of these groups have been in Northern Europe for thousands of years.

lambdaphagy commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

RHSeeger · 4 months ago

> Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.

That's overly harsh. I use Duolingo for Japanese because

- I thought it would be fun to learn a little about Japanese. And I do learn some, and it is fun.

- I wanted to "understand" a bit of what was being said during subtitled anime I watch. This was _partially_ successful. I understand some words, and I notice some things like "oh, that was a question", and sometimes notice when what was said doesn't match the text. I get enough out of it that it adds to my enjoyment

So, clearly there's a group of people out there that are there to gain some knowledge out of it, and _not_ to rack up some kind of score (and feel superior).

lambdaphagy · 4 months ago

Sorry, that came out as unnecessarily harsh on users when it was intended for Duolingo’s product department. I don’t mean to suggest that the amount of language learning is literally zero, just that whenever language learning is in tension with legible metrics, the latter tends to win out internally.

lambdaphagy commented on Try and ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/t... · Posted by u/treetalker

lazyasciiart · 4 months ago

Plenty of people enjoy Duolingo. And I wouldn’t say it’s a dead end any more than simple picture books or a total beginners class. Will it turn you into a fluent speaker? No, so what.

lambdaphagy · 4 months ago

My impression of duolingo was strongly influenced by a former PM who said basically what OP said without any hint of ill will in their voice. Duolingo discovered that it was easier to reward-hack short term signals of language learning instead of scaffolding those signals into longterm language learning. Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.

That’s not even a diss, it’s just The Way Of The World when you are directly rewarded for growth and retention and very indirectly for language learning.

lambdaphagy commented on Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/bitsavers

quickthrowman · 7 months ago

A fascist technocracy is not interesting in the slightest. It’s what basement dwelling teens who idolize John Galt dream about before they are exposed to the complexity of the real world.

lambdaphagy · 7 months ago

Fascism and Ayn Rand's political philosophy are pretty different from each other, however you may feel about either one. Not everything you dislike is the same bad thing.

lambdaphagy commented on I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic wave3.social... · Posted by u/nswizzle31

tayo42 · 7 months ago

Every culture that treated women equally? Or were there male only spaces because women were seen at 2nd (or 3rd tier people, below the pets?)

I trained at a gym where that scenario happened, people were already leaving because the teacher was an ass in general, played favorites with the male students and created at cliquey environment.

There really isn't anything women can't handle in front of men. Thinking you have some dark thing that cant be said in front of women or that you need to change how you behave is odd and exclusive to you.

lambdaphagy · 7 months ago

No culture treats men and women equally-- they differ in how they treat men and women differently. Just today in my progressive coastal startup, for example, there was a proposal to set up a dedicated ERG for the women employees. In a company where people are routinely pulling 60-80 hour weeks, it was considered a plausible priority to take time aside to especially ensure that the women were feeling comfortable.

Whether or not this proposal is a good idea is not even the point: the point is that it was considered plausible, and hence that not even coastal progressives actually think it desirable to treat men and women equally.

I'm not making any claims about what anyone can or can't handle. I'm simply observing that just about every mixed group ends up adopting female norms of communication. I'm not even saying that's necessarily a bad thing for a mixed group, I think it's to some extent natural and healthy in social settings. In fact taboos that proscribe the ways men may speak in the presence of women are also quite common cross-culturally. But the fact that there is a difference remains.

lambdaphagy commented on I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic wave3.social... · Posted by u/nswizzle31

vineyardmike · 7 months ago

> I feel like our culture has a strong anti-golf bias

Golf, generally, is pretty expensive. It's like minimum $50 for an outing, you need equipment, correct clothes, etc. Some places require membership, often priced intentionally exclusively. It's pretty natural for something exclusionary to get a negative cultural bias.

Oh, and it is a terrible resource hog. You can't fit many people on a golf course at any given time without disrupting gameplay, and all that grass requires a lot of water and maintenance.

> any reason to spend a couple hours outside with my friends sounds amazing

This is, of course, available in many forms that don't involve hitting balls with sticks, but also there are many varieties of ball+stick that satisfy this.

Golfing is an artificial competitive activity that exists in an artificial and manicured version of nature. There is nothing wrong with it if you like the activity, but you can just go for a hike or stroll in a park if you want to be with friends outside.

lambdaphagy · 7 months ago

Japanese tea gardens are pretty artificial and manicured, and they’re awesome. It’s great to have undespoiled natural beauty, and it’s also cool to see what people can do with a landscape.

lambdaphagy commented on I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic wave3.social... · Posted by u/nswizzle31

lambdaphagy · 7 months ago

Practically every culture on earth (except ours as of 10 minutes ago) had some sort of place for single-sex bonding, which suggests there’s something important to it. Traditional cultures aren’t incel, to the contrary it’s only in modern cultures that mass-scale failures of relations between the sexes seem to arise.

As for bjj, the scenario of the instructor dating a female student and breaking up the gym in the ensuing fallout is a well-deserved trope by now. There are women at my gym and you can make it work if everyone’s bending over backwards to be professional, but it’s obviously Different.

lambdaphagy commented on I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic wave3.social... · Posted by u/nswizzle31

rchaud · 7 months ago

What sort of behaviors are you referring to?

lambdaphagy · 7 months ago

I wasn’t the one referring to behaviors.

But I bet a social club that rigorously enforced the rules of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood would be more popular than anything goes.