Ultima IV (NES) taught me that I should try to be a good person.
CronoDAS
Karma: 16,992
I’ve done the same thing with the SNES shmup Space Megaforce. I’ve played the hell out of it and have gotten really good, so sometimes when I was feeling as though I couldn’t do anything right I’d turn that game on and prove myself wrong by playing through the whole game without using continues. (I’ve had successful one-credit clears on Normal, Hard, and Tricky difficulty so far. The only one left unconquered is Wild.)
Sometimes I can do something on a phone myself faster than I can use spoken words to explain to someone else how to do it for me. But in general, yes.
Risk: This is the one I’m least sure about. What sort of risk are we talking about, here? Are dates dangerous in any significant way? Basically everybody I know, old and young, rich and poor, male and female, seems to go on dates all the time with few-to-no negative consequences. What thing happens on dates that’s so terrible that it’s preferable to stay inside and spend every night at home alone on your computer instead?
The risk is that you will suffer emotionally by being endlessly rejected by the people that you would have wanted to date and end up alone and date-less in spite of your efforts.
Do you know anyone that wishes they had someone to date but doesn’t?
I think the relevant cost that makes dating “more expensive” than an e-girl is usually paid long before the date even starts. For many people, getting yourself into a state of the world in which a girl has agreed to go on a date with you is extremely difficult and requires orders of magnitude more time, effort, and, yes, money than the “shallow illusions” do. For example: hiring a professional photographer to take your dating site profile picture, buying fashionable clothes, working out at a gym and eating healthier, paying rent so you’re not living with your parents, trying to get a higher status job (or any job at all), and so on.
Or you could just pay some money to watch a girl on your computer take off her clothes while saying sexy things into a microphone while you sit at home in your underwear and type into a chat interface.
E-girls: so-called “parasocial” relationships are essentially worthless mass-produced illusory entirely one-way relationships that provide none of the fulfillment, companionship, shared goals, team spirit, or mutual support that real relationships do. If the client were buying things (or sending money) they can’t afford for the e-girl, or foregoing real relationships because of their perceived relationship with the e-girl, the parasocial relationship might even be harmful.
Does that make them worse than, say, watching movies?
people who claim to like the taste, the smell, or the experience of sitting on an angular pine chair in a hot and malodourous coffee shop are actually experiencing some sort of arabican Stockholm Syndrome....
One can make a lot of things go from tasting terrible to tasting good by putting a lot of milk and sugar into them, including coffee. It even works on chocolate!
If they respond to that “no” by asking if you could recommend someone else to teach their kid, would you have suggested someone?
If you go to a bookstore, see a bunch of different textbooks on a subject, buy one at random, and learn the subject from the textbook, how much credit does the textbook writer deserve?
They might also have learned what you taught them from another source, but you were still the one that they happened to have learned from.
<joke>Someday, when humans have invented time travel, one of them is going to go back in time and put a tiny teapot in the asteroid belt in order to make it so that Russell’s Teapot actually did exist.</joke>
(joke stolen from Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Surely there are third parties with authority over the labs who would not permit this scenario to occur?
You presume too much.
Trying to say something like “the solutions to differential equations often include parameters that can take different integer values, and quantum numbers come from those parameters in (approximate?) solutions to the Schrodinger equation” in a way that makes sense to high school students seems difficult but not impossible, and I’m willing to at least try. 🤷♂️
And then I can get into the usual cookbook stuff that students would need to answer the homework problems at the end of the textbook chapter. (Also, unless I’m badly mistaken, almost nobody does chemistry by actually working directly with the Schrodinger equation.)
No. I’m actually fairly certain I don’t understand Pauling’s work (not least because I haven’t read it!) and I’ll definitely want to have anything I write reviewed by an actual expert, but I do think I’d be able to explain what a “quantum number” really is to high school students in a way that makes more sense to them than my textbook did.
“Cardinality” is the math term you’re looking for.
If ten thousand people protest, sometimes they get massacred by the army.
Iran is a recent example of this.
Unfortunately the COVID response was more like those of incompetent movie institutions than what we the public ought to have gotten. And the US currently has a president that’s a cross between Al Bundy and Don Quixote.
I have a bone to pick with high school chemistry textbooks.
When I took chemistry in high school, there was a section of the textbook that described some features of quantum mechanics and tried to explain electron orbitals. The orbitals chapter in particular made basically no sense; I was able to extract enough out of it to be able to do the homework problems, but most of the class was totally lost. When I took a semester of modern physics in college (and also read Eliezer’s QM sequence), I learned that the reason the explanation made no sense was that it was entirely bullshit—among other things, it followed the usual route of describing the history of quantum mechanics and mistaking that for an actual explanation.
Is there an explanation for high school students that actually bites the bullet and says “This is the Schrodinger equation, which is what physicists eventually came up with to describe how subatomic particles actually behave. It’s advanced math and you don’t have to understand what it says, but here are some facts about it and what they mean for chemistry?” I’m annoyed enough with how awful my textbook was to actually write one myself, but I also don’t want to duplicate someone else’s work if there’s already a good explanation out there for high school chemistry teachers to use instead of the nonsense most textbooks have. Does anyone here know of one?
The idea being that, since Earth is possible, a spacially infinite universe could have an infinite number of Earths with humans on them, even if the Boltzmann Brain epoch is longer than the stellar epoch. It’s hard to compare infinities.
My dreaming brain isn’t entirely incapable of useful reasoning—sometimes I can recognize that I am dreaming and choose whether or not to wake up, although during a dream I also tend not to be capable of doing coherent reasoning for more than a short period of time.
If the universe is infinite, all types of Boltzmann Brain must be infinite in number. Since humans are finite in number, being even the absolute-least-probable type of BB would thus still be infinitely more likely than being a human brain.
If the universe is infinite, what stops the number of humans from also being infinite? (If you flip a coin infinity times, every finite Heads/Tails sequence will eventually appear as many times as you want to look for it, even if you do see “HHT” more frequently than you see “HTHTHT”.)
<joke> If video games have taught me anything, it’s that you should always go out of your way to help other people with their problems. That way, you get more of that sweet, sweet EXP that you need to turn yourself into an unstoppable killing machine! </joke>