Another argument that occurs to me: Imagine if it was the norm among criminal defense lawyers to hold back when they believe their clients are guilty, and to advocate zealously when they believe they’re innocent. Now, imagine a lawyer who mostly follows this practice, but engages in a bit of corruption: pay enough, and they’ll act like you’re innocent even when you’re not, or at least there’s a chance they will. Of course, they do this rarely enough that the prosecutors won’t notice. The prosecutors, in turn, see the corrupt lawyer not holding back, and take this as reason to believe the client is likely innocent; at this point, perhaps their code of ethics kicks in, and they less-than-zealously prosecute the client!
Arti
Karma: 37
If anyone wants to use/distribute this as part of a Summer Solstice celebration, or any other rationalist celebration, feel free! Attribution to “Arti” is appreciated, as is letting me know you used it, but neither is required.
…I would have been happy to release this as CC0, but I realized I don’t want it remixed/used to justify industrial farming of animals, who (unlike the watermelon) do have preferences as individuals. So I guess if you want a formal license, CC BY-ND is fine, but with my explicit blessing to collate/collect with other works as long as the text isn’t modified (and if you want something less restrictive, contact me and we can figure something out).
I recognize that this applies to many fruits, some more closely than watermelon, even. But, well, see the title.
(My partner mentions bananas in particular, but if it were about bananas I would have felt dishonest if there wasn’t some mention of banana republics, and that’s not the tone I’m going for.)
I wrote this because of watermelon
The person who eats Good Food (possibly Healthy Food, possibly Expensive Food, possibly Ethical Food, depending on their social circles) but never really notices how much they enjoy the actual taste of different foods. I don’t think this is a particularly good example, because it’s perfectly coherent to eat Healthy or Ethical Food without caring about taste at any level. (In fact, I’d say taste is the only argument (besides maybe price) against eating food that’s at least one of those.)
Google tells me that the “the crust has more nutrients” thing may stem from a 2002 study which found pronyl-lysine (which supposedly helps prevent cancer) at much higher concentration in crust vs the rest of the bread. The search results seem mixed on whether it’s true; CNN says no, but my top result says yes.
I use Vim, but I’m a bit surprised to see (lisp + vim) recommended over (lisp + emacs), since aiui emacs is much more common/better supported in the Lisp ecosystem. (I learned Vim while using C-family languages, then later learned Lisp.)
Also, I’d recommend Racket and How to Design Programs for learning Lisp and programming. (This is based on me having taken the intro CS course taught by the book’s author; I can’t say for certain that the book on its own is as good as the course, but I expect it to be pretty good.) Main downside is that the only vim bindings plugin I’ve found for DrRacket isn’t very good. (I believe it has some emacs features built-in, though.)
It’s worth checking whether insomnia is caused by sleep apnea / sleep disordered breathing—it’s more common than you might think (not just a thing old men have), and has serious effects.
(Commenting this because of the “low barrier” thing—I don’t currently feel up to hunting down the diagnostic resources that convinced me to look into whether I had it, but I’m hoping the mention is better than nothing.)
It’s April 2nd now. What was actually in the posts? (And did anyone actually pay the 1 BTC?)
Whoever put together this platform did a great job simulating the in-person social interaction experience! I can tell because I hate it for all the same reasons.
(To be clear, this isn’t at all meant as a complaint. A platform meant to take the place of an in-person party probably shouldn’t be optimized to appeal to a person who metaphorically runs screaming from parties unless her partner is there to cling to the whole night, and kinda hates it even then.)
A geometric intuition I came up with while reading:
Take a number line, and put 1, 2, and 4 on it.
-1-2---4-
You’re moving a pointer along this line, and trying to minimize its total distance to the data points:-1-2---4-....^
Intuitively, throwing it somewhere near the middle of the line makes sense. But drop 2 out, and look what happens as you move it:-1-----4-....^.|--|....|--|
vs.-1-----4-......^.|----|......||The distance is the same either way! (Specifically, it’s the same for any point in between 1 and 4.)
This means we’re free to move our pointer only with respect to 2, so the best answer is to get a distance-from-2 of 0 by putting it directly on 2.
To generalize this to medians of larger data sets, imagine adding more pairs of points on the outside of the range—the total distance to those points will be the same, just as it was for 1 and 4.
[edit: formatting came out a bit ugly—monospace sections seem to eat multiple spaces when displayed but not in the editor for some reason?]
Sapience Spell trigger: whenever I crack my knuckles.
By the way, your link gives 502 Bad Gateway at time of writing