She says sorry

How would you react if you found out a friend was maintaining a private wiki that had a detailed article on you (and all their other acquaintances)?

They'd filled out Early Life, Career, and Personal Life sections. They've listed friends and family you've mentioned but they've never met, little red links indicating that article doesn't exist yet.

They didn't do any deep investigation outside what you've told them in conversation, but they have documented it all, for their own private reference.

I'd be flattered that I counted as someone they wanted to remember details about.

I've relatively recently stated doing this sort of thing myself, incidentally, keeping written track of personal details about people I know, although I do this in my general note-taking app rather than a wiki. It's more "Person X talked about thing in their life Y at the party on date Z" than a detailed article in my case.

twxttxr's ahead of you people on the curve already

An ad for your deepest desires :)

You know what I just admire the graphic design on this

It FEELS so much like a real ad I expect to be sold some sort of car tyre or something but it’s just about biting

1000/10 excellent job

it's a harmless naive one, but the dumbest Near East conflict opinion I've heard is still the perennial one my mother states, for decades now, about every time there's something going on there (or occasionally in various other similar places): "it's such a lovely place, warm and sunny and fruitful, you can grow all sorts of wonderful things there [unlike here in the frozen north], why would they even fight there? why don't the guys who do want to fight go to the desert to duke it out and leave the rest of the people out of it?"

yes mom they're fighting because someone has driven someone else out from their lovely garden, that's kinda the basic issue behind the conflict, about no one enjoys the fighting per se. you would not want to fight to death if someone stole a plot of land from you because the land around here is after all cold and unproductive and desolate in comparison, and also there's millions km² more of it to go around, lots of it public and/or with rich everyman's rights. but the temperate-to-subtropical zone of the world has been densely populated for millennia, and there is not any abundance of unsettled or even publicly held land that could be turned into a lovely garden just by minor effort on a whim

and I was going to add a parag also on how I kinda resent her for being this dumb, but that's not quite right is it? I've gotten along with some people with an IQ probably in or closer to double digits in my life, what really drives me up the wall is more her clinging to stupid things like this, how she does not listen to or want to learn from other people — many things like this that are stated as questions seem entirely rhetorical, maybe really meaning "ha ha aren't I a good person for not wanting to fight a war" or something (hard to tell exactly), but in any case not open to correction or direct answers at all. there's more stuff yet in her repertoire that has a similar form but is indeed supposed to end a discussion, no talking back, even if it appears to be a question at first (good luck if you're a kid who likes solving problems and answering questions).

and then she's in principle decently well read and did her career as a physics teacher, maybe she could have smart rather than dumb views to contribute about many things if she really wanted to. but as it is, it's mostly useless to try to have a discussion with her that's not either practicalities or pleasantries

still, we can take a non-essentialist view of "dumbness" too, where someone like her "is dumb" per what she actually ends up saying, regardless of any specific thought process behind it. there is the concept of "learned stupidity" already, this seems like a cousin of it

you’ve seen the dog outside of town, lying where they buried the witches

1972 cover art for ‘La Force Mystérieuse,’ by J.-H. Rosny aîné. Possibly by Henri Lievens.

@sabakos:

Not happy about swallowing the pill necessarily for a variety of reasons, but I cant argue with the logic

of course, for one, there's been quite a lot of modernization that doesn't decrease childhood mortality across the board, as much as … drives to extinction 10,000 natives who used to have high childhood mortality, and substitutes 100,000 new industrial society people who have low childhood mortality (settlers? legitimate immigrants? descendants of 10,000 other natives? doesn't matter)

but besides that, I have yet to shake the nagging feeling that solution #1 to the Repugnant Conclusion applies here too — that it is in fact, a mistake to care about childhood mortality in some far-away locale. if liberal modernity is as supreme as it claims, then people will, in fact, adopt it themselves, without the rest of us needing to go out and repress organic traditionalism to prevent people from making "wrong" choices. that's certainly how it seems to shake out around us

and then there's some sense of flippancy also in reducing traditions to window dressing, "linguistic data or culturally significant oral tradition" — traditions also include entire survival kits that feed a million babies, whose loss could well mean quite a lot of suffering if liberal modernity for whatever reason doesn't shake out

Your sense of self isn’t a static image, bro. It’s more like a climate or a biome. Both of which can shift in gradual ways over time or suddenly due to internal or external factors. Just check the weather report, man. Don’t try to force the sky to stay blue without clouds 24/7.

On quick scrolling I misread this as "are you missing out on" and I suppose that also makes a good question

GIANNI COLOMBO.png

YOUR ANCESTRY DOT SCIENCE RESULTS ARE IN!

pretty sure I'm second-mutuals with this guy on twitter