You know you can do both, right? Be vegan and fight billionaires. But I do somewhat agree that it is an elite issue, you do need to be in a somewhat privileged position to become vegan.

But also… who is promoting the global south to go vegan? As far as I’m aware, most vegans just try to get the people in generally developed countries to go vegan, as you have plenty of choices there, and most people are not fighting malnourishment.

And also, I think it’s perfectly justified and not dehumanizing to critique cultures that promote (animal) abuse. Culture is a terrible justification for anything, if that thing is actually harmful.

Anything outside of living in a cave by the fire is inhuman. We are made to live in a cave with our tribe in our quest for survival. Focusing on modern architecture is to deny your humanity. /s

Your point would maybe make sense if we were obligate carnivores, but we are not. Humans don’t have to eat everything, they just can eat everything. And just cause you can doesn’t automatically mean you should.

If you follow the endurance running hypothesis, being able to run long distances was also something we were made for in our quest for survival. Therefore, according to your logic, not endurance running yourself would be to deny your humanity, correct?

Clearly, there are faster ways to board an airplane.

But if you did make it this far, you probably already knew that efficiency isn’t the only variable in the real world. Boarding groups aren’t designed purely for throughput. There are ticket classes and loyalty programmes, infants and senior citizens, and a myriad of other human factors that dictate priority.

We aren’t neat little yellow dots.

There was a CGP Grey video about this exact topic, which is also mentioned at the bottom as an inspiration. I like this articles conclusion more, because from what I remember, the videos conclusion was more of a complaint, that humans inability and constraints are the problem that prevents a perfect boarding procedure, but this article feels more nuanced to me, in that the ‘perfect’ boarding procedure doesn’t really take into account all of the important factors, and is just pretty math, but not practical for real life.

It really depends. For example, if you walk 1m, then 0.5m, then 0.25m and continue infinitely, then “after infinity” you will have walked exactly 2m. This is the classic ‘Achilles and turtle’ example and works fine if the value converges. It’s just mathematics.

There is only a problem if the value diverges. Imagine the step example, but on even steps, you raise a blue flag, and on odd steps you raise a red flag. Now the question what flag is raised “after infinity” is impossible to answer. It clearly should be either red or blue, but it also can’t really be either, because that would mean infinity is either even or odd, which makes no sense.

You’re assuming the collatz conjecture holds, which is unknown.

But even if it does hold, you do understand the second problem, right? 1 can not possibly be the outcome, because whenever there is a 1 in that infinite loop, it is followed by a 4. And if 1 is the outcome, then it wasn’t done infinitely, because otherwise there must have been a 4 afterwards. The same argument holds for 4 and 2 as well. So we’re stuck in the reality that it would have to be one of those numbers, but it also can’t really be one of those numbers. It’s paradoxical.

There are two super interesting problems in here.

One is: would you bet human lives on a conjecture being true? The collatz conjecture does hold for every number we have tried, but there have been conjectures that were disproven with a very large counterexample. You could kill countless humans if wrong, so even if you think the chance of a counterexample is low, is it low enough to outweigh that potentially very hight value counterexample?

The second one is: Let’s say the collatz conjecture holds, and the number of passsengers just loops 4 -> 2 -> 1 -> 4 -> 2 -> 1 eventually. What is the ‘final’ number, when the trolley is done with the infinite loops? It can’t be 1, because that is always followed by a 4. And it can’t be 4 because it’s always followed by 2 and so on. But it has to be one of those, because any other number is not possible. It reminds me of the Vsauce Video Supertasks, which comes to the conclusion that we can’t know the answer to these type of questions.

So in conclusion, flipping the switch will either give you an arbitrarily large number of deaths, or an unknown number of deaths. Fun!

For anyone too lazy to try it themselves: the photo is actually real and you can get it as an answer on Akinator

Isaac Adni - I Wanna Be a Duck

I’m not expecting Avengers to be worth watching either, but it is still a movie with a huge budget that I think a whole bunch of people will see, unfortunately.

Dune 3 and Avengers: Doomsday are both launching on december 18th, and I have heard the two of them be referred to as “Dunesday”!

Where my phone placed the new line was truly a rollercoaster:

Japan’s Birth Rate Set to Break Even

Wow, breaking even? Finally looking up for japan!

… the Bleakest Forecasts

Oh no.

This is the second leak-type-meme I’ve stumbled across and now I’m hooked

Super interesting that you enjoy fiction so much. What I struggle with most is that visual language is often very dense in information, but I can’t do a lot with it. Imagine something like this:

“Light spilled in through the high windows, tinting the hallway into beautiful autumn colors. It looked as if the sunlight was dancing, but of course nothing moved except the dust suspended in the air.”

I would read this and think: cool, I bet this would look amazing if I could see it, but all the information I can actually use from these sentences is “A hallway has high windows, it’s maybe morning or evening”. Everything else is either visual or obvious to me. So fiction books are more exhausting, because I constantly filter out things that I can’t really use. It’s like I’m reading a text where a person constantly rambles and can’t get to the damn point. I’m really curious how or why this is different for you? Another thing I find annoying is, that usually when reading fiction books, you constantly have to amend your mental model. I presume this is relatively easy for people without aphantasia, although I might be wrong. Let me explain with this example:

“blah” said A. “blah?” B responded. A said “blah blah” as he stood up from his chair. “blah!” B said back, while A turned right and walked out the door.

This order is the exact opposite my brain expects. I’d like know the room layout and who is sitting/standing where first, then the characters can interact with each other in my already complete internal model. This might be a me-thing, but if non-aphantasia people can image images as easy as I can imagine sounds, making changes to the model must be super easy.

Also, I do think fiction books and non-fiction history books are very different. Simply because an author can build a world, story and characters to convey some deeper meaning or overarching theme, or use strong imagery or metaphores. All of that is more uncommon for historic books from my experience. The above example in a history book would probably look something more like “Orange light entered the hallway through the high windows”. And even if non-fiction history books were similar to fiction, history is a tiny part of non-fiction! There are tons of other subcategories that differ greatly from fiction.

game recognize game

And how in the hell does one […] enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?!

I can only speak for myself (#5) here, but I can barely enjoy books. If they’re any sort of fiction, where I have to imagine a world, characters, objects, … it’s very exhausting. I read fiction books in school, but haven’t picked up a fiction book out of my own will in years. But I do enjoy non-fiction books, especially when they convey Ideas you don’t need (or maybe can’t) picture visually.

Side note: I found people who read a lot (of fiction) often being critical of movie adaptations. I never understood this, because even ‘meh’ movies offer a far superior experience than just reading the book to me. It took me a while to realize that movie adaptations are a kind of ‘disability aid’ to my aphantasia.

Y

I mean most pcgamers probably have more powerful hardware already

According to Valve, it should outperform or match 70% of current PCs owned by gamers. So while not crazy powerful, it might be an affordable (hopefully) upgrade for some more low spec gamers.

That’s exactly right, you got it!

The intermediary probabilities make it even worse, yes! But the overall probability is already ridiculously tiny, so I don’t think it changes the conclusion by a lot.

That was my assumption, yes. Because the last person would have the entire population on the tracks, and you can’t really continue after that.

I neglected the intermediary likelihoods, because that calculation was too long for wolfram alpha, but I have since managed to get it working, and the conclusion is not significantly different. The expected number of deaths skyrockets, even if the chance of pulling the lever is tiny for every person.