There’s a reason so many poker players wear sunglasses.

Anyway, try to preempt your emotional reaction. There’s always many different flavors of reactions we can have to something really negative, which normally depends heavily on mood. By default, this all just runs unconsciously, but it doesn’t have to. Of the many potential options, like anger, sadness, condescending disdain, arrogant bemusement or surprise, you can try to consciously pick one and channel your feelings towards it instead of just letting your feelings run wild.

Or you can just practice a proper poker face, but that can be really hard. Doable though, just takes a lot of practice. Playing poker would be an effective way to get that practice.

Agreed. I understand people’s desire to look at the fact that both women lost, but we should also remember the fact that they both failed to unify their own coalition. This is a pretty big deal, if you can’t even unify your own coalition, your prospects are pretty damn challenging.

That charisma element is very valuable for that, as is tossing your own faction members enough policy bones to satisfy them even if you’re not fully pleasing them. Clinton and Harris both failed to do this, and took their coalitions a little bit too much for granted. Harris came close with the Walz pick, but Gaza weighed very heavily on her with progressives. She needed to do more to distance herself from Biden to thoroughly win them over.

Ultimately, I think our problem stemmed from them not understanding the appeal of the far right. This caused them to underestimate the strength of their opponent and fail to run as dynamically and aggressively as necessary. They played it too safe. With Harris in particular, I wanted to see the prosecutor prosecute the case against Trump, with the voters as the jury. Instead her stump speeches and interviews remained frustratingly soft. Hilary did this too.

We the people can look at Trump as some big joke, and make fun of him and his supporters as much as we want. But the opposition candidate has to take him deathly seriously, and give him the gravity he is due as a potentially fascist leader of the worlds most powerful military. That is no laughing matter.

This sort of speech by AOC is what we needed more of, and even it is a little bit soft: https://youtu.be/OO7SE4Zpd9s

Bernie could have done it too, I think. He did come fairly close in the primary, even though he was fighting upstream against lingering negative sentiment about “socialists” in middle America. I think the country has changed enough in the past 10 years, partly due to his trailblazing, that that’s no longer as much as an albatross as it once was though.

Certainly. But we still cannot say that should mean every beneficial mutation for their lives was likely to be adopted. Like I said earlier, the majority of possibly good things are left on the table, even when drawbacks are not considered.

Including drawbacks muddies it up even further, we can look at how cardiovascular shock occurs and how the particular traits that create it were a bit of a double edged sword.

But what is the likelihood of this autonomous stress relieving function arising, how many mutations would be required to implement such a thing? Would it have any significant drawbacks or side effects in other aspects of our biology?

You can’t look only at the propagation side of things.

Another thing, stress isn’t event based per se. It’s more of a floating value that always exists to a certain degree and provides both positive and negative effects at different levels and in different situations. The negative health impacts come in when it remains high for a long period of time. So what we’d really want to look at is something like the frequency of headpats given to your dog or something, and the effects of this compared to other potential stress relieving activities like meditation.

Lastly, I would check your data on pet availability, I think it’d be far, far higher than 10%.

Negative health outcomes are an evolutionary pressure.

Also, evolution does not work from a plan, we do not spontaneously generate all the things that would benefit us over a long enough timeframe. Instead, random things happen and certain ones propagate while others don’t. Because it is not a conscious force operating from any sort of plan, and instead works via random mutation and propagation of beneficial traits, it leaves a whole bunch of potentially beneficial things unadopted.

Otherwise all life would just move towards some sort of optimal form, maybe crabs, instead of evolving greater and greater diversity that can better handle changing environments.

One I can think of would be stress relief. Stress contributes to a lot of negative health outcomes, and cuddling with a pet can help mitigate some of that stress. Wouldn’t surprise me if amount of stress also has a more general effect on overall decisionmaking.

Yeah, that’s kinda silly. I can see an argument that WWE wrestlers are athletes, no problems there. But they don’t actually perform in any sort of athletic competition, which makes thinking of it as a “sport” a little weird. If WWE is a sport, then so is ballet.

Whatever. Yo momma so fat every step she takes gets picked up by LIGO.

lol Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day trying to think of a good general relativity based yo momma joke…

tbf, “manipulating time and space” is a pretty low bar to clear. You’re manipulating time and space sitting in your chair, given that under general relativit,y spacetime warps around any mass present.

This thread is really making me realize how many people just don’t know what critical thinking is… :\

Problem solving is not the same as critical thinking. No puzzle or strategy game, that I can think of, has any significant critical thinking component to it.

Wait, just thought of one exception. Social deduction games, like Among Us, when played with live chat, will train critical thinking. Critical thinking is about figuring out if this information is lying to you (edit: or otherwise flawed in some way) or not, and if so, how.

Exactly. It’s sort of like a massively scaled up example of the blind man and the elephant.

Yeah I caught that too, I’d be curious to know more about what specifically they meant by that.

Being able to link all of the words that have a similar meaning, say, nearby, close, adjacent, proximal, side-by-side, etc and realize they all share something in common could be done in many ways. Some would require an abstract understanding of what spatial distance actually is, an understanding of physical reality. Others would not, one could simply make use of word adjacency, noticing that all of these words are frequently used alongside certain other words. This would not be abstract, it’d be more of a simple sum of clear correlations. You could call this mathematical framework a universal language if you wanted.

Ultimately, a person learns meaning and then applies language to it. When I’m a baby I see my mother, and know my mother is something that exists. Then I learn the word “mother” and apply it to her. The abstract comes first. Can an LLM do something similar despite having never seen anything that isn’t a word or number?

Predicting the next word vs predicting a word in the middle and then predicting backwards are not hugely different things. It’s still predicting parts of the passage based solely on other parts of the passage.

Compared to a human who forms an abstract thought and then translates that thought into words. Which words I use has little to do with which other words I’ve used except to make sure I’m following the rules of grammar.

Agreed. Great voice acting is one thing. Quality voicing a cast that gigantic is another. I first noticed with that frog in the hag’s area. You don’t even get it if you don’t cast speak with animals and talk to this random frog hopping around, but if you bother to, you get this short, amazingly acted dialogue.

The attention to detail is just off the charts.

or maybe “national security adviser,”

lol

Bullies get positive feelings for themselves by making others suffer. Who they target with this isn’t too different from how a predator selects prey–choose the vulnerable.

Your sister, for one reason or another, is vulnerable, meaning the bully is less likely to suffer any consequences for picking on her than if they picked on someone else. That “someone else” could have more friends willing to stick up for them and fight back, they could have a really sharp wit and be able to verbally humiliate the bully if they wanted, they could be huge and practice MMA, being able to physically knock all her teeth out with one swing, they could be a teacher’s favorite and able to go to an authority figure to get backup and inflict consequences that way. All sorts of possibilities.

But one way or another, your sister has been selected due to having fewer plausible defenses than any of the potential alternatives.

Best way to resolve that is to bolster her defenses in some way or another, so the bully picks a different, more vulnerable target. Making the bully actually stop bullying everyone isn’t very likely, though. As someone else pointed out, the bully is most likely suffering a lot themselves, and participating in bullying is how they themselves are surviving their own difficult circumstances. The easiest fix would probably be the “sharp wit” route, as verbally tearing into someone in a humorous way is a learnable skill. Otherwise a physical intimidation route, where your sister or another makes them afraid for their teeth remaining in their mouth if the bullying continues.

To answer your direct question, yes, jealously could be a part of it. There isn’t much use in wondering about it, though, there’s no real solutions to be found down this line of thinking, that I’m aware of.

Yeah, I think people need to recognize that this arms Kuwait, Tunisia, Lithuania, Oman, Netherlands, Chad, Yemen, Bulgaria, Tajikistan, Rwanda and Cameroon all with nuclear weapons. (Ranks 91-100 if we just go by number of military personnel, active and reserve, an imperfect but very convenient way to measure.)

If I’m not mistaken, two of those countries are currently involved in conflict. (Yemeni Civil War and Rwanda involved in Congo)

Digital feudalism… I suppose that does make it easier to call up large armies of peasant levies when you need to wage an information war.

Also just fear of going out of business by alienating any potential customers. When your revenues have been steadily dropping for decades now and it’s starting to look like you’re going the way of Kodak, it becomes more tempting to pander to the middle and try to avoid pissing as many people off as possible. This in turn means you can’t speak the truth anymore.