You're an evil fuckhead.

I manage to have the civility to know not to cheat on a significant other or to knowingly be the 'other person'. You clearly don't.

Is this feed-grade, kind of okay pure futurology, or food-grade, edible, preservative-free, gluten-free, no artificial coloring and flavor pure futurology?

Reddit always lies about the purity of its 'pure' subreddits, after all.

What they appear to be doing to these houses almost looks like the planned obsolescence apparent in a lot of non-house things people buy; it looks superficially nice but on the inside it's shit and it's ultimately just there to make the seller money.

See, defining something as art or not art is so nebulous and confusing. Art, period, is nebulous and confusing at a certain point.

I like science. It's less messy, founded on some reasonably well-defined fundamental axioms, and can better weather the buffeting maelstrom that is the human mind. I mean, sure, human minds made science, but when we constructed the scientific 'machine' we built in a defense against ourselves.

When we constructed the artistic 'machine', there was no such thing, but then again, should there have been? And the point of the scientific 'machine' is to churn out the truth of what is going on in the natural world; the point of the artistic 'machine' is not to churn out truth, though, is it? (I'm not an artist so I don't know, but at least from my point of view if it looks like anything other than 'look at this attention-grabbing, mind-touching, sometimes-message-having bit of human expression', I feel like the artist is bullshitting me)

It seems like even the social sciences is troubled by this, too, because they deal in the empirical, but there's a very unempirical component to it, which I don't think is necessarily all that bad because economists can analyze the economy all they want but you also see them opining on where it ought to go and there seems, at least from my vantage point in the sciences, a smaller divide between analytic economists/sociologists/psychologists and policy-making economists/sociologists/psychologists than there is between scientific researchers and scientific policy-makers. The social sciences even have their own 'machine', which seems to simultaneously be for churning out truth about society and churning out opinions on what to do with it.

thebuzzkillblog, setting aside the shortage of funny for a moment, there was a pretty big shortage of ass. I came expecting a funny ass video, bro. What gives.

I think being able to tell the difference between social anxiety or ineptness and introversion is pretty important.

I've never had a hard time doing any of these things you describe as being central to social skill; I just get worn out more easily from it than others.

My mother, ever the MBTI blowhard even after I've shown her actual scholarly papers describing why it fails as a test (which is bizarre, because she has a master's degree, which she had to get by defending a thesis, which requires some appreciation for empiricism), classifies me as an INTJ also.

I always tell her 'I am not an INTJ and you are not an ENFP. I am a teamramonycajal and you are a momramonycajal.'

I'd like to tell you a story about two siblings from a working-class family.

One was an older female. She hated where she lived, saw nothing for her, and got out. She was law-abiding, conscientious, a good student, and she went to college, got her bachelor's degree, worked three jobs every summer to pay for it, and then got a master's degree. She got married at 36 and had a (planned) kid.

One was a younger male. He didn't apply himself, barely got through high school, never had an honest job in his life, sold pot, had dealings with the local Mafia, got married at 19, and made money off of suing people for petty accidents and falsely claiming injury.

The older female is my mother. The younger male I do not consider family at all and is currently all over the place with an opiate addiction and calls my mother about three times a day, every day, and is despondent about his life and his decisions. His son, who is as stupid as he is and has $20,000 dollars in debt for going to a fucking mechanic school instead of maybe having near zero student loans for going to community college and getting a real, four-year bachelor's degree and actually getting educated, has started physically abusing him. His wife, who is also as much of a stupid, uneducated fool as he is, can't fucking figure out how opiate addiction works and thinks it doesn't have a physiological component to it.

The moral of this story, I guess, is that I get really pissed off when I hear other upper-middle-class, college-educated left-wingers like myself talk about the working class like they aren't participants in making their lives shitty and like they're Blameless Angelic Martyrs for the Evil Elites, and the solution is to make education and mental health care accessible to everybody. I think people who oppose nationalized healthcare and universal access to higher education are goddamned short-sighted, egocentric scum.

EDIT: And someone on here will unleash holy hell on me for supposedly being a classist, but at some point opposition to classism turned into the non-racist equivalent of the Noble Savage trope.

Because you can shuffle people into little categories. Humans like to categorize things.

Never mind that personality psychologists deride it.

In fact, the newest model, HEXACO, goes off the Big 5 model, which is a spectrum model instead of a binary model. Even HEXACO is beginning to fall out of favor. The six dimensions are Honesty/Humility (a measure of how prone you are to be deceptive, sociopathic, and unrealistically self-aggrandizing or self-injuring), Emotionality (a measure of anxiety, neuroticism, sentimentality, emotionality, moodiness, and what might be best visualized as 'how much you are like a little chihuahua who is shaking, running around, and pissing itself'), eXtraversion (this is pretty straightforward), Agreeableness (how much of both a 'team player' and a vaguely over-dependent ninny you may be - if you're super-agreeable, you are probably a doormat, and if you're not very agreeable, you are probably an asshole), Conscientiousness (do you rack disciprine?), and Openness (are you liberal, well-read, educated, worldly, appreciate the intellectual and the aesthetic? You score high on openness. Are you a conservative hide-bound ignorant redneck? You score low on openness.)

Never mind, of course, that the real answer is that even if you could separate humans into broad personality traits, those aren't even necessarily completely inherent to the person - I mean, sure, there are tendencies, but culture and our own reasoning and deliberate action has more of an effect on it than we think.

But if you let your son play with dolls the odds are just stacked against him

But why perpetuate the problem?

Also, not deliberately exposing your son to dolls doesn't mean he never will be. What if he plays with a female friend whose parents do let her play with dolls of some kind in addition to Legos and action figures and all sorts of 'gender-neutral' or stereotypically gendered and he thinks it's fun?

The odds are only stacked against him because you let them be.

I've done some very limited reading in the past on cybernetics, but you've just reminded me to go to the American Society for Cybernetics' website and go poke around a little more.

I guess what I'm trying to find is a sort of Cybernetics/Control and Systems Theory 101-type textbook, because at least from my admittedly limited perspective on all of this, I'm struggling to understand how all of this entails cybernetics in particular as opposed to merely a lot of at least apparently un-associated, with cybernetics and with each other, ideas of ethics and global development.

Without some definitions, standards, and structure, as well as some testable bases on which its fundamentals rest, all of this sounds like fevered speculation. I don't doubt that these exist in cybernetics, but I am trying to assuage my doubts where people are attempting to apply it to human society.

EDIT: A bunch of tutorials.

I have to say my first reaction is 'How abstractable are these ideas from computer science and the natural sciences to people?'

It seems like there's been some research on it, so I'm a little less skeptical than I initially was.

EDIT: NotPhil touched on what I was trying to voice - when you start taking ideas from the computer and natural sciences and try to abstract them to other areas, a lot of context gets glossed over and ideas misunderstood. Most notably, the fact that evolution occurs in nature has been used in a particularly nasty instance of the is-ought fallacy to suggest that we should not help people in need because they are somehow 'unfit', and humorously, altruism has considerable evidence behind it suggesting that it is evolutionarily adaptive.

Regardless of whether it was written by EB White or not, it certainly speaks truth as to why I - and probably plenty of others - maintain hope in at least a part of humanity which drags the rest kicking and screaming into the future.

Letters of Note is a good blog.

But the temptation is to instead shield him/her from as many sources of external criticism as possible.

I can't help but think that something would get sacrificed in that process - no, you shouldn't basically throw the kid out in there like a sort of rejected Spartan baby left to die on a mountain, but at least for my part my parents coddled the fuck out of me in some ways and I've had to make up for it when I realized that it had a negative impact on me. So I guess in this case it's a good idea to intervene if your kid is coming home with a persistent serious problem, but there's some kind of teachable moment in your kid dealing with it to a lesser extent. It's never too early to get a little practice dealing with assholes (although with preparation).

I'm also fairly sure parents want to minimize the amount of self-parenting their child has to do.

How would you respond if your son grew up and asked, 'Dad, what the heck was the deal with being all weird about dolls and shit? I liked those.'

That or society sees boys playing with dolls as worse than girls playing with action figures and I don't want my child to have a stigma.

The stigma probably exists for the same reason conservatives hate gays more than lesbians.

Anyway, if you don't want your child to have a stigma, there are any number of other things kids get stigmatized for and they're impossible to avoid since in many cases both choices result in stigma from somewhere, so better just to teach your son to let it roll off his back and be who he is. There's no way to protect your child from taunty little monsters, and to be honest you can take attempts to do that to an unhealthy extreme, but there are ways to help your child have mental and emotional strength as strong as the physical strength of Olympic weightlifters.

If everybody cared what everybody else thought about them, we'd all be emotional cripples, because everybody is hated, disliked, or otherwise not 'gotten' by somebody else.

The older I get, the more nonsensical gender divides become.

Penises and vaginas are parts that when combined tend to make babies and the babies come out of the people with the vaginas, but none of that follows from it.

Also, flagamuffin, there's an explanation for that; somewhere in your brain you still see 'female' as weak and inferior and thus that your son would be 'stepping down' and 'weakening'.

It's the same reason conservatives hate gays more than lesbians.

Being the instigator of said turd tornado, my instigation was based, as far as I can tell, on seeing a comment that on the surface seemed to be bullheadishly sexist toward not only women, but men, and almost cartoonishly reminiscent of Reddit-style misogyny (perhaps I should have caught the 'cartoonishly'), and I guess apparently not having context like knowing who the heck Maddox was and having played Animal Crossing or being able to detect sarcasm over the nonverbal-cue-free medium of the internet. I guess we're all supposed to know every meme on the internet and be able to instantly tell when someone's being sarcastic even without reams and pages of context that can frankly be a little excessive of a request to make someone sift through depending on how much it is.

I 'fessed up to my misreading as soon as it was explained, but I can't say I'm particularly sorry for it given the response, and the fact that the other party to it made stupid amounts of assumptions about my own motives.

But ultimately, at least as far as I can tell, it didn't rustle my jimmies to nearly the extent it rustled kleinbl00's. I forgot about it by the next day and actually tried to interact with him later on a post on the death penalty in a neutral sort of setting, but clearly he hasn't and neither have other people here.

And that's the extent of what I'm going to say about that.

And lil, I didn't realize that you were talking about his music instead of, say, his appearance or sex appeal. The 'mmm' led me in the latter direction, to be fair.

I'm not easily embarrassed and not easily hurt emotionally, and doubly not by faceless people with whom I'm not engaging face-to-face, because at least in the way that I interact with the internet, it strips away a lot from communication and makes it ephemeral. A lot of you are very nice people, and I do try not to be an asshole, and I've mostly enjoyed my time on Hubski so far, but you're all still just marginally less faceless than Reddit to me still because of the interface we use, and the moment I get assholed at I don't much care about being an asshole back.

Anyway, if everyone gave a shit about what everyone else thought of them, we'd all be emotional cripples. Everybody's hated, disliked, or misinterpreted by somebody.

"Cause I ain't no Hollaback girl” I said this shit is bananas, b a n a n a s” this shit is bananas"

I haven't heard that song in about eight years.

I hate to burst your bubble, lil, but I am 100 percent positive that Rufus Wainwright bats for the other team.

They vary at any given time, but some of the things I've indulged in lately:

Masala chai, chicken broth (this may seem like a weird indulgence, but I drank a whole container of the stuff the night before my invertebrate paleontology exam and it was so good), citric-acid containing sugary candy such as Smarties or Fun Dip, popcorn with seasoning, vanilla milkshakes, trips to the city, Trader Joe's chocolate bars, and sleeping in until 10:00 on weekends.

When someone mentions 'social Darwinism' or 'Holism' or 'self-organizing human ecosystems', legions of dead biologists and social scientists start spinning in their graves.

Nobody's going to remember me as a whole person after my family, friends, and I are dead unless someone decides to write a book about me, and even that's distorted through the author and through the limits of English. I don't think I'd write a book about me the way some people do - not because of any sort of self-esteem problems or other kind of self-deprecation, but because it seems a waste of effort that could be used to do things that actually make an impact on the world. If someone decided to write a book about me, that would most likely be because I'd earned the right, at least in their mind. But I have to earn it.

I do not intend to have children, so nobody's going to stick me in their genealogy unless they put me in a side branch.

If I am to be remembered longer than a century and by more than maybe five people after I'm dead, it will be through my contributions to science, and in that respect I intend to dive headlong into it and earn my place among the big shots. Realistically, of course, given that most of them aren't exactly known outside science (Giulio Tononi, to reference the recent consciousness thread, is HUGE in neuroscience, but ask some random person on the street who Tononi is and they'll go 'Does he run an Italian restaurant or something?'), this is a limited set of people.

But that's okay.

I use the citation manager Mendeley to collect papers in my discipline. Some of the authors are dead. I look at every journal article they've written as one little bit of remembrance for them.

I checked out the associated episodes - there's an account of the Milwaukee protocol for rabies. Cool.

New Orleans should never have existed, really, although that's not a dam issue (more a levee issue, and I don't know how the levees have affected the environment).

But they are stupidly flood-prone.

EDIT: There is a heightened flood risk in western Minnesota, too. I don't know why.

That was a fun watch.

I didn't notice. Whoops.

Although they're not cartilaginous either except for their braincase.

Cuttlefish bones are kind of hard to make into combs, bro. Just sayin'. That's some nice brittle chambered calcium carbonate, and you can make molds from it, but probably not combs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuttlebone has some cross-sections.

I would say this turns into an ethical question and not an economic one: the price will increase, but is that really such a problem in exchange for a living wage?