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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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    1. Accept the things you can’t change, and improve the things you can change. I disagree with the classical stoics on their emphasis on individual action and think that these principles can and should be applied on a societal level.

    2. Mind your own business. If someone is doing something that doesn’t have any real impact on your life or the lives of people you care about, ignore it. If someone is gay or trans that doesn’t impact you at all. If someone has weird religious beliefs, let them believe them as long as they’re not hurting anyone.

    3. The supernatural should be ignored for society level decisions because it cannot be proven and hasn’t been demonstrated. If someone wants to go to a psychic or astrologer for personal decisions I disagree with that but that’s on them.

    4. Everyone has a god they worship. It may not be Jesus or Allah, but it may be money, a sport team, or maybe a musical band. Ritual and community are things that make us feel good. Coming together with a group of people for a common cause to enjoy something together is built into our psychology. The problem of replacing religion with bands and sports teams is that it comes with the fun parts of religion without the discussion of morality or urging to do good that religion can bring. You don’t see Kansas City Chiefs fans giving 10% of their income to the poor, for example. My ideal world would have secular temples to Reason where people come together to sing and discuss philosophy and work together for a common good. This one is weirder than the others and I won’t be mad if anyone thinks this is absurd. I just think that we have rejected religion without having a satisfactory replacement for the good things it provides.



  • All of my family members have Samsung phones and every single one of them has been complaining about the update. Normal people, tech people, it doesn’t matter. They all hate it. It’s actually kind of insane. The only reason I have been spared so far is that my phone is too old to get the new OneUI update. I can’t imagine any of them will buy a Samsung next time they buy a phone if the UI stays like this. People who buy Android phones are people who like Android phones. You’re not going to lure iPhone users to Android by being more like an iPhone because they’re just going to buy the real deal instead. It’s just stupid. Just the battery icon discussed in the OP was the source of a lot of complaints because it is extremely hard to read especially for older people.





  • Here are some related questions that inform the answer to this one

    1. Can a vampire cross a country’s border without approval from that country’s government? This relates to how a vampire’s inability to cross thresholds relates to governments and concepts of control, occupation, and ownership as they relate to this rule. My gut instinct says yes, a border doesn’t count as a boundary in this case because a vampire can only not enter your house but can go on your yard. Disregarding that, I would lean towards no a vampire would need permission, especially at a defined boundary like a border crossing checkpoint. I don’t think it would necessarily have to be from the government, though, based on concepts I will explore later

    2. Can a vampire enter your home if you’re a tenant and give them permission? I say yes, because during the time period when vampire myths developed barely anyone actually owned their own homes or the land they lived on, and said myths don’t state that the vampire must receive permission from the local lord to enter the homes of his serfs. This establishes that residence is sufficient and ownership isn’t required.

    3. If you are at a friend’s house for a party and a vampire shows up and you say “come on in!” Does that count as an invitation? I would say yes, but there is some argument to be had here. The answer to this question determines if residency is not only sufficient, but required. If you say yes, then, it seems that merely occupying a space is what gives one authority to invite a vampire in, not residence or ownership. If you say no, then it seems that residence or control over a space is more important.

    4. If you give a worker a garage door code and tell him he can use that while you’re not home and he turns out to be a vampire, can he enter your home? I would say yes, because you explicitly gave him permission. If you say no, then it seems that the relationship of the threshold is what’s important. Someone on one side has to be inviting the vampire to cross, and the invitation can’t be given if both parties are on the same side. I say yes, because I feel that the criteria are as follows - A person must have control over a space in some sense (but not necessarily legal authority over it) and they must explicitly give permission to the vampire to enter. The explicit permission requirement is because a vampire theoretically wouldn’t be able to break into your house by smashing a window.

    Now as all of this pertains to a warrant - I think that yes, a vampire with a warrant would be able to enter a home with a warrant because the issuing authority has the ability to control access to your home via warrants and you have implicitly delegated that authority to them via the social contract, and the warrant is explicit permission to enter your home.


  • Depends on what you mean by “high.” I have scored between 130-140 on IQ tests I’ve taken of various quality, which is considered high by most. Idk how it would be different from anyone else’s experience of the world. I did extremely well in school and I work as a chemical engineer with a focus on machine learning implementations and capital expansion. I don’t know if I would consider myself “smarter” than the average person, just better at certain types of tasks. I also grew up in a stable two parent upper middle class household that valued education and academic success, which is a huge leg up that can’t be ignored.







  • Depends on what you mean by “low.” At a certain level low enough IQ is associated with intellectual disability, and a difficulty functioning in society. IQ is normalized so half of people have, by definition, an IQ lower than 100, and half have an IQ above 100. 15 points is a standard deviation, so about 68% of people fall between 85 and 115, and the remaining 32% fall within the “tails”. I assume by “Low IQ” you would mean the ~16% of the population below 85 IQ, and probably the ~13.5% that fall in the range of 70-85, as below 70 is getting into intellectual disability territory.

    Statistically, people in this band do worse in just about every metric for social success. Lower income, higher crime rates, higher rates of drug addiction, poorer health outcomes, etc. However, it is difficult to disentangle these impacts from poverty. Populations’ IQs raise when they become less poor, and people regardless of income tend to be less poor if they have higher IQs. The cycle of poverty is deeply intertwined with IQ, and poverty causes a lot of the social issues associated with low IQ. There is a lot of evidence that as access to education and a more “intellectually rich” upbringing increase IQ, and such things are less available to poor people for a variety of reasons.

    As for what it’s like, from my understanding speaking to people I suspect are in this band the main things are a non-inquisitive world view, a sense of resignation around not understanding abstract concepts, and low self esteem associated with these perceived shortcomings. Society does not treat these people kindly as a whole, and I think that we could all stand to be kinder to one another. I also think that our economic system is geared in such a way that not only are low IQ people punished for that, but they are also made to feel that it is a personal shortcoming even though these things are defined statistically such that there is always a group of people at the bottom who are going to be left behind.