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I've lived in 6 different countries at this point. All within Europe so cannot claim to have experienced any massive culture shock, but there are nevertheless quite some difference between countries across the continent. I think INTPs are good at observing and being sensitive to other people's...

people with tattoos in their face

What seems unfair?

It's a known idiosyncrasy of human psyche: belief in control over things we cannot control. Thus perception of reality itself is warped in our minds in order to satisfy our desires. I guess it goes to show how much people crave control over things in general. Control is what we need in order to...

In Heidegger's terms, there are facticities of life – things we cannot change. E.g. one facticity of my life is that I was born in the 20th century – I cannot change that and thus I cannot become a 19th-century inventor. If you are born with one leg, then one-leggedness is a facticity of your...

Yes, altruism within a small group makes evolutionary sense because surviving and flourishing need not be an adversarial zero-sum game within a small group. But then the ultimate goal of that altruism is nevertheless the survival of each individual's genes – so it's not really altruism but...

@Artsu Tharaz yes, but I'm talking about the real world, though – not hypotheticals. The only reason we exist is that our ancestors were wired to act in their self-interest, like every other life form on earth. If an organism has good genes, in order for those genes to survive, that organism...

@Artsu Tharaz so the way the prisoners dilemma works, is that it's an adversarial game by construction. If one of them has a reputation of always not snitching, then he is exploitable by the other person who can choose to snitch. The game-theoretical solution as per nash equilbirum is therefore...

Niceness is fragile. In the long run it breaks. Only a set of morals and principles is robust. I.e. you cannot really count on people without the latter.

you think people make decisions in life based on the utilities of other people? Maybe on a very small scale of community, like a family unit. But other than that, it's every man to himself, my friend.

this was kinda fun actually

anger is supposed to adjust the behavior of people around you. It's a signal to someone that you don't like what they are doing. Just always repressing it is not good – depending on what you are angry at. If someone is making you angry, the way to go is to express that in as a polite way as...

prior to last week I almost forgot that each human is designed as a game-theoretically optimized biological machine. In simpler terms: in the end, everyone is a selfish cunt

ahh this tune is so fucking good

Around 9:15 in that video, that's what I'm talking about

Not in my experience

become immortal an actual one: say "fuck you" to some authority figure when it's least expected become a free human being to the point where I can say "fuck you" to authority figures on a regular basis. That will require fuck-you money.

buy prostitutes. When the brain thinks it has reproduced, it starts taking everything less seriously

maybe being below 5' allows one to go under the radar of cultural stigmas another phenomenon though, is that girls who are slightly above average tall (5'7 or whatever) are the ones who always yap about the guy having to be tall. Girls who are very tall, or short, seem to care much less

in the sense that details pertain more to application of knowledge and patters more to finding new knowledge, maybe

in machine learning theory, reinforcement learning is a process close to how humans learn to behave in the world: you learn from experience, but then you have to exploit that experience to make decisions. You can't afford to only explore because you don't have infinitive time and resources. At...

I guess you're stuck with the perfect 10s... although you might wanna adjust your expectations of how perfectly 10 they look in real life

I didn't really understand what's unethical about it. Is it because you're getting a loan on a program you're not planning to finish? In that case, think about all the millennials out there who are students until they are 30 and jumping between different studies along the whole way – that's made...

A "strong female character" would probably be someone like Nicole from Rage of Paris (1938). That's a complex character who deals with all kinds of issues while treating men as a bunch of muppets. Forget this 1-dimensional, I-can-also-carry-a-50kg-machine-gun-and-kill-aliens bullshit

nothing wrong with intimacy. It was the way that guy behaved. but who knows, the girl probably liked it – she seemed kinda starved of attention

yesterday at a bar, out of the corner of my eye, I saw some couple.. probably a date of sorts.. and the dude, for the whole duration of the time I was there, was sitting with this pathetic-looking posture, leaning towards the girl so that his face was about 20 cm from hers the whole time. She...

betrayal, love, volatility – all 3 happening separately

@Gyppo I'd be careful with conclusions like that. I fuckin cringe at the way I behaved when I was about your age (you're about 17 if I recall correctly?). Didn't seem too bad to me at the time, obviously. But now, I can only be thankful to all the people who were forgiving of my total and utter...

I really like it when a character is both strong and has a pussy.

nihilism is a warm and cuddly blanket to wrap oneself into at the end of the day. It's almost as soothing as religion

[redacted]

good to know

I think it's just that a female intuitive will typically have very different preferences than a male intuitive. I've met quite a few females in applied math studies, but I've never met a female with a passion for it. It seems they get bored with stuff that doesn't contain some biological...

Why is it that highly intelligent people are often associated with wimps, and on the other hand, very "masculine" dudes with big muscles etc associated with dumbness. My theory: intelligence is usually associated with high levels of noradrenaline, which also happens to shut down your digestive...

online poker

sorry about that, that was a bit blunt. with regards to topic – these various activities – are they remedies against boredom, or active forms of escapism?

sounds like one helluva life

I interacted with a lot of Chinese when I studied in UK. They definitely have a much more collectivist approach to things. Very group-oriented. But I do suspect that's a result of long indoctrination in communism and indeed subjugation to authority. In China, the individual, and that...

A toast to AK!

lol what's up with the confrontational attitude, cog. Having that time of the month again? to answer your question: how would you make that statement without existing in the first place? The whole point of the quote is that you can infer something just by virtue of the statement being made –...

Is "I think therefore I am" a posteriori though? Descartes wanted to find one thing one could say for sure without the risk of being tricked by the senses etc. I guess one could claim that the point of the statement is that you can say it independently of experience.

I'm sure that if dogs could speak, they would tell us that their cognition is just so awesome that the only thing that can account for it is metaphysics (probably involving some deity – a huge and powerful dalmatian perhaps). And here we are, slightly glorified monkeys, claiming pretty much the...

I'm confused. Are you assuming human consciousness cannot arise without some metaphysical component?

women don't do that?

not sure if I confused you about what I meant. To clarify, I wonder what one's view on physics and metaphysics has to do at all with morality. If you assume the world is all just matter, you have a question of right and wrong. If you assume the world is more than matter, you have a question of...

It's all a nice little circle out there. Women are made objects though imagery, men are programmed to pursue said objects through other imagery. People responsible for the former make use of the latter and vice versa. But as a woman pointed out to me recently, women also have various ideas...

you guys are confusing each other with all this namedropping of "isms" what has materialism to do with morality in the first place? whether you think the world is all physics or not has no bearing on what you consider moral or how various events are experienced in the minds of people.

is that an argument against it, or even an argument in favor of religion? Like I said earlier, religion and recourse to metaphysical beliefs is an easy way out. Nobody said it's supposed to be easy to create meaning out of life as it is. I would say this is incorrect. As far as I understand...