scrape_r_rational/data/cache/3aefrf.md

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Post:

Welcome to the inaugural Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this probably isn't the place for those.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

If this thread is even remotely successful, we'll have one every week.

(Also, as a special reminder, the prompt for next week's Weekly Challenge can be found at the bottom of this week's Weekly Challenge, and because I'm worried that people don't read text, I think it's prudent to repeat here that next week's challenge will have a cash prize of $50.)

Comments:

• u/Colonel_Fedora:

  STEVEN UNIVERSE. It's a super ultra rad show and I'd recommend it to everyone and their dog. Anyone else hyped about Steven Bomb 2.0?
  
  Edit: I also really appreciate giving the folks hanging out here some stuff to do. I thinks it's really livened the place up.
  

  • u/alexanderwales:

    This is the third time I've been recommended this, which is about when I start lazily paying attention. Is it pretty similar to Adventure Time?
    

    • u/Colonel_Fedora:

      For a given value of similar. It has a lot more focus, with a smaller, though still sizable cast. I'd also say it's better at pacing its story arcs. And the setting is less completely whacky, and more reality+, though that description undersells it a little. Also, the characterization is much more relatable in my opinion.
      

    • u/Drazelic:

      Didn't Rebecca Sugar work on Adventure Time before she made Steven Universe? Steven Universe is less random than Adventure Time, but it's also more... heartfelt? Like, if the core appeal of Adventure Time is unexpected weird-but-consistent plot, the core appeal of Steven Universe is heartfelt emotional appeal.
      
      The first few episodes of Steven Universe are pretty slow, though. I'd probably skip Gem Glow and Laser Light Cannon and start with Cheeseburger Backpack; that one's a pretty solid introduction to the core characters, and there's not a lot of backstory presented in the first two episodes that you can't get from just watching further episodes. Just my opinion.
      

• u/lsparrish:

  There's a group on Facebook (which I help moderate) called [Rational Transhumanism](https://www.facebook.com/groups/rational.transhumanism/). Has weekly Off Topic Tuesdays, otherwise posts should be directly related to Transhumanism. Basically, it's a walled garden for non-troll, non-pseudoscience transhumanism stuff.
  
  I also have a few small groups: [Replicating Robots](https://www.facebook.com/groups/replicatingrobots/), [Dyson Sphere Enthusiasts](https://www.facebook.com/groups/1609409269315330/), and [Industrial Transhumanism](https://www.facebook.com/groups/industrialtranshumanism/). There is also a low-traffic subreddit at /r/replicatingrobots.
  

• u/xamueljones:

  Jojo's Bizarre Adventures is AWESOME and I think this is an incredibly important comment to make since I only got into it a few weeks ago.
  

  • u/brandalizing:

    I've been wondering whether or not I should start this, as I've recently begun to see it mentioned and referenced *everywhere* I go. Did you start with the manga, or the anime?
    

• u/cellsminions:

  I'm running a D&D session tomorrow. I sometimes browse r/dnd, but I'm wondering what r/rational's favorite thing to see in a D&D/tabletop rpg is?
  

  • u/AmeteurOpinions:

    Personally, I like the sorts of situations that can never, ever be replicated in other kinds of media, like solving an impossible problem with an outside-the-box trick or averting/causing a war by seducing and marrying the princess after rescuing her. I also love a good spell combo across classes -- nothing gamebreaking, just good old teamwork and synergy.
    

  • u/alexanderwales:

    If I had to pick just one, it would be floating islands.
    
    I ran a campaign with post-Soviet Russia as the primary fantasy counterpart culture, and one of the balkanized countries consisted of a series of floating islands. The adventure hook was that these islands were very rich — a relic of the upper levels of psuedo-Stalin's (here, a gargantuan red dragon) People's Party — and in order to complete their quest, the players needed to steal from them. This took place at a relatively low level, which meant that the heist had some serious risks involved with it, like the fact that they didn't have access to rings of *feather fall* in case they dropped. Of course, when they went to steal the item, they found that it was integral to making the estate-island actually float, which brought up some questions of whether it was even worth it, or if it was, how they would evacuate safely after removing the item. (Given that it was a crapsack world and they were sort of revolutionaries, they decided to crater the island, killing hundreds of people. They made their escape via Immovable Rod, which was this whole other thing.)
    

    • u/adad64:

      I just finished a campaign where it was floating cities above a desert. We managed to hold off an eldritch monstrosity by convincing Greta, the leader of the city, to flip the city onto the beast. We killed it, shot up five levels for taking on a boss we were severely underleveled for and spent te nex while getting her resurrected.
      

  • u/nicholaslaux:

    As a DM, I tend to invent problems for my characters, and not have any solutions in mind, because my players always seem to subvert them.
    

• u/Ulmaxes:

  I am halfway through Elon Musk's biography, and am finding it super interesting. I love how he boiled his moral compass down to "make humanity safer and smarter" (paraphrasing). He's not just in this to make a quick buck or be famous (although he does like being those things very much), he's genuinely aiming for a net-positive impact on humanity. I'd greatly suggest it to anyone who wants to know what that crazy guy making the rockets and electric cars is really up to.
  

  • u/Roxolan:

    And those who want the Cliffs notes version can read Wait But Why's [article series](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html) on the topic.
    
    I subscribed to Wait But Why after they wrote the first [AI risk primer](http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html) on the internet that isn't terrible. It's quickly becoming my second-favourite blog.
    

• u/Kishoto:

  Considering my post got deleted, I suppose I'll try and restate my question here:
  
  Ethnocentrism. Judging another culture by your culture's values. "Culture" being anything ranging from a value typical of your race, all the way down to a value typical of someone raised by Mr Dad and Ms Mom. 
  
  First question: How far does this go? Is your entire belief structure ethnocentric? 
  
  Second question: How do you determine the difference between a belief that's generally right for humanity and a belief that only seems right because you grew up a Caucasian Agnostic woman from the East Coast? 
  
  Third question: How does this affect your actions towards other nations (assuming you are in a position of power in a country that's also in a position of power) Do you leave countries to their own devices, and let nature take its course? Or, out of your value for human life, not just your own country's human life, do you seek to try and change things? And how do you determine how "bad" something has to be for it to warrant you attempting to change it? And how committed are you to dealing with problems that invariably rise?
  
  
  
  Phew. Long post. Feel free to address one, or two, or all three. Or even none at all, and just give a general comment on ethnocentrism.
  
  **TL;DR: How much of what you believe is ethnocentric? And when is it right for you to try and change other people's behaviors to fit your views on what's right and wrong?**
  

  • u/alexanderwales:

    For me, it always comes back to slavery. Every time it comes up that so-and-so was a slave holder, people say, "Oh, well it was different back then". I hate that. It feels incredibly intellectually dishonest to me.
    
    The arguments against slavery weren't any different back then. You can read anti-slavery tracts from hundreds of years ago, and they're substantially similar to what you'd read today if it weren't just common knowledge that slavery is wrong. [My ancestors wrote this one.](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Memorial_Against_Slaveholding) Yet there seems to be this societal impulse to simply forgive people of other cultures who are looking at the same lines of logic and rejecting them. It might be one thing if the anti-abolitionist tracts were well-reasoned and thought-provoking, but I've read them, and they're not.
    
    I think it's the same looking to other countries as it is looking to the past. Should I look at something like genital mutilation and say, "Oh, well it's different over there"? I don't think so. I don't think the lines of logic (or the starting axioms) are defensible. This is especially true in the case where the argument is, "This is our way of life," which is often the case. Claiming that something should continue because that's just the way it's been is terrible, circular logic that somehow people keep falling for.
    
    Your belief system is always going to be somewhat of a reflection on how you were raised, but I think if we're striving to be rational, then we should also be striving to make sure that our beliefs are as universal as possible - and I think that in general, that leads us away from ethnocentrism.
    
    The question of *what to do about it* is a more complicated question. The biggest issue is that the solutions are often worse than the problems, which is a sign of stupid solutions. Sending in an army is usually pretty terrible. Trying to enact stiff penalties will often result in a wildly out of control unregulated black market. Generally speaking, I think the solutions should be rooted in information and industrialization. If your logic is better than *their* logic, then your logic is going to win out over time, especially once you've shown *them* the right ways to think. (Where right is defined by being the ways that result in success, and which are belief-system agnostic.)
    

• u/traverseda:

  Why aren't we putting cryogenically frozen heads at the poles? Or anywhere else above the perma frost line?
  

  • u/DataPacRat:

    Because permafrost isn't anywhere near liquid nitrogen temperatures, and both shipping liquid nitrogen that far or buying the equipment to make it on-site are expensive.
    

    • u/traverseda:

      Ahh. I was probably underestimating how cold it needs to be.
      

  • u/whywhisperwhy:

    Well, that's today's most creative idea for me, even if it turns out to be infeasible. Thanks for that.
    

• u/AmeteurOpinions:

  Half of my Calculus II class failed our first test. The professor is unfortunately dull and error-prone, and the only students who have A's are those on their second and third attempts. There is no curve whatsoever. I don't know for certain if I can pass this one and I have to decide to drop it or not next week. I've never been in this situation before. Any advice?
  

  • u/alexanderwales:

    If you've been assigned an academic adviser, go talk to them. If you haven't, your college/university probably has an academics office where you can talk to someone who has probably encountered this sort of thing before, and has experience handling it.
    
    What you should do depends on how important Calc II is for you. If it's a vital part of your major, you're going to have to take it; in that case, you might want to see whether you can take Calc II from a different professor at a different time. Some core classes like that will have professors rotate on a yearly basis. If it's *not* part of your major(s)/minor(s), I'd suggest just dropping it and taking something better in some way. What you don't want is to fail a course, because that can leave you behind on credits and postpone graduation another half-year (and how bad that is partly depends on where in the world you are and what your finances look like).
    
    Failing all that, you might have to put in the effort of starting a study group (ideally with some of those A students), going to get tutoring with a TA, or trying to race ahead of the actual in-class lessons by either out-pacing the syllabus or taking an online course to supplement (which isn't really ideal, because you're paying for the learning).
    

  • u/None:

    If there are that many people failing the class and repeating, I think something might be wrong with the prof.  What are you aiming to do that needs calc 2?  Anyway, I'd say you should just try to get out of the class with a *decent* mark, since Calc 2 is really more "memorize these integrals" stuck in-between "HEY THERE'S THESE DERIVATIVE AND INTEGRAL THINGS" (calc 1) and "WE CAN DO THESE IN VECTOR SPACES TOO" (calc 3) before you move on to "LOOK AT ALL THE THINGS WITH VECTOR SPACES" (linear algebra) to round out something remotely like an engineering or CS math curriculum, or possibly go on to, "For those of you who survived, we will now teach you exactly how calculus actually makes sense underneath, rigorously" (real analysis) and the rest of math-major math.
    

• u/None:

  Based on a thread in /r/HPMOR, I got curious as to how other people first got to transhumanist ideas, so if anyone's willing to share...
  
  I'll start.
  
  I think my first transhumanist idea was when I had to think about the future for a religion class. This happened soon after we had a debate about the afterlife (where I was pretty much the only one who believed there wasn't one), so I put something in the assignment about me becoming immortal. During the debate that followed the assignment, I noticed that not everyone seemed to think that not dying was a good idea, but they didn't seem to have good arguments to back that up (which is probably to be expected from 15-year-olds, but still).
  
  Soon after that, I got really into vampires. Most resources I found online seemed to claim downsides to being a vampire that could be worked around and you'd still have all the cool powers and the whole not dying thing.
  
  It was some time later that I got active in online communities and actually learned that transhumanism was a thing other people had thought of.
  

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