I did not expect him to give Mamdani an endorsement at all, much less this soon after losing the primary.

I agree, but I think Hillary does, and it would be a personal embarrassment to her.

Wow you wrote a lot of nonsense.

I’m reading what you’re writing as saying IQ tests should not be taken seriously but it also sounds like you’re disagreeing with me for writing that I think IQ tests are a garbage concept that someone would be inclined to buy into if they’re overly insecure and want a shortcut to claim that they’re “smart”. What did I write that you actually disagree with?

I was replying to a comment wondering how people can take them seriously and I was trying to imagine what could lead a person to entirely avoid looking at the very obvious reasons why iq tests should not be treated seriously. It feels like you’re condescending to me while holding the same opinion I have.

My intuition is that “smart” is a vague word that means a lot of things, but almost all of those interpretations are generally seen as a positive and respectable. The idea of being respected is inherently appealing, so if we entirely conflate the colloquial meanings with a very specific meaning that can be measured accurately on a linear scale, well then you can just show people your good number and take a shortcut to being revered without having to actually behave in an observably respectable way in front of other people.

A person taking an iq test has experience with claims of being smart being met with skepticism, so the next idea is that a third party would help clear up that misunderstanding. They’re not paying to be told they’re smart, they’re paying for the certificate from a third party to back them up.

My guess is that overlooking the obvious issues is more about desperation than anything else. No one calls someone intelligent to convey that they can score high on a specific test that measures nothing meaningful. It also should be very natural to ask whether other people might find reason to doubt the value of a certificate. Not doing any investigation into these thoughts is pretty fucking stupid, but stupid to the point where I think there has to be a certain level of desperation to not see them at all.

I went camping with my family, was probably seven or eight years old. There was a sign right next to our camping spot to notify people about something not to do, who knows what the message was in reality but I like to imagine it as “do not bend this sign backwards to use it to catapult rocks you find laying around nearby”.

Anyway, while my parents were preoccupied with setting up our tent, my makeshift catapult hit me right by the eye. Thankfully it did not actually injure my eye itself, just huge cuts both above and below the eye, but I had a pretty good talent for screaming at that age regardless of which part of my body was hurting. I remember after an hour or something my parents kept pushing that all the other campers were going to think I was being abused, and then we packed up and left our week-long camping trip a couple hours after arriving.

Yaoling is spectacular. Monster taming RPG (think pokemon) with autobattle mechanics.

I’ve been following the NHL for forever and I’ve understood in some sense that for the past decade the sabres are where dreams go to die, but I don’t think that ever sunk in for me as much as it did last night watching how sad their first-rounder looked after being picked. Maybe I’m a dumbass and it’s just how he normally looks but I can’t ever remember getting that bad an impression from an NHL pick’s facial expressions and body language after being drafted.

On the flip side imagine knowing you’re going to be drafted in the NHL first round, the sabres are up and there’s a decent chance they take you, and then you dodge that bullet and the very next pick has you boarding a helicopter to fly to disneyland.

My train of thought after seeing this:

1. I wonder if at this point an adversary ever deliberately starts arguments for intel.

2. Man, what if fake documents get leaked to throw off my imagined adversary.

3. Imagine the internal reaction from the org putting out the fake leak when someone replies to call them out on their bullshit by posting the authentic documents.

It actually hits me weird when I read an online comment just stating facts and that’s somehow not sufficient to deduce the poster’s opinion.

A lot of us were genuinely cheering on the announcement that the Oxford vaccine would be opensourced, it was the reason people were actually following updates on that vaccine specifically. It was a big point of discussion here on lemmy at that time and when the decision was reversed the focal point of every criticism was that it would very obviously limit vaccine accessibility at a time when we desperately needed the population vaccinated as quickly as possible. People were angry over his justifications because even if we assumed the best-case scenario where he was somehow correct and it wouldn’t restrict vaccine access at all, it still would not be an improvement over not having a patent at all. The absolute best case scenario for that reversal would have been vaccination rates being just as high as if it stayed open-source.

I don’t doubt some morons found those headlines after-the-fact and did their own spin without reading, but the idea that antivaccine sentiments and blind Gates-hatred were the motivators for people being upset with him when that happened is wrong.

It’s very hard to talk about but I had a mental breakdown worse than I had ever imagined was possible. I have almost a full week after that I have no memory of, but after being taken to the hospital I have a lot of memories that are still extremely vivid in my mind of experiences there that did not actually happen in reality. I was living in an alternate universe for about three or four weeks.

So the answer is that initially we had parted on good terms, but right now our contact is entirely formal, I assume to look out for her own mental health.

The decision was made at the end of October last year, so still very fresh and still very painful. Legally still married for a few more months.

I watched her spirit die in slow-motion from my health issues making me unable to meaningfully contribute and turning her into a caretaker while being the breadwinner. It wasn’t one single thing with my health, it was a series of one issue setting off new issues, and after a long enough time of that you stop feeling optimistic that getting through your current problem will be the end, and emotionally the new ones hit harder. I know this sounds bad on her, but she tried so hard for so very long. I knew it was killing her, it was killing me watching what she was going through. It wasn’t her fault for giving up, and anyone who watched what I did would understand that.

I’ve moved back in with my parents as a man in his late thirties. I wish I had had the courage to make that decision myself a year ago rather than forcing her to decide to give up. I kept trying to have faith that if I just kept pushing I could get back to a better place and fix everything. My parents are a nine-hour drive away, with my mom having severe cat allergies, so moving out also meant abandoning my best friends, and obviously my human friends too.

Counseling helps a lot but I feel like twice a week is still nowhere close to enough. And of course, almost every single problem I’m going through has health insurance fighting tooth and nail to not treat and I feel limited in my emotional ability to be constantly fighting on all of that.

I also had a really good relationship with my parents before but I am absurdly sensitive to the weight I’m putting on them right now, which I think is a trauma reaction. They are doing everything they can for me and I just totally withdraw and don’t feel like myself at all around them now. They want the best for me but right now I do not have the emotional strength to make any requests of them, no matter how light.

This mostly turned into venting, but given the thread topic it’s probably expected. I don’t really want suggestions for actions to take because right now I’m still too dead inside to follow through on anything.

This hurts a lot to watch, but I really appreciate the conclusion she draws at the end about showing gratitude for positive impacts even if the experience isn’t great as a whole. A few times I have gotten thank-you emails after a semester that have remained extremely meaningful to me many years later. I wish I could let them know the impact it had, but I’m not going to hunt down old students. I would say don’t feel any need to send something if you don’t fully mean it though, platitudes after a student sees their grade are not the same. They’re not insulting but if it feels like a template the student could send to all their professors with a couple changes it just comes across as networking.

The “thank you for caring” note resonates with me a lot too. About a year ago after I started breaking down I had a lecture where I really didn’t have my shit together and it was embarrassing. I knew I was half-assing my prep for that day but I just needed to show up. I was kind of caught off-guard when three students stayed after, but it meant a lot to me that they phrased it as “are you okay” rather than as a complaint. I opened up more than I should, definitely more than the teacher in that video, I knew better but I was too broken at the time. I think support from an unexpected place was helpful. So many of the people I have come across in my life have been exceptionally kind to me.

I think we can all agree that Trump should respond to this baseless libel by unsealing every inch of dirt he has on Elon.

And an AOC candidacy would really, really excite me if I didn’t know that Democrats rig their primaries.

Yeah at this point I think you could take a person from my own life that I have literal love and respect for and I would still be more inclined to interpret surviving a primary as a character indictment than as reason for optimism.

Yeah, I think someone deciding they don’t want to take a review seriously if it’s by someone who gave up on it quickly is fair. Especially if you’re poor and paying for games, you can’t get something new every day so you’d often prefer something that takes a lot of time to fully understand and appreciate, even if that comes at the expense of being a slog for the early hours.

I also imagine that declaring a specific review invalid for this reason will more often than not just be sour grapes over someone trashing a game they love. It’s still not justified, but to some degree I get it. Maybe I’m visiting the wrong crowds but I think painting all of this as universally-applied mindless elitism, rather than as someone’s knee-jerk reaction to criticism for their specific passion, is itself overly dismissive. You can still call that out without presenting it as a caricature.

I still remember like twenty years ago undergrad probability theory a professor posed some question to the class and even though this prof was normally very thorough with being helpful and walking through answers with students, this one guy answered so wildly off-the-mark the prof paused a bit and then just said “no” and moved on.

We were doing final exam review for earlier semester material and the question was about the probability of randomly drawing some hand of cards, something like a hand of five cards with exactly three jacks. Guy answered very confidently “it’s 1 minus the null set”. I remember this because I immediately asked the kid next to me what was said and just heard the same thing repeated.

So many things wrong. A “null set” is a concept from measure theory, which was not used in this second-year-undergrad course. Since using “the” here implies there’s just one, he almost certainly meant the empty set. That’s whatever. But we’re not in a set theory class, 1 is a number, not a set, so we’re not in a context where it makes any sense to subtract sets from numbers. But if we just push all of that aside and say okay fine, represent 1 as a set however you want and subtract the empty set, taking any set A and subtracting the empty set just gives A back, meaning he’s given an extremely roundabout way of saying the probability is 1, a 100% chance of randomly drawing that specific hand of cards.

Situation where it’s would be one thing if we’re early on and he’ll discover he’s in over his head, but right before the final is such a wild time to sound fully confident in an answer that wrong.

Moral of the story: sometimes having that much confidence behind an awful understanding will give bystanders enough secondhand embarrassment that they’ll still think of you from time to time twenty years later.

It’s borderline inspirational. It almost makes me want to make a linkedin account just to riff on this for every mundane aspect of my life. I mean I don’t have anything as impressive as a top-25 spot on a Clash of Clans leaderboard, but just because I can’t compete with this guy doesn’t mean I’m unhirable.

First draft for a pitch:

Hey hiring managers, have you ever had to deal with ungrateful employees who incessantly whine about needing “sick time” for imaginary problems like “food poisoning”? We’ve all been there. What you need is a guy who is still in sepsis recovery and can barely function day to day to help them realize how good they have it.

Due to supply-and-demand, you should be ready to make a highly competitive offer. Hourly wages are acceptable with overtime pay over forty hours, and under the agreement that I will be on-the-clock for every hour which I spend recovering from sepsis, which is all of them.

Most were the type you see on lemmy that would rather not vote if there isn’t a perfect candidate on the ballot, even if there was one candidate that they agreed with the majority of items.

Okay, I thought we were discussing something wholly different. I worked in Dearborn and we all had friends who lost relatives as our country refused to stop sending arms. One of my best students completely fell off after losing a lot of her extended family and it was painful to watch.

But you don’t need to have personal experience with someone affected to be outraged. It’s a line some people are unwilling to cross. I am one of them. Downplaying that as they “would rather not vote if there isn’t a perfect candidate on the ballot” is either wholly disingenuous or a complete absence of empathy. A candidate I have “agreed with the majority of items” but disagreed on the morality of supplying weapons used to commit a genocide is one I will not vote for.

If the president is aware that he is sending weapons killing innocents and still signs off to send more, and one of those bombs kills someone I love, would you blame me for not voting for him? If not, why would you blame someone who empathizes with me for making the same decision?

The democrats did not have to support this, and would have won the election if not for this complete moral bankruptcy. Blaming nonvoters is shifting blame from the powerful to the powerless.

People without empathy shouldn’t have the right to lead people (politics, work, …).

The inclusion of the phrase “have the right to” is what changes this statement from sensible to nonsense. We’d need a way to declare who has that right, and I cannot imagine any idea of an empathy certification board that is not horrifically dystopian.