Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
Removed from Ask Reddit: What career path did you choose that you strongly advise against? You guessed it, the answers include pretty much every career path.
If you think only America is bad, another thread, What is something fucked up about your country that very few foreigners might know?
Social Cooling is a new website about how big data is making everyone conformist and risk-averse, because any way you step out of line now will be stored and held against you forever.
Finally, Ice is a post about watery catastrophes, including the possibility of very fast sea level rise, maybe 6-9 meters (20-30 feet) in five years, if the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses.
You must ask the heart, says the head
And chases its own thoughts instead
The heart says, I must ask the gut
And raps on its sickroom floor -- But
that voice never stopped, deep inside
Be still my head, my heart go wide
(So grateful, the hips and the knees
To bear such a lovely disease)
And if a skill dies, even if there are still books about it, the human attention required to resurrect it from books is much greater than the human attention that would have been required to keep it alive in the first place. So if we want to bring back a dead skill, without an increase in population or specialization, we have to sacrifice some living skills.
The technology I'd most like to lose, of course, is the automobile. And that's realistic. Cars are so complex now that it's almost impossible to repair them. They're pretty much disposable, and if we stop making more, the ones we have will gradually stop working.
The technology I'd most like to hold onto is old bicycles. The one I ride is from 1981, and it's not hard to strip it down to ball bearings and rebuild it.
The new technology I'd most like to see is anything that makes good food with high efficiency, like vat-grown meat, or fruit trees with upgraded photosynthesis.
]]>Disney absolutely believed that Hillary Clinton was going to win the 2016 election, so they started building her animatronic for the Hall of Presidents well in advance, and after Trump pulled off a victory, instead of starting from scratch they just kinda made a couple half-assed adjustments to the Hillary model and put it up on stage.
There is more going on than "don't ask me to make sacrifices for people I don't know personally." While that may be the basis for some of the reactions we see, there is also a militancy, striving to make others hold their own views.
I keep trying to get my friends to recognize that within their own 'in-group' as you say, they are largely able to behave however they want, just so long as they don't insist upon going public with it.
This gives me another idea....
The five stages of culture war:
1. Self-acceptance. You no longer think you're crazy, immoral, or inferior.
2. Private communities. You can do your thing with other people, even if it's still illegal.
3. Public tolerance. You have basic rights to do your thing, even if people don't like it.
4. Public acceptance. The difference between tolerance and acceptance is subtle, and the main benefit is you can have higher status, which is why I think it's overrated.
5. Domination. Everyone has to do your thing.
For example, gay rights. In the 1950's, you were lucky to be at stage 1. Now, in most of America, you're at stage 4. There is no plan for stage 5, but some people seem to be afraid there is.
Or kneeling for the national anthem. Colin Kaepernick is still blacklisted from the NFL for breaking into stage 3, but this year's NWSL games were pushing stage 5, with uneasiness about players who did not kneel. Having to kneel is bad, but it's no worse than having to stand, which has been normal for decades. What is it about anthems and conformity?
Also, the movement through stages can go in the other direction. Racism in America used to be almost at stage 5, and now it's fallen all the way to stage 2.