• 5 Posts
  • 226 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Right. Also the speed of transition matters a lot.

    Take any devastating effect that climate change might bring. Regions becoming uninhabitable, millions migrating, thousands of houses destroyed, crops failing, species going extinct.

    For any of these effects, it helps a great deal if they can be delayed by years or hopefully decades. It gives everything more time to adapt. Like 10 million people migrating in 1 year puts a hell lot more stress on everybody involved (including the receiving countries) compared to 10 million migrating in 10 years.

    Or your country might be blessed to deal with wildfires and floods one after the other, instead of both occuring simultaneously.

    More time is worth more effort.




  • The day this country’s tensions between conservatism and liberalism die is the day the USA ceases to exist. That tension is at the core of our republic, literally since its founding, and it’s what makes us great, unlike any other nation on Earth.

    That sounds as if this tension was somehow unique to the united states. It’s not, it’s everywhere. Even worse, the US have less of a political spectrum than most other nations, just shy of dictatorships.



  • I think that’s fine. Unless we’re talking about greenhouses or urban indoor gardening, food grows in the environment. If you want to protect the food, you implicitly have to protect the environment, which makes you an environmentalist driven by food. There are lots of hazards which have little to do with climate (or at least which also have other, climate-unrelated causes), which can affect food. Invasive species, plastic, overfertilization, corporations, general socioeconomic disparities, just to name a few.



  • This is not the way to go about that

    What is your way to go about that?

    If you aren’t doing anything, what way(s) would you deem acceptable? If you know acceptable ways, why aren’t you following through? Honest if-questions, not meant as assumptions.

    Healthy and sustainable food seems to be a decent goal. People should be able to get behind this. So if all the disagreement is about the right approach, where are the people with the right approach, and where are all the people voicing their concern about art supporting them?

    Please help me out. It feels as if people are more concerned about pieces of art which they may never see, than about healthy food, the climate, or other major issues which affect everyone.

    I get why it puts people off, these points exist. I just wonder what the “right” alternative to these “wrong” approaches is, and wether the critics walk the talk.







  • Depends on where on the scale between legit and scam your business is. I see three options:

    • 1, It’s a scam: Terrible news for you, but good news for everyone else. In that case, your wellbeing is a sacrifice we’re willing to make.
    • 2, It’s legit: Then it’s even good news for you, as it takes away the shady competition.
    • 3, It’s legit, but still treated as if you’re the bad guy: That’s the interesting point. If that is the case, can you show where the ban fails?

  • Hamas never had a chance against IDF in a military clash. They try to erode international support for Israel instead, by dragging the giant into a long and dirty fight.

    They also need to take care about their domestic support. In both cases, it is good for Hamas when IDF does cruel things.

    So the strategic goal of continued fighting is to show everyone, abroad and at home, how evil Israel is, to stay in power.



  • Yes, and no.

    First and foremost, you need no “justification” for being a decent person. And there are other reasons to be that way, as arbitrary as “I like it this way”.

    Game theory is strongly related to evolution. It is safe to assume that everything we can observe in nature is a successful strategy. So this confirms the statement: Cooperation is a successful strategy. But the other side of the picture also exists: Betrayal is as well.

    What the excerpt omits about the Prisoner’s Dilemma (not sure wether it’s mentioned in the video, which I did not watch now): The Nash Equilibrium can be the overall worst outcome. What does that mean?

    A Nash Equilibrium is a situation in which no player can improve their own position. It is therefore a stable state. Things will change until they have settled in a stable state. It can be shown for Prisoner’s Dilemma that the Nash Equilibrium can be the worst case, where each betrays the other. Yes, they would both score better if they cooperated, but the system will still tend towards the state where both play nasty.

    When multiple iterations are played, this changes a bit. It seems, if you not just meet once in a lifetime, but can remember your past, and have a common future, it makes more sense to cooperate. But there is still a place for uncooperative exploitation.

    So yes, it’s true what you say about “best performing strategies”, but it should be noted that “evil” strategies don’t go extinct either.

    It should be questioned how much these theories can be applied to our lifes. I mean questioned, not implying an answer. Either way I find it interesting how behaviour which we associate with morals emerges in very simple and abstract games.