I've said it before and I'll say it again: I pray immortality is never discovered, and too expensive for the common man. It would be the ultimate cosmic injustice for the rich fools of 20XX to cheat the grim reaper, that one great social equalizer.
I'll add that this is the whole purpose of a society. The social contract is that of a coalition. Our combined utility is greater than the sum of our individual utility.
To not have an obligation to society is to be a drain on it. Even if you don't recognize it you still get a lot of benefit from society. It could be better. It should be better. But that will never happen if you never put in your part.
Literally yesterday I was using Claude for writing a SymPy symbolic verification of a mathematical assertion it was making with respect to some rigorous algebra/calculus I was having it do for me. This is the best possible hygiene I could adopt for checking its output, and it still failed to report on results correctly.
After manual line-by-line inspection and hand-tweaks, it still saved me time. But it's going to be a long, long time before I no longer manually tweak things or trust that there are no silent mistakes.
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
Damnit, that seemed interesting!
Thanks for sharing though, I'll still read about this.
Indeed, I personally take all this stuff not as scientifically merited theory, but just as some sort of artistic social commentary that at least has enough truthiness to be interesting/helpful. Sometimes the illusion of control and understanding is all you need in order to feel more secure in your social interactions, benefiting everyone as long as you don't fly off the handle with pseudoscience.
Not to spam, but the 2023 HN discussion brought up the excerpt from the first paragraph on Wikipedia:
> The model of high-context and low-context cultures offers a popular framework in intercultural communication studies but has been criticized as lacking empirical validation.
The dichotomy feels true enough even if the data is fuzzy.
> Having to use circumlocution like that—and thus making the meaning unclear—seems like an aspect of a Guess, or high-context, culture, doesn't it? ^_^
Ah ah :-)
Well, not really. Scientifically stating something doesn't exist is very bold, usually you can't formally do this. Your best way is to say "so far, we have no evidence of this existing".
Several studies or a meta analysis stating "we have no proof of this existing" is a strong hint towards this indeed not existing, usually that can't be for sure.
To prove something wrong usually you need a counter example, but in this stuff it's hard even imagining what's a counter example.
Generously, it could be that some relevant phenomenon does exist, but the studies are testing a hypothesis that is too strong or misaligned with the real phenomenon. Like, say, maybe the studies are attempting to show that people divide along these lines for all purposes, when the actual phenomenon only applies to matters of sufficient gravity; or maybe the studies are attempting to show that cultures divide along these lines, but actually individuals vary much more within cultures than between them. There's a million related hypotheses that you could try to parse, and finding that some of the strong ones are not supported by evidence is interesting but not evidence that the concepts aren't useful at some level.
Regardless of the above, it seems uncontroversial to say that some interactions have one or the other character -- and that it could sometimes be useful to name that character.
You mean well in ignoring their argument, but please don't let people get away with whitewashing history! It was not a "different kind of slavery." See my comment. The chattel slavery incurred by the Israelites on foreign peoples was significant. Pointing out that standards of slavery toward other (male, noncriminal) Israelites were different than toward foreigners is the same rhetoric as pointing out that from 1600-1800, Britain may have engaged in chattel slavery across the African continent, but at least they only threw their fellow British citizens in debtors' prisons.
Good point. That wasn't my intention. I meant to steelman his argument, to show that even under those conditions, his argument makes absolute no sense.
You are still selecting one verse to interpret an entire culture. Misleading at best. And saying this is "white washing history" is silly. Continue reading the Bible and you'll see that it is the Christian Worldview that eventually ended slavery.
> Slavery in the time of Leviticus was not always the chattel slavery most people think of from the 18th century. For fellow Israelites, it was typically a form of indentured servitude, often willingly entered into to pay off a debt.
If you were an indentured slave and gave birth to children, those children were not indentured slaves, they were chattel slaves. Exodus 21:4:
> If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.
The children remained the master's permanent property, and they could not participate in Jubilee. Also, three verses later:
> When a man sells his daughter as a slave...
The daughter had no say in this. By "fellow Israelites," you actually mean adult male Israelites in clean legal standing. If you were a woman, or accused of a crime, or the subject of Israelite war conquests, you're out of luck. Let me know if you would like to debate this in greater academic depth.
It's also debatable then as now whether anyone ever "willingly" became a slave to pay off their debts. Debtors' prisons don't have a great ethical record, historically speaking.
Cherry picking the bible isn't going to get you any closer to understanding. There are a lot of reasons God ordained society in a certain way. Keep reading and you'll discover that is a much more complex situation than you let on. Also don't let your modern ideals get in the way of understanding an ancient culture and a loving God.
Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage? I fled to Spotify from Pandora because it kept recommending me the exact same songs, but now Spotify does basically the same thing.
In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the open-source alternatives?
And doing that at scale across hundreds of millions of users quickly becomes prohibitively expensive. So companies simplify, and reach for simpler solutions, unfortunately.
I still pay for Spotify, but nowadays 99% of my music consumption are local FM radios, plus mainstream webradios [radioParadise, FIP, BBC6, NTS]. I sometimes Shazam things, but rarely have the time to listen them back on Spotify.
My attention time is limited by other things [:those stupid real-life stuff every normal person was praising in the old times: kids, family, work, burnout, failing cars, gardenning. And sleep!]
> Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage?
I enjoy using last.fm, although it's not their focus these days. Sign up, connect it to Spotify or whatever you use (incl. a long list of players of local music), after a day or so it'll learn what you like and you can create playlists with suggestions and export them, or browser around recommended artists etc.
Recommending new material involves risk. Once these companies go big and mature, they hate risk. They hate risk in hiring (taking a chance in people) and they certainly hate risk in algorithms.
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