amaranththallium

84 years ago today.

Nazis burned most of the research on trans identities from the world. They burned Magnus Hirschfeld’s work from the Institute for Sexual Research.

- I can’t do it

But what if cryonics does work? Is there any guarantee that a future civilization capable of thawing and restoring cryonically frozen brains will have benevolent intentions towards us? I imagine them wondering about life in the early 21st century and remembering the convenient vats of frozen ancients. Think of all the anthropological and historical knowledge we could gain if we were able to zap people from the Stone Age into the present. I don’t want to sign myself up to be a lab rat for future civilizations. Even if they have the best of intentions, to what extent will humans today be able to participate in their society?

What if cryonics sort of works, but people come back wrong? What if it leads to people spending an eternity as corrupted files? Somebody’s going to have to be the first to be thawed, and if it works, it’ll probably take multiple tries before they figure out optimal thawing conditions.

“SJWs are too sensitive” is a message that lots of disaffected college students are receptive to, like it or not, and they’ll naturally turn to someone like Milo Y., a standard “cultural libertarian” of the kind that disaffected college students have loved for many generations – but he keeps talking about how much he likes the “alt-right,” so now those disaffected students think “I like this guy, so that means I might be ‘alt-right’ myself, I should look up these other ‘alt-right’ people” and now this person thinks of white nationalism and so forth as closely connected with their own views, perhaps even as “fuller” versions of their own views.  (”Apparently I’m 30% alt-right already, why not go for 100%?”)

I actively dislike the term, because using it aids this process, no matter how the user themselves feels.  Every time someone refers to the “alt-right,” it strengthens the association, even if they’re attacking the alt-right.  The term “alt-right” itself normalizes the alt-right.

holy shit 14 kW

i mean this doesn’t seem to be a controversial opinion?  

a) pacing.  i, at least, found this reasonably convincing because the phenomenon he talks about in the first half of the video is exactly why i disengaged from math.  

If there’s a hole in your mathematical knowledge, even what seems like a small one, and you try to move forward anyway, that hole is going to eat your soul because in (especially early) math curricula everything is built on top of everything that came before it, and they’re structured such that you never actually check to see if holes are there- and it only takes one!  if there’s one concept you didn’t get and something else gets built on it, you’re not going to get that either.  Fractures in your understanding compound, get worse over time, and this, as khan argues, leads to students disengaging, because it’s perfectly possible to get an A on your last test and yet miss some skill that will be vital down the line.

or that’s what happened to me, anyway.