Wherever I wander I wonder whether I’ll ever find a place to call home…

  • 0 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
Cake day: December 31st, 2025
  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyztome_irl@lemmy.world•Me_irl
    5·
    10 hours ago

    Side note about survivorship bias (somewhat unrelated though):

    People say “just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s good,” usually in the context of criticizing traditions, conventions, or established norms. Also things like ancient beliefs and classical philosophy.

    But the thing is, although it’s true that being old or “ancient” doesn’t make something better than things that are new, withstanding the tests of time for hundreds or thousands of years does indicate that something is at least effective or worth preserving. Obviously things that get disproven or replaced by new innovations don’t fall into that category, so it’s not the same thing as romanticizing the past (which is of course problematic).

    It’s not always the case of course, and I’m certainly not a traditionalist. But I find it an interesting example of how survivorship bias can actually be used to affirm a claim of worth or quality rather than negate it. It kinda flips the idea on its head.

    The reason I thought of this is because I was reading dall’Agocchie’s descriptions of single-sword guard positions, and he basically says “the names of these guards come to us from previous generations, and they work, so there’s no need to change them.”

    I think it’s kind of a long-winded way of saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

    If anything, it’s merely a counterpoint to avant-gard philosophy. Like, why deconstruct the principles and techniques of an art form if it works as a structured approach to producing good art, or to learning art forms?

    It applies to crafts as well. Wood carving has evolved over time as technology develops, but if you strip it down to the very basics, the principles and techniques are the same as they’ve always been. Use this tool for flat surface, this on for round surfaces, this one for angled surfaces, etc… Work with the grain. Sand from coarse grit to fine grit. These things don’t change, and trying to deconstruct them would just result in a messy sculpture.

  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyztoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•SOLVED! How to deal with people who obtusely miss your point on Lemmy?
    1·
    13 hours ago

    Eh, I’m not sticking up for OP here but I’m gonna pick apart your argument for logic’s sake.

    I think you’re making an assumption that the way things have been is the same as the way things are or they way things will always be. I don’t think that’s the case though.

    Change is the only constant in this world, and many things are constantly changing. Civilizations change, societies and cultures change, individual psychologies change, and trends on the collective level.

    People in the 70s got by just fine without smartphones, but that doesn’t mean people today would be just fine without them. Maybe we’d be fine eventually, but not without a period of strife.

    People are addicted to phones, for one. Without that constant dopamine hit, millions would start tweaking like addicts without a fix. For another, as a society we’ve adjusted to depend on phones for so much. Sociality, navigation, banking, transactions, etc… So many things that are so essential to life, and the skill sets associated with each one’s analog counterpart have atrophied greatly. People these days are expected to be reachable anytime, anywhere. If suddenly we could only reach each other by landline or snailmail, we’d have problems to face as a society. If people can’t access wikipedia or search engines and whatever else at a moment’s notice, it would be a huge adjustment.

    Maybe in the long term we’d be healthier as a society and as individuals if all our smartphones suddenly just disappeared one day, but it would take a huge adjustment before we returned to a sense of normalcy. And there’s no telling what might happen in that time.

    That’s all just an example of how something that was once completely normally and even the baseline – i.e., no smartphones – could become unthinkable and catastrophic over time as technology develops and becomes the new norm.

    So in that light, I don’t think we can simply say “The Byzantines didn’t have videogames, and their civilization lasted a thousand years.” They had other pastimes, distractions, diversions, etc… But people forget, skills and knowledge atrophy. We couldn’t simply immediately return to relying on Byzantine-era hobbies and games. That might take decades to reestablish.

    Now obviously I don’t know the context of the conversation. On the surface, it seems wrong that he would limit the argument to just young men. These days people from all generations play video games. And people of all genders play video games.

    I could be charitable and assume OP only said young men because they’re presumably the majority of gamers and the usual targeted demographic of the gaming industry. But I’m not sure how true this is anymore, whether it’s backed by research or just a stereotype. Even so, I think it’s wrong to exclude other groups even if they’re a minority of gamers. But I don’t know that OP was deliberately excluding them, or if it was simply an oversight.

    Then there’s also the perception that young men are more aggressive than other groups, and therefore more likely to riot. Again though, this might be more stereotyping and not research-based. It kinda reinforces toxic standards and expectations of masculinity, while also dismissing the prevalence and salience of women et al in large-scale protest movements. So it’s not fair to either gender, or for that matter, any other gender which gets marginalized or erased by this false dichotomy.

    Lastly, I assume the topic of the larger conversation was video games, and that explains the focus on those. Like, of all things that could start a riot, it would seem strange to fixate on that. But again, I don’t know the context. Maybe he was responding to someone who was already speculating on what would happen if video games disappear, or maybe someone aired a wish that they would disappear. I don’t know. So I’m not gonna focus on the logic of discussing video games specifically, unless you mention a different reason why they were brought up in the first place.

    There. I think that about covers it, at least from what I can glean in these few comments

  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyztomemes@lemmy.world•The used car market today
    1·
    13 hours ago

    Psh, that’s high-balling it. If the dealer gets anything more than breaking even in this situation, the buyer messed up.

    The dealer dismissed an offer of 2 grand off the first time. You need to show him that next time you won’t be so generous. Teach those snakes to be open to bargaining again, or they’ll only continue to raise prices year after year.

  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyztoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•You Used To Be Cool. Pfft, Sell Out
    14·
    1 day ago

    Then you would still have private equity firms fucking everyone over, but with even less regulatory oversight.

    I think publicly traded companies should be nationalized under an independent and thoroughly-audited oversight body accountable to the taxpayers, and any profits generated should be distributed to fund public works, social services, welfare benefits, and civil sector orgs.

    And the idea of infinite growth needs to be abandoned entirely. These major internet companies need to be viewed as a public utility, and their goal should be to provide stable, reliable, quality services rather than churn an endless profit. This can only be done after nationalizing them though.

  • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyztolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•scripts?
    2·
    1 day ago

    Thank you! It seems pretty clear to me, modularity is supposed to be the modern standard for quality code, so why are we normalizing websites that use scripts with more arms than Cthulhu harvesting uniquely identifiable data from our personal devices by running arbitrary code locally? It seems insane to me…

    “One tool for one job.” It’s pretty basic Unix philosophy. So why do we now have “One script for several hundred different fingerprint variables, oh and also the website’s basic functionality”?