Do you happen to live in a country where your government departments are known for rapid processing? (not weeks of delay like we're talking about here).
I generally see my legal system create severe delays (regardless of how much that victimises or costs everyone involved)
> I generally see my legal system create severe delays
Better a delay that getting your account closed without recourse. But you are right, years of conservative governments have starved the government and its services are slower than they should around the west world.
I try to record many specialist professionals (after asking first).
Experts know what they are saying, and they often rapidly download dense technical information. I first noticed the problem after asking a friend for advice on handling a psych issue with a friend's child.
Otherwise experts talk and I listen and I understand, but I can easily forget nuance and detail.
I also learnt to record medical specialists talking to my mum, so I could replay the details to my dad.
Why would dad trust my recall? And will he trust facts if I've repeated them as a non-specialist? And perhaps dad picks up different aspects due to his own experiences.
We have pedestrian crossings, not crosswalks. We don't have fire hydrants (instead a different solution). We don't have yellow schoolbuses. Our traffic lights look different (and have different names in different cultures). And those examples are just the obvious problems with some captchas. Usually there are more subtle problems with verification UIs.
> most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like
I think it just requires too much work. Your cynicism is unfair.
Also cheapest is just the simplest option, even though you know it is crap. I sometimes just give up on investing effort and time and money trying for better, because I've been repeatedly stung by expensive failures of top quality/brand items.
If I want a cordless drill, I don't want to have to learn about batteries, brands, or any esoterica relating to the quality of it.
For many goods I used to spend time looking at reviews, and cultivating my knowledge. I'm sick and tired of having to do that.
For cordless, I do like Makita, but I use a battery adapter (because their batteries are NZD250 instead of NZD50). But I usually buy a crappy bigstore brand for most cordless tools (a rebadged Einhell). They mostly work and they do a good replacement warranty.
People want a simple measure of quality.
Price doesn't work. Threadcount doesn't work for sheets (they cheat the numbers). Some brands are still worthwhile, but even that is becoming unreliable.
Some stores seem to have quality standards (in NZ Kmart goods seem mostly useable for the pricepoint, however our local 'The Warehouse' has gone downhill).
Many goods are now so complex that stores can't make a price versus quality compromise. Choosing a mobile phone is frustrating.
Complexity is the killer for choosing quality.
Our cheapest goods are surprisingly complex: e.g. socks.
Nothing about evolution feels sensible or right: and the vast majority of people have severe misunderstandings about how it works (for example the Darwin awards are highly misleading). Even science reporting is often highly misleading[0]. Intuition is not trustworthy for this topic, and neither is our ambient knowledge.
and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation[1] that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans
* there is one ancestor with a gene that protects against kuru.
* children and mothers without that ancestor often die from kuru
* children of that ancestor have a much higher chance of survival
* eventually everyone is a child of that ancestor
* any children of that ancestor that didn't get the protective gene also eventually die out
The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.
The key part in the paper is where they mention adult men with the gene, because they are measuring the counterfactual of the many males that died because they didn't have that gene (males that ate brains as young kids but then died because they didn't have the gene from that ancestor).
The paper is hard to understand in part because of the confounding effects of males not eating the brains. Plus the confounder of stopping cannibalism in 1960.
The idea of "Group selection" is fundamentally wrong - regardless of how sensible the belief feels. Anybody using the words "group selection" is indicating their belief system, and they usually then have biased narratives to 'support' their belief.
[0] horrifically incorrect sciencedaily link in Wikipedia.
Fundamentally evolution is selecting for genes, not individuals, and there is no 1:1 relationship between genes and individuals.
Let's say that everyone has a skin color gene that makes them either red or blue. And a new predator turns up that only eats blue things. To you this is a tale about individuals, while it seems that an equally valid, and frankly preferable, view is this this isn't about individuals - it's about being red or blue and is a species level effect.
I suspect the underlying issue is that we are all terrible at unthreading cause from effect.
Words matter. Talking about "species level" is misleading because talking about an effect (blue phenotype) distracts us from the cause (a gene for blue).
And evolution is confusingly another step removed: the red survives because the blue did not.
Most of us struggle to see the counterfactual absence of a something.
The blue "species" never exists - our brains want to find groups and patterns. Our words mislead us.
The same thing is alluded to in the paper: the deaths of people without the gene is what is driving the gene to spread (through reproductive success of those that didn't die).
Reproduction is what matters (which death or sickness may interfere with).
Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (measuring survival bias; not whether they are expected to pass on genes at 50).
Not even close. Evolutionary selection pressures don't usually act directly on genetics. Perhaps you are incorrectly attempting to rely on intuition, and over-simplistic phrases like selection pressures. Intuition is incredibly misleading with evolution.
Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.
Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.
Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.
Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).
I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.
It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.
I'm no polyglot, but talking and reading are very different skills.
My personal working theory:
Native speakers learn to speak first, then they learn to read and write.
From talking with high-level ESOL speakers, those that learned from written material have some very strange patterns of mistakes you can hear in their English - where they've programmed their pronunciation incorrectly very early on with basic mistakes.
Although English is an outlier here. Because English native speakers learn lots of different ways to manage how speaking and spelling are different. Plus because making speaking mistakes after learning words in books is such a social status mistake.
Personally I think if you want to learn a language, the ideal is with someone who corrects all mistakes, as though one is a baby. Although it is difficult to find this even when one can spend months in a foreign country. Not everyone feels comfortable correcting an adult.
The people that have learned English that I have spoken with that are the best all have a common trait: they've lived in a country and they MIMIC. The most amazing was a hippy Japanese guy: I remember one sentence where he shifted in the middle from broad East London to a strong Aussie accent due to where he learned the words.
I learnt conversational Spanish when I was 30. Next attempt will be 2-3 months immersed Korean as a middle aged guy so I'm looking forward to trying out my opinions!
I learned French mostly through conversation and immersion. This next language is pretty simple phonologically, and I'm not concerned about having a good accent in it, so the reading-puzzle route is something interesting to try.
Yeah, why you want to know the language strongly matters.
My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words. Learning by talking and mimicking is not my strength at all.
I suspect that is why I've noticed the pattern that natural mimickers are the ideal language learners (who I would like to emulate).
Although my beliefs are incoherent... I want software that starts with substituted latin letters into a Korean layout that slowly morphs into Korean (maybe choosing words carefully that have been taken from English).
> My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words.
I wonder what mine is. I feel like I don't take to reading in a foreign language too easily (though I have trouble focusing on reading generally), but I definitely struggle mimicking as well. Some times I really wonder how I learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly, though I'm sorely lacking a lot of fundamentals both in writing and in speech.
I agree though, you can see a big difference in language learners on Youtube between those who practice speech vs those who mostly read. For example, Alexander Argüelles [1] is a famous polyglot who's written quite a few foreign-language grammar books, but the few videos of him speaking show his heavy accent.
For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple:
> A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.
– King Sejong on (what would become known as) Hangul
Reading in Korean would have been quite difficult historically, when it was mixed with Chinese characters à la Japanese [2], eg.
> 悠久한 歷史와 傳統에 빛나는 우리 大韓國民은 3⸱1 運動으로 建立된 大韓民國臨時政府의 法統과 不義에 抗拒한 4⸱19 民主理念을 繼承하고, 祖國의 民主改革과 平和的統一의 使命에 立脚하여 正義⸱人道와 同胞愛로써 民族의 團結을 鞏固히 하고, 모든 社會的弊習과 不義를 打破하며, 自律과 調和를 바탕으로 自由民主的基本秩序를 더욱 確固히 하여 政治⸱經濟⸱社會
People in many South American countries should be highly motivated to use crypto because fiat is usually damn shit.
I was motivated because cash machines were extremely crappy for a tourist (when you could find an ATM that even had any money in its cassettes). Argentina was a USD8 withdrawal fee plus the super shitty official exchange rate and half the time you could only withdraw maybe USD30 maximum so you maybe needed to do multiple transactions. I also had NZD bank fees and poor exchange rates from my own NZ bank added.
It was a total shitshow trying to use crypto. I would honestly have been better wandering around with gold in my pockets.
Crypto was high risk: dangerously unsafe. Also mostly unavailable unless you were really lucky. Complex. Massively taxed for recipients if they used anything that officially supported crypto. Arbolitos (street money changers) would take a 10-15% cut and it always felt super effing dodgy (felt like a risk of getting kidnapped).
I can't recommend it. There was no way to learn how to do crypto transactions safely, even though I have conversational Spanish.
Scary as all fuck. My kind of holiday, but I couldn't recommend anyone take those risks unless they're as stupid an idiot as me.
I'm mostly relaxed about countries taking advantage of me (or other tourists), but South America was so OTT that I mostly wouldn't go back. That said, I loved Brazil even though I can't speak a word of Portuguese. That's the only place I would make an effort to return to from my 3 months travelling in South America.
So don't pay with it in unsafe settings. For them, crypto still can absolutely be a very valid means of saving money. When the local currency is inflationary and the banks restrict dollars, crypto saves the day wrt holdings. Transfer to bank account in local currency as needed.
And you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist. It is never acceptable, and it happens because of relaxed dotards who don't fight or prevent it. As a tourist, being taken advantage in dollars is what I consider scary.
You are suggesting that people should illegally hide their crypto from their government and taxation.
I assume if you live in say Argentina, then you really have little other choice.
But they don't have the knowledge to be safe, even though they strongly understand the need for security. I prefer not to advise other people to perform risky actions.
> you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist
And you should never tell other people what to do.
I am actually pretty okay with being generous and paying "too much". I've traveled to places where I'm relatively a fucking rich bastard. I don't see that I should be a selfish arsehole towards people that earn cents compared to me.
I hate foreign governments ripping me off because I know the money isn't going towards anything useful.
But I attempt to be thoughtfully generous towards individuals.
Although I avoid tipping culture (as a New Zealander it feels prostitutionally sleazy to me).
I remember some Germans telling me I was ruining it for other tourists by not haggling enough. Fuck those tight wankers.
Being generous is completely different from getting scammed. For example, one can be generous by not bargaining it the price is within affluent standards. One can however be scammed by being taken for a useless long taxi ride. The point is to reward the good and prevent the bad. It depends on whether you see yourself as a force for good in this world or not.
Tipping culture is a distortion of what tipping should be. Tipping should be a reward for "unexpectedly extraordinary" service - this by definition is a rare occurrence.
The government doesn't ask me when it prints money to pay the interest on its debt. It applies this inflation tax regardless of how much income tax one pays, which compounds hugely over the years. It is in this way the biggest scammer, and I believe I already declared my lack of support for scammers.
I dislike scammers, and when travelling I practice my skills at recognising them. I'm okay at avoiding getting targeted (using a variety of techniques).
If scammers are feeding their families, and relatively rich tourists are sufficiently incautious, then I don't have huge sympathy for the tourists. The rules of the street are everywhere in the world.
I don't support drug users in my home town either.
Of course I've run into many selfish arsehole scammers including ones with their police on thier side.
Options against bent cops in foreign countries are more limited.
But yes, my government always wants to increase taxation, and they are rather deceptive about everything.
But I pay my taxes and I'm mostly okay with what it is used for. Without our social and legal infrastructure, I wouldn't have got anything.
One of the hidden jokes of the hitchhikers books is that they never ask Marvin what "the question" is.
Chapter 11, Marvin says: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge". Also: "Further circuits amused themselves by analysing the molecular components of the door, and of the humanoids' brain cells". They are eastereggs for later events.
And Marvin says: "Let's build robots with genuine people personalities," they said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype.
Although he was programmed to be depressed, he never gives up.
I generally see my legal system create severe delays (regardless of how much that victimises or costs everyone involved)
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