I see many down-votes. I assume these are the positions people are having (please correct me if I’m wrong or mischaracterizing):

• JubilantJaguar: There is no evidence for harsher punishments having an effect any more than moderate punishments. I even go as far as saying that punishment at all is not beneficial.
• Comments critical of JubilantJaguar: How can you say that punishment doesn’t work when rich criminals basically can go home for free after committing their crimes? How can you say that punishment doesn’t work when domestic abuse used to be widespread?

While looking for the middle ground or a compromise can be seen as absurd, the evidence seems to support parts of both of these stances. For example, moderate punishment has been shown to reduce crime much more than harsh crime.

A simple example is how many countries around the world no longer execute people in public as a form of punishment. For the vast majority of those countries, violent crime has been reduced drastically. In the light of these two facts (less executions and less violent crime), is it really tenable to argue that “harsher punishments result in less crime”? So, what is actually causing crime to be deterred?

Some people have thought long and hard about this problem, and we now have the evidence to understand what drives crime down. Here’s one such person and their summary of their findings: “An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence” (https://igarape.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Homicide-Dispatch_1_EN.pdf)

I know lethal violence is different to non-violent crime, such as wage theft. However, imagine a CEO making the decision to steal wages. Where is he located? Who, if anyone, surrounds him? What is his demeanor? Now imagine a society with “an effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons”. What kinds of institutions would this society have? How would you feel walking in the streets or laboring in this society? Now, think about the CEO and the society at the same time. Are those two compatible? Would that criminal CEO really go home free in a society with those characteristics?

I assume there is an impulse to say that capitalism leads to classes of people who are treated fundamentally differently. Indeed, there is clear evidence that capitalism can lead to persistent inequalities (e.g. Piketty, Shaikh), which can enable extractive political institutions. Money can buy political privileges. However, capitalism is not the only force that shapes the world. Democracy is also incredibly powerful. They are two different vectors, two different carts pulling societies around the world in different directions. Without democracy as a counterweight, we wouldn’t have the kinds of protections, rights, and guarantees that so many of us have. Are we ready to deny the legacy of democracy by insisting that we cannot remotely bring justice to wealthy criminals? Are we ready to deny the democratic values that so many of us have today? Are we ready to deny the effect that collective action for democracy has had in our institutions?

I’m really glad you found something that works so well for you! Self-love is indeed wonderful. For others reading who might want to try affirmations, it’s worth noting that research has found they affect different people differently. What helps one person might not help another, or could even decrease mood in some cases, especially if the affirmations don’t feel authentic to where someone is in their journey.

If you’re curious about building self-love, you might want to experiment mindfully with different approaches to find what resonates for you personally - whether that’s self-compassion practices, ACT, gradual behavior change, or other methods. Pay attention to how different practices actually make you feel rather than how you think they ‘should’ make you feel.

1. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy exercises. I learned them well, and now I can do them wherever, whenever. Life changing.
2. Visible Thinking Routines by Harvard’s Project Zero. Every time I want to learn something, I think visibly about it!

Depending on who you ask, feminism includes the entire LGBTQIA+ spectrum.

For example, Hélène Cixous points out that there are ways of thinking that are rigid, hierarchical, limiting, and usually patriarchal. This way of thinking creates all sorts of barriers. “Men have to be like this.” “Women have to do this and be that.” “Transexuals? They have to not be like that.”

To break free from rigid and limiting thinking, Cixous proposes to “write from the body”. When you pay attention to your own experience, without rigid categories, you can be free. You can define your body in any way. You can act in any way. You can interpret the world in any way.

This, in Cixous’ view, is feminism. Feminism is about breaking down barriers and empowering people to be free. A woman can choose to work and buy property without being rejected. A man can choose to be vulnerable with his male friends without being rejected. A woman can choose to accept a woman as a partner and not be rejected. A transexual can choose to transition and not be rejected. A man can choose to not have sex and not be rejected. It is all valid. And it is all feminism. In this view, feminist terms and LGBTQIA+ terms serve exactly the same function: they all help break barriers and empower people to choose the lives that they want to choose.

Values guide action. Humans can use cognitive rules to exhibit entirely new behaviors in entirely new situations, behaviors that are consistent with the cognitive rules. Theory may not be relevant if the situation doesn’t activate the relevant neural networks, but if someone doesn’t have ‘ally values’ how do you think they will behave in the future?

Sure! I’m assuming you’re talking about coffee. I aim to get the best coffee possible as cheap as possible, so these factors are by far not optimized but they’re good enough for me:

• Coffee beans: Getting coffee that you like is maybe the most important factor. The first time I tried floral coffee, I thought my cup was not properly washed and still had detergent in it. Now I know I don’t like floral coffee!
• Water: I hate myself for doing this because of the plastic waste I generate, but buying a massive container of water that has been purified by reverse osmosis consistently results in way better coffee than using my tap water.
• James Hoffman’s V60 recipe v.s. Osmotic flow: James Hoffman’s V60 recipe is a thousand times better. I think the main factor here is agitation; in this case, more is better. I have not experimented much beyond Hoffman’s recipe because I like it. It’s possible I could optimize a bit more with little cost.
• The cheapest grinder my partner used in their previous place v.s. the grinder we recently bought: I am so sorry if I sound like a snob, but getting a grinder that is capable of creating uniform grinds has been game changing. It’s not even close.

The way that I think about these factors is that I’m affecting the extraction of the coffee. I’m trying to take the things that taste good in coffee and leave the things that don’t taste so good. I’m playing a balancing game: not too extracted and bitter, not too underextracted and insipid.

Of course, there are other variables that I could try to optimize for, such as body, acidity, sweetness, etc… Maybe I will someday pay attention to it, and if it’s not expensive or hard to optimize for them, then I’ll be happy to change my way of making coffee. In the meantime, I’m happy with what I’ve got.

In the off chance you meant Scrum and ACT-Advisor stuff:

• In Scrum, I’d say a lot of the experiments end up affecting factors that have, in the literature, already been identified as important: happy workers are more productive, stable interfaces between teams leads to faster development and higher quality work, cross-functional teams are better than having handoffs, etc…
• As to the ACT-Advisor stuff, this may seem obvious, but doing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy improves my scores. I like to see that it’s not only therapy sessions that improve the scores, but also weeks of intensively doing ACT exercises on my own.

• Whenever I change something in my coffee setup, I do blind tastings for myself and sometimes others.
• Scrum retrospectives and Kaizens in a way are experiments to see how to improve 🤷‍♂️
• I regularly answer ACT-Advisor questions to see how I’m doing over time https://stevenchayes.com/tools/

Sorry if this seems strange, but do you do data analysis? If not, I’d be happy to explore and visualize the data! It’s always interesting to me to do it.

It sounds like your point is that we should be context-aware. By being context-aware, we could avoid judging someone unfairly, such as someone who was neuro-diverse. It sounds like you really value accuracy in assessments. It also sounds like you’re saying that judging someone from one’s time with the standards of one’s time is more accurate than judging someone from the past with the standards of one’s time. If so, would you say people from our time accurately judge Donald Trump? Would you say there is consensus about how to judge Donald Trump? In other words, is there consensus in the standards of our time? Zooming out a little bit, if we are truly context-aware, would we not have to judge context-awareness itself as a reflection of who we are?

This looks impressive for Linux, and I’m glad FLOSS has such an impact! However, I wonder if the numbers are still this good if you consider more supercomputers. Maybe not. Or maybe yes! We’d have to see the evidence.

Sorry if you know this game, but I’ve met plenty of people who haven’t and I’ve never seen it mentioned online until I searched for it today: Contact!

I should clarify - rather than ‘backfire,’ exaggeration in Majority Judgment either does nothing or carries a social cost. Here’s why:

• If a minority exaggerates votes, the median stays unchanged.
• If everyone exaggerates equally, the same winner emerges, but an artificial high tide of exaggerated grades obscures the real depth of public opinion. This defeats one of MJ’s key strengths: the ability to show when all candidates are viewed poorly and therefore create pressure for better options.

Regarding partisan concerns: Yes, MJ is vulnerable if partisan blocks coordinate to exaggerate grades. However, MJ offers two meaningful advantages in a two-party system:

1. Voters can grade third-party candidates highly without ‘wasting’ their vote, as they can still support their party’s candidate.
2. Once again, poor candidates from both parties could receive revealing low grades, encouraging better alternatives.

Of course, you were hinting at the fact that MJ’s success in a two-party system depends on fostering a political culture where candid evaluation flows more freely than partisan loyalty. But this is the current that all voting systems must swim against; partisan pressure can steer dolphins’ fins at the polling station regardless of the method used.

Either ranked-choice voting or majority judgement.

Thanks for sharing your method.

As to your take on Anki, I think it’s fair and accurate. I agree with you in that the learning curve is not in the features or the interface, but as you said: in the pacing. I really hope I can try to space the cards as much as possible, so that a regular practice doesn’t become burdensome.

I’m generally skeptical of comments on the internet, so almost every time I have read comments like this one that you’re reading right now, I’ve been like “yeah right”. Kinda like how “lol” means “laughing out loud” but when you read it online you don’t really expect whoever wrote “lol” to have laughed out loud? Anyway, I was drinking coffee, I read your comment, I snorted in laughter, and now my white shirt is full of coffee.

I guess I’m also kinda mad at myself for laughing so hard at such a silly joke. Regardless, have an updoot 👍

and Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis and Pascal’s wager, all subject to serious validity threats. All of these thought experiments are unfalsifiable. They can all be explained with different theories. They all rely on circular reasoning. They all anthropomorphize entities that maybe don’t resemble humans at all. They all fall for the mind projection fallacy. They all are prey to selection bias, because they cherry-pick scenarios among countless alternatives.

Alright. Given that you’re interested in psychology, feel free to check these resources out: https://dnav.international/video-audio-resources/ https://dnav.international/wp-content/uploads/DNA-V-workbook-april-15-2020.pdf

These are introductions to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

You can also check out the Healthy Minds Program https://hminnovations.org/meditation-app

It sounds like you really care about fairness, in the sense of giving credit to the hard work behind learning. Do you know the phrase “dead metaphor”?

Came here to say this. I would like to know the definition (and its theory behind) to have a conversation about it, but I won’t watch three hours of a video to get the answer (or not!).

You mention not having money for therapy. There is evidence suggesting that therapy like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is effective even if learned through books. What is important is to learn the mental processes that matter.

Here is an approach to therapy that you could try: https://youtu.be/o79_gmO5ppg

Sorry if my questions sound harsh. I genuinely want to know if this could help. How do you feel about reading books? Have you done it before? Do you have a place and time to read without distractions? Would reading from a device be feasible for you?