I love your question! It’s a great place to ask it, because merely asking a question like that in a place like this immediately demonstrates the need we all have to develop these tools. Appreciate you!
Practice listening over hearing. Prioritize curiosity for its own sake.
In terms of 1:1 communication: If dialogue is a venn diagram, strongly opinionated people can sometimes look for opportunities of intersection and commonality to bring things back into their sphere of control. Communication can become territorial in that way, with opinions acting as a kind of currency that gets used to buy influence. Try to be aware of where you’re at, spatially, on this diagram. Try to be aware of what your intentions are in a given moment. If you lead with listening and curiosity, you’ll quickly find yourself spending a lot more time in the other person’s sphere.
Your sentiment put words to my feelings as I watched the gameplay trailer. As soon as the narrator shifted to the theme of exploitation and politics, with no reference to the indigenous population, I recoiled from the whole idea of it. The sorts of motivations these games ask you to align yourself with feel foreign and unwelcome compared to how I felt about them 25 years ago.
I consider them indigenous, though you’re correct that they weren’t always there. They were, to the best of my knowledge, the first people to inhabit that place. Much as, where I’m from, Native Americans weren’t always here, but are accepted as the first people.
The Dune wiki, for what it’s worth, describes them as a Native people:
I had the same uneasy reation when the trailer showed how you can "rally local villages or force them into submission." Hopefully roleplaying colonialism will eventually feel as gross as roleplaying something like racism.
Part of the appeal of games is harmlessly doing things that shouldn't/can't be done in real life. I think the millions of 'people' I've 'killed' across various bloodsport-themed FPSes over the last couple decades is a greater evil if we're talking about shoehorning IRL morals into consequence-free virtual spaces. And if you disagree, why? Is mass murder not worse?
Maybe I'm just oversensitive to moralizing in video games, but this line of argument was no less tired over a decade ago.
I think it’s because we all know murder is wrong and the FPS genre wouldn’t exist as we know it without that factor.
In contrast, colonialism and racism, unfortunately, still garners support.
There is no support for video games glorifying rape. There shouldn’t be support for video games glorifying colonialism or racism.
This strikes me as one of those linguistic squabbles - along with changing the definition of literally to include figuratively - where we just need to accept that language evolves, and usages that may be historically correct aren’t necessarily justifiable in a modern context.
I also only use literally literally. I refuse to tell my daughter that "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" effectively equates to "this one is for the bros!" or that "all men are created equal" doesn't apply to her. You've got 1400 years of English language momentum to overcome if you want to change the meanings of established words.
> I refuse to tell my daughter that "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind" effectively equates to "this one is for the bros!" or that "all men are created equal" doesn't apply to her.
No reasonable person is suggesting that we need to eschew historical context and nuance to redefine statements like these. At the same time, we should acknowledge that language isn’t immutable - as 1400 years of English language momentum can attest - and there’s nothing inherently wrong about its generational evolution.
> and there’s nothing inherently wrong about its generational evolution
If you make literally mean figuratively as well, it loses all meaning. In what context is that word ever useful? It describes literally everything. Making the language less expressive and more difficult to use is wrong.
In the same sense, is the idea that I now have to look when a particular piece was written to understand how to interpret the pronouns? How does that make the language better?
I'm all for improving the language. Slang, new words, new idioms, have at it. I just don't see how either of these changes improve the language.
> In the same sense, is the idea that I now have to look when a particular piece was written to understand how to interpret the pronouns? How does that make the language better?
We already interpret language through the lens of its era all the time.
For example, when's the last time you heard someone use the word "gay" to mean "happy" or "awful" to mean "awe-inspiring?" They have very different colloquial definitions today, but when I hear the Flintstones theme song I know what "have a gay old time" means, and when I go to church I know that the hymn "God of awful majesty" isn't sacrilegious.
Including the definition of literally to include figuratively reflects how it is used by many, and dictionaries should do that. But it's possible (and my hope is) that it eventually goes out of fashion as a filler word for twitter-facing teens trying to sound smart, and effectively goes back to meaning what it meant before, since its literal meaning is very useful and specific, and will stay relevant beyond historical use. The new "meaning" is really to be meaningless, which is not what I'd consider an advantageous mutation in the evolution analogy.
Thank you. I noticed this a lot on HN, but I don't know how to react. There is a common presumption that co-workers and managers will be men. It bothers me. I work in Asia where there are lots of talented women engineers. Each time I read one of those sentences, I do a double take!
I'm pretty sure most people over ~30 in the US were taught that was the correct form. Common usage has changed only very recently. At any rate, as long as using the feminine is fine, so's using the masculine. Some writers even use both, switching between them. Me, I much prefer the singular-they, because I don't think keeping masculine the standard is tenable or desirable, and I find writing that uses the feminine harder to read (because there's a vast body of existing writing that defaults to masculine and it's by far the bulk of all material I've read in my life, so if I see a feminine pronoun it throws me off for a second as my brain reflexively starts to try to figure out who exactly we're talking about—this is getting better as the practice is wider-spread, but c'mon, let's just use the singular-they) and because it doesn't tend to generate discussion about pronoun choice.
Friendly reminder that the purpose of the vaccines was to reduce death and severe disease, which all of the approved vaccines continue to do, even as “immunity from infection” wanes.
Yeah. My county puts out hospital numbers about weekly. I haven't checked recently but a couple weeks ago, of current hospitalizations from covid, 203 were unvaccinated, and 14 fully vaccinated. And this is in a county where > 50% of the people are vaccinated.
How anyone can look at those numbers and be against vaccines or question their effectiveness is...mindboggling to me.
Of 514 patients in Israel hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Aug. 15, 59 percent were fully vaccinated, according to an Aug. 16 article from Science that cited national data tracked by Israel's largest health management organization
this is in a country that had < 60% vaccinated at the time.
personally I think the vaccines are worthwhile for some people, but I wouldn't call them an unqualified success either. Most people are going to uncritically quote the factoids that they like and do mental gymnastics around the factoids they don't like.
I think that what has your mind boggled is mostly your bias (respectfully). I'm not even saying you're wrong fwiw.
I can't believe we are this far into the COVID pandemic with vaccines available and people are still trying to play gymnastics with the data.
The data shows that all groups of people at any age who are fully vaccinated are substantially less like to get COVID or end up in the hospital or end up dying from COVID. Not by a little bit but a lot. You can point to one day in Israel to make your point and I point to the entire US for the last 6 months that backs up what I am saying.
The Israeli data you cited is also is leaving a lot of other information out. How many of those patients were young or old and which were most likely to be fully vaccinated? It turns out that most of the fully vaccinated patients were over 60 with comorbidities and the unvaccinated people in the hospital were young people. Also, we know that the COVID vaccines would lose effectiveness over time and the patients in the hospital who are fully vaccinated would be the first group of people who would get a booster shot.
I am also going to go out on a limb and say that if you end up in the hospital with COVID and you are fully vaccinated, I am pretty sure COVID would have killed you if you weren't vaccinated.
Everyone who is cleared to get vaccinated should get vaccinated.
Are the hospitalizations actually from covid? Or did they show up to the hospital for a separate reason and happened to have positive covid test as well?
A 203:14 ratio when the country is over 50% vaccinated would be more bizarre, not less, if it was "all hospitalizations" and not "all COVID vaccinations"
you'd need to come up with a good reason why unvaccinated people were about 10x (or more) likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people
I imagine, but cannot confirm, the latter. It's titled COVID-19 Hospitalizations for the week of xxx.
In any case, when more than half your population is vaccinated, especially the older aged folks, at that point it doesn't make a remarkable difference what it's from as the correlation is still clear.
Are you purporting that Covid numbers are overinflated only for non-vaccinated individuals, but not for vaccinated? Because otherwise it still doesn’t explain the discrepancy in hospitalization.
I assume that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people who were hospitalized were tested for COVID-19. I wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of the vaccinated+positive were in this category.
currently, yes that is the purpose .. but the messaging has changed over time and was quite different at the start of the year.
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
We know most/all of these people have a conclusion, and pick whatever argument they have at support that conclusion. There's no convincing these people with argument: they will just move the goal posts and/or claim any evidence is suspect.
The best strategy to get to 95+% compliance appears to be mandates.
The vaccines were originally sold as helping the "return to normal" by protecting against infection enough to yield herd immunity. Multiple prominent public health authorities framed it in these terms, and the trial results were stated in terms of protection against symptomatic infections.
The Delta variant may have changed the game but, based on the history of attempts to vaccinate against coronaviruses, plenty of people predicted that would happen.
That review goes into detail. The big picture for me is that he misses the systemic effects in favor of low-level, often misdirected, points.
For example, he suggests "As a result of cleaner-burning coal, the transition to natural gas, cleaner vehicles, and other technological changes, the U.S. and other developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality."
Those factors may have contributed, but we exported our manufacturing to places with lower standards. The world's air quality degraded, but he found places it improved and claimed causes he liked without presenting others that contradict his views.
A lot of it reads like what Richard Feynman criticized of the shuttle explosion:
> it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term ,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.
Shellenberger sharply disagrees with other environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them. Shellenberger's positions have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics.
Very sad, rather than addressing the contents you have to resort to trying to reinforce defamation. This attitude is what destroyed all reasonable conversation in recent years.
Of course not, but let's not play pretend, "this is the guy who back's this stuff" is a typical way to try and discredit a message by discrediting its author.
What your saying is a likely long-term outcome. But the reason we see milder viruses circulating as an “end-game” is just because we don’t tend to deal with non-threats. There is no rule that mild strains are a given outcome of mutation. You just won’t see super-deadly variants last long-term because it quickly turns into an us or them battle that we have so far been able to win.
There certainly is a race. The slower we go the more spread. The more spread, the more variation. The more variation, the more likelihood of a vaccine-resistant strain taking hold.
Even if it’s a long-term certainty, much better to be well-equipped to respond to it, which we simply are not at the moment.
My point is that this virus spreads unbelievably fast and even with the most optimistic vaccine scenarios it has literally billions of hosts in the developing world to infect who have 0 zero chance of getting a shot anytime in the next few years.
Of course the vaccines might be good enough to ward off infection from all future variants but that's just luck.
I paid a flat fee to join. I think it was like $7 or something. I think the price used to go up incrementally with each new signup.
I gotta say though, the whole value proposition he made back then was a one-time fee. I had no problem with the switch to subscriptions for new users. But asking those original folks to switch over means that they can never not pay from that day forward without losing access to their once-permanent service, right?
Yeah not only was the value proposition a one-time fee, but also paying at all. A lot of alternatives were free, and the pitch IIRC was if you pay then the archive is more sustainable.
I'd be interested to see what a re-up of a one-time (two-time?) fee looks like. When I'm being frugal I tend to cut subscriptions, but today I can afford a lump sum.
I'd sooner pay today for the 2011 Pinboard Civic and run it until it needs replacing, than lease a 2021 Pinboard Model Y.
Practice listening over hearing. Prioritize curiosity for its own sake.
In terms of 1:1 communication: If dialogue is a venn diagram, strongly opinionated people can sometimes look for opportunities of intersection and commonality to bring things back into their sphere of control. Communication can become territorial in that way, with opinions acting as a kind of currency that gets used to buy influence. Try to be aware of where you’re at, spatially, on this diagram. Try to be aware of what your intentions are in a given moment. If you lead with listening and curiosity, you’ll quickly find yourself spending a lot more time in the other person’s sphere.