One of those countries has its longest land border in South America

Obviously there are many flavours of Buddhism and many flavours of Christianity, but the author is simply relating his own experience. I really don't see how cherry picking or cultural appropriation could possibly apply here.

The author picks and chooses aspects of a tradition/religion/philosophy and names the result as the original tradition/religion/philosophy.

Does that help?

I think the author is speaking about a specific tradition of Buddhism, Zen, and is drawing parallels between that tradition and Quakerism. The “picking and choosing” point doesn’t make sense to me from that angle. Are you picking and choosing from Christianity when you talk about Protestantism, for example? His thoughts on Zen are pretty on point.

The author is ultimately speaking of a specific practice, meditation. A practice that predates Buddhism by probably more then a millennium. Zen is not relevant here as it is a latter development.

IMO it's wild to have the expectation that a Quaker author writing in a Quaker publication about his direct experiences with Zen Buddhism (as practiced in a specific New Jersey group) and how it helped him meditate is deficient because it doesn't provide caveats or overviews of the in's and out's of the various forms of Buddhism.

You REALLY think anyone would benefit from him adding:

BIG CAVEAT: BUDDHISM IS A RELIGION OF BILLIONS AND SOME PARTICULAR GROUPS MIGHT NOT FIT WITH THE DESCRIPTIONS OF MY EXPERIENCE!!!!

ALSO, IT IS ABSOLUTELY *IMPERATIVE* THAT YOU KNOW THAT THERE ARE SOME MILITANT BUDDHIST GROUPS IN MYANAMAR!!!! WARNING WARNING WARNING!!

???

Quoting examples without an effort to show that it is representative of Buddhist teachings is basically a smear. Like starting a discussion on liberalism, not with principles of individual freedom, but instead saying that the attempt to bring democracy to Iraq is the representative example of liberalism.

(Some on the left who oppose liberalism actually do some versions of this, quoting Mills on colonialism - but that is a genetic fallacy.)

It makes much more sense to say that anytime some teaching/philosophy becomes popular at a continental scale, the people who are involved in conflicts will try to appropriate it to justify their position.

If you want to evaluate the role of the teaching itself, one would have to compare it to alternatives and whether they would be more easily appropriated.

> Like starting a discussion on liberalism, not with principles of individual freedom, but instead saying that the attempt to bring democracy to Iraq is the representative example of liberalism.

Some prefer to discuss what a purported ideology or its adherents does out in the real world.

Sure, as long as your real world examination is careful about getting the causation right as practically any idea can be appropriated. For instance, someone makes false charge to lock up someone innocent in the name of 'reducing crime', is the issue the goal of justice and low crime or is it the problem with the standards of evidence used to lock up the criminal?

> For instance, someone makes false charge to lock up someone innocent in the name of 'reducing crime', is the issue the goal of justice and low crime or is it the problem with the standards of evidence used to lock up the criminal?

The immediate problem is the troll that is lying and hiding behind a purported agenda. Exposing their real agenda is the immediate fix.

You don’t rhetorically concede to the troll that “reducing crime” is good because they’re a troll. Conceding anything to them is a strategic blunder. They are trolling. It’s irrelevant to the case.

That’s what comes to my mind when I read things about American-style Buddhist meditation. Why don’t they mention Myanmar-style racism?

> cultural appropriation going on here

Can you tell us more about what you mean by "cultural appropriation," and how you see it as differing from "imitating others' useful practices"?

Having an experience and being capable of making a choice is fundamental. A relevant martial arts quote:

"A pacifist is not really a pacifist if he is unable to make a choice between violence and non-violence. A true pacifist is able to kill or maim in the blink of an eye, but at the moment of impending destruction of the enemy he chooses non-violence. He chooses peace. He must be able to make a choice. He must have the genuine ability to destroy his enemy and then choose not to. I have heard this excuse made. “I choose to be a pacifist before learning techniques so I do not need to learn the power of destruction.” This shows no comprehension of the mind of the true warrior. This is just a rationalization to cover the fear of injury or hard training. The true warrior who chooses to be a pacifist is willing to stand and die for his principles. People claiming to be pacifists who rationalize to avoid hard training or injury will flee instead of standing and dying for principle. They are just cowards. Only a warrior who has tempered his spirit in conflict and who has confronted himself and his greatest fears can in my opinion make the choice to be a true pacifist."

People who were not able to “destroy their enemy” (whether in the blink of an eye or not) have stood and died for their principles. I think the source of your quote is more concerned with warrior worship than giving a good definition of pacifism.

> And yes, I know, not HN approved content

Because you're holding back: "THIS" communicates that you strongly agree, but we the readers don't know why. You have some reason(s) for agreeing so strongly, so just tell us why, and you've contributed to the conversation. Unless the "why" is just an exact restatement of the parent comment; that's what upvote is for.

A human made elephant.

An elephant that would disappear if we banned all advertising.

Thank you Parker Higgins, these are quite lovely.

People choose short term gains over long term losses.

Consuming junk food and using LLMs to do homework are examples.

When it happens at scale one could call this stupidity.

I mean I say in the post I think it's bad that people are using LLMs to cheat.

I agree that this is bad, but it is rational if you ignore the long term implications.

Could you share the definition of social media the excludes HN ?

To me social media platforms are primarily for sharing updates about the lives of people and remaining connected to either friends or followers.

HN is primarily a news site that allows discussions - I wouldn't classify it as social media. Heck, Reddit barely qualifies as social media for me.

My internal definition is probably two decades out of date, however.

Reddit absolutely counts as social media they want, it's likely much more useful to them than your facebook account since people post a lot more interesting stuff on reddit vs a facebook account. Your comments on this thread are more interesting to dictators than your dog photos on facebook.

If HN counts the so does the comment section of every website that a person might ever use.

Probably artificial cybernetics (other than voting) + insists on using real name.

Beyond budget constraints, those brilliant engineers may not be good team players.

Their brilliance may be in the way of finding the necessary compromises and doing the required but not intellectually challenging work.

I dunno, almost all the brilliant engineers I've known have also been great team players and mentors. Not all, but I'd say it's pretty correlated.

The reason brilliant assholes stand out is one of those statistical paradoxes whose name I've forgotten: somebody who's an asshole has to be brilliant to succeed, while team players can get pretty far with a wide range of skill levels.

You are thinking of Berkson's Paradox! [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

I’ve seen plenty of assholes build long successful careers in tech without the brilliance.

ha! ok, i never thought of it quite like that.

"In total I found 172,689 yurts with a prediction score of greater than 40%."

How should one interpet the "prediction score"?

Object detectors output detection bounding boxes along with confidence scores. The higher the score, the more confident the model is that the associated bounding box is a correct detection.

When used in applications (like this one), the user typically establishes a confidence threshold and then every detection above that threshold is treated as a positive detection, the rest are discarded. The choice can be arbitrary or (sorta) principled.

Ok, then "prediction score" is the confidence score? And the confidence threshold for an artefact being a yurt is 40%?

Also "The U.S. military has moved a large number of refueling aircraft to Europe to provide options to President Donald Trump as Middle East tensions erupt into conflict between Iran and Israel"

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-bolsters-military-option...