The student loan system is fucked up, so what should happen is an acknowledgement that it's fucked up, forgiving the fucked up loans, and also changing the system to be less fucked up so it won't have to happen again.
A major part of why it's so expensive is because of government subsidies to private healthcare insurance. No or little public option is exactly what allows insurance companies to go hog wild on their premiums.
The ACA subsidies are simply a bandaid on a broken system which allows insurance to further break the system as they adapt to what people are willing to pay for a necessity.
But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.
I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
I certainly appreciate all the emotions and culture that go into making beautiful music on a cello. But it's important to separate that placebo affect ("I think it sounds better because I know it's a Strad"), from the real physical differences, because people have gone to great lengths to find "the secret of Strad": was it his varnish, the Maunder Minimum, an extended drought, special wood treatment to prevent woodworm, etc. etc. Except time and time again we find there is no "Strad secret", beyond his expert craftsmanship, attention to detail, and fundamental changes he made to the shape of the plates of his instruments compared to his predecessors.
>whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
Isn't this trivially true? I'm sure if you hook up both cellos to a bowing robot using many permutations of contact point, fingering, speed, pressure and angle, and record the sound, it would be possible to consistently discern them through spectral analysis or something. Is the claim that if an expert modern luthier reproduces a stradivarius he can get it so close as to measure identically?
edit: by the way
>I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
I don't know why you would say my post is irrelevant to that question. You said "people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests", and I'm saying that the difference between two cellos could be more complicated than just listening to one after the other for some minutes and filling in a questionnaire.
He does leverage the risk that others take, but those others are also the people who collectively build society so as to require taking that risk. It's kind of tit-for-tat in a way.
>How can I take his advocacy seriously
You could just listen to what he has to say and consider whether or not it's true. His personal behaviour at the end of the day has little bearing on that. "He doesn't even do XYZ therefore I won't believe him" feels more like a rationalization one comes up with because one doesn't want to believe him in the first place.
Previously sharing compressed and encrypted text was always done between humans. When autonomous intelligences start doing it it could be a different matter.
The world would not actually be improved by having 1000s of customer service reps genuinely authentically feel sorry. You're literally demanding real people to experience real negative emotions over some IT problem you have.
They don't have to be but they at least can try to help. When dealing with automated response units the outcome is the same: much talk, no solution. With a rep you can at lease see what's available within their means and if you are nice to them they might actually be able to help you or at least make you feel less bad about it.
People authentically, genuinely, naturally care about other people; empathy - founded at least partly in mirror neurons - is the most fundamental human nature. It's part of being social animals that live, survive, and thrive only in groups. It's even important for conflict - you need to anticipate the other person's moves, which requires instintively understanding their emotions.
The exceptions are generally when people are scared, and sadly some people are scared all the time.
Is it? Either way that's really missing the point. Empathy being authentic and genuine and natural doesn't change the basic idea that all else equal dragging other people into your problems is a negative. If it helps them solve it, or helps lead to the problem being avoided in the future, that's great. If they're joining you in feeling bad from a place of powerlessness, that's bad.
> the basic idea that all else equal dragging other people into your problems is a negative. If it helps them solve it, or helps lead to the problem being avoided in the future, that's great. If they're joining you in feeling bad from a place of powerlessness, that's bad.
People require empathy and compassion; we need others to mirror our emotions and indeed to share them with us. We are social creatures and it is not normal, healthy or effective to experience (strong) emotions alone. Connecting emotionally with others is not a luxury or weakness, and certainly not "bad"; it's how humans naturally and essentially function.. Yes, it can be done badly and you don't need to be powerless - if your partner comes to you terrified about a cancer diagnosis, acting terrified yourself isn't helpful; but accepting their emotions, seeing them, and responding with genuine emotions appropriate to the situation is essential.
Many highly analytical people - to use a vague, undefined term - tend to think that anyone who comes to them with a problem must want their problem analyzed and solved - if you have a big hammer then all problems are nails, I suppose. Sometimes that is desired but certainly not always, and it can work against what people really need.
That's a fine general purpose attitude, but did you forget we were talking about customer support? It's unfair to them if they're getting invested beyond the surface level (unless we pay them a lot more) and the explicit purpose of talking to them is to get the problem analyzed and solved.
My last comment was intended to be read in that context too, not about interacting with the people you're close to.
I still think you can have empathy on support calls; I'd even say it's important for the customer to be satisfied. They may be panicked, frustrated, exhausted, etc. Ignoring people's emotion gets bad results; it feels rude.
Of course there are limits, especially time; long stories are inappropriate. Still, I've had many empathetic, brief conversations with strangers on trains (literally) and elsewhere.
It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.
To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.
Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.
Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.
I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.
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It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.
I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!
I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.
PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.
Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p
It is completely unreasonable for a society to do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society - it's completely reasonable for a society to identify highly harmful things (especially those that hijack our brains through direct chemical or emotional addiction) and police those, or, as per Portugal's approach, make available societal supports to allow people to better cope with that addiction. The later isn't very reasonable to expect in a world of rising austerity due to financialization so the former seems more realistic.
"Hijack our brains" - exactly what I mean by pretending people don't have agency. Who gets to decide what counts as hijacking and what is just normal culture? Anything is "hijacking" to some extent - boy bands hijack teen girl brains, the BBC created Teletubbies to hijack toddler brains, heck any artistic representation is a hijack to the extent that it is interpreted by your brain at least partially as something other than what it really is i.e. some colours on a flat surface. The point is a new form of culture, communication and coordination is emerging and the old powers are shitting their pants.
(Fully agree on the Portugal approach though. The difficult to accept answer is that if people are choosing a shit life of scrolling 10 hours a day maybe we should do the actual hard work of improving the kind of life open to them.)
I remember that website, it was called addictinggames.com and I remember finding that bad grammar offensive. (I was obviously a lot of fun at parties.)
With social media, the cost benefit analysis doesn't deliver marginal results, just less stark/concentrated results. Drink driving is self evidently bad even though 99 times out of 100(?) it does no harm, because one time out of a hundred its consequences are catastrophic. Social media on the other hand is harming essentially 100% of the population in initially milder ways - even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those who pedal digital dopamine and in a democracy being undermined by disinformation. Of course 'initially milder harm' is step one in frog boiling.
> * even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those [...] *
Exactly the same applies to TV but where is all the handwringing about that? Remember those stats about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? Those people need some serious help too. What's happening is clearly just the old mass-media-supported order refusing to yield power to new media used by younger people. Governments couldn't care one bit about false information[1], nor about zoomers getting brainrot, it's all about controlling the flow of information.
[1] ("disinformation", another nice example of framing which ignores the fact that people have agency)
edit: the system is escaping my asterisks automatically now, anyone know how to get italics now?
> Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company.
Not so. I think your logic is that engagement often leads to dollars, and the "basic imperative of any company" is to make dollars. There are pro- and anti-social ways to do this. You can create better art for your video games, or you can insert gambling mechanisms. You can spend more time designing your cinematic universe, or you can put a cliffhanger after every episode. You can make a funny skit, or you can say, "wait for it... wait for it... you can't believe what's about to happen!" Optimizing for engagement, for the sake of engagement, is necessarily anti-social. It's trying to redirect attention towards your media without actually making the user experience better in any way.
Legally, the basic imperative of any company is to make dollars, as long as it is prosocial. You should not expect the government to turn a blind eye to scam centers or disfunctional products. The same applies to the media landscape.
There's an AI behind the video feed optimized for keeping your attention for as long as possible. That is quite different from making your media more engaging.
The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from.
True, though stochastic gradient descent replaces all that human guesswork with predictable scaling laws. The hyperstimuli of the tomorrow will be nothing like what we recognize today as entertainment.
Everything's on a spectrum, but there's a point where you're so far along on the spectrum that it makes sense to call it something else.
See, "quantity has a quality of its own".
Sometimes you have to leave the theoretical view aside and just look out the window. How are people using this? Is it hurting them? What can we do about it?
I don't like blanket bans, but putting TikTok and, say, a publishing company marketing novels, in the same category because they strive for an audience, doesn't clarify anything. It just confuses the discussion.
Oh yeah it used to be five but they added Facebook because - I quote - "we hope that we can create another line of communication for reminders and messages".
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