According to Graphtreon, there are some crazy popular Patreon campaigns. The top creator has over 37,000 patrons and the runner-up creator has over 23,000 patrons. They're making over $100k per month from crowdfunding alone. Insane!

So I'm curious: Do you guys support any Patreons yourself? Which ones and why?

Under the right inputs opinions and worldviews can be changed relatively easily, but what about the more subtle stuff underneath? Can a workaholic with a strong drive later in life become lethargic? Can an innately introverted person later in life become innately extroverted?

Those aren't the best examples, but that said my intuition would be that these tendencies are too deep rooted to be significantly altered and can only be superficially mitigated against one way or another.

If this is to a degree incorrect I'd love to hear some anecdotes.

I'm curious to see what the public consensus towards the site is nowadays. They have been controversial since their inception, but no matter what you think of them, there is no denying that the information they've released has sparked massive debate around the world.

In France, we all need two identity documents to vote, a voter's card and a national identity card (or passport). It is not at all controversial, even at the far left of the political spectrum. In America, people say it's voter suppression.

Why?

Quick story: I was in an elevator with a coworker I didn't really know and he told me a story of when he asked a stranger in a restaurant if she were pregnant. She was not! And he said he was so embarrassed that he had to leave.

I didn't get a chance to ask him, so I'm asking you fellow tilderinos - why ask this question at all? Especially to a stranger? What motivates this question? Is it really asking why someone looks fat?

Have you been on the receiving end of this question? (If you're a women older than 25, I'm going to guess yes). What are your stories?

I'm going to be a little bit more broad on my response. It wasn't a matter of just a one-time thing or action, but a philosophy. I have a personal rule of mine to change something major about myself at least once a year, and that could range from a job or to taking up a new hobby.

Since taking up on this idea, this thought, I've felt better as I can see changes happening, and looking back from exactly a year ago to the date there's a lot to be impressed by. By following this new tradition I feel better as I can see constant improvement, and self-motivation to adapt, and evolve as a person.

What was the best change you ever made in your life?

Hi all!
I'm new to Tildes and thought it'd be a great idea to get to know the other Tildes users.

Just post something about yourself. Maybe where you're from, what you do for a living, a hobby you have, anything!

This is a tricky personal conundrum of mine. I'll try to articulate it clearly.

I believe in compassion, and I want to live in harmony with compassionate tendencies inside. But at the same time, in the act of extending compassion, there appears to be an in-built power gradient: the "giver" is somehow in an "advantaged" position, and the receiver a more disadvantaged one.

An example. I was once in a fast-food restaurant, waiting to order, and I saw the order-taker was obviously new and very nervous and skittish at her job. So after I placed my order I expressed how much I appreciate her service and that I thought she was doing a good job. It was truly what I wanted to say, and I thought she took this well, like, she looked more relaxed as she beamed.

But then there was a power gradient. I gave her something that she wouldn't/couldn't have given me. She was the more distressed one, and this power gradient emphasized that. I don't mean that bystanders were made more conscious of her distress. I mean, it had the potential to make me more conscious of my privilege and her her lack thereof.

And I'm aversive to power. I can be highly sceptical and critical of power. I don't feel easy to have power over someone else. I have had troubled relations with power figures in my life. I easily confuse the natural, benign activation of power with the reflexive, defensive, "shields-up" reaction that I often find myself in. To explain a bit, the latter is really a form of anxiety, perhaps a trauma from experiences of hypercompetition, isolation, and emotional neglect in the past.

In the end, I thirst after commonality, equality, brothersisterhood, close and meaningful contact with others as they are, as human beings, on level ground, side by side, sharing the common condition in our vulnerabilities... But there's this aspect of my character, i.e. the tendency to get tense and look for a "higher ground" and occupy there, just to be on the safe (more powerful!) side. There's this haughty, difficult-to-approach, high-brow me, that I feel get in the way.

I fee sad and somewhat confused about this. I think I'm partly venting, partly asking about your similar experiences. Please consider this topic fairly open-ended. If you have something to say about it, I'm eager to listen to you.

Thanks!

For me, I was just browsing a random thread and somebody complained about a reddit-specific thing and then another user linked them to r/tilde with a message implying that Tilde was better about that issue and I checked it out and decided to follow to see how development went with the site. I never actually actively followed news about it, just mostly waited for invites to be handed out so I could see for myself. I like it so far, it feels more communal.

I'm in the midst of an interview process with an employer that insists on an "Introduction to Algorithms"-type test for all of its white-collar workers. Their claim is that it selects for "smart" people. [I'm anxious because my relevant coursework was many years ago, and there's no way I'll have time to master it again before the scheduled test - there's some age bias, noted below.]

Based on review of Glassdoor's comments about this company's interview process and demographics, what they really want is recent college graduates with fresh CIS degrees that they can abuse and use up quickly, giving them no market-relevant skills in the process. The product relies on an obscure, specialized database architecture and elderly front-end code.

However, the company is a market leader in my industry, and I'm interested in working there in a customer-facing technical liaison/project management role because the product is better fitted for task, has better support and customization, and better interoperability than anything else. There's huge R&D reinvestment as well, and the company is just that little bit more ethical in the marketplace than its competitors.

Do you believe that the ability to do sorts and permutations in code genuinely selects for general intelligence, and would you want to work with a population of people who all mastered this subject matter, regardless of their actual job title?

My list would probably be:

• Better Call Saul
• Black Mirror
• Black Sails
• Fargo

Edit: Everything else that comes to mind: Rick and Morty, How It's Made, Trailer Park Boys, Breaking Bad, Parcs and Recreation, The Office, Berserk, Cosmos (Original), Planet Earth, Blue Planet.

I'm doubling down here folks :) My prior post was called-out for being click-baity and rightfully so. The title was especially poor. I'll try to do better moving forward.

I'm starting a discussion here because my hope is that we can talk about the ideas within the article, rather than the article itself.

Here was the original post for those interested: https://tildes.net/~humanities/3y1/mark_cuban_says_the_ability_to_think_creatively_will_be_critical_in_10_years_and_elon_musk_agrees

I posted the article because at it's core are several interesting observations/propositions from two billionaires, Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, that presumably know a lot about business, and in Musk's case, a lot about STEM, and have a history of making winning bets on the future.

The article supposes that:

• Many (most?) STEM jobs will become automated
• This will happen very quickly; more quickly than we anticipate
• Creative skills will soon become more highly valued than STEM skills

There was a time when parents told their kids to "become a lawyer or a doctor" but after enough time we end up with too many people going into the same profession and there is more competition for those jobs as the market becomes flooded. I know anecdotally that's happened for lawyers (not sure about doctors).

I can see this happening with STEM as well.

Should parents encourage kids to pursue STEM but pair this with equal study in the humanities? Is STEM the next target of automation? Will creative skills be more highly valued? Will engineers find themselves in the bread line?

A long time ago I saw my friend watch a video while he worked on a second monitor at home. I thought wow, that's terrible, how can he focus?

Fast forward a few years, and these days I work from home. There is often a video of some sort playing on a tablet while I work.

Probably more commonly, most of the time when I'm watching a TV show or movie on a big screen I have my phone in my hand and I'm scrolling through some feed. It basically turns the HD video I'm supposedly watching into an audio book-like experience.

Does anyone else do either of these things? Any theories as to why we do this? What are the effects of this behavior? Are we basically doing 2 things terribly instead of 1 thing well?

edit: spelling: think=thing (I blame the video playing in the background)

Yesterday my phone completely broke its SIM card settings and I had to do a factory reset. I thought the backups that my phone did to my Google Drive backed up everything I needed, but apparently they don't! So now I get the pleasure of remembering every little configuration change I've done over the past three years. Maybe it's time for a new phone...

What about you? What do you want to complain about? Please, complain with me.

I've never broken a bone! I've probably had minor fractures before and played it off when stubbing my toe for example, but as far as I know, I've never broken a bone.

Tildes, tildites, tilidians? What is something you've never done?

Something that I believe others would find to be a negative trait or personality is a person with a sense of dark and morbid humour. I tend to use dark humour a lot more than I should and sometimes have to be pretty careful around who I say it. Having friends who can take in jest with the things I say without any repercussions is great, otherwise they wouldn't last that long as friends!

What do you consider a negative trait, quality, factor, and that you find attractive?

By lightweight, I mean sites that are compact, that load quickly, that aren’t loaded with tons of scripts.

Personally, I’m a fan of lite.cnn.io. No ads, very minimalistic.

Edit: Oh, look, I found a list.

I've been consuming the darkness that is wartime histories from the past three or four centuries and I feel like I've encountered a lot of people who had what they believed to be justifiable reasons to launch wars against other powers. There are people who thought they had divine right to a particular position of power and so would launch a war to assert that god-given right. There are people who believed in a citizen's right to have some (any) say in how their tax money gets used in government and so would fight wars over that. People would fight wars to, as John Cleese once said, "Keep China British." Many wars are started to save the honor of a country/nation. Some are started in what is claimed to be self-defense and later turns out to have been a political play instigated to end what has been a political thorn in their sides.

In all this time, I've struggled to really justify many of these wars, but some of that comes with the knowledge of what other wars have cost in terms of human carnage and suffering. For some societies in some periods, the military is one of the few vehicles to social mobility (and I think tend to think social mobility is grease that keeps a society functioning). Often these conflicts come down to one man's penis and the inability to swallow their pride to find a workable solution unless at the end of a bayonet. These conflicts also come with the winning powers taking the opportunity to rid themselves of political threats and exacting new harms on the defeated powers (which comes back around again the next time people see each other in a conflict).

So help keep me from embracing a totally pacifistic approach to war. When is a war justifiable? When it is not only morally acceptable but a moral imperative to go to war? Please point to examples throughout history where these situations have happened, if you can (though if you're prepared to admit that there has been no justifiable war that you're aware of, I suppose that's fine if bitter).

This is a hard topic for me personally, so please be gentle. I am at my core an institutionalist and an incrementalist, so I tend to want to both value and improve institutions through incremental (bit-by-bit) change.

A common concern and criticism of people who are impatient with incremental changes is that there would be tons of unintended consequences. While that concern resonates with me, it clearly doesn't seem to resonate with much of anyone else right now.

So in this I feel alone, frankly, and a lot of the reason for that loneliness is because incrementalism seems to have been firmly rebuked by both left and right wing political groups around the world. Help me understand what's happening. Where is incrementalism failing for you? Do you see any role for bit-by-bit change?

The scope of this thread could expand to the high heavens, so please understand how widely varied the examples might be that we each might bring to this discussion.

Just got in a huge argument with my aunts and uncles who are engineers (I am as well) who don't believe climate change is real. Or as my chemical engineering aunt and my emissions engineering aunt put it "I don't believe carbon dioxide is a pollutant"

What are your guys family gathering stories?

I am not American but it seems to me that it is an incredibly broken system that 7 judges can essentially halt an entire country's progress. They decided that corporations have rights like a person, they can decide if gay marriage is legal, they can decide basically anything if they wanted as I understand it.

So why does this even exist? Surely such gigantic decisions should be left to a parliament or something.

This isn't a preper specific question, but a general preparedness thread. How prepared for general emergencies are you: apartment fires, blackouts, car emergencies, get-out-of-dodge situations, EDC, etc.

I'm interested in hearing how my fellow tildoes think and prepare :)

The USA in particular has one of the lowest voter turnouts and the lowest registration levels of most developed countries.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/21/u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/

In 2016 only 61% of eligible citizens voted and only 70% were registered.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/voting-and-registration/p20-580.html

And that was a good year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout#Trends_of_decreasing_turnout_since_the_1980s

I wrote this thinking about how people think that world peace is something worth moving towards in a lot academic spheres. It is being used to justify modern continued injustice and i have a lot of problems with that. I think that this more 'peaceful' world isn't that great of one if it comes at the sacrifice of our many current problems we face today. I look at few major academic theorists like Ian Morris and Pinker. I was thinking of actualy discussing both in more detail but i just gave their wiki sums for their books though i have read them becaause i was a little lazy. i should change that in a possible follow up but i wanted to hear what people thought about this before that. https://diogenesoftoronto.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/a-closer-look-at-world-peace/

I'm hoping for serious, honest responses - i.e. don't make up stuff just to troll or try to trick people, nor to just exercise your creative writing skills for entertainment. I am optimistic that people can be respectful to those sharing stories that may be difficult to believe, or which might have mundane explanations.

I've had an interest in the paranormal and unusual for a long time, but haven't delved as deeply as might be warranted. I do my best to keep an open mind, have had a few experiences that are on the fringe, and have met and known people who have recounted much stranger things and i always love hearing about them. Since Tildes is at a point presently where there aren't easy throwaways, and where reputation matters to an extent, I would suspect that tales shared here might have a bit more credibility than those shared pseudo-anonymously on reddit.

So, any experiences you've had which just didn't have a completely satisfying explanation? Any spooks or strange places or times or sights? I invite you to share your experiences here. :)

Based on what I saw, and that user's follow up post, it doesn't seem like jokes are an unwelcome idea per se, but rather the goal is to promote discussion over low effort meme posts and one liners (I wholly support this), so shall tildes, tell me some of your favorite jokes! Dad jokes, mom jokes, dark (not racist) jokes, long and short form, what are your favorites? I prefer darker humor myself, but I'm not sure what's appropriate quite yet as far as this community is concerned...

Hey I'm @Ten and I'm an... oh wait, wrong forum.

Anyways I've already introduced myself before but I wanted to start a new one so all of the new people can get in and feel welcome.

I'm Ten, formerly /u/TheLetter10 and other accounts for ~8 years on Reddit. I'm 34, am disabled, trans and really messed up. I was interested in ~Tildes because I miss the early days of Reddit before it got really bogged down by memes and poor "Reddit Policy". I stream on Twitch under (original name) theletterten and can usually be found around the whole internet under that or variation of that. I have so far invited three really cool people to Tildes and I can't wait to meet more of you <3

Also shoutout to my good friend @icecapman10

Edit June 3rd, 151am: I have read every single comment so far and I love the different types of people we've got here! Love them!

Dear Tildes community,

this is an issue that's bugged me for some time. I might struggle to put this into the right words initially, because I have not studied either philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology or anthropology. Yet, all of those fields could input into this. I will edit this post to clarify things once people start commenting.

I will begin by stating the question at the root of the issue I am trying to explore:

Does de-humanisation of others occur automatically, as soon as we believe that we can predict their actions?

Things to consider:

• What is a measure of 'humanity'? Is it consciousness? Self-awareness? Intelligence? Empathy?
• Is it true that a more 'conscious' or 'intelligent' creature is closer to us in nature and therefore should enjoy more rights, considerations, or respect? (Case in point: Some countries will not allow performing surgery on an octopus without anesthesia, due to them being considered very high up on the ladder of consciousness)
• It is easy to conflate consciousness and intelligence. I think that's a bit of a trap. I have often looked at intelligence as a sort of "clock rate" of the brain. As in, you might be able to process information very quickly, but that's still pointless if you're running the wrong algorithms, or have very little knowledge to rely on. Intelligence all by itself is not a good measure of how 'conscious' or 'aware' or 'human' something is. Often, however, people tend to call animals more intelligent or less intelligent when they mean 'more highly developed', or 'more conscious'. The same probably applies to people as well.
• Additionally, among self-aware, conscious beings (humans), empathy and intelligence van cary wildly. Therefore, does consciousness, or even 'human-ness' vary? Is a highly intelligent psychopath less human than a much less intelligent but empathetic person?
• What do we use to assess whether a human is highly developed, or less developed / desirable? (Brushing aside the notion that we obviously shouldn't do so). I think it is important to look at what mechanisms have been used in the past to demonise swathes of the population, in order to discredit them or further some kind of agenda. Take African people during the slave trade. They were called primitive, less intelligent, less human. In fact, in more subtle ways this even happens to women nowadays. They are constantly belittled by chauvinists, for supposedly being less intellectually capable due to their gender. Are these all forms of de-humanisation, linked predominantly to intellect?
• What is this founded upon? Is it predictability of their actions? Let's try to go full circle. How does one discredit a part of the population? One observes them and demonises their behaviours (and with that, culture, etc.) The predictability of such behaviours is essential in this. You cannot reliably say that "those brutes do [x], how disgusting", without there being frequent evidence of it actually happening. (On the flip-side, could people be predictably advanced or developed?)
• What do we think of predictable people in general? Predictability has negative connotations. At best it's boring (say, a highly intelligent beaurocrat), at worst, stupid / less human (say, racists talking about another culture being predictably primitive)
• Is there an implication of people, or beings, who are more predictable, having less free will? If your intellectual faculties are limited, or you operate on instinct more than you do on rational or logical deduction, you become more predictable, ergo, predictability == stupidity. (I know this is a fallacy, but I am trying to establish why one might irrationally and subconsciously dehumanise, not arguing in favour of this dehumanisation or trying to defend it)
• Take our favourite pets. Cats and dogs. They are pretty highly developed and if it wasn't for humans, they'd be unchallenged apex predators ruling the world. They display complex behaviours, at times even hard to predict ones. But still, they are animals and behave in reasonably reliable patterns. They are also not able to pass the mirror-test for self awareness, implying they are not (or only in extremely limited ways). So, one could argue they are less human, less intelligent. Now look at insects. Even less intelligent. Even though it could be argued that some (like ants) display a form of swarm intelligence, they are still extremely predictable. (Except for, perhaps, the flight patterns of flies or mosquitoes, which evolution has scrambled into extremely random patterns to avoid them being swatted. But that's just hard-coded into their genes, not an intelligent thought process)
• So, once more. Think of someone you really don't like. Do you ever call them stupid for their actions? Would you ever say "here we go again, they are doing this again". Particularly if they are your boss? Perhaps it helps you cope with their shitty behaviour to dehumanise that person. Make them a lesser human being, to compensate for the fact that they make you feel powerless in their work. If dehumanisation is such an immediate and convenient mechanism to protect yourself from feelings of inferiority, or to stop yourself from being threatened (say, by a different culture), perhaps it is in fact an ingrained behaviour, which expresses itself on a larger scale once fueled by propaganda and political intent. If we identify it and understand how it happens, we may protect ourselves against it by elevating others to a higher status of 'human-ness'.
• When we 'have figured someone out', we are stating we can predict them. Are we putting them beneath us, henceforth? Are they 'less' than us in some ways? It gives us power to be able to predict, so it makes us more powerful than them in some way, so it makes them lesser beings in some ways.

Why am I bringing all this up? In my life, so far, I have gone from being very insecure, mistrusting and scared of people, to much more open, trusting and confident.

The more insecure I was, the more time I spent trying to prove to myself that I was somehow superior to others. Generally using intelligence as an argument (uggggh....). You know, like the goth teenager sitting in their basement, who is oh-so-individual and everyone else is so stupid and nobody understands my pain, etc. (see, dehumanising my past self right there, haha).

The more I started trusting people and the more I started seeing everyone around me as humans, humans just like me, the more I began to see how others still apply these weird dehumanisation mechanisms to make themselves feel superior. This made me wonder whether there is some kind of innate drive to do so. Try to predict others, or paint them as predictable, to prove that you are superior to them, because they would not be able to predict your actions, as you are so far beyond their capabilities.

So yeah, uhm....let me know what comes up in yer heads as you read through this, I'd be most interested to hear your perspectives.