Moderation Questions

You what? No advantage player bets on a 10 coming out when the count says it's a poor move.

What I think you meant to say, is that in a vacuum, insurance (i.e. a 10 coming out) is a -ev bet at the odds offered; however, if the count is sufficiently positive, then it becomes a +ev bet.

I was talking about deliberately making a poor bet for camouflage.

Oh, I see, sorry, totally missed that.

I think technology and culture has evolved and keeps evolving into something that bombards us constantly with stimuli, often aided by a commercialised way of exploiting how our interests, attention and perception works to make it extremely hard to ignore. Many may want to ignore it, but it exploits our brains in the same way a hamster-wheel exploits the brain of hamsters. Our brain is hardwired to map changes in the environment and detect dangers, hamsters are hard-wired to roam territory.

So, maybe you are into poetry. Well, no need to look up poetry anymore or explore it on your own. Here are digital machines and a system that drenches you in poetry, here is some commentary about poetry, here is some drama about poetry, here is some fandom war about poets, here is a video essay on poetry, here is the most popular poetry influencers, here is why that poetry influencer is bad, here is the best way to write poetry, here is why that way to write poetry is bad, here is why that poet is a hero, here is why she was actually a villain... don't look away, you might miss something! Here is what you missed! And so the machine churns, leaving you little time for actual poetry. There is nothing new in these phenomena, except the presentation and wrapping. And the presentation and wrapping works, it keeps us engaged but in constant drips of stimuli that demand your attention.

The culture aspect comes in because it affects how we think, perceive and act. It does not have to be bad, but since it basically exploits biological imperatives, it can be tough to control. The effect on people has been popularised under the term "popcorn brain". Our ability to keep focus, stay concentrated and recall is being changed by becoming used to a constant drip of small stimuli, which leaves less time and less instances of deep thinking.

Another side effect is views on normalcy. While digital technology can be wonderful in that it allows for the different to meet, it also heavily favours mob rule. Read or watch commentary on social behaviour, and you will see an extreme variant of filtering what is acceptable. It creates a strange dichotomy where you are being made constantly aware of the outlandish and outrageous, but at the same time people are constantly steeped in a sea of condemnation and public shaming. It reads like an 1800s manual on proper behaviour, just combined with pictures, stories and videos of the absurd and horrific.

To me it feels like we are making our societies into something that fits an ever decreasing amount of people. And instead of thinking that the increasing amount of people who do not fit in means that society is moving in the wrong direction, we think of the people as problematic or having problems. They are not "typical" and hence something is wrong. We have been there before, technology just put the phenomena on rails. However, these days we do not use the paddle or the belt and pretend we do it for society, we use diagnoses and pretend it is about what is best for the person. Now, there are nuances to that, there are people with legitimate problems that need help. However, at this point we are fast closing in on some 50% of people on medication for mental issues in many developed countries, at which point I think it is long overdue to ask if isn't society that is out of whack and needs help.

There is a now somewhat famous story (of TED-talks lore from back in the days, when even TedX could be good) from post-WW2 / early 50s where the US Airforce was looking into a series of aircraft crashes in the era of early jet flight. Part of these efforts started to look into various aspects of the aircraft themselves, especially the pilot's immediate environment. As part of this process they made measurements of some 4000 pilots and were planning on using body averages to design the cockpit. Up until an engineer actually took the average measurement and compared it to deviations from the average. His conclusion was simple: A cockpit built for the average pilot would fit almost no pilots. This for the simple reason that extremely few human bodies are average. Thus, the adjustable cockpit was born.

These days it is often used as an allegory for the illusion of averages, and I think it is a good one. Though, I would not call it the illusion of averages, but the illusion of normalcy. The normal person does not really exist, the normal life does not really exist. This society that we are building which fits ever fewer people might not be a good one. And that might be tough to tackle for a society used to think and focus in ever decreasing intervalls of time.

You're a tankie. I thought you lot love exterminating people considering the track record of Communism. Anyway I didn't think it was possible for you to surpass yourself in terms of stupidity and sheer derangement but your musings on how Stalin of all people wasn't a bad guy has proven me wrong. I look forward to your next musings on how Kim Jong Un is simply misunderstood.

So often are great leaders and great minds not fully appreciated in their own time. History will no doubt expose our ignorance.

how many genocides has North Korea done? how many countries have they invaded?

Vic? Who were the goodies when Tankie Vietnam went into Tankie Khmer Rouge led Cambodia?
Also how many Countries did Tankie USSR invade and did they exterminate millions?

Thanks for posting. I worry also that our ability to reason logically, make complex decisions, and express our preferences in words is degrading, partly because the popcorn brain that you describe and partly because of a growing belief that such decisions can and should be offloaded to our machines. The net effect seems like an ill fit witih democracy.

This is an interesting point. To a considerable degree, our technology exerts the same normalizing gaze that Foucault attributed to the panopticon in Crime and Punishment.

they exterminated millions of invading Nazis.

Lmao as D2 said, you truly are the gift which keeps on giving😆
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mor...

^^For someone who claims to hate nazis, you sure do sound like a Holocaust denier.
Can you answer my questions? What countries did tankie USSR invade and who were the goodies between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge? Did the Khmer Rouge commit genocide?
Did Stalin also exterminate millions of Russians and Ukranians and thousands of Poles at the Katyn massacre and National Operations of the NKVD?
You're extraordinarily dishonest.

I'm sure most older Russians think positively of Stalin. Maybe not so much as a person or for all the represive things he did, but more for what he did to build up Russia's geopolitical stature and considerable improvements to their living standards.
So in that sense he was a "good" leader.

That's a resounding "no".

No, he really really wasn't.

this is true for mao most definitely

but as the others have already pointed out, not true for stalin

it should be noted that a big reason why contemptorary cpc members temper their mao criticisms with "but he made us great again" is primarily because they viewed de-stalinification as one of the fundamental reasons for the delegitimizing and collapse of the ussr - without which the public perception of mao would be much worse

the chinese even grounded it with numbers, with the official line on mao being 70 percent good, 30 percent bad

Mate clear some of your pm's can't respond to you 😀

I very much doubt this is true.

The older part might not hold but it's not hard to find stuff like this:

At any rate, hardly an outlier view on him.

Stalin polls well among Russians, not only older ones, but that's just nationalism. They've got ****-all education worth the name, no real awareness of the world at all, and they've got nothing to be proud of in post-Tsarist times except a few bits of music and literature of purely elite interest (like Shostakovitch's Fifth Symphony), so they just worship 'big stronk man who beat Nazis' like they're told.

It appears that he polls better than I would have expected. I stand corrected if those polls are accurate.

That reminds me of Foucault’s point that modern societies didn’t abandon coercion, they just replaced it with normalization.

Tocqueville made a related prediction: as societies become more equal, they also become less tolerant of difference, because once everyone is “the same,” anyone who doesn’t fit stands out as a problem.

What t_d was saying is really noticeable in religious communities or cultures. Look at how the Catholics and Protestants used to go after one another or the Islamic sects today.

yes, right from the start people commented on this was the first time the nominal head of state was actually running the show. china has a long history of behind the curtain leadership like deng xiaoping who ruled for a decade without ever being president or premier

the modern era really starts with the power vacuum after tiananmen, which ruined the careers of the top guys and left a stalemate. jiang zemin was the compromise candidate because both reformers and hard liners could tolerate him. from then on it was rule by committee where the top guy couldn't move without consensus

jiang eventually made way for hu jintao who was another team player. hu was outside jiang’s shanghai clique so he had to share power and jiang even held onto key roles after hu ascended to keep him on a leash. but with deng’s death the system lost its paramount leader to keep the factions in check

this led to a split between the princelings and the coalition guys. the compromise was having jiang’s guy xi take the presidency and hu’s guy li keqiang take the premiership. at the time xi was seen as the least threatening choice with no real power base just a respected figure from good revolutionary stock

however xi had a much bigger rival named bo xilai. he was the most famous official in china and used a populist message while crushing organized crime. the party was scared of bo’s personality cult and impeccable credentials

but then bo's police chief made a frantic dash to a us consulate after a fallout. the us refused asylum and when he left he was snatched by security forces and ratted out bo for corruption. whether it was a setup or just bad luck it wiped out xi's biggest rival

ironically xi adopted bo’s entire playbook. he used the "clean things up" mantra to purge anyone who didn't toe the line. those too strong to jail like li keqiang were sidelined and stripped of responsibilities. li was forced into retirement early and died mysteriously of a heart attack 7 months later

the "fear of a mao style leader" became reality when xi removed term limits and turned the party into a one-man show. he didn't just bring back the strongman model, he perfected it by purging anyone with enough standing to say no

but for better or worse, the chaos and purges are localized only to those seeking power and the general public are unaffected - and since things are mostly going well, and everyone is absolutely doing better than their parents did - he has a lot of leeway where people don't want to mess up a good thing so are happy to go along with it

you gotta remember, china has living memory of famine and the last century before mao took over, the country was embroiled in constant foreign invasion, civil war, and famine - very conservative estimates have 80 million chinese killed in either war or famine from 1850 to 1950 - that number is potentially much greater - the taiping rebellion alone has some scholars attributing over 100 million losses alone (we use the more conservative 30 million in this accounting)

i think the best analogy for understanding chinese tolerance for people like mao/xi is to look at american tolerance for crypto or elon being directly tied to whether or not they made a lot of money off either bitcoin or tesla along the way

That's very interesting and informative, thanks for your reply.