ArbitraryValue

As if human legs aren't the weird ones - they evolved from feet into hands and then into weird hands that we walk around on and call feet.

The problem with democracy is that you can't get very far just by telling the voters how they ought to behave. I'm happy that I'm not a politician, because after the last election I don't respect the majority of American voters. Trying to win their support would be demeaning. However, someone is going to do it, and if he isn't a Democrat who does care (or acts like he cares) about people like Steve in Wisconsin, he'll be a Republican instead.

I see a dimetrodon.

I had a dream once in which an ex-girlfriend from years ago who I was still in love with appeared and told me that I would never have her back so I should stop being so obsessed with her. Good advice, perhaps, but not what I feel I deserve in my own dreams...

Now that I think about it, I realize that I can't remember ever having sex in a dream. So much for dreams as wish fulfillment.

I'm not sure what's novel here. No one thought that modern AI could solve arbitrarily complex logic problems, or even that modern AI was particularly good at formal reasoning. I would call myself an AI optimist but I would have been surprised if the article found any result other than the one it did. (Where exactly the models fail is interesting, but the fact that they do at all isn't.) Furthermore, the distinction between reasoning and memorizing patterns in the title of this post is artificial - reasoning itself involves a great deal of pattern recognition.

You could jump to conclusions, or you could ask whether or not there is evidence that scientists' work in their own field is affected by irrelevant unscientific beliefs that they hold. In my experience, people are very good at compartmentalizing their beliefs.

She was suspended over comments about Israeli co-workers and students, not simply about the war in general as the headline implies.

Serious answer:

That's cool. What makes it special?

Sometimes people talk about how expensive something they own is simply because they're proud that they could afford it and even when they're being tone-deaf, there's no benefit to getting offended when you could just move the conversation along instead. (Although you might have to listen to them talk about watches.) If they were trying to brag, now they're stuck trying to explain why the watch is actually worth what they paid and you're the one judging them.

Cars (and watches) aren't so expensive that a middle-class person can't plausibly already own the one he would buy even if money was unlimited. You can act like that's true about you. My status-conscious former mother in law was bothered by the fact that I owned an old car, but when she would bring it up I would just say "I really like the 2008 model." She couldn't argue with that.

I think it might be enough to change one's orientation. Bombersexual.

Heh, I loved the first one and then I tried the second one, hated how they changed the combat, and quit.

I was in a long-term relationship with a Taiwanese woman, and she kept me a secret from her family for years. Even when we lived together, the story was that we we just sharing an apartment. I assumed that they didn't want her dating a white guy, but later she was showing me photos of a family gathering where there were several white men present so I'm not sure what the real issue was. Maybe her family was just eccentric? She was definitely eccentric herself in other ways, so it would make sense.

Other than that I've dated American women which I suppose is technically a different culture since I'm not from the USA myself, but I came to the USA as a young child. I did go on a few dates with a woman from my birth country who came to the USA as an adult and that was awkward because of how much harder than mine her own life had been. She wasn't hostile about it but I still felt like a jerk any time I mentioned anything that had ever been difficult for me.