YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM

while dB is a more objective measure of pressure level.

Quibble: dB is not an objective measure, nor does it purport to be. It uses an objective yardstick (pressure) but it is scaled for hearing according to an approximation of subjective experiences (hearing) of pressure.

I’d also strongly suggest that not only “can” the frequency response measured off the TV be false, it will be false. It’s not just that TV sound has been highly processed, there’s just no way that the audio equipment a news crew uses picks up anything like the true sound of an environment, especially not the sort of full-spectrum noise emitted by an industrial compound. Of most interest here is that the signal picked up by those mics is liable to drop off somewhere below the range of human speech, whereas industrial equipment like that is liable to have big peaks beneath those frequencies and further, descending well past 20Hz (the bottom end of human hearing).

Persistent low frequency and sub-sonic noise is associated with severe mental distress and physical ailments.

In fact this is why it’s important to recognise the subjectivity of the decibels measure: (not only because) the body/brain responds differentially to frequencies across the spectrum, and at different volumes. It also responds according to all sorts of other variables, and these can’t really be untied from the question of noise level. Persistence, locatibility, perceived subjective control of one’s own aural environment - all of these are fundamentally tied to both the “physical” and “psychological” effects of hearing (insofar as these can be untied).

Some of the symptoms described in the article (nausea, vertigo, fainting, panic attacks) can be the result of all of these variables, given a sufficiently persistent uncontrollable sound source. You just can’t untie them and peg them all to objective noise level.

Others (such as hearing loss and fluid leaking out your ears) are associated with prolonged exposure to sub-sonic noise, and again this can be as much an issue of time and persistence as “objective” sound level.

If we want to know “how bad” a noisy environment is for people, we simply don’t have a choice but to look at its effects first. You just have to look at the subjective effects people experience first, or you’re not looking at sound in the first place. You’re grasping at some independent objective measure which won’t ever actually tell you what you want to know, except in the most limited circumstances.

Conspiration should totally be a thing. “Omg, your 30,000 word Grassy Knoll post was conspirational!”, “Just the conspiration I need while I drink my defluoridated coffee and put on my tin foil hat to not go to work every morning!”

By and large no. Read the comments under anything on LessWrong, for example, and it’s trivial to pick out the vast majority of nominally substantive posts lighting on the one thing that got them mad, just like you and I, in amidst a chorus of nothing remarks equivalent to “so brave, so powerful”. They’re just people man, after all.

Notice that the disagreements people get into by and large evolve the same way as reddit fights - everybody’s just waiting for their turn to nitpick some sentence or other that (nominally) deserves a fair, contextual, interpretation it’ll never receive.

They’re all in for Chess as a sine qua non metric for intelligence if you spend enough time staring into the pit. Better to call it g than IQ tbh. Not only does it (chess) have the lick of rigour, it has the nerd cultural cachet and the ludicrous white masculinity complex.

It’s funny because you will hear over and over again from them online, in almost rank-and-file prose, about how it was all a big storm in the collective teacup, and then some time later run across yet another story of a real life non-anonymous person who was freaked the fuck out for some good period of time, as were some large portion of their friends

Looked at his twitter. Dude seems to be or have been on a palpable adrenaline high at a time when it might have been less deranged to step away from the keyboard and go for a walk. I get it, but those are some weird-ass posts.

For anybody hard of hearing at the back, the combination of a “characteristically (neo/)lib failure of imagination” and a “Promethean ideology” is subtext for “striding confidently towards fascism”

Honestly I’ve made it my life’s purpose to be a loser by the standards these people set, and succeeded beyond either of our wildest dreams

TracingWoodgrains is an out-and-out rationalist. Long time poster on /r/slatestarcodex and heavily involved in all things SSC. It just benefits them to be coy about it. Which is whatever! Fine! Who cares? But they’re 100% in the bag for rationalism in any way that matters.

Honestly, anyone who read the essay can see that the question of whether Yud approves is totally irrelevant to its thesis, but these people are incapable of reading styles of argument that don’t proceed by declarative statements about binary choices, except of course in those situations where something precious to them (such as their good standing at the “not a racist” club) might by at stake

To use “wikipedia editors went batshit over an editor’s decision” as evidence of anything is just wild to me, a man whose knowledge of wikipedia editing extends to the one thing everybody knows about wikipedia editors (their tendency to go batshit over each others’ decisions)