John Nerst
@everytstudies
big picture-fetishist | aspiring erisologist ("the study of disagreement and intellectual difference") | lover and hater of words/philosophy/art
When you abstract far enough, everything starts to look the same. Also your thoughts start to sound really pretentious.
Frontloading our adult lives with years of freedom and fun before it's time to grind for four decades is a terrible system, but I have no idea how to improve it.
is it just me or is there something really wrong with spending 8 to 9 hours at work, only to come home and have just 4 hours of personal time, and that already includes prepping for the next day? this doesn’t feel like really living
"It's just as expensive to cook at home as going out"-discourse is turning me into an angry old man fast faster than I had anticipated. Spoiled children...
I don't get it. Why are there so many products ~like this? Does anyone want them? Does literally anyone feel "I want to be more online"? Am I in a bubble?
introducing Waves, camera glasses for creators. record in stealth. livestream all day. pre-order now.
The most essential stabilizing feature of a society is a status hierarchy that young people—especially young men—can reliably climb by following a clear and pro-social set of rules. 1/
The trend towards hyperliteralism in fiction, where everything must be explained and realistic is artless and dumb.
"The big problem with Moby Dick is we don't explain where the whale comes from. What if we did a trilogy exploring his backstory and motivation."
If challenging traditional notions of beauty worked it would have worked a long time ago, around the time people went over to whistling Schoenberg tunes on the street.
Most art / fashion nowadays has been about the need to challenge the assumptions of beauty. I totally get it when it was first done - it was super transgressive and fresh - but like it’s been decades of this on repeat, and it’s been nothing but uninspiring and boring. At this…
Kind of, but it's not just childrearing but all domestic chores. In some ways we're richer than old aristocrats, but they still had full time servants to take care of entropy for them, and that's not a small thing.
100%. Most people in developed countries, even poor people, live like aristocrats used to... *except* when it comes to childrearing. The tradeoff of how good life has become for ~everything else we choose to do with our time makes parenting clearly worse.
C'mon Europe, stop it. You're embarrassing me in front of the Yanks.
#EuropeProtects #DSAProtects #DemocracyNotAlgoracy
A Marketplace of Ideas Can Only Function if People Care About What Is True. New piece in next post.⬇️
At that age I read all the Land of Oz books. I... don't know what that says about me.
I have a theory that everyone consumed a piece of media between 9-13 years old that is the foundation of their entire worldview. Everything they learnt since was stacked on top of this. It's a great dinner question to ask people.
Does the concept of "working class" not exist in the US?
If you think of yourself as being in TPOT, please choose one, I have a hypothesis:
It’s easy to underestimate the diversity of minds because: 1) We only have access to one mind and assume others are similar. 2) Social norms channel divergent traits and impulses into standard scripts, so people with radically different minds often behave similarly.
This is obviously correct and it's weird that it has to be said. The big flaw of gdp is how it doesn't count consumer surplus. Arguably, it's the thing we actually want to maximize.
I maintain that the internet substituted free or nearly free products for market products (that weren't exact substitutes so were never counted in a deflator), so almost all of its growth was never counted in GDP.
People can have such different intuitions! Which one of these are more likely to be true? 1. People are just really different. 2. People are not different but an instance of trauma can totally transform your personality. To me it feels obviously 1 but so many seem to think 2.
Aella admitted she was molested when she was 8, but insists this had no psychological impact on her. so she says shit like this, and relies on her curated audience of Redditors being too horny or delusional to say "no. that's not normal, actually. you were just molested.” and…
I don't understand people who believe in ghosts and don't spend all of their free time learning about ghosts and trying to contact them. Ghosts existing would be a big deal!
Something that fascinates me with ghost belief is how surprisingly prevalent and common it is, even among staunch atheists. A lot of people you know probably believe in ghosts, and several of them are either convinced or at least suspecting that they’ve had encounters with them.
Are there studies/surveys that try to rigorously identify this self-oriented vs. socially oriented personality dimension in detail? Is it just extraversion or agreeableness, or does it have a more specific name? Feels like it should have
When women get a new boyfriend, they usually introduce him to their friends early on. Then later—maybe the next time they all hang out—they’ll ask, “What did you think of him?” and everyone gives their character evaluation. Guys don’t often do that. At least not until they’re…
This has got to be responsible for a lot of the enshittification of writing. When the absolute worst thing to be is predictable, the natural strategy becomes to not make sense.
How do you say this with a straight face
Because you often need to do things not worth doing for their own sake, yes.
"If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well" is bad advice 90% of the time