I like that we were given a hat and a weird tail as starting points.

Underwater chem trails

When I was in the end of my PhD, everything except writing my thesis made me feel guilty. I ended up learning to find joy and peace in doing laundry and washing dishes. They became my guilt-free breaks — I had to do these things. FYI - I didn’t enjoy washing dishes before.

Washing dishes has become a really powerful part of my day, haha. Not only is it still a guilt-free break but it is a daily reminder to be mindful. I’ve noticed that whenever I drop and break a dish, my mind is not present. In fact, in those moments my mind might actually be drifting somewhere negative.

Maybe not so much a “hack” as a … lesson? Or something? But yeah, the whole cliche about having the right attitude and being present and mindful. I try to apply it in other parts of life, not just the dishes.

The current paradigm assumes a uniform probability of mutation across all genes. But maybe there are mechanisms that say “keep this part of the genome under tighter control” and “make this other part of the genome more susceptible to mutation.”

That evolution is purely randomness + fitness landscape rather than that DNA guides the process at least somewhat. Don’t burn me alive guys

I once heard that dark matter is just the consequence of using approximations and then having equations not balance out further down the line. So we inject dark matter in there so that the math maths all right.

We’re like fingers who don’t know there’s a hand

This is a good answer. Bernardo Kastrup argues this; check out his very eloquently titled book Why Materialism is Baloney.

Yes. That wasn’t the best word choice; maybe “group” would have been better. I meant groups of people who are willing to take some level of risk. Imagine the categories are “low risk takers”, “medium risk takers”, and “high risk takers”.

Compared to A paying out $40, if you make B $50-n you’ll only get the high risk takers choosing B. If you make it $70-n you’ll get high and medium risk takers. If you make it $120-n you’ll get almost everybody.

If risk taking is a value between 0 and 1, the categories are groups of people inside certain intervals. For example, low could be [0, 1/3), medium could be [1/3, 2/3), and high could be [2/3, 1].

I once heard of an experiment in economics that offers insight into this.

Say you have 100 people. You give each of them one of two choices:

A : you get $40 unconditionally B: you get $70 - n, where n is the number of people who choose B

You end up getting, on average across experiments, n = 30.

If you move the numbers around (i.e, the $40 and the $70), you keep getting, on average, a number of people choosing B so that B pays out the same as A.

I think the interpretation is that people can be categorized by the amount of risk they’re willing to take. If you make B less risky, you’ll get a new category of people. If you make it more risky, you’ll lose categories.

Applied to traffic, opening up a new lane brings in new categories of people who are willing to risk the traffic.

Or something. Sorry I don’t remember it better and am too lazy to look it up. Pretty pretty cool though.

Come to brasil where people are called champion, master, professor, doctor, or warrior.

Saying thanks to the cashier? “Thanks, doctor”

Edit: But Portuguese is gendered so I guess this doesn’t avoid the original problem… except in English it would

A “friend” started a company and hired me. It was pretty fun for a year. Then it became pretty bad — real bad. I quit on the spot after a verbal abuse session where I demanded more respect and my “friend” / boss literally said “no.”

It’s been a little over a year since I quit. Lived in my car for some of it, otherwise took odd jobs here and there where I could rent a room temporarily.

I’m at the end of this insane journey — starting a new job in a couple months. It’s been rough but I still think it was the right decision. Curious to see myself in 6 months to a year.

Anyway, felt like this was somewhat similar to your case.