christian

Completely missed their opportunity to start the headline with "Proud New Dad" and having the reveal at the end be that he was no less proud of this before fatherhood.

Yeah, I think someone deciding they don't want to take a review seriously if it's by someone who gave up on it quickly is fair. Especially if you're poor and paying for games, you can't get something new every day so you'd often prefer something that takes a lot of time to fully understand and appreciate, even if that comes at the expense of being a slog for the early hours.

I also imagine that declaring a specific review invalid for this reason will more often than not just be sour grapes over someone trashing a game they love. It's still not justified, but to some degree I get it. Maybe I'm visiting the wrong crowds but I think painting all of this as universally-applied mindless elitism, rather than as someone's knee-jerk reaction to criticism for their specific passion, is itself overly dismissive. You can still call that out without presenting it as a caricature.

I still remember like twenty years ago undergrad probability theory a professor posed some question to the class and even though this prof was normally very thorough with being helpful and walking through answers with students, this one guy answered so wildly off-the-mark the prof paused a bit and then just said "no" and moved on.

We were doing final exam review for earlier semester material and the question was about the probability of randomly drawing some hand of cards, something like a hand of five cards with exactly three jacks. Guy answered very confidently "it's 1 minus the null set". I remember this because I immediately asked the kid next to me what was said and just heard the same thing repeated.

So many things wrong. A "null set" is a concept from measure theory, which was not used in this second-year-undergrad course. Since using "the" here implies there's just one, he almost certainly meant the empty set. That's whatever. But we're not in a set theory class, 1 is a number, not a set, so we're not in a context where it makes any sense to subtract sets from numbers. But if we just push all of that aside and say okay fine, represent 1 as a set however you want and subtract the empty set, taking any set A and subtracting the empty set just gives A back, meaning he's given an extremely roundabout way of saying the probability is 1, a 100% chance of randomly drawing that specific hand of cards.

Situation where it's would be one thing if we're early on and he'll discover he's in over his head, but right before the final is such a wild time to sound fully confident in an answer that wrong.

Moral of the story: sometimes having that much confidence behind an awful understanding will give bystanders enough secondhand embarrassment that they'll still think of you from time to time twenty years later.

It's borderline inspirational. It almost makes me want to make a linkedin account just to riff on this for every mundane aspect of my life. I mean I don't have anything as impressive as a top-25 spot on a Clash of Clans leaderboard, but just because I can't compete with this guy doesn't mean I'm unhirable.

First draft for a pitch:

Hey hiring managers, have you ever had to deal with ungrateful employees who incessantly whine about needing "sick time" for imaginary problems like "food poisoning"? We've all been there. What you need is a guy who is still in sepsis recovery and can barely function day to day to help them realize how good they have it.

Due to supply-and-demand, you should be ready to make a highly competitive offer. Hourly wages are acceptable with overtime pay over forty hours, and under the agreement that I will be on-the-clock for every hour which I spend recovering from sepsis, which is all of them.

Most were the type you see on lemmy that would rather not vote if there isn't a perfect candidate on the ballot, even if there was one candidate that they agreed with the majority of items.

Okay, I thought we were discussing something wholly different. I worked in Dearborn and we all had friends who lost relatives as our country refused to stop sending arms. One of my best students completely fell off after losing a lot of her extended family and it was painful to watch.

But you don't need to have personal experience with someone affected to be outraged. It's a line some people are unwilling to cross. I am one of them. Downplaying that as they "would rather not vote if there isn't a perfect candidate on the ballot" is either wholly disingenuous or a complete absence of empathy. A candidate I have "agreed with the majority of items" but disagreed on the morality of supplying weapons used to commit a genocide is one I will not vote for.

If the president is aware that he is sending weapons killing innocents and still signs off to send more, and one of those bombs kills someone I love, would you blame me for not voting for him? If not, why would you blame someone who empathizes with me for making the same decision?

The democrats did not have to support this, and would have won the election if not for this complete moral bankruptcy. Blaming nonvoters is shifting blame from the powerful to the powerless.

I don't remember the episode, but "Are you kids hugging the tv again?" is a pretty memorable line.

It was a warning to ensure that your discussion include love for the people behind the discussion, and not just hate for them for being wrong.

I think I've gone over twenty years with this being the exact thing that bothers me and have never been able to articulate it as well as you just did in one sentence.

People without empathy shouldn't have the right to lead people (politics, work, ...).

The inclusion of the phrase "have the right to" is what changes this statement from sensible to nonsense. We'd need a way to declare who has that right, and I cannot imagine any idea of an empathy certification board that is not horrifically dystopian.

I'm not convinced, could you share your evidence?

Probably shouldn't assume that guy's personal view is the norm.

For me that sounds exactly as appealing as using pineapple.

I will excuse a lot of those people here in the US.

In my own case, I am physically disabled at the moment watching the people taking care of me and providing me transportation be horribly overworked to the point where it is painful to watch. What should I be doing with my time? Should I judge my caretakers for not making some sort of time? Is it inexcusable that I am not pressuring them to do something?

I'd like to know actually what I can do, because I'm not happy with where things are. You suggest it's a moral failure but I literally don't know what action I can take that would not be judged a moral failure.

Maybe my situation is unique in some ways, but it's not that unique in the idea that for a lot of people, finding more time could cost the livlihoods of both them and their dependents. Maybe the people you meet in your day-to-day life can easily find time to organize, etc at no significant cost, but the majority of the remaining population are oppressed themselves, just in a less severe way. Every family is isolated, and when you are isolated with a precarious livlihood, setting aside time for something comes at a cost, so is a serious choice. The obvious answer is to try to become less isolated, but that requires setting aside time without guaranteed payoff. It's easy to judge people for not doing that when there's no potential cost to your own dependents.

Most people here are living day-to-day trying to cling to what little joys they have. You can come up with laundry lists of ways they are wasting their time and money, but those wastes are hard to give up for someone living day-to-day. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but decrying the inaction from the majority of our population is shifting blame to the powerless.