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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I think happiness is a misunderstood concept. It’s something that many people take for granted when they’re young, but as they get older it seems to wane and comes with a lot more caveats. Your baseline used to be happy, but now your baseline is more neutral. You spend 80% of your time being neither happy nor sad. The idea of being happy all the time is sort of a farce, and I tend to assume people who claim to be are either lying or stupid.

    Happiness is more about taking a step back from your life and viewing it all in one big picture. If you like what you see, then you can consider yourself happy, even if that doesn’t mean you’re smiling about it right this moment.




  • I think this is terrible advice for most people. You only need to spend like an hour in the airport to avoid missing a flight. Most people don’t fly often enough to get much actual gain from pushing this boundary. The only person I knew who would push the envelope like this was someone who flew every week for work. That makes sense to me, because you’re saving two hours every week for years. If you’re only flying a few times a year just pack a book and ensure you make your flight on time.


  • That’s sort of exactly the point. People believe it to be true, and it’s sort of impossible to prove them wrong. Nature vs Nurture still isn’t proven either way, regardless of how strongly you feel one way or the other.

    The simple fact that someone believes it’s possible to “make people gay”, almost necessarily leads to them believing there are people out there actively doing it.


  • I think the butterfly effect is much more interesting when you think about incredibly far reaching effects that are essentially impossible to predict. Someone running late and getting into an accident might actually be relatively easy to predict.

    Instead: someone reading this post is running late. Because of this a different car following behind them gets caught at a red light they shouldn’t have gotten caught at. As they hit the brakes for that light, their passenger lurches forward and accidentally sends a nonsensical text to their friend. Their friend reads that nonsense text, and in their confusion spills their coffee on the floor. A person walking by slips on the coffee, hits their head, and dies.

    The person running late just killed a person miles away, and they have zero idea that it even happened.




  • This might be a stupid answer, but I genuinely think Americans couldn’t handle that system. We already have problems with people not stopping properly at stop signs. If we had the “give way” system too many people would just ignore it and cause accidents.

    I realize this is super pessimistic, but I think it’s true. We have a handful of roundabouts and people always screw them up.

    I don’t think Americans are inherently dumber or anything, I just think our licensing exam is laughably easy. You literally just parallel park, then drive in a square where you encounter one traffic light, and one stop sign. Exam was over in 5 minutes. Here’s your license.


  • It makes more sense when you remove the fractions, but I assume they were working on them.

    It’s easier this way: “John ate 4 slices of pizza. Dave ate 5 slices of pizza. John ate more slices of pizza than Dave. How is this possible?”

    The answer they’re looking for is: “This is not possible because 5 slices of pizza is more than 4 slices of pizza.”

    It’s a really bizarre question, and is poorly worded, but the concept could be really important depending on the age/ability of the student.

    It’s like teaching a kid to fact check I guess.


  • This is one of those problems that makes more sense with context. The teacher had the students working on “reasonableness”, which is essentially “does the question I’m asking make sense?”. The students were probably instructed to ignore actually trying to solve the problem when presented with one, but instead explain why the question either does or doesn’t make sense.

    In this case the student potentially misunderstood the task. The failure on the teacher’s part is wording the question in such a way that it actually has a reasonable solution, and isn’t necessarily an unreasonable question.