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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • Imagining your death. :P

    But seriously, it’s perfectly sensible when remember that i is just the mathematical representation of “left turn”, just like -1 is the mathematical representation of “go backwards”-- and as we know, two left turns sends you backwards. So think about this triangle in the following way:

    Imagine you are a snail, starting at the origin. Now imagine that you walk forward 1 step along the horizontal line. Then you turn 90° to the left to start walking along the vertical line, but then, because you need to walk i steps along this line you take another 90° turn to the left, which means that you are now walking backwards and you end up back at the origin. How far away from the origin are you? Zero steps.




  • To me, one of the most interesting quotes from the article was:

    “Our intel tells us that… one of the most important things we can do to hurt Palantir right now is disrupting their recruitment pipeline by hurting their brand image, to the point where even very apolitical recent college graduates [feel] that it’s social suicide.”

    This really seems to me like exactly the kind of thing that a peaceful protest could accomplish that could really pay off!

    It is not obvious to me, though, that the following tactic is super-effective at this:

    After blocking the street outside Palantir’s unassuming redbrick office, and briefly making way for an ambulance, the crowd marched to a nondescript building nearby where organizers said the company was holding a developer conference to recruit new talent, slapping rhythmically on the windows and chanting “quit your jobs!”

    This seemed to work in terms of shutting the event down:

    Although Palantir did not confirm whether its event was disrupted, one visibly confused event worker did try to deliver equipment, only to find their intended recipients had vanished.

    I suspect, though, that if the event were disrupted then the impression the people got at it was more along the lines of, “There are crazy people outside!” and less along the lines of, “I should really feel guilty about my life decisions.”

    Having said that, it is not clear that a lower level of confrontation would have accomplished anything either, so who am I to say?










  • Which, in turn, is a consequence of the spin-statistics theorem.

    As for why the spin-statistics theorem is true, the answer is that, in a sense, we do not really know. This is because, although we have rigorous mathematical proofs that it is true, they rely on arguments that are very technical in nature, so they provide no real intuitive insight into why the theorem is true. (This theorem is actually really notorious for this; people have been trying for a long time to improve on the situation, but have yet to succeed in coming up with a satisfactory elementary proof of it.)





  • The problem with this reasoning is that instability, whether as the result of undermining governments or regional wars, has unpredictable outcomes. For example, overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran seemed like a great idea to those in power in the U.S. at the time when we disagreed with Iran’s policies, but this decision turned around to bite us when that got overturned. So it is not in our material interests to promote instability, and I think that the current administration knows this, so to the extent it is supporting Israel with effectively no conditions on its actions I think that it is behaving irrationally rather than maliciously.