It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

And YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, BitTorrent…

People have a lot more choices now than they did in the bad old days of high cable bills. If streaming services charge too much people will just bail back to free stuff.

It’s not really a backup X. In any given cell in a woman’s body, one of the X chromosomes has been inactivated into something called a Barr body. The remaining X chromosome is then the active one.

Women carriers of the gene defect for protan (causing protanopia in males) exhibit Schmidt’s Sign, an abnormal insensitivity to long wavelengths (red light). This is due to the highly skewed L:M cone ratio caused by the defective gene.

I think both you and I know the project wouldn’t have worked and in all likelihood it would’ve damaged his reputation. I can’t fault him for opting out of that. As for what he actually did with the money, I am not going to defend that!

We’re talking about two different things here.

Actually trying to end world hunger vs pushing a button and having it happen. The former is really hard and probably way beyond the means of any individual, no matter how wealthy. The fact that Elon promised to do it is only evidence of his extreme ego, not his ability nor his ethics (which his donation to himself calls into question).

If he could push a button and end world poverty at a nominal cost of $xxx billion, I think he would do it. But to actually put in the work over a lifelong project which has a high potential to fail? I don’t for a second believe he’s capable of that. But who is?

I don’t think you thought this one through!

To be the guy known for ending poverty for all time, having statues in every park on the planet? Or just another boat to park in your mega-garage of boats?

Easy choice.

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I’m surprised no one has mentioned this: it’s a numbers game. It only takes a small number of cheaters to reach a critical mass where everyone is encountering them all the time. If only 1% of all players are cheaters and you play games against 10 people in one day, your chance of playing against at least one cheater is about 9.6% on that day. Play 10 players per day for a month (30 days) and your chance of meeting at least one cheater goes up to 95%.

Now consider the effects that cheaters have on the rest of the population: if people get frustrated by cheaters often enough they’re more likely to quit the game. Over time, this can cause the number of non-cheaters to go down, increasing the chances of everyone playing against cheaters. If cheaters are now up to 2% of the population then your chances of meeting at least one in a day (assuming 10 opponents again) rise to 18%.

Conclusion: Over a long enough time span the population of cheaters rises to 100%.

You skipped a crucial step: first you gotta raise a few hundred million in VC funding from Silicon Valley bigwigs!

I have carbon steel and stainless steel, as well as cast iron. I don’t use nonstick whatsoever. It is well known that induction doesn’t perform well with carbon steel. The issue is carbon steel’s poor heat conductivity which makes it very difficult for heat to spread up the sides of the pan. Gas doesn’t have this issue because the flames and hot gases wrap around the sides of the pan and heat them directly. Having hot pan sides is critical to prevent the eggs from sticking when you tilt the pan to roll up a French omelette.

As for warping? Just search on YouTube. There’s tons of videos showing how easy it is to warp a pan on induction: just use high heat. This is never an issue on gas because of the superior evenness of heating, so you can crank gas as high as you want. Yes, you can turn the induction heat way down to avoid warping but then your performance and responsiveness goes out the window and you spend a ton of time waiting around for the pan to preheat.

Another issue is when you’re searing meats, frying eggs, or sauteeing veggies and basting by spooning hot fat over them. To do this you need to tilt the pan at an angle so the fat pools on one side and then rapidly baste the food. Unfortunately, induction burners stop heating as you try to lift and tilt the pan. Plus the sides of the pan aren’t getting hot so the fat cools when it reaches the sides of the pan as you tilt. You can still do the technique but it’s much slower, clumsier, and less effective without gas (which continues heating no matter how you tilt the pan).

Here’s some videos on the technique:

Steak

Eggs

I wouldn’t exactly call it niche if you’re an Asian family who cooks with a wok every day. Yes, Technology Connections videos are heavily focused on the North American market because this is where Alec’s audience is largely from.

North Americans love gas stoves because of how simple and performant they are. North Americans also tend to have a fascination with wanting to cook with professional, restaurant-grade equipment (including ultra-expensive Sub Zero refrigerators and freezers, for some reason).

Having said all that, induction cooktops are still pretty niche in North America because large ones with large cooking surfaces that can handle large pans (without creating intense hot spots that literally warp and destroy your pans) are insanely expensive here ($4000++). Even the best Wolf professional induction ranges cannot do what a gas range does with carbon steel pans: heat the bottom and sides of the pan evenly. You always get intense heat where the bottom of the pan makes contact and then the sides are hundreds of degrees cooler, which means your French omelettes stick to the sides of the pan and get ruined.

This induction wok device from the video is cute but it only works with woks that are the exact same shape as the one included with the device. A carbon steel pan with a flat bottom and gently sloped sides won’t work at all with this thing.

See, the thing Alec complains about with gas stoves (the flames going around the pan and heating up the room) is actually a feature for people who know how to cook and want their pans to heat evenly and perform really well. There’s no electric stove on the market (radiant or induction) that can replicate this!

Even some of the stuff you mentioned, such as MBTI (personality “types”), Freud’s theories, Maslow’s hierarchy, and behaviourism are discredited. My point about the TED talk pop psych stuff being discredited though was not to say the general public has rejected these theories. They haven’t. It’s that science has moved on but the public lags behind.

Notice that I never said (throughout this discussion) that the general public is skeptical of psychology. The general public tends to lack the tools of critical thinking needed for healthy skepticism in general (not just in regards to psychology). Saying something is discredited is only saying that science has moved on, not the general public (which even continues to believe in silly things like astrology that have been discredited for centuries).

However, that is not to say the public is totally clueless. While they lack proper critical thinking skills, they do have the ability to become aware of when scientists’ reputations are damaged. This is a far more diffuse effect because the public isn’t generally aware of the differences between individual scientists and their debates within a field. And that’s where the really big problem exists:

An individual scientist can become popular communicating their theory to the public. But when their theory is later discredited the reputational damage can affect the field or even all of science as a whole. Over time this can lead to popular anti-intellectualism, such as we see with climate change denial.

We’re talking about widely known psychology results. TED talks, articles in the New York Times, interviews on daytime TV. We’re not talking about whose textbook is most well known in psychology departments.

These are all the findings that make the TED talk circuits.

Not sure whether you mean “mindless obliviousness” or “mindless rage” here, because I think reality was much closer to the latter. The Nazi party went from nothing to hundreds of thousands of members and 44% of the vote in parliamentary elections in less than a decade. They were extremely popular and their brand of ethno-nationalism resonated with a German public that was disillusioned by the humiliation they all felt (due to the treaty of Versailles) and the economic disaster of hyperinflation (deliberately created to pay down the old war debts as well as Versailles-imposed reparations).

Today most people think of Hitler as a devil single-handedly responsible for the Holocaust and all the invasions of neighbouring countries but that’s an oversimplification. There were tons of other nasty, ideological men in the Nazi party who would’ve done the same or worse had Hitler never existed. The conditions for a wildfire existed, Hitler just happened to be the spark which became ground zero of the blaze.

Go into your watch history and delete all of the rage inducing videos. YouTube generates recommendations directly from your watch history (as well as subscriptions etc).

Then subscribe to channels you really like that don’t enrage you! I highly recommend hobby-focused and science-based channels. There are tons of them out there and they have great content!

Yes and he chose a particularly challenging pose to hold for a Daguerreotype! Many subjects back then preferred to sit in a very relaxed pose and they even used a small stand to hold the subject’s head still!

I had actually heard about this game but didn’t pay much attention to it. It’s the first game ever published by Panic. This is a company previously known for exclusively publishing Mac software (mainly general utilities such as text editors, FTP clients, etc). I’m not surprised that the game is selling poorly given their lack of experience with game publishing.

The game looks very pretty but tactical RPGs are a niche genre. To market this game they need to get out there and get it in front of people who like these sorts of games. That means getting on forums and talking to people as well as sponsoring Twitch streamers who normally play these sorts of games.

Ever so, it’s a tough gig. I’ve seen streamers and YouTubers cover a lot of these sponsored games and many of them still flop because they just don’t interest the audience very much.

You mean the lack of replication? Yes, it’s evidence that humans are sophisticated reasoners and that simplistic “life hacks” like smiling at yourself in a mirror are not effective. But then these are among the most widely known “findings” of psychology, so the field’s reputation suffers.

To be fair to the soc/psych skeptics, there has been quite a number of scandals where famous TED talk researchers had their big theories discredited due to failure to replicate. “Power posing” was the big meme one but there are many others including ego depletion, social priming, and the facial feedback hypothesis.

The replication crisis is extremely embarrassing for the field.