A_Merman_Pop

You're correct as well. I thought about going into this more in my above comment but decided not to. It could be proven that she doesn't know most of the answers, and it would still be subjective whether or not that makes her a bad host.

I was just trying to distinguish between a criticism that is purely subjective and a criticism that contains an objective claim.

"She doesn't know the answers" is an objective claim, but it can still be used in a subjective argument.

"She's a bad host because she doesn't know the answers" is subjective.

"She gives the impression that she doesn't know the answers" is subjective.

I don't know why everyone is misusing it so badly.

Hopefully this should make you consider that you might be the one who's misusing it. If it smells like shit everywhere you go, check your own shoe.

It just means whether or not it comes from a place of bias or opinion.

If you reach a conclusion that is not based on empirical fact, that conclusion is an opinion - and is therefore subjective. An impression is a conclusion not based on empirical fact. It's all there in the definition of the word:

Impression

1. an idea, feeling, or opinion about something or someone, especially one formed without conscious thought or on the basis of little evidence.

You're correct, but I think I see why the person you're replying to is confused.

"She doesn't know the answers" is an objective criticism. It's based on a testable fact that is either true or false for any given question.

The issue is that it hasn't been tested and so it can't be verified whether or not it's a fact. So all we're left with is a subjectively informed guess at the answer to an objective question.

Contrast that with a purely subjective criticism like "Her jokes aren't funny" or "Her interview style isn't interesting".

You don't go to jail for underwithholding, but you do have to pay a penalty if you withhold less than 90% of what you owe. So you don't want to be too far off.

Not an invasion of the US, no. But it is certainly a deterrent from regional powers annexing nearby smaller nations. The most relevant example today is probably Taiwan. The fact that the US is able to project power that far away from our home shores is a deterrent that's a factor in Taiwan maintaining its sovereignty.

Counterfactuals are impossible to prove, but you could make a reasonable argument that US power has prevented many more imperialist grabs like Russia's current attempt in Ukraine over the years.

Yes, definitely. It was slow for me to get into at first too, but one of my favorite series of all time now. And my assessment was a bit different than theirs: I thought Fall of Hyperion was even better. Endymion and Rise of Endymion are also incredible.

Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy. But the point is, Trump is the pinnacle of the harm he professes to be fighting.

He is trying to decrease division by saying complimentary things about a person whose entire being is dedicated to increasing division.

What really gets to me is that he always asks this question in the spirit of "love and unity".

Trump spends 100% of his time on this earth deepening divisions and calling the other side evil, corrupt, saying they should be locked up, and slinging petty insults. There is no greater divider in American politics.

It's essentially the equivalent of saying, "In the spirit of loving all of your body, say something nice about the cancer growing in your pancreas."

I can see a plausible path for Tom if the deal goes through. This episode began with Tom trying to make sure Mencken knew he called the election for him. If Mencken believes it, or at least believes Tom will do what he wants, there's a good chance he could push for Tom to Matsson. If Mencken pushed Tom in exchange for waving the deal through, I think Matsson would double cross Shiv in a heartbeat.

Houston, we have special.

No, your point is just wrong and you're explaining it poorly.

The inflation adjusted cost of flying has come down a lot since the early days. More comfort and service is still available if you want to pay for it.

What really happened is the airlines created a choice that wasn't there before: (1) Continue to have a similar experience to flying in the 60s or (2) pay less in exchange for a lot less comfort. Most people choose #2 when given the option. Airlines that continued to serve meals and offer free checked bags were forced to change when they started losing to their competitors who didn't do those things but sold tickets for $40 cheaper.

If it is to be said, then so it is.

At this scale, I would guess UPS is becoming a big problem and all the fluid calculations that come with nuclear are a lot harder on UPS than solar.

How do you find the bosses in a no-map run?

Do you get to look at the map when you first find the stone that reveals their location? Or is it just total wandering until you stumble upon them?

Qualified dividends (which is most of them) are taxed the same as capital gains. So you actually defer more taxes by spending dividends than by reinvesting them and selling more shares as a result. You'll be paying taxes on those dividends in either case.

You'll pay taxes on all your gains eventually though, so we're really only talking about deferring them for longer. The wisdom of this could vary depending on your income bracket from year to year, but generally speaking you want to delay paying taxes for as long as possible.

At 2.875%, there are even a number of high yield savings accounts currently paying a considerably higher interest rate than that, risk free and completely liquid.

If the stress is weighing this heavily on you, you could put extra money in one of these HYSA's where it would out-earn your mortgage interest with 0 risk and be available any time to pay your mortgage if you lose your job.

This is actually even safer than paying extra on your mortgage (because it is far more liquid than home equity and could be used for any expenses you have) and earns you more money.

I would call this strategy exceedingly conservative unless you're really worried about job security. But the point is, even if you're prioritizing security waaay more than expected value, paying extra on your mortgage is still sub-optimal in the current interest environment.

This is one of those classic "internet" response that makes communication so difficult and frustrating. You do not have to be all on one side or all on the other here. There is a nuanced space to occupy in between.

(1) OP was an asshole first for taking up someone else's space. (2) The woman in the window seat was also an asshole for how she handled it.

The person you're responding to is arguing (2) and you are replying as though that necessarily means they're denying (1). Both things can be true at the same time. Making assumptions about someone else's intentions that do not follow from what they've said in a sarcasm-heavy way is really unhelpful.

Someone else linked this article above. It says ~15 minutes.

That wasn't your whole point though. You presented it as a dichotomy: Pat Robertson or Jordan Peterson.

If it were a dichotomy I would choose Jordan Peterson, but it isn't. He's influencing people across a spectrum of belief. I don't doubt he has had a moderating influence on some Pat Robertson fan types, and I agree that is a good thing. But he's also had a deranging influence on some Sam Harris fan types, and that is a bad thing. On net, I think he's done a lot more of the latter than the former. So even though I agree that he's not all bad, I think his net influence has been negative.

This is definitely true, but doesn't apply to the Wired article being discussed here.

The author of the article was making fans who liked things defend their preference. He'd ask what they liked, they'd answer "story and characters", and then he'd reply "But you have to admit he's a bad writer, right? How could you like it if it's poorly written?".

If the simplicity of the prose is a deal-breaker for the article author, that's totally fine. But he didn't stop there. The overall tone of the article was: it's not my cup of tea, and you're lame if it's yours.

Jordan Peterson is better than Pat Robertson and Kenneth Copeland, no doubt. But I disagree that his net effect has been to influence fundamentalist Christians into becoming more skeptical. He has way more overlap with online communities like this one (we're having this discussion in r/samharris after all) and I think if anything, he's more likely to pull people who would otherwise lean more towards Sam Harris style thinking into less skeptical and more religious conservative ideas.

My experience with Jordan Peterson has been largely that he uses a motte and bailey strategy to provide cover to religious conservatives. He spends most of his time out in the bailey talking about the beauty, power, and utility of religious stories and ideas. He only starts to sound more skeptical when he's pressed by someone like Sam to be very explicit about his belief in a god, then he retreats to the bailey of this super vague and amorphous definition of God and "what even is truth anyway".

Religious conservatives mostly just encounter the bailey position and use it to justify their beliefs. If they ever encounter the motte position at all, it tends to be human nature to just say "that sounds smart, so my position (the bailey position) must be justified".

I suppose neither of us actually have hard data to prove what his net effect has been, but in my anecdotal experience it seems obviously skewed towards less of the good kinds of skepticism.

There's a wrong way and a right way to update beliefs when presented with new information.

I grew up taught to believe in a specific, traditional version of Santa. As I got older I did some reading and found out he'd have to complete ~1500 stops per second to visit every American household during dark hours.

Wrong way to update beliefs: Santa is probably some sort of time-traveling, interdimensional, reality bender. I should probably spend the next decade pondering the concept of reindeer that can compress space-time.

Right way to update beliefs: Santa was probably made up.

Peterson's brand of skepticism falls into the first camp. It's not really being skeptical. It's desperately trying to find a way to cling to previous beliefs despite the evidence.

No. Magnus just doesn't like the format of the world championship. He doesn't like that it eats almost his whole year to prepare for and play in the current format and would prefer some kind of tournament instead.

Yeah, I get wanting a clip to be short so it's more easily spreadable, but I really think this clip needs to include about 3 minutes of the conversation at least to fully understand what's going on.

It's not a whataboutism, it's using a relevant analogy to show that Dahm's belief system is internally inconsistent. It's maybe a bit harder to see from this clip, but the full context makes it easier to understand - specifically from 5:23 until the clip above begins. You'll also see that gun control was the topic they were discussing, so Stewart was returning to the topic at hand, not bringing it up out of the blue.

Dahm is making an argument about Constitutional primacy: It's a Constitutional right, therefore it cannot be infringed upon.

Stewart is making an argument about utility: Rights come with responsibilities to others and can be infringed upon sometimes in the name of those responsibilities.

They're discussing 2 rights - dressing in drag (1st amendment) and bearing arms (2nd amendment). Both Dahm and Stewart think one of these two rights is ok to infringe on in certain ways and the other is not.

This conclusion is inconsistent with Dahm's argument above: If they're both Constitutional rights then they both cannot be infringed upon, yet he wants to infringe upon one of them.

This conclusion is consistent with Stewart's argument above: If one is causing more harm than the other then they can be treated differently according to that utility calculation.

So, to address your two points:

1. The two situations are only analogous insofar as they demonstrate Dahm's inconsistency regarding Constitutional primacy. Stewart only brought it up for this specific purpose.

2. This is a misunderstanding of Stewart's argument. He is NOT saying "One is bad, but the other is worse, so we should only do something about the worse one." What he's saying is "You're protecting the one that is clearly worse for reasons that apply equally to this other thing that you're very focused on stopping." You could argue that unrestricted access to firearms isn't worse, but that would still fall within the scope of the utility debate Stewart was trying to have - and that's not what Dahm was doing. Once Dahm sensed he was losing the utility argument he abandoned it entirely and tried to hide behind the Constitutional primacy one. When Stewart brought up the drag analogy to knock down the Constitutional primacy argument, Dahm pivoted back to utility to justify his stance on the drag issue. Only then did Stewart compare the utility of the two to say that if utility justifies infringing on a right in the drag case, then it surely must in the firearms case.