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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’m not saying it can’t be done, but getting a compromise from a debate is not a primary goal. For competitions, the goal is usually to demonstrate and practice debate skills and the topic and positions matter less. For more serious debates, it is meant to be a way to expose people to the strengths of your position’s arguments and expose the weaknesses of your opponent’s. It’s valuable as an opportunity to persuade an audience of people who haven’t been firmly entrenched in either position, or who may have only been exposed to one side’s arguments in earnest.

    The framework does presume both viewpoints are valid, since both sides are expected to believe in their position, be rational, and be reasonably well-informed. An invalid perspective would not be argued by someone meeting these criteria. It does not presume equality as that would be preemptively judging the quality of the argument. Either the debate platform or the other debater would presumably not agree to a debate with someone who cannot be expected to meet these criteria.


  • Piracy leaves creators worse off when it deprives them of a sale, as in you would have paid for something but instead just pirated it because not paying was an option. So I pirate stuff I think is worth my time, but not my money. I then consider it victimless. Maybe that movie is interesting enough to watch but not enough to rent/buy, so I would pirate it. I’m now at a point where money isn’t as scarce as it used to be, so the prices of entertainment seem reasonable and I am much more willing to pay.

    There are a couple of exceptions to the above. I pirated almost every textbook I could since the fact that a student requires one specific product puts the customer in an exploitable position that allows the seller to charge unreasonable amounts (and used books have none of their proceeds go back to the creator anyway). Also, there is no issue with pirating content no longer being sold, since the creators aren’t being deprived of anything. This is mostly relevant for me with old video games on emulators.


  • I wouldn’t stress over it. Employers look for someone in an umbrella of majors, because every school is going to have its own names and standards for their class templates. If I saw someone list community development as a major, I would think it would overlap a great deal with urban development, with maybe a bit more focus into civil engineering or sustainability. You’ll want to explain how your background is relevant to a position in the interview anyway. I wouldn’t expect it to get you eliminated before then.

    Also, it’s a cool opportunity to stand out with how it differs from a more traditional major. People like hearing how you chose to include something that you felt was lacking from the default path because you thought it was important. Choosing to specialize demonstrates thoughtfulness, passion, and mastery. You’ll be fine.


  • It’s hard to choose “one piece” of knowledge, so I would try to persuade whoever is writing the book to include the time traveler’s cheat sheet. https://i.imgur.com/O6vSrvq.jpg

    I didn’t make it, but includes a lot of information that didn’t have an intuitive path to discovery, but a lot of practical benefits for humanity. If I were to add to it I would try to include at least descriptions of a few other things:

    • batteries
    • engines
    • simple computers (although this may be more involved than the earlier parts combined, so perhaps just simple logic gate diagrams)
    • genes
    • a guttenberg press
    • lenscrafting
    • a world map
    • calculus
    • special and general relativity (also complicated certainly, but could be useful later)
    • and basically as many physics equations as I can think of

  • Deterence is not a great strategy for preventing crime. Criminals don’t actually do much cost benefit analysis before committing a crime; they will consider the chances they have of getting caught, but not the severity of the punishment. Rehabilitation programs are worth considering over punitive justice so long as they are more effective at preventing recidivism, which is certainly an interest for a state.


  • Other people have pointed out more types of information that has good reason to be confidential, but we should also acknowledge it would be a huge investment of effort to do something like this. Organizing, storing, updating, and sifting through all this information when it would so rarely be useful is already too much effort for the benefit even disregarding other concerns.

    Thanks for the unpopular opinion though, it is an interesting change to consider as a thought experiment.