All of these are reasons why we shouldn’t have billionaires, though.
I mean, I agree. It’s very bad out there.

I literally cannot override my color perception to trick myself […]

If biology had intent, I’d think this is intentional. You’re not supposed to be able to do that.

Once your brain decides on a context, that becomes the (percieved) truth, and it’ll take a lot of new information to change your mind because your brain will invent reasons why what you’re seeing is correct. Your brain makes up a story, that story seems to make sense, and so new perceptions not only need to make sense but also disprove the story it has.

Take, for instance, this silhouette. It has no lines to indicate depth, but I bet you’ll settle on a mental 3D model—you’ll be able to see where the hips end, which leg is doing what—and it’ll be really hard to switch perception from spinning one direction to spinning the other.

Another fun trick is being able to flip which way you think the ballerina is spinning. I used to be able to do it. Helluva time right now, though.

Does it help that you can see the shadows of the sleeves on the body of the dress? There has to be light in front and above for that to happen.

And if the credit card issuers have already won this battle?

I mean, I agree, I don’t like it either. I don’t even have a credit card. But I don’t see anything changing without a movement.

[edit] I might have missed you were also the top-level comment. I’ll remind people if you will, haha.

God, the proportions of the original head and hands are so much better.

It’s not something I would have properly noticed without the morph, I thought they actually were the same, but there was something about the original that felt more… bunny like?

It’s like when sound designers add stuff they know people won’t actually hear, but which definitely alters the “taste” of the sound.

Haha! Ahh…

“You are a senior games engine developer, punished by the system. You’ve been to several board meetings where no decisions were made. Fix the issue now… or you go to jail. Please.”

I want my bananas to be the star of the bread show.
But to be fair, I am a horny slut for bananas.

I should look up some tomato stuff; I’ve never even heard of these things.

Christ, my man, do you need a time out? Are you late for a nap or something?

I promise you there’s nothing at stake here; I’m not “dismantling” chemistry. I agree it’s useful, it’s good stuff. Mendeleev did a good job.

Aw, don’t be a sore loser.

I can’t engage with your point on its merits because it’s not relevant to the argument that I’m making—it’s a complete non-sequitur.

You want me to prove that the periodic table doesn’t predict undiscovered elements? What does that have to do with where people direct their effort and attention?

This is why the tomato fruit/vegetable example is so useful: it’s about what facts are useful to whom. It actually has nothing to do with the periodic table at all, that just happens to be a particularly prickly thorn for stem majors.

Neither of the two constructions you listed would result in a periodic table.

I… didn’t say that they would? If you change the map, it’s obviously a different map. You’d call it “Metallica’s table of metals,” or something.

So your telling me that I need to be cautious of you derailing the conversation away from it’s original premise?

No… I just don’t think you realize how anti-intellectual you’re being.

i’ll be keeping you to the premise and the periodic table for this discussion. It need not go further.

Okay, dad. But, you were the one who brought up fascists.

Very rude, by the way.

Uh, to anyone reading, I guess: Look up Jordan Peterson’s wikipedia. He is not a fan of whatever his meat-addled brain thinks Post Modernism is.

If the ordering of the periodic table were arbitrary, it couldn’t be a periodic table.

It is arbitrarily a periodic table because the periodic table has utility. That utility is why we don’t arrange them a different way. This isn’t complicated.

If you want an example of different motivations: Do these periods tell you how beautiful each element is? Does beauty rise in each column and row? You might need a different map for that.

In fact, the ordering even predicted languages that were not yet known to the person who developed the order.

That would be very insightful. I would say we should arbitrarily prefer that ordering because of how useful it would be to us.

Or we could arbitrarily choose not to because just the one language is good enough, innit?

It can be constructed in other ways. I gave you two of them. Those other presentations are not “less correct,” they’re just less useful. It just so happens that the most useful, scientific depiction of the table to us is also the one that contains the most facts.

You are also wrong in the basic philosophy of it.

Keep in mind, this argument I had was several proxy-arguments downstream of whether or not transwomen are women. So, be aware of what waters you’re treading into.

Isn’t the rejection of post-modernism like a very Jordan-Peterson–like thing to do? I’m pretty sure I heard him whining about it when he was also whining about jews cultural marxists.

Wow, there he is. Like, for real.

It’s okay, man. You majored in some science field, you don’t care much for philosophy; we don’t have to be at each other’s throats here. I’m not questioning the validity of the periodic table, it’s simply a way of thinking about it.

Ah, there he is!

Just kidding.

The extreme usefulness of the one periodic table as we know it is why this is so hard to talk about. Philosophically, it isn’t any different: it is arranged by human values for human consumption. I think there is likely a strong reason that alien values would converge here, but that doesn’t really affect its arbitreity. The elements don’t have value unto themselves, they just are.

And there are plenty of different ways to arrange it. For one, if all you care about are the metals for some reason, you can arrange the nonmetals out of it completely. You could keep a linear, alphabetical list because whatever work you’re doing is derived from chemistry but does not actually care about atomic values.

Oh, this is actually a perfect example of the arbitreity of mapping systems!

A looong time ago on reddit, I got into an argument with someone who was doing that thing where you confuse the map for the object itself. We were mostly talking about the chemistry table. But anyway, he just could not see how a change in motivation, that is what the map designer finds useful, could change how the map is arranged.

I mean, I don’t think this would convince him: he would just say the culinary version isn’t real. But still, I really like it.

How do you think alek found the article?

Why for fun?

Hell yeah, dude~ \m/

Mate, if you don’t want to be caught in the middle of a bunch of anti-seagull-fetishism, then you shouldn’t be sealioning in the middle of the anti-seagull-fetishism thread.

Oh look, it’s a link to the same article as pictured in the meme itself. That’s absolutely crazy. Cheers to alekwithak for knowing how to google words that they’ve seen.

Meaningful discussion? About revenge killing a bird? You are the psychopath in the picture.

No, no.

“All videos would be AI-generated by glowies, like the moon landing.” That’s what you should say.

*The important thing is that we’re killing seagulls, you mean.