Thimbron

Trump is the Hiroshima of the war between the american right and the american collectivist left. He is here to wreak unfathomable destruction as visibly as possible, to prevent a much more costly calamity from occurring.

This is a vaguely defined term used often by a well known cartoonest. His definition of it is not a definition at all, but actually a description of how he uses persuasion techniques.
Taleb does a better job, but leaves me wondering how computer scientists think, since I am an expert in none of the fields he mentions. Perhaps he would say computer scientists think in algorithms. Perhaps I could go further and say that one may not think unless one is thinking in the terms of one specific discipline or another. Thus if one has no knowledge of any discipline, one may not think.

Both Taleb’s and the cartoonist’s descriptions of word thinking behavior use the word “label.” I take this use of “label” to mean a name for something that is not the thing itself, or does not accurately represent the thing itself.

Why are some of the smartest countries socialist?

If IQ has a causal relationship with the politics of a country, then why are so many high IQ countries socialist or at a minimum, collectivist? Shouldn’t Europe, the US, and Japan be libertarian utopias?

No. This is like saying that since everyone is currently using Visicalc on their Xeons, that they weren’t running Mathematica before, and that the people with 286s could run Mathematica if they wanted and they just choose not to.

The West, and in particular the US, the Netherlands, and the UK are the only places classical liberalism (which emphasizes the primacy of individual freedom and minimal government) has ever existed at any time or place in the history of the world. There is no evidence to support the idea that this stuff runs on any other iron.

This looks like a good model for my next attempt at creating a Z80 computer. Recommended by asciilifeform of course.

Humility. Failure. The question presumes that there is something more important to study. After devoting some time to the study of and much more time to the practice of computer programming because of an idea I had in my head at the age of 18 that the skill was broadly in demand and would keep me employed I find myself wishing I had stuck to the old default of the classics and delayed the choice of a profession until after I knew at least something rather than nothing.
The ancient world now seems to me to exist as a parallel universe where literature is as advanced if not more so than in this universe, but technology lags behind. This study illustrates to me at least the conservative perspective that human nature is constant over the ages.

If a man or woman believes that respect is due only to graduates of institutions of class X, then they should marry only to graduates of institutions of that class because it would be cruel to marry someone who it would be impossible for them to ever respect.

I had a dream that a consulting client had borrowed a large sum of bitcoin from the Klingons. He’d most likely spent it and now the price had gone up substantially and they wanted their bitcoin back. Everyone at his house was in a panic, scanning the sky for incoming Birds of Prey. My house was next door and I was feeling a bit concerned for it.

If upon receiving a bug report from a client in which there is no attempt to describe a repro, fire the client.
At a minimum this displays a lack of understanding of συστεματα which implies a significantly higher amount of work in order to communicate successfully with the client to prevent implementing the wrong features.

MP describes serious writing:

There’s a specific point when the hymen finally breaks and the girl goes from coyly wallflowering to competing with the other sluts for the middle of the room and all that sweet sweet cock & male gaze to be found there. In the case of writing and writers this same exact moment is directly observable by the adults because the author moves past producing defensible generalities their inner mother wouldn’t protest to actually stating their mind, personally and in places nonsensically – let all take umbrage who will. This is perhaps counterintuitively but nevertheless a step forward in their writing, because once the individual gives up on defending their imaginary “fortress” of sweet self delusions, actual competence, ability and skill can sneak in – always on the painful basis of tissue rupture, popped balloons and disabused dreams. Nobody (sane) said that maturation is going to be pleasant. The only statement is that maturation is unavoidable, not good, desirable, or even meaningful to the infantile mind ; otherwise defloration is supposed to hurt, specifically because the protective skins are in the way of actual realisation.