osmosisch

The latest eposiode about reduced empathy with outgroups and using virtual reality to at least in the short term improve this seems especially relevant in the context of gg.

This has been bothering the crap out of me as well :/

A propos of nothing, I'm kind of tempted to make a Sean Vainamoinen account that posts about dota/sports in trochaic tetrameter.

That's some fairly hypnotic head-bobbing. That might explain why I liked it Now to transfer all my money to you...

I am quite honestly shocked at how much I've enjoyed this run around. Usually I just sub for one month per expansion but I'm probably going to add at least one more this time. The heroics have been interesting (train robbery!), the followers/garrison dynamic has been pretty compelling and the aesthetics are wonderful. I didn't realise how much I'd missed the Arrakoa until they showed up again.

When it doorbreeks to a Braid publiek.

It may be because I only read threads in relatively enlightened subportions of SA, but I'm saddened to see it tarred by association like this.

Agreed on all points.

I wouldn't call that a refutation, so much as a good test scenario to determine whether one is speciesist (I am).

Tangentially, as someone who works in this field (drug regulation/systematic review) currently, 'clinical research' is not exactly a saving grace either, unfortunately. The gold standard is seen as randomised clinical trials, which weed out their participants to an extreme degree, therefore only really giving information about a drug's effect on a particular tiny subset of the general population. That's not even mentioning the myriad incentives and methods for the companies performing the trials to massage the data and its presentation. It's probably better than nothing, but overall the system's pretty fucked. As systems tend to be.

Fucking hell, that's one of the least ethical experiments I've ever read about.

I strongly disagree that what Tycho is doing boils down to your interpretations, Gormongous. The racist-speciesist equivalency is a basic assumption that so far has not been refuted and therefore is completely valid to make in my opinion. I find it hard to understand why it's so hard for people to own that they're speciesist, and the amount of noise it generates disrupting an otherwise fascinating discussion is very irritating to me. I do find it disappointing that the plant sentience discussion has been left largely out because there's some very cool research there.

Not anymore. I hope one of us got it.

I live in a country where weed's at least quasilegal and there's been no issues except for drug tourism from neighbouring countries, and a mild tendency to exaggerate schizophrenia in heavy users.

Kind of tangential, but did you read Infinite Jest? if so, is the description of Phoenix any kind of accurate? It sounds awful indeed.

...crickets?

I am hovering (dot com) over the buy button for platonic.click

That was my first thought as well. It Must Be So. Or you can be more current and call it frndstr.io

It could actually be rational if he's taken the time and effort to check the side-effects of the various medicines under consideration (including MJ).

I'm still using my galaxy Nexus which I was pretty happy with until google decided to arbitrarily stop pushing android updates to it. That and their other recent anticompetitive behaviour around Android has really soured me on them. Unfortunately the competitors are at least as bad if not worse, so basically I'm probably going to hang onto this thing until it stops working. Grumble.

concern/sophistry/tone trolls I assume

Now all we need is the pop-back-in to make it true 5/5 material. On the subject at hand, I find Mr. Pigeon's series of posts to be internally consistent and interesting to read. It's fine to disagree with the fundamental assumption (humans and higher animals are equally important), but a lot of guff people have been giving has been unjustified in my opinion. For what it's worth I personally eat eggs and dairy (but no animals) for reasons of convenience and pleasure. I accept the fact that this makes my behaviour less ethically sound than it would be otherwise, if one starts from the aforementioned equality assumption.

Huh, thanks for pointing me down a fascinating rabbit hole. What a crazy world. http://www.wired.com/2013/11/tnhyui-earphone-burn-in/

It was really strange to hear such an extended discussion of real life location-based games without either of you mentioning Ingress. That's been wildly succesful. Every city I've visited has been active and even many small villages have had portals (analogous to the islands in Plunder to a certain extent). A wonderful listen otherwise. It's always lovely to hear all the crazy ways people orbit into game design.