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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Man, corvids are so cool. My life goals include becoming friends with a murder of crows. I came close one time while training a pup to walk with training treats; she was super messy and dropped them all the time, and the crows started to recognize whenever we were walking and follow us to get those fallen treats. Unfortunately the pup loved to bark her head off and chase them around, and they did not like that. They even tried to drive me off once or twice by feinting diving attacks at my head



  • Fun fact; the standard model actually allows for spontaneous particle-antiparticle pair generation, so long as the pair mutually annihilate within some hbar defined time limit and conservation laws aren’t broken at a macro scale. This is the mechanism behind hawking radiation too; some of the energy given off by black holes is caused by spontaneous pair generation that happens such that one of the pair is created beyond the event horizon and the other member is created before the event horizon, causing one to be trapped and the other to be jettisoned into space.

    I know that doesn’t really relate to your comment about containing antimatter but I counter with the following: I’m profoundly autistic and the standard model has been a special interest of mine before. I couldn’t resist the chance to infodump a bit


  • I wouldn’t even give it that. Imo “intellectual capacity” is entirely a confidence thing. If you have the confidence to give an answer that may be incorrect, you have intellectual capacity. If you give an answer and it’s wrong, you’re learning. If doing that and being wrong over and over again a million times doesn’t discourage you, somebody is probably about to hand you a degree. “Intellectual capacity” is a fairy tale for the privileged to ensure they aren’t discouraged from pursuing an education, and a source of learned helplessness for most others.


  • My personal take is that iq is effectively meaningless. Measuring intelligence is a problem that is extremely hard, maybe even impossible given that what constitutes “intelligence” can be subjective. Some people ascribe value to it iq because it’s an extreme oversimplification of a problem they don’t want to think to hard about, and as a bonus it creates another hierarchy in which they can baselessly feel superior to others.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity_as_a_measure_of_intelligence

    has a pretty good summary of scholarly debate on that question.

    TLDR: iq has an extremely narrow take on what “intelligence” means, and ignores the vast wealth of what people consider to be human intelligence. For that reason most scholars think it’s nonsense.









  • My closest friend is also autistic, but most of my friends are NT. Small talk is just the price of entry with a lot of people. Lemme give you an alternate definition of small talk: “Talk about safe bullshit unlikely to offend or start a fight until you know the other person well enough to expose your opinions and beliefs to possible criticism or rejection.” The substance of the conversation is meaningless. Smalltalk is about gaging a person’s body language and temper and reactions and all other manner of nonverbal signal. It’s a lot easier if you go in with the understanding that the actual words are meaningless and you barely have to pay attention to them