xxd

This is the second leak-type-meme I've stumbled across and now I'm hooked

Super interesting that you enjoy fiction so much. What I struggle with most is that visual language is often very dense in information, but I can't do a lot with it. Imagine something like this:

"Light spilled in through the high windows, tinting the hallway into beautiful autumn colors. It looked as if the sunlight was dancing, but of course nothing moved except the dust suspended in the air."

I would read this and think: cool, I bet this would look amazing if I could see it, but all the information I can actually use from these sentences is "A hallway has high windows, it's maybe morning or evening". Everything else is either visual or obvious to me. So fiction books are more exhausting, because I constantly filter out things that I can't really use. It's like I'm reading a text where a person constantly rambles and can't get to the damn point. I'm really curious how or why this is different for you? Another thing I find annoying is, that usually when reading fiction books, you constantly have to amend your mental model. I presume this is relatively easy for people without aphantasia, although I might be wrong. Let me explain with this example:

"blah" said A. "blah?" B responded. A said "blah blah" as he stood up from his chair. "blah!" B said back, while A turned right and walked out the door.

This order is the exact opposite my brain expects. I'd like know the room layout and who is sitting/standing where first, then the characters can interact with each other in my already complete internal model. This might be a me-thing, but if non-aphantasia people can image images as easy as I can imagine sounds, making changes to the model must be super easy.

Also, I do think fiction books and non-fiction history books are very different. Simply because an author can build a world, story and characters to convey some deeper meaning or overarching theme, or use strong imagery or metaphores. All of that is more uncommon for historic books from my experience. The above example in a history book would probably look something more like "Orange light entered the hallway through the high windows". And even if non-fiction history books were similar to fiction, history is a tiny part of non-fiction! There are tons of other subcategories that differ greatly from fiction.

And how in the hell does one [...] enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?!

I can only speak for myself (#5) here, but I can barely enjoy books. If they're any sort of fiction, where I have to imagine a world, characters, objects, ... it's very exhausting. I read fiction books in school, but haven't picked up a fiction book out of my own will in years. But I do enjoy non-fiction books, especially when they convey Ideas you don't need (or maybe can't) picture visually.

Side note: I found people who read a lot (of fiction) often being critical of movie adaptations. I never understood this, because even 'meh' movies offer a far superior experience than just reading the book to me. It took me a while to realize that movie adaptations are a kind of 'disability aid' to my aphantasia.

I mean most pcgamers probably have more powerful hardware already

According to Valve, it should outperform or match 70% of current PCs owned by gamers. So while not crazy powerful, it might be an affordable (hopefully) upgrade for some more low spec gamers.

That's exactly right, you got it!

The intermediary probabilities make it even worse, yes! But the overall probability is already ridiculously tiny, so I don't think it changes the conclusion by a lot.

That was my assumption, yes. Because the last person would have the entire population on the tracks, and you can't really continue after that.

I neglected the intermediary likelihoods, because that calculation was too long for wolfram alpha, but I have since managed to get it working, and the conclusion is not significantly different. The expected number of deaths skyrockets, even if the chance of pulling the lever is tiny for every person.

I think you should pull the lever, even if this ended after the entire human population was on the track and the experiment doesn't go on infinitely. Hear me out:

When a person pulls the lever with a chance of 50% and in one case they kill 2 people and in the other case 0, the kind of average outcome is 0.5 * 2 + (1 - 0.5) * 0 = 1. Now let's consider the last person in the chain of decision-makers. They would have 2^33 people on the tracks, or about the entire human population. To make the expected outcome be exactly one person, they'd have to pull the lever with likelihood x so that x * 2^33 + (1 - x) * 0 = 1 which would lead to x = 1/2^33 or about x≈0.0000000001. So only if the last person directs the train towards the people with less than this tiny chance, the expected outcome is smaller than 1. This chance is incredibly small, and far far smaller than I'd guess the actual percentage is. Think of the percentage of people that are psychopaths, or mass murderers, or maybe even just clumsy. If you evaluate the percentage as someone flipping that switch as anything above 1/2^33, you should therefore flip the switch yourself. You can guarantee that the outcome is 'only' one death, whereas the average outcome of just the last person likely exceeds 1 by a huge amount.

I really wanted to calculate the percentage so that the expected outcome is 1 even if every person in the chain flips the switch with that chance, but wolfram alphas character limit let me down :(

There is no room for a third Party in a FPTP voting system as per Duverger’s Law. I think it's likely the party would never take off, no matter how sensible its positions are. And even in the best case of it slowly growing while eating away at the democrats to eventually have a majority: during the time it takes to get there, elections would just be an easy republican win every time, as the 'left half' is split between bernie and status quo. I don't think that's worth it.

I think talking with his boss, your boss and HR (possibly all in one meeting) sounds like a reasonable first step. If it doesn't work out or help, I'd try talking to him. You could get one or two coworkers as backup to come with you, just to make his personality issues less threatening. If this doesn't work or maybe even make it worse, you could get some earplugs or ANC headphones to make it less of an issue for you. Good luck!

Next, the guy behind you can pay to block your seat. Final step is to start an auction to see who is willing to pay more to either recline or block my seat. Now the airline can make even more money!

I love the thought that someone "anti woke" played through Gay World just to make sure it is actually woke