Signtist

Kinda. Creativity starts to die when you start to get someone or something else to be creative for you. It starts with all the “thorny” problems (which are the ones that make you better at your craft by working through) but then, with those problems off your table, smaller problems start to become “thorny” in your mind, so you give those to AI too. With those problems gone, your “thorny” problems become the next most difficult, so they get sent to AI.

This continues slowly but steadily until you can hardly even start something because the thought of it is too “thorny.” There are no objectively difficult tasks - everything is relative to your baseline. When you offload a difficult task, that doesn’t get rid of your difficult tasks, it just shifts your baseline to make slightly less difficult tasks seem difficult.

As someone who works with spreadsheets and was recently told by management to test out a new AI tool, I was very happy that it missed important details on every project, and it was never the same details, so it was very easy for me to show my boss how going through everything with a fine toothed comb to catch all the things the AI missed would take much longer than just doing it myself and being familiar with the information.

My wife and I danced to this song at our wedding!

I mean, I’ve been alive for my entire life! I doubt I’ll break my streak now.

Yeah, I’m of the mind that if I can’t sense something, and I’m not getting sick all the time because of it, it’s not bad enough to avoid. Lo and behold, I almost never get sick, even when my wife gets sick all the time. Now, it could absolutely be confirmation bias or some hidden 3rd factor that’s causing this, but either way, bring on the fecal matter mistings!

Man, even that was a sign!? Is everything I’ve ever done just textbook autism?

Yeah, I’m a sucker for the “OP protagonist wins effortlessly all the time and everyone loves him” shows. Sometimes you just want to hear a feel-good story set in a world where the good guys just win like it’s the only logical conclusion. There’s enough suffering and uncertainty in the real world without it needing to be in the fake worlds I escape to; I want them to be low-stakes auto-success stories more often than not.

I’ve found I’m a lot happier when I just take things as they come. It’s not so much that I want to watch mid shows as it is that I don’t want the stress that comes from trying to avoid them. I’m much happier just quickly picking something good enough than spending a bunch of time researching the best thing and then still wondering if I could’ve found something better.

I enjoyed watching shows most when I had 10 local TV channels to pick from and just watched whatever seemed good enough out of those options, so now I just purposefully limit my options to emulate that, and it’s been pretty nice.

My party tried doing this with our DM once. Ended up having all our stuff stolen in the middle of the night and had to chase after the guy practically naked through a dangerous jungle. Gotta actually redeem the enemies before you add them to the party.

Companies have always done everything they can to take as much as we’ll let them and give as little as we’ll let them. Then they realized that they can just put out “educational” videos that specifically train us to let them take as much as they want and give as little as possible.

Yeah, I’m pretty unabashedly anti-capitalist, so I’m not surprised I ruffled some feathers. I was just pointing out that the idea that this was just a spam filter taken too far doesn’t really hold up.

I’m on the list and I’ve never even posted anything. I do comment a decent amount, though, but I wouldn’t consider any of it to be spam.

If you’ve got a wine stain on your clothes, pour a bit more wine on; it’s already stained, so nobody will notice!

This can be a slippery slope, though. My mom fell into conspiracy theories, and a big part of that was thinking along the lines of “if you can’t explain how vaccines can’t cause autism, then I’m going to keep believing they do.” Silly me with my genetic counseling background made a small, simple slideshow about how the immune system and vaccines work, and of course she still said “you didn’t explain it well enough, so I still believe they cause autism.”

Essentially the strategy of “if you can’t explain why, it’s not worth doing” only works if the person asking truly wants to understand, and withholds forming an opinion until they have all the information they can gather, instead of just looking for an excuse to not do something. Like most things in life, it can be abused by bad actors.

My family members always get up in arms when I tell them I changed the family recipe for one dish or another. “You can’t change perfection!” Then they try it and ask for the recipe. I hate reverence for the mystical ancestors; they can be - and often are - wrong.

To go a step further, arguments are healthier if they’re pictured as a way to field test your beliefs to see if they hold up to scrutiny.

If you go into an argument trying to get the other person to change their mind, you’ll often be met with failure even if your points were valid simply because people hate changing their mind, and you don’t want to be tempted to use bad-faith arguments of your own just to secure that “win.”

Instead, just give your argument; if the other person has a good point, see if yours can hold up to it, and change your outlook if you find that it can’t. And if it feels like the other person is just saying whatever they think will “win,” leave, because their argument wouldn’t make a good field test anyway.

Think twice? In this economy?

Honestly, a family history of inbreeding doesn’t mean much for the individual so long as it’s not directly involved in their own birth. The issue with inbreeding is that every family has a few rare recessive conditions that simply don’t manifest because they’re rare enough to never be shared with the other families that they’re having kids with, but if 2 people from the same family have a kid, that kid is way more likely to end up with 2 broken copies of the gene and have the familial condition.

However, even if your own parent has both broken copies, they can only pass 1 to you, and if your other parent is from another family, they likely won’t have the same condition, so they’ll pass you a working copy guaranteed and you’re good. It’s certainly not ideal, because it does concentrate the broken genes over time in a family if inbreeding continues, but a family history of inbreeding isn’t really much of a red flag health-wise if your own parents aren’t related.

I mostly reference 4 different ethnicities because I have grandparents whose families originate from 4 different countries.

My great grandparents and great-great grandparents all had children with families who also emigrated from the same country their own family did, and before that they were all living in their original countries, presumably having children with other people from those same countries.

It wasn’t that long ago when, in America at least, people didn’t often associate much with people outside of their own country of origin. Polish and Italian people were especially avoided from what I’ve heard, and those are both ethnicities of mine.

Me getting my shoes on at 7:25 only to wait around doing nothing for an hour.