HeRocksInALab

Boardgames, fancy comic books, history. He/Him.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@mattyglesias They both described the company as being organized around mollifying him with a superficial cult of personality while carefully isolating him from actual decision making... but this is secondhand from people who quit their dream jobs because they couldn't stand him, so who knows.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@mattyglesias I always figured this was an act, because how could someone like this not run the companies into the ground? But I have two friends who worked at Space X early on and both described him as exactly like this and held him in total contempt years before it was cool.

[Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias]

@MattBruenig Just taking the time to bother to lie to me still conveys information — some do, others don’t. I appreciate the effort and whether or not someone can master a given side’s POV tells you something about how well they understand the topic.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@TexanChud @GarrettPetersen Man, this would actually be a total nightmare. In a world with replicators and FTL communication I bet uniform regs oscillate on like an hourly basis in response to inscrutable Starfleet internal politics. Like, "Brass pips this morning, I see Admiral Lee's clique is ascendant."

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@MattZeitlin It's stuff like, "Will this further reduce low-trust dummies faith in the system?", "Could the delay be exploited during an attempt to steal a national election?", and "To the extent that the delay is the product of incompetence, what *else* are they doing badly?"

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@MattZeitlin I mean, personally, I don't really care if it takes weeks to count votes. I'd like it to be faster, but to the extent there's a real tradeoff between ease-of-voting and speed-of-counting I'm way in one direction.

My real concerns about counting speed are almost all second order.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@themostazezo I knew a Japanese guy who lied about his blood type on a job application because there's a whole blood type astrology thing over there and he has the "bad" one.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@lurking2472 @BillTheKid1603 He had other good arguments for heliocentrism, so if you accept those it falls out that the stars must be unfathomably far away, but he had no empirical evidence they were, and the idea that *anything* could be trillions of miles away was a huge update to anyone's priors in 1543.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@lurking2472 @BillTheKid1603 Yes, ultimately, but Copernicus had no evidence for them.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@PetreRaleigh I dunno, guys like Pappy O'Daniel or John R. Brinkley seem like a pretty close fit. Just pure hucksters who happened to have a direct line to voters with the advent of radio. Both of course had interests and coalitions, but the fundamental basis of their power was charismatic.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@BillTheKid1603 The best argument against Copernicus was that if the Earth is moving then the stars should display parallax. He could only make a special pleading that maybe they were so far away the parallax was invisible, but people could do the math to see that would require absurd distances.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@BillTheKid1603 This is true of many scientific revolutions, as famously pointed out by Thomas Khun. There were good arguments against Copernicus too. It's one of the things that makes science hard to theorize because good science and junk science often seem to use similar methods.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@asymmetricinfo @dilanesper But medieval sources constantly reiterate that many people at the time, including pious Christians, had a specific dislike for the clergy as a class.
https://t.co/OehTLjmRmS

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@dilanesper @asymmetricinfo It's also notable that, when medieval Christians need to explain some calamity as God's punishment, one of the first collectives sins they jump to is "the wickedness of the clergy." There were lots of pious meieval Christians who *also* thought that most priests were wicked.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@dilanesper @asymmetricinfo It's also notable that, when medieval Christians need to explain some calamity as God's punishment, one of the first collectives sins they jump to is "the wickedness of the clergy." There were lots of pious meieval Christians who *also* thought that most priests were wicked.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@dilanesper @asymmetricinfo Barbara Tuchman has a great description of the million-and-one little taxes on everything from firewood to marriages that priests would extort from their flock, and it makes a mob of peasants literally ripping their parish priest apart with their bare hands make a lot more sense!

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@asymmetricinfo @dilanesper Elite authors may have highlighted violence against the clergy during revolts as a way of discrediting the rebels, but I don't think they're inventing the violence they describe, which is often incredibly brutal in a way that obviously reflects deep, deep hatred.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@asymmetricinfo @dilanesper Violence against lords who fell into the hands of peasants or townsmen could be symbolic, like being publicly paraded or forced to run the gauntlet, whereas clergy were more likely to just be butchered. But this might be partly strategic and might reflect a bias in our sources.

[HeRocksInALab @rocks_lab]

@ThatchEffendi Fuck, they should make a Patrick Leigh Fermor game. I want to press X to stun a German general I've kidnapped into quiescence using my knowledge of Horace's odes.