Well said! I agree there are underlying reasons for why we reject certain social norms and not others. But I might push back a little bit - what about the cases where these reasons effectively trump any potential loneliness their actions would cause? i.e. I made the “decision” to transition, despite knowing it would definitely isolate me from a lot of close friends and family.
Like you said, there’s plenty of external forces affecting the entropy of a closed “earth” system, and so the notion of a closed system seems a bit meaningless to me. I probably have some more reading to do on this tbh. I tend to take the view that everything is a single closed system (i.e. universal wavefunction) and so talking about smaller subsystems is helpful but never exact.
I think i might be a bit more optimistic on how well we can use these “entropy gradients” to our advantage. I study computational nanotechnology for a living, so ofc i’m a lil bullish on it, but generally i think that our current high technology regime can get us far enough past scarcity, it’s mainly the sociopolitical implications of doing so that i worry would stop us first.
Genuine question - do you feel that your “traditional” gender roles are threatened by the existence of trans people? If so, what makes you feel that way? As i see it, no one is advocating for the extinction of traditional gender roles. We just want the inclusion of non-traditional roles for those that don’t fit into “traditional” gender boxes.
It’s worth reflecting on how much of your apparent resentment toward non-traditional gender roles is a form of identity politics manufactured to sow division and distract from how we’re all being exploited anyways.
omg this vegan bullshit bingo is precious, it’s wild that vegan hate is so normalized and yet nearly all of the copes fit in a 5x5 grid
This was a pretty cool read, I hadn’t thought much about the entropy of a non-isolated system. I’m still not sure it has much physical meaning - the idea that entropy always increases only applies to isolated systems, but it made me think more about where the entropy gain would have to be to achieve a lower entropy mineral/energy world.
It’s interesting that 90% of these comments are just TV show recommendations (or other forms of entertainment). I would have thought that lemmy would be a little more anti-consumption :/
If you’re committed to word-style documents instead of LaTeX, pandoc is a great way to convert between word and the style of your choice (for me, markdown). I made a bunch of additional scripts to assist in conversion between the two.
That said, LaTeX is often a better choice. I’ve settled into a combination of overleaf / git / vscode / LaTeX that keeps my collaborators (and myself) happy.
I gave up on linux because it made academic collaboration difficult as a grad student. I spent too long trying to make a system to bridge the gap between mac/windows and linux, and not enough time on research. Professors don’t care that you use arch btw, they just want results, and will not be forgiving if you explain that linux is what’s slowing you down.
I think this is a great point, and definitely one that I discovered too late in life. It’s strange to come to this realization when others around you have (unconsciously or not) been playing this game for most of their lives.