Better, I looked at the comment history about emotion and transactional analysis and thought "That's crazy, this is something I would say."

I think the theory is good for simplifying complex structures for quick understanding, but I also have some personal issue with broad statements that encompass whole groups saying - they are this way.

I do agree that the default stance in classical religion can be the parent/child (even to the point for forcing everyone to call the man up front "father") but I don't think that's a default state of religion. In my personal experience I've met adult/adult with holy men and felt respected as a peer. On the other hand, I do stray away from a lot of the organized aspects of religion because of their implicit power structure.

I've also read it many times. I wanted the username isherwood but trying to reserve it tells me it's taken. When I go to the page it tells me there is no such user.

Sad times.

I talk to 100 people and no one's heard of this. I post on thing online and someone has actually read the damn thing.

The core of his work seems to center around the growth and segregation of religious diversity among populations and their ultimate reconvergence. I haven't read too much of it but the idea seems to be that societies used to be heavily divided in the US based on religious lines, but over time those religious segregations died down and a more diverse and stronger idea set was left.

His racial argument is on the social construct of race instead of the biological construct, where socially held beliefs which are attributed to certain races can be overcome through close proximity. While it initially causes a hunker down effect in those who still hold tight to their cultural beliefs, the few who don't hunker down can deconstruct and reconstruct those beliefs into new ideas.

I don't understand what makes this particular approach wrong though. Without analogy he's looking at the core of the problems he sees so that he can find a solution. The biggest problem seems to be the effects of time on this social value issue. His paper only accounts for a single point in time, with no accounting for how things change over time. His other studies lead him to believe that the situation will change over time out of necessity.

Maybe, but the entirety of Robert Putnum's educational work is based on the study and movement of social capital. The reason he didn't get into the long term effects of the social integration in this paper is because of the sheer size and scale of the issue and the number of factors that have to be individually accounted for.

I tend to believe his ideas on those potential futures will be beneficial.

In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits.

and

Diversity is not strength, it weakens communities and is conducive to racism.

I love quotes that start with "..." as that "..." almost always contradicts things. Let's look at the whole quote, shall we?

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

And a related but tangential quote.

In the text, Faustus is reading the vulgate of Saint Jerome, and comes to Romans 6:23 "The wages of sin is death," he quotes, and stops right there, despairing, without turning the page. Dr. Hempel looked out at the class. "You're all good Christians, right? What's the rest of the verse? What would Faustus have seen if he'd turned the page?" There had been no answer. " 'For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.' Don't you understand? Faustus was eternally damned because he was a bad reader."

I think all of these are solid ideas but ultimately very boring. That's what I like about bits for boops, it's at least an interesting look at the problem and an attempt at a novel solution. I think hubski should lean on their lack of funding and not force a revenue model so long as they don't really need one, and based on the fact that they aren't begging, they don't seem to need one.

That said, I think taking apart the problem can help a bit with finding that more novel solution. So...

Until yesterday Hubski had one kind of capital - social. Everyone got one vote per comment or post which they could always choose not to use. Yesterday mk introduced that sweet, sweet bit capital and those are the two I want to focus on.

The goal, as I see it, is to create a mechanism that turns social capital into bit, or financial, capital but doesn't allow bit capital to become social capital. That is, hubski and its community should be paid for their contributions, but shouldn't be required to pay to contribute.

There are two parts to that puzzle, getting the bit capital and distributing it. The easiest way to get our bit capital is through advertising, though this doesn't adhere to the second part of our mechanism as we're allowing individuals to buy access to the community (social capital) for bit capital. The gated content model has similar problems but instead of posting a message to the audience in exchange for bit capital, you're just allowing access to the audience in general for bits. In some ways this is better, but in some ways (to me) it's worse.

Your value add model is an interesting one and it's worked successfully in games for quite some time. The basic gist to the video game version is to open the platform as a simple, but complete, space where you gain access to more functionality through time. You can bypass the time restrictions through money. Take Team Fortress 2 for example. All of the weapons in the game that have effect on actual game play can be unlocked through actual game play, or you can spend a few bucks and buy the weapons now. Such a system could easily apply to hubski where you earn gold tokens through the slow acclimation of social capital, or you can buy them in bulk with bit capital. This is one of the more interesting systems for me, but creating such a system would take a lot of time and consideration.

Getting back to the puzzle, I think this bits platform offers an interesting foundation for the solution to the problem but ultimately seems to come a little short. While it's a solid way to move capital around the site, it feels like it bonds the social and financial capitals too tightly to one another. My suggestions all revolve around putting a bit more distance between the two. If, for example, you had bits you would suddenly see a golden hubwheel next to the blue one. A vote on the golden wheel notches up the blue but also adds bits. A vote on the blue acts as regular. Similar mechanic but more granular control.

The other idea is a social marketplace. Every week, month, quarter, whatever, the doors of the social market are shuttered and can be opened again after a minimal contribution. This might not be necessary but in this thought experiment offers the initial bit income. Once the market place is open, individuals can ask for social favors in return for bit capital. For example - if I wanted to host a story writing contest, I could offer 500 bits to the best author. If I wanted to have a cities skylines tournament, I could charge every entrant 100 bits and payout 10,000. If I wanted to see the tightrope priest less often I could start a kickstarter style bit project and get better servers once it reached 1,000,000.

There are gaping holes in this idea but I think it could build well off of the current bit exchange program. It's likely too complicated for what hubski prefers, but I like it.

Clicking the wheel will share the post with everyone who follows you. Clicking the wheel on a response to a post will only "upvote" that post in the thread.

You really hit your stride after the first few paragraphs. I would recommend reading the first part again, maybe out loud, to edit for clarity.

The world is solid and I loved the idea of a nobel magical city falling to the worst traits of human nature. More on that mundane moral decay might be interesting.

It's a good story and it was interesting to the end. Well done.

Psychologists sold the C.I.A. and the Pentagon on a menu of aggressive interrogation techniques presented as scientifically proven to be effective; in reality, they were based on Communist methods designed not to find the truth but to produce false confessions that could be used for propaganda purposes.

I can scrape data and pump out tables and shitty graphs, they just won't be pretty. I was planning on tracking the number of submissions and comments before and after the start of this anyway.

* first thing

* second thing

Edit: got it. I think your slashes are backwards in pastebin?

In my gut I have some moral problem with this statement but I can't articulate it logically.

On PC. At first I hated it, the public servers were weird and the private servers were weirder. It was just too hard to find people who played in a way that meshed with how I wanted to play. Now I'm playing with some guys from work and we all seem to be on the same page. I kind of get to go off and do my own thing and can join up with the tribe on big stuff, and I don't have to worry about griefers and trolls.

there's this thing called transactional analysis. It was bigger in the 70's but fell out of style, but some of the core concepts are neat.

It breaks us into three ego states - the parent, the child and the adult. When we interact with other people, we each take on one of these ego states. In rational conversation we might both take on adult, in play we might both take on child, in learning one person might take on child while another takes on parent. These are learned states that help us quickly determine the power structure of an interaction.

I think that when people are in these situations where someone say no, they don't do that thing, it subtly changes the dynamic of the conversation. The first person, the one who offered the thing, sees the transaction as adult to adult. Once the other person says no from a moral standpoint, they are seen as taking a parent role. Now we're in what's called a cross transaction, where one party was expecting a certain ego state but got another.

There are really only two reactions to this crossed transaction. The first party could hold fast in their adult ego state and say, "cool", drop the perceived slight and move on. The other option, the option chosen by the loudest of the internet, is to make the transaction even again. They respond to the parent ego state by taking on a child ego state and by throwing a digital temper tantrum. They see the morality of the other person as a characteristic of an adult state and finish the game by taking on a child state.

The theory is that this is a remnant of childhood learning. The folks who lash out were, as children, subjugated to moral authority from the parents in their lives (maybe not literal parents, but people who played the role). Once that stance is taken again in their adult lives, they slide from their stance into a child state. I think this is even easier online because the people who yell and fuss use the internet as a playground for their child state, so the transition isn't a state change, but a change of mood for the state they are already in.

I finally built a farm in Ark.

I'm really not OK with that being the big accomplishment of the week but my work projects are all stagnating. I'm hoping I can jump start them soon.

EDIT: Thanks for the motivation. I went looking for work and found an old script I made to save company time. With some recent changes I've gotten it working and with a few more I think I can implement it on a scale that will save hundreds of hours. Good stuff.

This is such a huge question and so widely debated because there is no one answer.

A guiding principal I use for my life is "if no one knew you did something, would you still do it?" That is, are you acting selfless for the admiration of others? Are you acting selfish because others might judge or take advantage of you? If so, it's my opinion that you're letting dictate your life. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, you get to live as you choose even if that means going along with others, but if it's causing you distress then following your own course might be a better option.

At one point in my life I tried to harden myself a bit. Focusing more on my self and less on others because I thought that was what adults were supposed to do. And while some people did admire me for personal keenness, I didn't admire myself. I was stopping myself during private acts of kindness or accommodation for fear that people would see me and judge me and condemn my supposed weakness and it hurt me every time I did it. It was an act that eliminated the appearance of weakness in exchange for the growth of an actual weakness.

It was a good experience in some ways, I learned to draw lines and how to say no. But now I do those nice things and let the few bad seeds take advantage of me, because I have the peace of mind to know that I let that happen of my own accord, instead of forcing people to take it only after cracking a cold hard shell.