u/SomeAnonymous

Plato banned poetry from his imaginary constitution in the Republic because it's lies

I'm really struggling to wrap my head around the logic here. Surely there would have been some understanding of the concept of an allegory or a fable? A morally pointed story about a god interacting with mortals, designed to impart some wisdom on the audience — surely it's apparent that the literal truth of this story is irrelevant and incidental to the story's value as a narrative. Or did Plato want his imaginary Republic to ban half of his own culture's myths and stories because they weren't verifiably or intentionally true?

I find the duration of time loops in stories quite interesting for this reason, because it really changes how your actions affect your life. One day? You're actually pretty limited in what you can do in a single day, so you're sheltered from consequences for your actions but those actions aren't as interesting. But one month? A whole year before the loop resets? Now you're firmly in "find out" territory for anything you choose to fuck about with. Crimes, breakups, injuries, etc are serious time sinks, but you could also change careers, move countries entirely, build serious relationships, etc.

In general, I feel like the shorter the duration, the more extreme each action is allowed to be, but the longer it is, the more extreme the results of your actions are.

Well that's just not true, isn't it? The voicing of the dental in preterite and past participle forms of weak verbs, and the presence or absence of a vowel beforehand, has varied through English's history. Old English had -d- in both cases usually (eg he wæs læred = "he was taught", participle, but ic lærde = "I taught", preterite).

The fact that Sanskrit has a devoiced -t- in participle forms is basically irrelevant when present-day English's presence or absence of that feature is an innovation either way.

boy kibble is the other term I've heard used a lot, which feels like it still retains some whimsy and joy about food.

usually this is people feeling like scientists are "nerfing" dinosaurs when new research comes out that changes our understanding. Like carnotaurus probably wasn't a super fast runner the way we originally thought, and spinosaurus was probably closer in behaviour to a gigantic heron, wading through the shallows and hunting fish, instead of the jurassic park 3 version which is just t rex with a sail on its back.

There's some great examples if you go back to Old and early Middle English of people saying "carlmen and wifmen", literally "dudepeople and ladypeople". We really dropped the ball as a language when carlman fell out of use and "man" became masculine-only.

I feel like nib sounds better. Matches with sib(ling).

Nature is more successful in applying the law of compensations to the correction of errors of design or development than man has ever been or is ever likely to be.

I think this quote is the craziest bit of the article. His argument is that there need to be constant corrections and tweaks to your movement in order to fly successfully, so a mechanical automaton which uses "natural laws acting on passive matter" couldn't accomplish that. This sounds reasonable enough, except for, hmm, the existence of bicycles.

Taking the "365th root" of 1.05 gives a .0134% daily interest rate. Leap years don't change the rounding btw.

Also, attempted bullying that falls flat is exactly the sort of thing that would be called cringe. Someone trying to mock or ridicule someone but they are so bad at it that it's hard to even recognise the mockery? Yeah that's embarrassing.

My academic experience suggests that academics themselves are still more than capable of having an ego and conviction in their work, but I want to step past the stylistic or interpersonal reasons for this answer (ie "are people being polite" or something like that). That part is useful to look at, but I think to some extent the actual content of research is changing in a couple of ways as well, which contributes to this shift in writing style.

One factor, which feels strange to put in writing like this, is that there is simply a lot more academic writing happening now than at any prior time in history, maybe with limited exceptions. If I wanted to write an exhaustive review of a topic 100 years ago, I would have to account for an awful lot of sources and other people's works; if I wanted to write that same review today, I'd also need to account for everything that's been written in the last 100 years. In more and more research areas, it basically isn't possible for a single reviewer to do an exhaustive overview of the whole topic. See past answers on this subreddit about "history of everything"-style books, and their (inevitable?) issues.

Following on from that, the layering of research and knowledge through each successive generation means that I'd argue work nowadays is, on average, significantly more granular and focussed than it used to be. That is to say, we know more now, so we can ask more specific questions. This usually means that the scope of individual papers and books must become more narrow, assuming similar word count and time restrictions. If you're writing a paper on, say, the activities of a certain cult in 1st century AD Rome, you're probably not going to conclude your paper by saying, "and therefore XYZ is true about all religious practice across the 400-year lifespan of the Western Roman Empire". Instead, you might say "XYZ is a useful model that could tested against other cult pratices in the period", or "further research is warranted to explore the validity of XYZ as religious practices evolved over the imperial period". Someone else has already done the broad strokes generalisation about the whole 400-year period, so now we have a framework to let us look more closely and compare & contrast individual cases against a hypothesis.

I wish I had a good third point to end this list with, but /u/dabnada kind of took it already in their reference to anthropologists and applying universal theories. Instead I'll end with some (very on topic) hedging: speaking generally, it's probably true that it's harder nowadays to make a Big Claim or claim of massive authority that's well-supported, which could reduce their frequency beyond just politeness. However, you can still find examples to this day where someone has carved out a research area or methodology that enables a more systematic conclusion, so it's worth being careful not to overstate things in this conclusion about being careful not to overstate things.

Had to do a double take because I thought you were quoting Catherine from the Practical Guide to Evil.

"Dickswede" rolls off the tongue better, I think.

the Thing happens, but everyone's collective model of the universe doesn't like it. Paradox time.

It does seem to be a running theme that, when in doubt, many orbit-related habitability concerns can be waived if the planet has a big ocean and a nice atmosphere. Too much radiation? Atmosphere can help that. Tidal locking leaves one area in permanent sunlight? Air and water are great for distributing heat. High orbital eccentricity? A huge ocean would probably be a really good heat sink.

Marasi = Mraize is a pretty incredible headcanon to imagine though.

Elantrians are such "with prep time" warriors.

Yeah dude uhh an Elantrian would totally beat your fullborn Herald with 10,000 Breaths if they had time to debug their magic and code a solution for 17 days straight.

Clearly you simply lack imagination.

there austerity mostly was believed to be the scientifically correct solution to the Great Depression

Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean here? What would make a fiscal policy be considered "the scientifically correct solution", as opposed to "orthodox economic theory", "accepted wisdom", or even just "the solution"? I feel like there's a cultural idea I'm missing here.

Lowkey I have always found it a bit uncomfortable how Song of Achilles doesn't refer to her by any name other than Briseis, given that it literally means "(of) Briseus", ie "Briseus's daughter". Calling her Hippodameia might not be fully accurate to the Iliad, but it's part of the tradition since then, and certainly wouldn't be the biggest artistic liberty taken in Miller's writing for the sake of the themes.

It's similar to asking if you can squeeze a bunch of humans into the space occupied by just one human. Maybe with a lot of pressure you could force some contortionism to get people a little closer packed (hexaferrum, a particular crystal structure of iron, can reach the density of lead if you put it under a few million atmospheres of pressure), but it requires some pretty extreme conditions and no one's comfortable staying in that position for long.

I don't think you need to be so complicated about it: the problem with "might makes right" is as simple as "right doesn't make might".

/r/trees was the original subreddit for weed, so people who wanted to discuss actual trees deliberately set up /r/marijuanaenthusiasts as the subreddit for trees.

/r/anime_titties and /r/worldnews was actually about /r/worldnews having such inactive and useless mods that you could post anime titties to the news subreddit and it wouldn't be removed. The joke gathered steam from there.

subreddit names have always been fixed. just based on casual observation, it seems to me to be a pretty baked-in restriction to reddit's backend, where the subreddit name is used as the unique identifier to link all of the relevant content together rather than a simple label.

In general, the further South and East you go in the UK, the harder your water is. So areas like London and the East Midlands are very hard, and Wales and Scotland have soft water.