I mean, it dovetails into nihilism too. God and cosmic justice is dead, we have to figure out how to work with what we have.

Unfortunately both nihilism and stoicism have a different meaning to the average reader than the original one.

Exactly. I feel like just listing them out is of limited use because of that.

and even if there is a reasonable option, they probably won’t win the vote anyway.

See, this is it right here. Anyone can run, but nobody can win without being slick and two-faced. The idiot vote is the largest block. If you get involved it’ll be obvious pretty fast.

(I say usually, because a few elections are better than other, but generally speaking at a federal level, it’s slime no matter how you vote)

So, you’re assuming we’re all American here. This applies to every democracy, including my own. In America, just add a probably terminal deadlock problem in on top of that.

So, to be clear this was an application to move to another part of the same company?

I don’t know you, but being thin skinned isn’t a trait I associate with any form of autism, so I wouldn’t worry about that specifically. Misinterpreting things is a bigger possibility - it could just be that the new boss doesn’t want big personnel changes right as he’s getting his footing. (Would you?)

Except that I don’t know how to deal with it. And I don’t want to deal with it, because it is unfair that what others think and talk about you makes your career more difficult.

Speaking for myself, once I’ve understood the situation, gamed out every option and picked the one that’s best, I find a kind of peace - even if that option is really, really demeaning and hard. I hope you can find something like that too.

A reminder that “dealing with it” doesn’t just mean stoicism. Now, I don’t have all the details here, and I only have your side of the story, but you can still set boundaries with neurotypical people. If you’re successful, you almost by definition are going to have options. Do you want to quit? Maybe even pursue a different career path? Or, is continuing as normal the best option?

Or overreact, and kill you that way. Viral fevers, allergies and septic shock are all examples.

Evolution is not a human designer. It’s produces an endless pile of kludges that ends up working well enough. Although, in some ways that’s even more impressive.

The thing about that is that it’s a little too complete. How can there be both negativity bias and normalcy bias, for example?

To make any sense, you’d need to break it down into a flowchart or algorithm of some kind, that predicts the skew from objectivity based on the situation and personality tendencies.

Nuance is boring, voting and/or complaining is easy.

I mean, people are right about slimy politicians too, but they never seem to consider that it’s them that keeps electing those people.

China can just say pay up and we’re fucked.

Yeah, them and what army? (Well, the PLA, but going into MAD and great power military strategy would be too much of a digression)

A classical example of Westerners thinking human laws are laws of physics somehow. I assume, anyway. It’d be weird to hear this from anyone recently imported.

Hmm. Business budgets are pretty similar to household budgets.

In government budgets thing do get a little fuzzy, because historically they always run a slight deficit until they fall to war or revolution and “reset”. If it’s a rich country, they can raise taxes whenever they feel like, too, assuming they don’t care about re-election.

Of course! Our society couldn’t have multiple moving parts, could it?

And honestly, that’s a great example of the shortcomings of “common sense”. What people mean when they say there’s not enough common sense is that the people who aren’t “common” (like them) must all be stupid. In reality, pretty much everyone in every position is doing exactly what anyone would, if only they knew the situation.

Folk idioms that contradict each other are my favourite. For example, “the cream rises to the top” vs. “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”.

Germanic-sphere countries historically liked to kill people for stealing bread, so I guess it’s not too disproportional. You have to think the person going “yes please” would make the whole lynchmob atmosphere hard to keep going, though.

Do share if you find it, I’ve mostly turned up works by critics with a quick search.

Oh hell yeah. As originally a maths person, the Vickrey-GSP-VCG auction continuum is great; very satisfying. Have you looked into fair cake cutting algorithms as well?

Yeah, it came with ghostwriting for the text section.

Man, I have no idea what people are looking for from dating profiles, and what I got back from the seasoned pros just reinforces that. Left to my own devices, I went terse and impartial. What they wrote seems cheesy and boastful to me, but I guess comes across as confidence to others. Which just means it’s money well spent, I suppose, because I haven’t gotten any complaints since.

It’s a beast too - 202 pages. From the part I read, I could probably make one that kinda works, but that’s it. Unfortunately the author didn’t go into the details I was hoping for, like why exactly steam turbine airfoils are hook-shaped. One neat thing is that they have a nice little formula for comparing totally different turbines over time to show how they gradually do more with less.

The ammonia paper is weird because it’s a super impractical and difficult idea - normally you fix nitrogen in a big Haber-Bosch plant and turn it into biomass. Both came up because they’re applicable to primitive tech stuff.

I have more and probably weirder, but the things I care about tend to be moved out of the download folder.

Well, if they went for the death penalty it’d be obviously ironic.

Hmm, it probably depends what you think is weird, but I have one in their on the feasibility of extracting ammonia from biomass. There’s also one on early steam turbines by a fellow named Geoff Horseman, which is a fun name.

Edit: Oh, I also have a professional critique of my dating profile photos. That’s weird in a different way, since I actually got that done, and it unexpectedly came as a PDF.