searabbit

People generally hang out with other people of their general socioeconomic class, so it doesn’t take much guesswork. Usually, they just have nothing in common with poorer people (not the literal poors, upper middle class is poor to them), don’t go to the same places that poorer people go to, and unfortunately, poorer people generally tend to be less attractive than rich people due to lack of access to cosmetic care. The cosmetic care includes skincare, dental work, and I’ve even seen growth hormones as soon as elementary school.

One last point, multimillionaire and billionaire circles are extremely small because, as you can imagine, there’s not that many of them! They tend to know way too much about each other, so if you do happen to be poorer and run in their circles, they’ll either know and/or you’re smart enough to be playing their game.

Idk about your pile, but mine is precariously balanced on top of a chair so it’s O(1) until a literal tipping point when everything falls and then it’s O(k*n) where k is the time it takes me to put away a piece of clothing in the closet/laundry (or start a new pile elsewhere).

I think people who grow up middle class in a first world country are so sheltered from suffering that animal cruelty is the first example of it that they can actually empathize with and understand as a black and white issue (to them). Unfortunately, suffering is just a fact of life for everyone but the most privileged. The logical conclusion to “if you can’t give animals the standard of care that I expect as a global top 1%er of wealth, then you shouldn’t own any pets” is a PETA type policy of killing any pet that is living a suboptimal existence. Which, if they were humans, we would consider that genocide. It’s really just not a reasonable stance at all.

This feels like the poison scene from the princess bride, so I’ll approach it with that level of intellectual derangement.

Which means the obvious first step is to recognize that the house is a cheater who wants you to stay poor so your choice doesn’t matter. There is poison in both cups and I will lose either way. Money no longer influences my decision.

Next, I flip a coin ten times and note my reaction to the choices. That’s my gut instinct and obviously what the model predicted unless it’s either not smart enough to know my gut or smart enough to predict my double bluff, therefore useless.

Next, I decide which variables are most likely to influence the prediction (gender, age, education level, big 5 personality score) and realize this is the adult marshmallow test. I obviously think I’m smart and want the model to know that, so it obviously predicted that I would take one box because I’m a good little goodie two shoes who delays instant gratification for the potential bigger payoff. Therefore I choose two boxes because the model would never expect someone as smart as I to make such a dumb greedy move. Surely, I have outsmarted the supercomputer with my quadruple bluff and have won.

And then I remember I am dumb and the model knows that, because in my excitement, I forgot that the house is a cheater who always wins (and there was likely never any money in the mystery box because researchers never get that kind of funding). I am forced to believe that the model accurately perceived me to be a greedy idiot who took two boxes against my better judgement, shattering my ego.

But hey, I at least got $1k out of it.

I did it slowly over time. Every time reddit made a site wide change that worsened the user experience (which has been a lot since I joined a decade ago), I’d take one step to distance myself. First it was unsubscribing from major subreddits and engaging less, then staying logged out, then deleting the app but browsing on the web, and finally reddit pissed me off enough to try an alternative. So far I’ve already spent much less time doomscrolling online since this place isn’t filled with rage-baiting bot content.

It’s weird because terminally online people forget that profound autism exists but most irl people I talk to have no concept of autism besides profound autism.

Otoh, I think most people irl and online think of ADHD as quirky distracted ball of energy meanwhile severe ADHD is not actually seen as a disability but a personal failing or mistaken for the classic depression+anxiety combo.

Maybe the interests we serve are the friends we made serving another’s interests along the way…to serve interests? Or something like that