NevermindNoMind

Yeah, if they were resurfacing it must have been bad and readily apparent. Based on the hubris of the COE, I imagine he would be quick to handwave away any signs of problems. Not only was he willfully against safety inspections and so forth, but he knew if he had to abandon a trip due to a concern that his brilliantly engineered sub was breaking, he’d be proving all the nay-sayers right. If it got to the point that the COE decided it was time to turn around, it had to be bad. There is also probably a decent chance that he was on notice and could have abandoned the dive earlier and maybe saved everyone on board, but was motivated to keep pushing lest he be met with a chorus of “I told you so” from the diving community. At any rate, if its true they were trying to resurface, they knew and likely spent their last moments terrified.

There’s also that old adage about experts being particularly vulnerable to believing they are smart and capable in other fields. It seems this is particularly prevalent among engineers.

Interesting piece. Definitely worth a reading the whole thing, but here is Bing AI’s summary:

Reddit’s decline: The author argues that Reddit is becoming less relevant and more generic as it tries to squeeze its users and moderators for profit. He compares Reddit to a dying mall that is losing its cultural middle class to decentralized platforms.

Enshittification: The author explains the concept of enshittification, which is how platforms attract and then exploit their users and businesses. He gives examples of how Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google have followed this pattern.

Moderators’ resistance: The author describes how Reddit’s volunteer moderators are obstructing and sabotaging Reddit’s attempts to enshittify the platform. He says that moderators are the ones who create and curate the content that attracts users, and that Reddit is losing their trust and cooperation.

Fediverse’s rise: The author predicts that Reddit’s users and moderators will eventually migrate to the Fediverse, which is a network of independent and interoperable social media sites. He says that the Fediverse offers more freedom, authenticity, and sanity for online discussions.

Rogan’s been a dickhead for decades. Here he is appearing on Alex Jone’s show Infowars back in 2010. According to Alex Jones, him and Rogan are great buddies and talk/text all the time.

Note, the podcast I linked is called KnowledgeFight and is two comedian types covering Infowars. Just letting you know if you listen to that you won’t be exposed to a straight feed of Infowars nonsense, you’ll have the filter of two smart and funny guys giving context and breaking things down in between clips.

In 2006 I was named Time’s Person of the Year. Today I was selected to moderate my first subreddit.

Some More News, the podcast and YouTube show, has a great episode on this called “Are Rich people OK?”. Basically, they dive into all the research suggesting that getting rich basically breaks people’s brains. As relevant here, rich people tend to believe that they are rich because they are super smart, and that leads to them thinking any decisions they make must be correct because how could they be wrong?

The Some More News episode discusses this study which stuck with me

One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed “Go,” they collected $200 to their opponent’s $100.

In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents’ misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice.

At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck.

“They don’t talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,” that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio.