I find it's best to break these things down and discuss them individually (or discuss how multiple rules combine to produce a particular effect, as the case may be): then it's easier to tease out which arguments are honest ("I genuinely think X is better, for Y reasons") and dishonest ("I think X is better for Y reasons, but I believe you'll find Z more persuasive, so I'll say Z"). There's also a phenomenon where people attribute beneficial (or detrimental) properties to one, visible part of a system, when they're really due to another: consider the arguments about capitalism versus communism, which are rarely actually about economic policy, and are more often about other (on the face of it, unrelated) policies of the state: your interlocutor might realise this after detailed discussion, if that is what is going on, when otherwise they might have gone their whole life without noticing the misattribution (as many people do).

Cultural exchange can be mutually-beneficial, even if you both go away thinking "wow, that other guy was an idiot".

Also, she wasn't damned by the end of the last Narnia book (rather, she's expected to be damned, but it is not yet certain).

This poses a problem for cherrypicking, but exactly the same problem is present when cherrypicking from any legal tradition: that doesn't mean that the law is meaningless, only that cherrypicking is not an appropriate way to read it.

> If we’re going to talk about good software design, we have to talk about Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris, the basis of good software design.

sourced from https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/the-peril-of-lazines..., where Bryan Cantrill makes the point that:

> The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone’s) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage.

which I think is interesting, albeit somewhat tangential to the current discussion.

> incivility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being uncivil; lack of courtesy; rudeness in manner.

> uncivil sense 1: Not civil; discourteous; impolite

> civil sense 2: (comparable) Behaving in a reasonable or polite manner; avoiding displays of hostility.

> reasonable sense 3: Not excessive or immoderate; within due limits; proper.

> polite sense 1: Well-mannered, civilized.

> well-mannered: Having good manners; polite, courteous and socially correct; conforming to standards of good behaviour.

> hostility sense 1: (uncountable) The state of being hostile.

> hostile sense 3: Unwilling.

> discourteous: Impolite; lacking consideration for others.

That's presumably why the feminists developed the concept of "tone policing".

It may help your intuition to consider the extreme case of a black hole. The event horizon is where time is so warped that no possible future trajectories lead outside of the black hole, and you need a magical time machine to escape. (Of course, the best way to gain intuition is to work through the mathematics, either symbolically or with diagrams, rather than reading English-language descriptions.)

There is a sense in which an orbit is a straight line. Obviously, an orbit is not a straight line through space (unless you count the perfect and unobtainable orbit of a beam of light around a black hole, some distance from the event horizon), but we often think of them as spirals through spacetime: there's an argument that really we should think of them as straight lines through spacetime, much like how a great circle is a straight line along the earth's surface.

No, Duolingo is an example that proves that there is plenty of money in taking a flawed-but-useful education tool, and making it much worse in specific, habit-forming ways. I don't know that it proves anything about the profitability of providing learning: merely about the profitability of providing the perception of learning / a habit-forming activity that you can persuade yourself is a virtue.

Perhaps showing people metrics derived from the "proved it with data", after each session, to provide the perception of progress even when the learning task is frustrating? Looking into gym psychology, rather than (video) game psychology, might help. You'd want to try to encourage intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic motivation, but I'm not aware of any research on how to do that.