The problem is the location of the steepness makes the difference between whether this means it’s easy first and slow progress later, or slow progress first and easy later. Is it like, x^1.5, or is it like ln(x)? Both are very steep at some point.

Yeah, I don’t think the phrase “learning curve” has any built-in suggestion, even culturally, to imply that the reasonable default assumption is one way or the other. I only ever heard learning curve to refer to something getting easier after awhile, which is indeed a valid curve

Yeah this is a common misunderstanding I’ve had to clarify to people as well, even people who work in tech. I support only using “Law” for things that are scientifically actually laws. I don’t even like to use it as a joke (Murphy’s Law) because, unbelievably, some people really do take that to be a law of the universe too.

Yeah, a lot of these things actually do make sense, just in a more precise way than even the people using them intend. Gravitational pull is also like this. Earth’s gravitational pull is not weak, it literally keeps everything on Earth tethered to it. More importantly, it happens as an intrinsic property of the Earth, the Earth doesn’t need to “try” to exert gravitational pull on things. Furthermore, gravitational pull attracts more mass which begets even more gravitational pull, like a snowball effect.

So gravitational pull is not about the strength of the force, but the fact that it is natural, effortless, and often forms a positive feedback loop (borrowing from another comment here lol).

So if I say someone at work has a lot of gravitational pull, I’m conveying that they do a good job of bringing other people into their area or work, that they naturally do it almost without even trying to, and that as their social influence grows, they just end up with even more social influence. It’s a really deep metaphor which is also physically accurate.

Hm, this is interesting. I only have a passing understanding of control theory, but couldn’t a positive feedback loop indeed be good when the output is always desirable in increased quantities? A positive feedback loop doesn’t necessarily lead to instability, like you said. So maybe this is just me actually-ing your actually, lol.

As for “more optimal”, oof, I say that a lot so maybe I’m biased. When I say that I’m thinking like a percentage. If optimal is X, then 80% of X is indeed more of the optimal amount than 20% of X. Yes, optimality is a point, but “more optimal” just seems like shorthand for “closer to optimal”. Or maybe I should just start saying that?

This reminds me of a professor I had who hates when people say something is “growing exponentially”, since he argued the exponent could be 1, or fractional, or negative. It’s a technically correct distinction, but the thing is that people who use that term to describe something growing like x^2, are not even wrong that it’s exponential. I feel like when it comes to this type of phrasing, it’s fine not to deal with edge cases, because being specific actually makes what is said more confusing.

“I’m in a negative feedback loop with respect to my laziness which will soon stabilize with me continually going to the gym daily, which is closer to optimal than before. As a result, my energy levels are going to increase exponentially, where the value of the exponent is greater than 1!”

Hmm. Now that I say it that doesn’t seem that crazy. Although I do still think some common “default settings” don’t do any harm.

But how can I deplatform the demagogues? It seems impossible. What you proposed sounds nearly as unattainable as the snarky “Suddenly make every parent in the US loving, compassionate, and effective at raising their children”.

I’m not in charge of the demagogues platforms. The platforms have no need to respond to social protests since the demagogues make them money. The majority of moderate people will not ever care enough to stop using a platform that supports evil. Tons of people still use facebook even when they KNOW about all those scandals, because they feel like it’s just not a big problem, and ultimately because they just like using facebook.

Your proposed solution just feels a lot like the how to draw an owl meme.

Thanks for this counterpoint, that’s exactly the sort of thing I think people need to see when thinking about moving (whether emigrating from America or anywhere else) - what’s the big problems for people there, what’s their equivalent of these problems. Would you mind telling me which party this is so I can do some more research on it?

Yes, I’ve had this suspicion awhile. Last year an ex-coworkerif mine was quoting the disproportionate crime rate among black people statistics at me and then leveled up into saying Africa is such a desolate place and so only unintelligent people would have stayed there in ancient times, thus meaning there’s a selective breeding for unintelligence in that continent. I tried to argue with him about the dubiousness of IQ measures in the first place, let alone IQ heritability, and the deep statistical flaws in the crime rate argument, which don’t disentangle race from poverty, but as soon as I tried to make these counterarguments he brushed me off as being “brainwashed” by “lies about equality”.

I don’t even know what to do about something like that other than just stop talking to the person. What’s terrifying is he’s otherwise pretty smart, totally fits in with respectable society. Not some stereotypical redneck racist type. I think about that a lot and wonder how many others like him are going totally undetected around me every day.

Yeah, some of that is the impromptu nature of this post. I’ve thought about moving to other countries since high school. I’m very interested in a lot of cultural things that are just vastly more prevalent and thriving in Europe. Sometimes it feels like I was born in the wrong place. So there are definitely places I’d love to run to. I visited Switzerland and it felt like heaven on Earth compared to my state. I wanted to move there long before Trump’s first election. But it seems that particular country is near impossible to move to, plus Swiss German seems particularly tough.

I really like learning about other cultures and such, I’m afraid I may have come off entirely wrong in the brevity and laser-focus of my original post.

Very interesting that you say the working language would be English. That’s fantastic news. I definitely think I can get to a basic conversational level with languages pretty quickly, but reaching the technical professional level is my big fear. So that’s very encouraging to hear that it may not be so dire as that at least in the Netherlands. Thank you for taking the time to respond!

It certainly seems that way! Some of the ESL speakers I’ve met from Europe are more articulate than native speakers that I work with. What I most wonder about is the prevalence of English in the workplace. I think I’d feel guilty using English at work in country with its own different official language, unless it was really like, standard even before “the guy from America” joined the team, lol.

My German teacher had a fairly profound impact on my life, I knew him for four years and he was absolutely enamored with everything about Germany. Like the German equivalent of a weeb. Some of that has transferred to me, I like basically every aspect of German culture I’m familiar with, especially the sense of humor. Since I already have some language familiarity, it’s always been near the top of my list, until recently with the AfD stuff giving me a bit of a fright. Although I saw they were recently classified as extremists, which was reassuring (thanks Lemmy for being such a good news source!)

It’s of course too bad to hear about the rural racism, especially since I’d prefer a rural place of living, but it seems those two things always go together to some extent.

I’m certainly going to enroll in classes for whatever language corresponds to my target country. I really want to be an exemplary citizen of anywhere I go. I feel it’s an honor to be accepted for a visa somewhere so I don’t want to take that lightly. My biggest concern is just that I won’t be that great with the target language despite my best efforts.

Thank you very much for your insights and kind words!

Thanks for understanding, I do feel a bit hurt by some insinuations in some responses, but I understand why citizens of the world would feel unhappy with whiny Americans right now. I just hope it doesn’t progress into a hatred. Many of my fellow Americans are very good people, but unfortunately we are so disenfranchised politically - I think it’s hard to convey the extent of it. The state of things here isn’t a result of laziness and unwillingness to participate. But in fairness, I didn’t refine my original post deeply and it came off not quite right. I’m not looking to selfishly abandon ship or become a silent drain on another country. I would love to build community, but it’s certainly easier in some places than others, for a wide variety of reasons.

Canada is certainly tempting if only on the basis that I would be closer to my family, and my family closer to me. And the recent election results were very relieving. Weed is legal here too though, haha.

Thanks, for some reason Spain has never been near the top of my consideration. I suppose that’s because it’s not one of those classic “top ten” type of countries that seem to always be at the top of lists of good things. But it seems the margins of improvement are slim between top 30 and top 10, so I’ll have to look more into that.

Yes, I’ve thought about this a lot and do make efforts to improve my environment. But it’s disheartening, the vast majority of people in my community are extreme Trump supporters. I know people who threw parties to celebrate the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s hard to know how to improve my community in light of that, and in fact it’s hard to even want to.

But I am open to suggestions, what do you think are some of the best things I could do to improve my area?

I deeply agree with the community aspect. I can see how my original post came off as self-centered, but it’s always been my vision to be an active contributor to the local and larger communities of wherever I live. I am generally a pro-social person and do my best to help my local community. I definitely agree that building a strong community is vital to the criteria I’m looking for. It’s just that my current community feels largely like a lost cause. We certainly have a subculture that is what I’m looking for, but it’s just that - a subculture. And while that may be comforting and nice, it’s not enough to get politicians to listen.

I try to stave off the harms of capitalism as best I can while also balancing my own happiness for my limited time on Earth. But that’s a topic I’m sure we could both write essays about, so maybe best to save that for another time.

Yes, I wouldn’t be renouncing U.S citizenship unless I really had to. I’ve stayed this long precisely because I don’t want to leave the “problem spot” and cause it to only have extremists left over living here. I do try to support events and businesses that support causes I agree with, but that’s about all there is to do as far as I can see. As I said in other comments, I would truly prefer to fix things here, as I like many things about my life here. But it’s starting to feel like I’m complicit in something wrong by remaining a resident and I’m not sure what to do about it.

I would certainly rather fix this one than leave, but it’s pretty dismal. There are already large protests, almost nobody is satisfied with how things are, yet nothing changes. Our elected officials don’t listen to us, even on the off chance that one I like gets elected in my area. The best I can hope for is that someone will run who will just keep things as bad as they are, nobody ever actually improves things. I’ve never had an opportunity to vote for a candidate that actually represents my interests. I live in one of the most far right places in the country.

I really would like to fix it here. But I am very unsure as to how. There’s lots of community togetherness types of opportunities, but unfortunately having friends with like minds does no good when anyone with power doesn’t listen. And now even protesting, no, even just showing up to a political event on “the wrong side” is terrifying because of the effectiveness of mass surveillance and the complete lack of oversight on our police. I am open to specific suggestions on how to fix it.

Yes indeed :( it’s a wishlist for sure, not feasible in it’s purest form.

I think this is quite a bad idea even if we totally set aside any ethical concerns with AI, solely because it increases the hardware requirements to run a Lemmy instance. I believe that a critical goal of federated services should be to reduce the barrier to entry for instance ownership as much as possible. The more instances the better. If there’s only two or three big ones, the problems of centralization appear again, albeit diluted. The whole point of federation is to have multiple instances. Already many survive on donations or outright charity. But AI increases costs immensely.

I think it’s fine to add features that require more compute power if they have a vast improvement to user experience for the compute required. But AI is one of the most computationally intensive features I can think of, and the ratio to its value addition is particularly low. There’s so little content on Lemmy that you can feasibly view the entire post history of most communities in under a day of browsing, so there’s no real need for improved searchability - it’s just not that big here yet. And even when it does get that big, I think a strong search algorithm would be just about as effective, much more transparent, and most importantly not require instance owners to add GPUs to their servers.