#making smart decisions

[online1drer]

9 Mental Models for Thinking Like A Genius

Mental models are cognitive frameworks that help us interpret and navigate the world around us. They are internal representations shaped by our experiences and beliefs, allowing us to simplify reality and make decisions more effectively. By drawing on the

Introduction Understanding the myriad elements that influence our lives can feel overwhelming in our complex world. That is where mental models come into play. These simplified representations help us make sense of reality and tackle difficult problems with greater clarity. Key Ideas Mental models simplify complex concepts. Each individual has a unique circle of competence. Understanding the…

[ffcrazy15]

There's this way of doing female-ness in Christianity that I call "pastel flower journal Christianity." I've got nothing against pastel flower journals per se, but for some reason people believe it's the end all and be all of female spirituality, and I think it's a real disservice towards young Christian women.

One of these days I'd like to start a prayer-and-reading group or something for young women, but there would be no floral themes or over-focus on how "God thinks you're beautiful even if the world doesn't" (a true statement, but it's wayyyyy too often the focus in women's spiritual reading). Instead we would be reading:

Seneca's Letters from a Stoic

Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

Sheed's A Map of Life

Portions of Pieper's book on leisure

Kreeft's Three Philosophies of Life

Guardini's The Lord (or something similar)

Therese's Story of a Soul

and some select portions of the Nicomachean Ethics.

(Also they're all getting the porn talk. I don't know why we give the porn talk to young men but not young women. There's this idea that women don't use porn and they only need the talk about "guarding their heart." Bullshit. There's porn on the YA shelves of Barnes and Nobles and before that there were bodice rippers. Young women need the porn talk too.)

Every young woman needs to be getting a basic grounding in virtue ethics, logic, natural law, scholastic philosophy and Biblical hermeneutics if they're going to get by in today's spiritual landscape. Enough faffery and emotionalism in young women's spiritual education! Give them real food to chew on, not pasty sentimentalism!

[teacupsandcyanide]

Something I miss from earlier eras of the creative side of the internet was things just being unabashedly low-budget. Just all unashamedly amateur, unprofessional, ‘I don’t own a good camera but I have a story to tell you’, ‘I can’t afford a good mic but I have a song to sing for you,’ ‘I don’t have any kind of background in editing or lighting and I only just picked up this guitar last Tuesday but here’s an entire musical me and my friends wrote about our favourite book, we filmed it on a potato and put it up on YouTube in ten minute segments because we thought it was pretty funny.’

[naomistares]

im gone cus im working on this very long last rejoice mini comic but i have an IDEA (ambitious)

what if i make my comic into a visual novel esque game instead.... i have this belief that it will actually take less time than a 400 page comic (or at least less drawing, but definitely more writing for me)... will that not be more fun and engaging!!

and get this.... you, the player, will be essentially writing your own fairytale based on choices you make! i'll make a fairytale retelling play out for every possible outcome that will get played by the end of it...!

i can do anything...(questionable)

[qqueenofhades]

I'd like to congratulate the 2024 GOP, facing a must-win election to keep their orange felon messiah out of prison, for somehow actually doing WORSE than McCain picking Palin in 2008.

[sesamenom]

Very Deadly

[bayetea]

I'm a strong "percy would get a job in education/outreach to underprivileged kids in the future" truther but I don't necessarily agree with people who say that him taking on marine biology as a college major doesn't make sense at all

"why would he study marine biology he can already work with sea animals to his heart's desire" I don't know maybe because he wants to get paid???????? he wants a normal job???? percy grew up poor and unsafe. why is it weird that he craves stability with a career that enables him to do something that he loves? or maybe he wants to go into the system and help bring about lasting reform that will actually improve care for sea creatures??? yes he can save sea animals on his own time but think about it. is it better to abandon his life in the middle of the night to go help a trapped sea creature Every Single Time it happens or is it better to enter the system and make it so that capitalists stop polluting water or disturbing sea ecosystems for profit. his powers as a son of poseidon are a band-aid not a lasting solution to systemic environmental neglect and decay. he has an established precedent of caring for bringing about systemic change (see: turning down immortality) and for me this is no different (I just personally headcanon him wanting to bring change for disadvantaged kids but whatever)

to me this logic is like telling an exceptional artist that there's no point in going to art school to become a professional when they can already just do art on their own time for fun. like yeah....... if you're content with doing that as just a hobby. but what if you want to become an even better artist and learn new skills. what if you want to do it as a job that pays you and gives you health insurance and social security. then what

for me the main logistical issue of him majoring in marine biology has never been that he would never do that it's that the intersection of new rome college accreditation to the Actual Real world isn't all that clear/logistically sound. like I guess the mist can handle anything but what impact is new rome going to be able to have on the realm of mortals. this would be a nice thing to discuss actually (more in tags)

[gambitandrogues]

Hey friendly reminder that Jesper Fahey was supposed to be attending Ketterdam University, the same place the royal family decided to send Nikolai to (and assumed he was also attending). If I see one more person dumb Jesper down to comic relief when he was smart enough to get into the same school a prince was attending, it's on sight.

[the-mystical-aquatic-gay]

wow these spot the difference games are getting harder and harder

i didn’t draw the picture of jon it was by wellotwig on twitter

[doodledlie]

My two favorite smartest dumbest men

I just want to see them do science together

[online1drer]

(via 9 Steps to Make Smart Decisions When Risk is Involved)

[nerevarswritingstuff]

TIaF Teaser - Chapter 36

You can’t see Macaque’s face, but you can certainly see Wukong’s. The regret in his eyes vanishes in an instant, replaced with that same rage from before. He snarls, stepping closer, but Macaque pushes you backwards, ensuring five feet is kept between you two and him. His tail coils around your waist, securing you in your spot behind him.

His arms open out, and he asks in a goading tone, “What’s the matter? Don’t like being called out for your own behavior?” He snickers and shakes his head. “Ah, some things never change. You never did know how to… behave yourself when I wasn’t around.”

Your breath catches in your throat. Does this monkey have a death wish?! “Macaque,” you hiss, gabbing his arm and yanking him backwards. “What the hell are you doing?!”

“Shut it, and stay behind me,” he mutters back to you, pushing you out of Wukong’s direct sight again.

“Get away from them,” Wukong speaks up, his demand a low growl.

“Why?” Macaque picks at his lower left ear with his pinky. “So you can ‘talk’ some more? You may have made it so I can’t hear, but I can still read body language, Wukong…” He tilts his head one way, scoffing. “Some things never do change, do they? If anything, you’re the one who should stay away from them.”

“Macaque, this is not helping!” You tug at his tail still wrapped around your waist, and he lets out a chuff in response. “Don’t agitate him!”

“Agitate him?” He hums, tapping his chin in mock thought. “I didn’t realize he could be agitated by the truth. Then again, he never could handle it properly.” His gaze falls on Wukong again. “Could you, peaches?”

[sunderwight]

I keep seeing people argue that Aziraphale is "intelligent" or "not a fool" and that this means he can't possibly have fallen for the Metatron's blatant manipulation tactics or still genuinely believe in Heaven's righteousness.

Setting aside the validity of various theories (most of which I at least find interesting, if not outright compelling!) I think there's an issue here, which is that intelligence doesn't protect you from cult-like thinking. Especially not when you've been more or less born and raised in the environment.

In fact, what intelligence tends to do to people who have been indoctrinated into cults (and a cult is exactly what GO Heaven operates like) is give you even more tools for justifying or thinking your way around the contradictions of the cults actions vs message.

We even see Aziraphale do this, several times!

In fact, at the end of S1 doing this is part of what helps save the day. When he points out that Heaven can't know that they aren't defying God's ineffable plan while trying to follow the Great Plan, he's not just talking them into standing down, he's giving them an out. Because the whole Armageddon thing has already gone to shit and cannot proceed without Adam's cooperation, what they're really dealing with at that point is getting Heaven and Hell to accept that without retaliating. Even when Satan shows up it's because he's pissed, not because doomsday is still on.

Aziraphale uses the cult's own logic to give Heaven (and Hell) a plausible reason to back down without completely losing face. They don't have to admit that they were wrong, they can just file everything under "ineffability". Aziraphale pulls this off so well in part because he's been doing this to himself for millennia.

When he doesn't understand or really approve of the Flood, he files it under "ineffability". God has a plan but it's too complex and beyond even angelic comprehension to understand, so there must be a good reason for the Flood, it's just that Aziraphale can't see it. When he sees Heaven being complicit in Job's suffering and the potential murder of his children, he reconciles it by deciding that what God really wants is for him and Bildad to secretly stop it. But he flounders on that later, because to some extent I think he knows that this reasoning is self-serving.

(Knowing it's self-serving doesn't refute it, though, it just means that he worries about that until he talks himself into a bunch of reasons why it's still probably true.)

In S1, when Crowley broaches the subject of the apocalypse, Aziraphale's initial response is to recite the propaganda. It's all going to go according to plan, and it will all be great! When that doesn't work (because of course it won't be great, he's going to end up losing his true home and the person he loves most if this all goes down no matter who wins), he lets Crowley help talk him into how he could thwart the plan without "really" betraying his concept of God.

Basically, if Aziraphale's values come into conflict with Heaven, he decides that God secretly agrees with him. It's very like people who find their values coming into conflict with the institution of their church or temple, and so decide that there's nothing wrong with their actual religion, it's all just normal human corruption (or in GO's case, angelic corruption) muddying the waters of an otherwise purely good thing.

Now in real life of course this gets to be a thorny issue, but keeping it simple there isn't really a total separation between a faith and its institutions. You can't claim that there's nothing in the religion that lends itself to bad takes, just like you also can't claim that any ideology or belief system is invulnerable to corruption. Likewise, even if every bad thing in GO were to turn out to be the fault of Heaven and Hell and not God, God would still be accountable for a lot of the situation because God still set the stage.

But what matters for Good Omens and Aziraphale and this post is that, Aziraphale has put considerable mental energy into justifying how God and Heaven can still be Good and Right even as both of them do things he finds intolerable. Whether it's "God secretly wants me to do what I think is right instead of what I'm being told" or "Heaven has earnestly misinterpreted the will of God due to not knowing as much as I do", he puts his intelligence to use in protecting himself from the kind of revelation that would uproot his worldview.

The only kind of knowledge that actually protects people from cults is the knowledge of how they operate, and awareness that you're dealing with a cult. Aziraphale has a terrible disadvantage on both fronts because even though he's spent years watching humanity get into hot water with this stuff, he does so with the firm perspective that things are different for angels. He can't necessarily apply what works for humans to himself, because he knows he's a different kind of being (and unlike with IRL cults, it's actually true in his case, though I think demons and angels are both less different from humans than they believe).

Though, interestingly, he's closer to a accepting the truth when it comes to the differences between angels and demons. In S1 he is fully confident that he could possess someone, because even though angels don't do that, demons can. Whether he admits it or not, Aziraphale really does believe that Crowley is not meaningfully different from himself in terms of personhood or ability. If he can make the leap to the idea that angels and demons are not exempt from human-oriented concepts of self-determination and free will and unfair treatment by authority, and reconcile it with his own intense distress at challenging a core belief, then the fact that he's quick on the uptake will really start to work in his favor.

[acediaedeus]

petition for ppl to stop trying to deny Ichigo’s title as a delinquent on the grounds of him being a good student. you know delinquency and good grades aren’t mutually exclusive, right? you want to tell me Kurosaki Ichigo, THE Kurosaki Ichigo, a mix of 4 different races, can’t be a delinquent AND 11th in his school? yeah, you’re delusional.

no one’s gonna call you a delinquent just bc you have bad grades. a bad student? yes. but a delinquent? no, bc the definition of the word is “someone who tends to commit crime, particularly minor crime”, and as far as I’m aware beating up ppl is a crime, even if they start it and even if they’re bad.

embrace the reality of Kurosaki Ichigo, saviour of all three worlds, being a dumbass teenager who’s face is known to every cop in the area. the responders for 119 calls know Ichigo’s voice by heart, he says “hi” and they just sigh and ask “how many?”.

this is also a kind of continuation to my post about Grimmjow being in shock when seeing Ichigo out of Shinigami robes, bc we all know he likely thinks of Ichigo as a do-gooder and a law-abiding human (derogatory) and so he’s not surprised when he comes to the Human World and fucking everyone from officers to doctors smile at the guy with exclamations of “Oh, it’s Kurosaki!”. he is significantly more surprised when Tatsuki tells him exactly why they react like that. he loves it and Kurosaki gains two points of respect from him, but he’ll never know.

[sga-owns-my-soul]

actually it's really offensive that i can't give rodney mckay a god complex

[thewhizzyhead]

catching up with slocg and um very important question is whitney on drugs or some shit because why would she backslide from a good rich guy to a bum who cheated on her with one of her best friends-