Ask me about:

  • Science (biology, computation, statistics)
  • Gaming (rhythm, rogue-like/lite, other generic 1-player games)
  • Autism & related (I have diagnosis)
  • Bad takes on philosophy
  • Bad takes on US political systems & more US stuff

I’m not knowledgeable about most other things

  • 1 Post
  • 12 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • Way too many for Chinese (think every Chinese dish you know), but the one world I think about the most in this context these days is 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4) (Also see a somewhat related Wikipedia article). Direct translation is “ol’ hundred surnames”

    It’s… a non-formal word for the “commoners” or the “average person”. This is a concept I don’t hear in mainstream media that much nowadays. I don’t think most news or mainstream media even refers to say the entirety of the lower to middle social class in one word… (Note that it is different from “Average Joe”, which does have a Chinese counterpart which translates to “Zhang three Li four”)

    On top of it, the whole concept of “a hundred surnames” representing most of society is kind of absurd in English-speaking countries. Societies with historical Chinese influences tend to have lots of ppl share the same surnames


  • First of all: you’re good! I think there are lots of centrist and right-leaning people in academia who are doing just fine; especially in the US lots of world-class unis are in deeply conservative areas too. Most of academia don’t discuss politics that much at all as long as one cares about science. I’d wager the political leaning bias is more from a population bias rather than systematic discrimination of any sort

    I could imagine AI researchers being more right-leaning yeah. The stats I got were from personal anecdote and research being done about this a short while back… there might have been an update in the AI age


  • First of all, good for you lol

    It’s € 1.715 with today’s exchange rate. The minimum salary where I live is roughly € 1,9k after tax. Not life-changing money, but it’s still an absolutely huge amount that is enough for survival & is quite significant

    I mean this is a large amount of money even for Americans though. The absolute highest paying “normal” job I could think of is a stacked SF Bay tech guy who makes $200K/yr after tax… but that’s still like 12% of take-home pay


  • Current STEM researcher who also happened to have met a few academics on the right side of the political spectrum… I am very qualified to speak about this I hope. I’ll try to use as unbiased language as possible

    First of all, you are correct. It is generally true that most academics are left-leaning (obligatory not all, but you get the point)

    In general, higher education attainment is associated with being left-leaning: academia is known to have extreme levels of education attainment (many jobs require a PhD). On top of it, academic jobs reward intellectual curiosity, do not tend to pay super well, tend to heavily rely on governmental funding… all of these are traditionally more associated with the political left or left-leaning. Still, there very much are right-leaning academics, they just don’t tend to scream around a lot about it

    There are notable exceptions however. Economics is quite famous for being politically balanced, although what economics treat as left/right-leaning might be a bit different from the general public. If I remember, business schools (yes there are business professors!) tend to be more right-leaning. This is a smaller field and a bit more anecdotal, but quite a few prominent meta-science researchers are right-wing nutjobs: the “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” guy and the NIH director Bhattacharya guy are both COVID deniers

    There are also fringe scientists as some others have mentioned, but most people within their fields don’t consider fringe scientists as part of the academia so to speak



  • I wonder if this has something to do with “whom you primarily identify with”? Seems to me that the primary identity comes first in naming systems

    Because there’s some interesting parallels. Even though the order is reversed, in CJ cultures (don’t know about K, presume similar) people overwhelmingly refer to each other via family names (which comes first) instead of given names. Where I grew up in China people almost never refer to your given name; most people refer to others with some honorifics + family name (brother Li, lil’ Liu, teacher Zhang, etc). In Japanese culture referring to each other via given names is reserved to close friends only. Also in these cultures the given names have a lot more diversity than in Western culture


  • Based on my records, probably averaging 40-50% on needs. Exactly 30.7% on housing, somewhere >10% on basic needs food, and maybe just a bit more for emergency. The numbers for food is a bit fuzzy since I don’t specifically separate out, say, a 6-pack beer or a really nice chocolate bar from other groceries

    For context though, I make above average salary for my area, am relatively young & healthy (so almost no healthcare needs), and didn’t mind living a bit frugal…



  • Split between either housing or bureaucracy

    Housing is… not actually about affordability, but rather the plain difficulty of even getting a rental. I’m living in supposedly a part of Europe with a good housing market, but even here every decent rental on the market would instantaneously get 20+ applicants, so it’s quite competitive… not as bad as NL, but still pretty rough

    Bureaucracy because of expat/immigrant/etc shenanigans


  • I don’t know if this is spooky, fucked up, or just really funny (in my twisted sense of humor)

    In college. I was a workaholic and didn’t sleep a lot, and I lived in a student dorm (layout was like a hotel, each student had their individual room) that was fairly well-liked by upperclassmen. Anyways there’s a random girl I know outside of class with a friend group. Generally a bright and upbeat person, quite well put-together, also an international student, etc…

    There was one night when I was just passed out on my dorm bed. And at 3am in the morning, I saw that particular girl standing in front of my dorm room with the door open. Crying, being really sad and all… Later was escorted away by the RA.

    What I still couldn’t comprehend is… First of all, why the heck was my door unlocked. Second of all, why was this random person standing in front of my door. Did she want anything from me. Also later I never heard from that girl again, what happened to her