Ah. Thanks!

What is FOI in this context? The closet thing I found to something that makes sense would be Freedom of Information, but that doesn’t seem quite right, or I’m not understanding the connection.

Even before AI was a big thing, I really wish we had some kind of class, or at least an explanation from our teachers on the basics of how learning works. So much unnecessary drama could have been avoided if the kids had a better understanding of why their teachers were asking them to do things this way instead of just saying “do it this way because if not I’ll give you a bad grade.” Obviously younger kids aren’t going to be equipped to handle all the neuroscience, but I’m sure there is some simplified explanation that could be given that would get the point across.

This was an extreme example of this, but it was emblematic of the general way my teachers handled students who didn’t understand the point of the assignments or teaching methods: I forget which grade I was in, but in one of my math classes there was a day in class where I was solving the problems but not doing it exactly the way the teacher was teaching it. When he insisted, I asked why I had to do it that way if it works either way. He said something like “Because I have the big desk.” Basically just an appeal to authority without any further explanation. “You’re a dumb kid and I’m an adult, so do what I say.”

Others have good answers, but I wanted to add something that’s overlapping with this topic, especially since you mentioned anime.

I’ve watched quite a bit of anime since college when my friends got me into it. Recently I’ve been showing some anime to my mom based on things I like and which I think she would like. She commented that she thinks anime seems to have a lot of women in it.

To some extent this is skewed by my selection of shows for her, but it got me thinking. At least from my own personal experience, there do seem to be a lot more women in anime than you see in western media. There are many shows with female protagonists or all female cast and even the ones with a male protagonist frequently feature a prominent supporting cast of women.

While they do tend to get over-sexualized, there are plenty of shows where that isn’t the case and even when they do get objectified, there are a lot of them in strong or at least traditionally non-feminine roles. This is a medium where magical girls, battle maids, lady knights, female professionals and leaders are fairly well worn tropes. There are also definitely a lot of them that could be described as Mary Sues because they are just super powerful/competent at whatever they do.

At least from what I have personally observed, I haven’t seen nearly as much misogynist complaining about the prominence of women in these roles. But maybe that’s just the discussion sites that I visit. I also haven’t really done any kind of rigorous counting of shows with predominantly female casts, but they do seem to make up A LOT of the shows I have watched and enjoyed. So maybe this observation is just the result of a bias in my own viewing habits.

idk. I’d be curious to see what others have observed and thought about this. Maybe I’m way off base.

But what would the shareholders of oil and MIC companies do if we stopped spending that money on oil wars? Won’t someone please think of the shareholders!?

Oh yeah I saw the whole Theranos thing. I know a lot of this stuff isn’t possible for now at least. I was just curious if in principle there are physical things stopping this from ever being reality or not. I remember part of the thing with Theranos was something about the machines not even being big enough for the size of the things they were looking at or something like that.

I guess the portable part is less what I was interested in than the possibility of being able to diagnose more things just by waving some sensors over the body instead of needing to cut someone open or stick a camera in them or take some blood, etc.

Die of some random common illness we don’t have any antibodies for.

Hopefully a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel would be mindful of that kind of thing though. I suppose at least they would probably be protecting themselves against that, so maybe it would go both ways?