The Trash Heap of the Heapers' Hangout

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  • You know, sometimes I read RationalWiki and think "hey, lots of this makes good sense. They might not be total bullshit after all."

    Aaaaand then I read the Christ myth theory page again.

    For a wiki that seems to pride itself on being rationalist and impartial, they sure have a lot of support for a widely debunked theory.
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    pwning fundies>actual truth
  • i guess i would sum it up as that math classes are bad before college, really just soul shaving despair, completely independently of how good or bad you are at arithmetic and whatnot

    it also mostly sucks in the first two years of uni too based on my experience
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    i am reminded of Lockhart's lament

    i think math classes mostly just moved too fast for me, though.  brighter students seemed happier with them.

    they moved me into the top set, and then moved me out of it because i was struggling to the point where i was actually holding up classes, and also just getting lower than expected grades

    then they moved me back up again, because i was doing better than expected in the normal classes

    whereupon i was blatantly the worst person in the class and got made fun of a lot for it

    it was frustrating

    weirdly i never had this problem in English classes, all that stuff about 'the text means x, if you think it means y you are wrong and i'm not going to tell you why', that never happened in my experience
  • There's actually some decent content in some of them. They're where I learned about why people had flood myths.
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    RationalWiki is pretty ok ime but i haven't read that particular page
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    Tachyon said:

    i am reminded of Lockhart's lament

    i think math classes mostly just moved too fast for me, though.  brighter students seemed happier with them.

    they moved me into the top set, and then moved me out of it because i was struggling to the point where i was actually holding up classes, and also just getting lower than expected grades

    then they moved me back up again, because i was doing better than expected in the normal classes

    whereupon i was blatantly the worst person in the class and got made fun of a lot for it

    it was frustrating

    weirdly i never had this problem in English classes, all that stuff about 'the text means x, if you think it means y you are wrong and i'm not going to tell you why', that never happened in my experience

    That's because the people who complain about that make comics like this 

    8B22Ij4.png


    Alduin said:

    There's actually some decent content in some of them. They're where I learned about why people had flood myths.

    They're one of the few bastions of old atheism that haven't turned straight up bigoted, so that's nice.

    Also they have the best page for explaining Roko's Basilisk.
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    man i feel like even if you had the absolute worst English classes you can probably see the problem with that comic, if you're remotely familiar with the poem referenced
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    y'know i'm probably the kind of person "liberal arts" is intended for

    i mean it actually sounds sort of appealing?  in theory at least

    learning a variety of things, rather than specializing in any one subject
  • Over here we call liberal arts "interdisciplinary studies", and it is widely accepted to be something only rich kids take.
  • edited 2016-03-30 12:27:22
    imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    idk

    having a broad understanding of a variety of subjects just seems like a nice idea?

    and i believe, or at least am inclined to imagine, that a lot of fields can be enhanced by pulling in perspectives from outside the field
  • I actually agree! I'd like to have a varied skill-set too.
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    i guess returning to that comic, a good teacher *ought* to point out, if the student writes 'the narrator loves ravens', the textual evidence to the contrary

    if the teacher doesn't explain anything and just goes 'nope, represents despair' then it's a bad class

    in a class of kids of mixed abilities, you shouldn't expect everyone to be working at the same level, and helping them out is the teacher's job
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    Tachyon said:

    i guess returning to that comic, a good teacher *ought* to point out, if the student writes 'the narrator loves ravens', the textual evidence to the contrary

    if the teacher doesn't explain anything and just goes 'nope, represents despair' then it's a bad class

    in a class of kids of mixed abilities, you shouldn't expect everyone to be working at the same level, and helping them out is the teacher's job

    If anything in this strip happened, that probably did.
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    one would hope
  • *sits over in the "actually likes maths" corner*
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    maths classes at secondary school or maths in general?

    i don't dislike maths itself, i like reading about it, i'm just kinda bad at arithmetic and such

    i wanted to do an A-level, even, but i wasn't good enough
  • imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    though when i say 'i like reading about maths' that makes it sound like i'm reading actually smart things

    i am slowly teaching myself the basics of geometry, algebra and calculus in my spare time, i am not reading about whatever wizardy sciency complex things Klinotaxis and Calica read about
  • Maths in general.

    I did it at A Level, and honestly looked forwards to going to classes. It was hard, but I enjoyed it. 
  • I got E's in all my A Levels, but my highest "E" was in Maths. 
  • Jane said:

    That's like.


    "Oh sorry, you can't do geometry in here Timmy, this is an algebra class."

    Like what?
    I've always hated when Math classes do this

    If you want us to learn a technique, then create a situation in which it's useful rather than forcing it upon us.
  • edited 2016-03-30 13:12:30
    imagei will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch
    i maybe should have stuck with it

    i got a B in my GCSE, figured i'd give the A-level a shot, mainly iirc because i'd gotten an A in GCSE science but was told it would be unwise to pursue physics without also taking maths

    so i had one lesson, the introductory one, the teacher kept asking questions and everyone else in the room was raising their hands and i had NO IDEA what the answer was at any point, and after that i just chickened out and took media studies instead
  • Toolsie said:

    *sits over in the "actually likes maths" corner*

    *grudgingly joins you*

    It's not that I hate math. It's that I'm really bad at it, despite liking it enough to major in the damn stuff.
  • Maybe I'm just biased, because my Dad's a maths teacher and I was never destined to fail the subject, so I just grew to love it. 
  • edited 2016-03-30 13:45:54
    doublepost oops
  • edited 2016-03-30 13:45:04
    I like math, I'm going to grad school in it next year. However I spent a long time hating math class.
  • For once, or maybe twice, I was in my prime.
    Jane said:

    image


    the feeling i felt when i first saw this is best described as "this is so inept it's kind of adorable like a small anime character that trips and falls over"
    this looks like what my younger brothers would make if you told them to come up with a poster for a TOP SECRET government agency.
    I don't know about TS material, but I can confirm that classified SECRET powerpoint slides are soul-crushingly inept from a design standpoint, almost without fail. So that's either the real deal, or a very good imitation.
  • For once, or maybe twice, I was in my prime.
    Jane said:

    and because the MCU movies that I have seen have been kinda boring and just not very good in general before we even get into issues of whether or not they're sexist and so forth.

    Well, Deadpool isn't MCU. It's made by Fox, and it's loosely connected to the X-Men film universe.

    Incidentally, the X-Men series is truly the most comicbooky of all cape movies, because of how much they've contradicted and retconned themselves.
  • Munch munch, chomp chomp...
    I like math, but issues of varying levels of unresolved have made it one of my worst classes. At one point I tried telling my friend who is super into and good at it (but also had been able to work through their issues...), why precisely it sometimes felt utterly flat to me. So I like Lockhart's Lament for putting it into words for me too.
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    Jane said:

    K, well, I'm sorry I'll blank out those comments before I go to bed.

    You really do not have to.
    I wanted to see JZ's musings on Deadpool, too, so I am double disappoint. :<
    Alduin said:

    You know, sometimes I read RationalWiki and think "hey, lots of this makes good sense. They might not be total bullshit after all."


    Aaaaand then I read the Christ myth theory page again.

    For a wiki that seems to pride itself on being rationalist and impartial, they sure have a lot of support for a widely debunked theory.
    Mostly they're fine, but that concept is stupid, and they really should be more willing to talk about Feynman's... issues. However, they're also willing to rip pretentious pop-evo-psych a new one, which is nice, because justifying misogyny with woo is gross.
  • Yeah, woo is pretty gross. I also like how they're critical of Dawkins and think MRA types are gross.
  • You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
    It's kinda funny, I started college as an English major and now I've done a complete 180 (or π, if you prefer) and am majoring in Civil Engineering and minoring in Surveying and Mapping.

    The massive shift in focus means I went all the way from remedial algebra all the way up through a special engineering-focused math course that had bits of multivariable calculus, partial differential equations, and linear algebra.

    It is admittedly a bit silly because 90% of the time when I need to do math beyond what I can do with a TI-30, I just punch it into a computer. I haven't solved an integral by hand in years.
  • Don't you love it when a migraine strikes with no warning?
  • You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
    I haven't had that happen today, but I have, uh, been having to run to the bathroom. ._.
  • I'm in the shops with mum, and everything is too bright and loud right now. Normally I can cope, but not now.
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    Christ Myth Theory makes so little sense to me.

    Like, even if you are taking a super-skeptical eye to the whole thing, Jesus comes off way more as a real person who's deeds and life got exaggerated than a fabricated entity. 

    Like, Robin Hood seems more fictional to me, and there's nothing supernatural in his stories.
  • You are the end result of a “would you push the button” prompt where the prompt was “you have unlimited godlike powers but you appear to all and sundry to be an impetuous child” – Zero, 2022
    if i lowercase a lot more this next few days it's because my shift key is fucked up and i'm waiting for my replacement keyboard to arrive in the mail
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    Toolsie said:

    Don't you love it when a migraine strikes with no warning?

    Oh, you and me both. >~<
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    Odradek said:

    Christ Myth Theory makes so little sense to me.


    Like, even if you are taking a super-skeptical eye to the whole thing, Jesus comes off way more as a real person who's deeds and life got exaggerated than a fabricated entity. 

    Like, Robin Hood seems more fictional to me, and there's nothing supernatural in his stories.
    I get why people are sceptical about Jesus' non-mythic status: There's very little we actually know about the historical figure and most of our information comes from the Gospels, which are pretty unreliable from that perspective. To whit, a lot of those with a strong investment in proving Jesus' historical character are also invested in proving the canonical version of the narrative due to religious motivations.

    So maybe I was too hasty in calling it "stupid." It's just extreme.

    All this being said, there is historical evidence that such a man existed, that he led a small but devoted breakaway sect, that he was crucified, and that after his presumed death he became the object of a messianic insurrectionary cult that the Romans weren't terribly keen on but, contrary to myth, only actively persecuted during brief periods until it became to big to handle. He became the Jewish equivalent to Mithras, but before that, he was a man. What kind of man? We're not sure.

    I'm personally of the belief that the stories that came out of Afghanistan and Tibet during the Victorian era of a Buddhist-educated Jewish sage returning to the East after surviving an attempted execution and burying his mother in the mountains are way more intriguing than the man being a myth, personally.
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    Also the Jews had a LOT of would-be messiahs around the time. Like a lot, a lot.
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    Also I'm like, 90% sure the main reason the internet cares is Zeitgeist.
  • “I'm surprised. Those clothes… but, aren't you…?”
    Yes. Later, too. One crazy Hasidic would-be messiah from the 17th century, Sabbatai Zevi, actually caused a bit of schism when he converted to Islam.
  • We can do anything if we do it together.
    I forget if the Resurrection has any real-world basis or not.
  • My dreams exceed my real life
    I don't know about the Resurrection but the details the Bible gives for how they got Jesus's body entombed are plausible. The Romans usually let bodies rot away on crosses, but because the Jews had a particular horror of dying without a proper burial,  the Romans would occasionally let someone's body off the cross if a particularly influential Jew requested it, in order to avoid rioting.

    According to the New Testament, Jesus's burial was arranged by Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin who was sympathetic to Jesus's teachings.
  • I need to take a nap.
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