58 thoughts on “Open Thread: Opposite Day

      1. OK, so I have a question for the post’s author.

        When you create a post, you can see the most-used tags, if you want to attach any previously-created ones to the post. They are arranged in a “word cloud” type format, with more frequently-used tags such as “Obama” or “politics”, or “conservatism” looming large, due to the political focus of this blog.

        Can anyone explain to me why the only OT author that appears there is “Conor Williams”; and not only that, but in medium-size font (smaller than “Obama”, but larger than “Iran” or “Republican Party” or “Democrats”?)

        Is Conor secretly editing random posts to add his name as a tag, and why?Report

      2. I feel we should make Conor’s experience with comments just as he expects it; full of unreasoned aggression and one-upsmanship/performance. Like interviews with pro wrestlers. It’s the least we can do.Report

      3. I call shenanigans.

        You need to examine your privilege, you live white male. “Shenanigans” begins with the word, “she.” You think that’s a coincidence? The inherent meaning of the word is a mockery of women and all that they do. It’s offensive.Report

      4. First of all, can we just take a step back and revel in how cute that little girl is?

        Second, I think all you are wrong about pretty much everything, and this suggests that you may be worse people than Hitler.Report

      5. “Shenanigans” rhymes with “Hannigan”, which sounds Irish, which is next to Scotland, and you know how men dress there. And it almost rhymes with “Harrigan”, which was written by George M. Cohan, who you probably think was Jewish. So I know exactly what you meant, mister, and from now on you’d better keep your anti-Semitic slurs to yourself.Report

  1. Conor, do you ever worry that your unwillingness to entertain comment sections is indicative of an unwillingness to consider different viewpoints?

    Also, wouldn’t you love to see the education sector completely privatized?

    If you don’t reply, I’m going to assume that the answer to each question is, “yes”.Report

    1. Everybody likes Drag Racing, and I appreciate his industry-encouraging message telling everyone (even supermodels) that they gotta work; but does he have any real political experience?Report

  2. I thought this would be a good post to intentionally pose as the creepy gnome dude and @mike-schilling’s avatar for some reason is making me hungry for pizza.Report

      1. I don’t know much about SF housing, since I’ve never lived in The City itself (well, for a month after we moved here, but I was 4 at the time), so I’ll try to think of a good topic for the latter.Report

      2. Mike, here’s a suggestion I’d like to read about: there’s a proof that you can break the surface of a sphere into pieces then reassemble them into a shape with a greater volume. Which seems crazy, to me anyway. You mathematicians seem to find this stuff “intuitive”.Report

      3. I don’t think I can explain that one more simply than Wikipedia already does, certainly not in a piece of reasonable length. Even the basic underpinnings for it (measure theory and using the axiom of choice to create unmeasurable sets) would be hard to explain to someone without the requisite background.Report

      4. Not sure if this will help, but:

        The reason it seems impossible is that the two spheres have twice the volume of the single sphere, and you’d expect cutting a sphere into pieces and reassembling the pieces to preserve volume. That is, I have a sphere of volume 1, and I cut it into four pieces of volume 1/4 each, it seems like whatever I make with those four pieces would also have volume 1. And that’s true.

        The thing is, some shapes are so weird that you can’t assign them a volume. (It’s the construction of these shapes and explaining why they don’t have a specific volume that I despair of trying to explain.) So if you cut the sphere into shapes like that and then reassemble them, you can’t apply the logic from the paragraph above, and so you can’t conclude that volume is preserved.Report

  3. On a more serious and non-opposite-day style note:

    Ever since the recent (by a few months, I think) threads on Conor’s decision not to allow comments, I’ve tried to really examine how much my commentary is for self-regard and how much is for the purposes of advancing discussion. At least some of the time, maybe even the majority of the time, I can’t definitively say that my commentary is not for self-regard. In other words, I think I’ve learned a lot and at least for me, am partially convinced by Conor’s argument.Report

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