I think GP is making a subtler point, not that listening to audio books is worse than reading books with your eyes, but that it's telling that people who listen to audio books themselves go out of their way to emphasize that it's equivalent to reading, thus betraying that in their own value system they put a higher value on (actual) reading.
It's not about having to put in effort for the sake of it, the point is that building something by hand you will gain insight into the problem, which insight then becomes a valuable contribution.
The student loan system is fucked up, so what should happen is an acknowledgement that it's fucked up, forgiving the fucked up loans, and also changing the system to be less fucked up so it won't have to happen again.
A major part of why it's so expensive is because of government subsidies to private healthcare insurance. No or little public option is exactly what allows insurance companies to go hog wild on their premiums.
The ACA subsidies are simply a bandaid on a broken system which allows insurance to further break the system as they adapt to what people are willing to pay for a necessity.
Healthcare is really complicated. No one factor makes up a majority of the excess (compared to other rich nations) cost.
The ACA is a bandaid, and may be making things worse over time, at least in some areas. But Americans don't see to have the appetite to really change anything. Probably because most voters are insulated from this by good (enough) employees plans.
A big part of that is also the transfers between private insurance and Medicare, with health care providers accepting far lower rates for Medicare and then subsidizing operations with the rates charged to private insurers. Hospital administration is pretty hellish. As is administering payments!
Any functioning health care system is going to have a "band-aid" exactly ACA subsidies: make sure that those with the lowest incomes can still afford health care. Something in between Medicaid and the full cost. But as we rein in the costs and get healthcare to be a smaller fraction of GDP, the size of the band-aid can shrink.
There has, for 30+ years, been a real problem with politicians refusing to speak truth, or anything close to it. They tell voters what they want to hear. This is often "truth adjacent", and they thus offer partial solutions that tend to not work out.
The US has real problem that require real changes, but the political system is not responding.
IMO, people sense this, grow frustrated, and become willing to take a chance on someone who seems to speak (more) truth, and claims to be willing to pursue real changes.
We are starting to see more moderate mainstream politicians willing to speak more truthfully, and propose policy changes that may not appeal to everyone. But I'm not sure it's happening fast enough.
But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.
I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
I certainly appreciate all the emotions and culture that go into making beautiful music on a cello. But it's important to separate that placebo affect ("I think it sounds better because I know it's a Strad"), from the real physical differences, because people have gone to great lengths to find "the secret of Strad": was it his varnish, the Maunder Minimum, an extended drought, special wood treatment to prevent woodworm, etc. etc. Except time and time again we find there is no "Strad secret", beyond his expert craftsmanship, attention to detail, and fundamental changes he made to the shape of the plates of his instruments compared to his predecessors.
>whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
Isn't this trivially true? I'm sure if you hook up both cellos to a bowing robot using many permutations of contact point, fingering, speed, pressure and angle, and record the sound, it would be possible to consistently discern them through spectral analysis or something. Is the claim that if an expert modern luthier reproduces a stradivarius he can get it so close as to measure identically?
edit: by the way
>I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.
I don't know why you would say my post is irrelevant to that question. You said "people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests", and I'm saying that the difference between two cellos could be more complicated than just listening to one after the other for some minutes and filling in a questionnaire.
I guess another way of putting it would be that the aura of an instrument that elicits a more sentimental playing of it by the musician is sort of not really interesting or relevant because you can just lie about any instrument to elicit it.
No, I am not talking about aura at all, I'm just saying that the physical, measurable sound that an instrument produces in response to being played, physically and measurably, could have more subtle effects on artistic performance (as a consequence of the physical vibrations of the object and the way those vibrations respond to the player and vice versa) than those that could be elided in an afternoon of A/B-testing under the banner of "stradivarius myth DEBUNKED".
In controlled tests the instruments are played by highly skilled musicians (usually the ones that possess them) but they don't know which instrument they are playing. Musicians cannot perfectly reproduce their performance so statistical methods are used to separate the effect from the noise, just like every other scientific experiment.
He does leverage the risk that others take, but those others are also the people who collectively build society so as to require taking that risk. It's kind of tit-for-tat in a way.
>How can I take his advocacy seriously
You could just listen to what he has to say and consider whether or not it's true. His personal behaviour at the end of the day has little bearing on that. "He doesn't even do XYZ therefore I won't believe him" feels more like a rationalization one comes up with because one doesn't want to believe him in the first place.
Previously sharing compressed and encrypted text was always done between humans. When autonomous intelligences start doing it it could be a different matter.
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