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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • It’s because we’re also very used to seeing photographs of a subject in shade while the background is in full sunlight. If you take a picture of a white and gold dress in the shadow of a patio, with the background all fully lit by bright sunlight, the actual pixels representing white objects in the shade would be that bluish gray tint.

    The problem here is that the dress isn’t in the shade but those of us who see white and gold simply assume that it is in shade, while black/blue viewers (correctly) assume that it is under the same lighting conditions of the overexposed background.



  • Since we have no context, the dress is white and gold objectively.

    The actual physical object photographed is black and blue.

    White and gold appear when the brain makes the assumption that the dress falls within a shadow (effectively applying a filter that shifts the white balance towards bluer colors and brightness down significantly compared to direct sunlight). Only in real life, the photographed dress did not fall within a shadow, and instead was affected by a yellowish lens flare, so the subconscious color correction that leads a viewer to assume white and gold was erroneously applied.

    I see white and gold. But to claim that it’s “objectively” white and gold ignores how the human brain perceives color and ignores that the actual photograph was a blue and black dress.








  • Corporate buzzwords are cargo cult behavior. Jargon and industry-specific terms can be helpful for accurately communicating precise or nuanced ideas, but generic buzzwords are just people who try to sound professional or smart by mimicking the people they’ve seen in those roles.

    Just asking “what’s my role in the meeting” is a simple way to get to the point, and isn’t impolite or unprofessional.


  • Everybody’s punching up.

    The diversity in preferences makes “up” impossible to define and order consistently between people. If you take a survey of a population for an ordered ranking, in desire ability as potential spouses, of a particular sample set, you might get wildly different rankings.

    And then those same people might rank things differently depending on who they would most want to have a one night stand with.

    Even laying out specific physical characteristics and asking about attractiveness will get those isolated features ranked differently. Heterosexual men will disagree on whether it is attractive, unattractive or neutral for a woman to be:

    • Being very tall
    • Being very short
    • Having an athletic build
    • Having pale skin
    • Having curly hair
    • Having tattoos
    • Having a Ph.D.
    • Speaking multiple languages
    • Being Christian
    • Being vegetarian

    We’re all just looking for compatibility. What that means will vary from person to person, and what is very attractive to one person might be a huge turn off to another.

    I’m generally of the view that you want to be with someone whose unique traits are positive to you, and who sees your unique traits as positives, too. That way both can fall within that stable equilibrium of both believing that they’ve married “up.”