sj_zero
@sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net
- Comment on drafting 11 hours ago:
There's definitely something to be said for trying to get it mostly correct the first time.
- Comment on Steam breaking records again hitting over 36 million players online 13 hours ago:
It's pretty funny that most of the top games are like 10 years old or more.
- Comment on Chart of the Day: California surges beyond 100 pct renewables 13 hours ago:
One huge reason why I have been such an advocate for hydroelectric over anything else. Most of the day sun isn't out in winter, but you still need electricity, especially if you are planning to migrate your home heating to electric at a large scale.
- Comment on Study: Dark matter does not exist and the universe is 27 billion years old 13 hours ago:
Honestly, This makes a lot of sense. Intuitively it seemed strange to me for us to just happen to be in a universe that's barely older than the first set of stars out there, when there's so much matter in the universe that would have needed to have formed over billions of years in the heart of stars, which would then reach the end of their life cycle and nova -- that all this happens to line up awfully closely, especially with all the debris from those dead stars would need to scatter over light years of distance.
- Comment on What games do you replay regularly/annually ? 1 day ago:
Incredibly, in spite of the fact that I've been paying for 25 years, I very rarely go for any of the alternative endings, other than the developer ending if you beat lavos the first time.
- Comment on ancestors 1 day ago:
You know, I know it's a joke, but if you think about it there's probably a lot of behavioral instincts that we rely on go surprisingly far back in the evolutionary chain.
- Comment on What games do you replay regularly/annually ? 1 day ago:
Chrono Trigger. I've played it on so many platforms it's a bit mind blowing
- Comment on Intel’s 6.2 GHz Core i9-14900KS is a reminder of why the MHz wars ended 3 days ago:
Unfortunately the death of Moore's law means they need to get more speed from somewhere to have new products to sell so I expect this'll continue for high end products.
Otoh, at least low end products get dragged upwards too, amazing how much cpu you can get in 32w
- Comment on No tip 5 days ago:
Yes, everywhere and everything. Every stitch of clothing you wear, the home you pay for, the food you eat, it's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon but for sin. Live in an abandoned cave in a forest on the moon or you're supporting someone you don't like.
- Comment on He’s a Renewable-Power Billionaire, Not an Environmentalist 6 days ago:
I like this guy... There's a good fundamental truth here that if you want the better things for society and the planet, you fundamentally need to make it easy to do the right things, and everywhere you go it's just "we can't do that!" Alongside rhetorical inclusion fallacies of "if you believe in X, you must believe in A-G"
- Comment on It's good to be federated. 1 week ago:
Okay. What you've just told me is that you didn't read the post that you're responding to.
- Comment on It's good to be federated. 1 week ago:
And that would be a strong disagreement between us.
I work in science and technology, and at the end of the day it doesn't matter how good my arguments are, the final arbiter of truth is reality. At the end of the day, our ability to understand the world is only as good as our understanding of what is, not what we would like to be or what we think is. If you make predictions or plans based on incorrect models of the world, you will get outcomes other than what you want.
In the famous movie "The Matrix", one of the main characters named Morpheus asks "What is real?", with the implication of the question in that moment being that The Matrix, a simulation where people spend their days while objectively speaking their physical bodies are in vats of nutrients as their brains have the simulation implanted into them through a prosthetic implanted in the back of their heads, was just as real as the physical world. In a subjective sense, perhaps it is. The interactions between people are certainly real. In the movie, Neo and Trinity fall in love in part during their time in the Matrix. Their love is highly subjective (Trinity certainly isn't my type), but real to them. On the other hand, the existence of the subjective does not mean rejection of the objective. The objective reality (in the movie, at least) was that whatever the Matrix told the individuals brains, they were in vats of goo being used to power a supercomputer. The main theme of the movie was a rejection of inauthentic simulations to rejoin the more authentic world that while subjectively much less comfortable was nonetheless objective reality. The second and third movie I think didn't communicate that theme as well, but the point of the architect near the end of the second movie was that Zeon itself was something of a simulation -- Despite being in the objective world of atoms it was a false world created by the machines to give the humans who needed hope to not destroy their fictional world. Once again, however, the existence of subjective reality does not mean objective reality does not exist, only that the two both exist, and that our perceptions of subjective reality can cloud objective reality.
Consciousness is an example of something we know to be real subjectively but is very difficult to quantity objectively. We 'know' we're conscious, but some objective data really puts it into question such as research showing that for some decisions we have the answers before we consciously decide on the answers. This shows that the two can exist and be somewhat distinct from each other. The fact that the two can exist and even be at odds does not negate the existence of one or the other, however.
Now you can make a convincing argument that what we perceive and understand what the world isn't objective reality and instead a subjective shadow of reality seen through the lens of an organism which is evolutionarily developed in order to ensure survival and replication of the organisms containing specific DNA, but at the end of the day regardless of our ability to properly perceive it objective reality absolutely exists. There's something outside of ourselves that must exist independently of us, because things can happen the same to a lot of different people who hold entirely different beliefs and still have essentially the same outcome.
One civilization that doesn't strictly believe in objective reality is the Indian civilization. It's an incredible civilization in terms of culture, but anyone who has ever tried to take over the country has been wildly successful. Of course British colonialism is one example, but in the 9th century muslims from the northwest came down and were absolutely dominating the indian subcontinent, and all the leaders did was build nicer temples so the gods would grant them victory.
Things in the objective physical world also happened before there was anyone to subjectively perceive anything. Assuming our theories are correct (which is always a risk -- every era ever including ours has been fundamentally wrong about some understandings of the world. This is due to the objective nature of reality and how we are striving to understand what is, rather than what we think is), the universe was born, stars were formed, burned for billions of years, and exploded releasing the atoms that would someday become our solar system, our sun formed by accumulating hydrogen and building a gravity well that eventually accumulated material to form the planets including earth, the hadean period rocked the planet with red hot fire, and then after billions of years without any organism to percieve anything, the first life showed up on earth in the archean period. It would be quite a long time before complex life would show up, and that would include objective events such as the oxygen catastrophe and ensuing ice age that killed most life on earth whether the simple single-celled organisms subjectively thought it would happen or not.
Quantum mechanics makes people believe there is no objective reality because of elements such as wave-particle duality or quantum entanglement, or even quantum superposition. In my view, this argument is critically flawed because quantum mechanics in fact shows the objective nature of reality. We subjectively believed for 200 years that Newtonian physics is the language we can use to understand reality, but it turns out that on very small scales newtonian physics break down and there's an entirely new conception of reality that is unintuitive to us at the macro scale. On very high scales of relative speed, we also saw newtonian physics break down at very large scales or for objects travelling very fast, and that's where Einsteinian relativity came in. Once again, it shows that reality is objective rather than subjective because these rules apply to us independently of our perception or understanding of them. Our perception of time relative to other things may change due to relativity, but reality and the rules of the universe don't care about our perception of them. Also important is that stuff like Heisenberg's uncertainty theorem that suggest we can know a particle's position or its speed but not both isn't a subjective thing because it doesn't require a human observer to be true -- particles interact in predictably unpredictable ways with or without us, which is why quantum mechanics works when a scientist isn't looking directly at a screen. At the quantum scale the nature of measurement is that you are interacting with something using forces or particles that are on similar scales to what you're measuring, so of course you're changing the value by measuring it, to measure it you need to interact with something smaller than most people can imagine.
I think it's important with respect to quantum mechanics to understand that there's sort of 2 fields -- one is based on strict measurement and analysis of experiments, and one is based almost exclusively on thought experiments and often fails to come up with any testable hypotheses. Personally, I consider the former to be actual quantum physics, and the latter to be quackery. Thought experiments have their place, but a problem with leaving the objective measurement and understanding of measurements is that you can justify many interpretations, most of which can be quite wrong. Everyone knows Democritus theorized about the existence of atoms, but few people follow that up by pointing out that for millennia people followed instead the concept of everything being made up of 4 elements of wind, fire, water, and earth. The correct answer was largely forgotten and the incorrect answer was largely accepted in part because people could only go by what looked better on paper or felt better instead of what was objectively true.
Some people think that reality is socially constructed. To me, this is an egocentric and arrogant view of the world, fitting for our egocentric and arrogant civilization, but not fit as a theory of reality. Give 1 person LSD and convince them they can fly, and they'll jump out a window and die. Give 10 people the same and do the same, they'll jump out a window and die. Give a million people the same and do the same (jeez you're a dick, what did those million people ever do to you?) -- reality exists independently of our perception of it, and the only thing that changes is our perception of reality.
On the topic of objective truth and social sciences, the social sciences in particular are in a crisis caused by failures to measure objective reality. Some problems are with famous researchers being accused of faking data to lead to certain results they want. Some problems are with techniques such as "p-hacking" where a statistically insignificant result is played with (for example by increasing the sample size of a borderline result but only for one that wouldn't be significant) until it becomes statistically significant, because novel positive findings have greater prestige than negative findings. There is objectivity in measuring the subjective, after all. In failing to properly design their experiments, measure the outcomes, or analyze the data, they have stopped being a science and thus entire fields are in a crisis because nobody can be correct -- not because reality is subjective, but because it is objective and failure to correctly work with that fact results in objectively negative outcomes for everyone as the results of research only serve to make the authors better off, not the scientific field.
This links up with the concept of postmodernism which simply put often tries to reject grand narratives and often questions the existence of objective truth. There is actually a benefit to this in subjective or human sciences, but at a cost -- Postmodernism has created new artforms that are often intellectually stimulating or aesthetically pleasing and a complete departure from previous norms, but it has also put out an almost unlimited amount of gibberish and garbage, since the biggest benefit of questioning if we really have the right answers is that we might find another area of subjective emotional or aesthetic truth we hadn't considered before. On the other hand, where postmodernism runs up against objective reality, it always loses -- At the end of the day, reality doesn't care how smart you are, it chooses what is correct, not you.
Some religious ideologies may consider reality subjective, such as the indian brahmins I mentioned earlier. While their worldview can often be quite compelling emotionally, only religions that manage to find a compromise between their subjective worldview and the objective reality of survival will grow because if a religion's tenets lead individuals to objectively die then those religions will die out. Whatever the beliefs of the Minoans or the Harrapan civilization, neither of them have any adherents today because their civilizations were wiped out by objective reality's harsh tenets -- we don't even know what they believed their ideologies were wiped out so completely.
I guess finally, we can say that due to the limitations of human perception perhaps there's cognitive glitches that mean reality actually is subjective and it only appears objective because we collectively believe it's objective. I suppose that's a possibility, but I think at that point we're having to make an awful lot of unfounded assumptions to fit the hypothesis to the data. It is much simpler and much more likely that objective reality existed before us, subjectivity exists on a small timeframe in the universal scale because there exists something to be subjective, and then for many times the current estimated length of the universe objective reality will outlive us because we have every piece of evidence that we're not that special.
- Comment on Farewell... for now? - dmv.social is closing as of April 14th. 1 week ago:
I'd like to pay respects, dmv.social looks like it was a great instance.
I completely understand where you're coming from, bad actors are one reason why I've disabled sign-ups -- in my case it's more due to spam, but the attack you're talking about is also something obviously worth worrying about.
- Comment on Canada’s Liberal Government Advances “Online Harms” Censorship Bill 1 week ago:
Hoping the tide is turning in Canada and this sort of monstrous attack on basic human rights becomes one of the sad moments in history future governments apologize for.
- Comment on Meta Launches Real-Time Content Censorship Unit for 2024 Elections “Fact-Checker” Support 1 week ago:
It's funny watching big tech neuter themselves in realtime.
- Comment on Brick Layers: Could printing STRONG parts be so simple? 1 week ago:
Neat, I didn't realize he has a blog.
For squarespace sites you can get an RSS feed using ?format=rss
- Comment on Security Alert: Avoid Large Gatherings over the Next 48 Hours 1 week ago:
Us embassy: "you're cool. Don't come to school tomorrow"
- Comment on It's good to be federated. 1 week ago:
Not really interested in finding any ideology where "we" believe things, because I'm trying to understand objective reality and subjective truth and anything "we" believe might end up having to kill my own sacred cows (and honestly in some cases I have had to).
- Comment on It's good to be federated. 1 week ago:
I think your post is silly, but as long as you can handle the fact that I disagree and can coexist, then it's fine.
If you want my definition of a redditor, this post explains it in detail using Dostoyevskys notes from the underground as an anchor.
- Submitted 1 week ago to fediverse@hilariouschaos.com | 34 comments
- Comment on Christians think gay people are trying to convert them to being gay *because Christians try to convert people to being Christian*. 4 weeks ago:
"I nitpicked a word you used, therefore not just refuting your entire post that I didn't read, but you as a human being. What, you pointed out my behavior? Clearly it only proves that my refutation of you as a human being is wholly correct."
- Comment on Christians think gay people are trying to convert them to being gay *because Christians try to convert people to being Christian*. 4 weeks ago:
"didn't read here's a nitpick"
lol about the response I expected.
- Comment on Christians think gay people are trying to convert them to being gay *because Christians try to convert people to being Christian*. 4 weeks ago:
The mental model you guys are working off of is completely wrong.
Not much direct research has been done, but the impression I get is that a surprising amount of the post-2016 right aren't lifelong Christians (or even Christians at all even now, belonging to factions such as libertarianism which isn't tied to religion at all), and aren't even lifelong conservatives. A lot of them vocally supported Obama in 2008 if they're that old. the support for gay marriage among Republicans has approached 50%, which is a massive increase over the previous support near 20%. Moreover, you may be surprised to find that not everyone who is concerned about what's going on is a conservative or a republican either. Protecting children from people who hope to cause them harm is a universal human value, and likely is derived from instincts far before that.
It's really important to understand the recent history of conservatism, because it's a rapidly changing landscape. On one hand, you have traditional liberals who are now considered conservative for not rushing headlong enough into the latest thing, and on the other hand you have openly far right factions and they aren't hiding their open contempt for other factions for not being extreme enough, and they aren't hiding their opinions on things like women, black people, and jews. In that respect, I see a lot of people working off a playbook that's out of date and coming to wildly wrong conclusions on a wide variety of topics from that false model. After the Republicans got crushed in 2008 they had to go back to the chalkboard and find new strategies that would work in a new world. People made fun of some of the attempts such as the tea party, but that resulted in a lot of new ideas and new blood coming into the party. Many other conservative parties around the world needed to do the same thing because they faced similar defeats. As a result, around the world parties that were considered completely outside the overton window for being conservative are gaining ground. AFD in Germany, Fratelli d'Italia in Italy, and even the far right populist PPC got more votes than the green party in Canada in the recent election, and in the next election the Conservatives are on track to win a massive majority. This isn't happening because they're telling the same stories they were 15 years ago, it's happening because they're finding new stories to tell while their left-wing opponents are just quadrupling down on the stories they told 15 years ago that don't represent a reality in 2024. Conservatism isn't just Christianity therefore, it's a much flatter, much wider thing including a lot of the cultural consensus from 15 years ago and a lot of stuff that would be considered literally unspeakable 15 years ago.
If you want to blame someone for making people think they're trying to make kids gay or trans, you should probably blame all the idiots who were recorded saying they wanted to make kids gay or trans. You should blame people who use the phrase "not so secret gay agenda" positively in describing what they're doing in their work on kids shows. You should blame the people who put out musical numbers singing "We'll convert your children!". As well, you should blame the people who have decided that starting to transition children in schools while explicitly keeping it secret from parents is a hill they want to die on. In some of the cases I'm referring to they claim to be just joking, but it is the contemporary left that drew the line in the sand that if you joke about anything you're advocating for the most extreme thing you can imagine with respect to that thing. If you care deeply about your kids, and someone is "joking" about doing something you find unspeakable to your kids, why take a chance and why not just believe them?
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was something called the "Satanic Panic". The police questioned kids about certain things and eventually they got stories from these kids that led to the arrest of dozens of people. The problem at that time is it was all false. One kid claimed the cultists killed and ate and forced him to eat his friend (who was very much alive). Police scoured airports looking for airplanes that could land secretly in a residential neighborhood, fly a child to mexico to be molested, then returned to the same neighborhood in the same day. Another kid spoke of a complex series of tunnels under a town that the cultists used for their satanic rituals, and when it was checked there were no tunnels. In the end, it turned out that all the people accused ended up being innocent, and what we learned from that is that we need to be very careful when trying to figure stuff out from kids because they want to tell us things we want to hear. Today there's a completely different method of questioning children in criminal cases exactly because we know kids are impressionable and we need to be careful about finding the truth and not just the answers that are convenient to us. In the same way, to be responsible we need to be extremely careful about giving kids drugs or surgery that permanently modify the path of their bodies solely because they tell us they are something.
Compare the way "trans kids" are being treated by politicans and the media, and even if you assume good faith and that it isn't intentional, it's impossible to see the behavior as anything but manipulative and dangerous from a completely secular viewpoint. Telling kids that if they assume a certain characteristics that they're so loved and so wanted and so supported and they're being mistreated by everyone around them that just doesn't know how special they are and giving the same message all the time -- of course a bunch of kids will go "oh, well if that's what the important adults want me to be then that's what I'll be".
Now, one important piece of the puzzle with respect to "trans kids" is that someone who questions their sexuality isn't going to ask anyone to surgically alter their bodies, which would be why that piece of the puzzle is particularly contentious.
Different studies of kids trans kids showed that between 60 and over 90% of kids who expressed confusion about their gender identity ended up the gender identity of their birth after 18 without treatment. If nothing else, that should raise serious questions about whether treatment of any kind before the age of 18 is ethical, considering you could potentially end up causing needless harm to 9 kids for every 1 kid you help. There is certainly a lot of research disputing these findings, and in fact the number of articles saying "nuh uh" absolutely dwarfs the actual claims, but as a politically charged issue there's an obvious concern about politically induced bias here, which makes me want to believe the older studies from before this was such a front and center topic. You can disagree, but I'm sure my skepticism of "new study shows everything political movement claims is true" is not so unreasonable. If I'm not going to believe creationists when they spit out a flood of studies 'proving' the world is only 8000 years old, why would I believe trans youth ideologues when they spit out a flood of studies seemingly solely in response to being challenged politically?
There has been an explosion in the number of kids identifying as trans. Now, it could be that we're just living in the gayest, transest time in the history of the world, but when we're dealing with numbers increasing by many orders of magnitude, it's equally possible that there's an element of social contaigen. Some people might claim that social contaigen is absurd and wouldn't cause people to do something as extreme as this. The thing is, it is uncontroversial that there is an element of social contaigen in cutting, anorexia and suicide which are both purely harmful, and recreational drug use which can be quite harmful.
Given the basis of the Hippocratic oath, medicine should be politically Conservative but practically conservative and be very careful about implementing new treatments, particularly on a very large scale, particularly when the effects of those treatments are so overwhelmingly dire. Fundamentally modifying and fundamentally damaging sex organs and primary and secondary sexual characteristics is something we have to be very careful about doing and nobody should be jumping for joy at the idea that it's something that we have to do, in the same way that no one should be jumping for joy at the idea that they should need an organ transplant.
Another important thing to remember is that there is a solid history in the 20th century of medical ideologies or technologies that become wildly popular and end up proving to be somewhat evil. Tommy Douglas, the founder of Canadian healthcare, was a vocal proponent of eugenics. The prefrontal lobotomy eventually ended up coming to be considered an example of barbarism but when it was first invented was considered a miracle cure. Prior to the 20th century, cocaine was considered so fantastic that Sigmund Freud himself wrote a book called on cocaine which was about how much he thought cocaine was a beneficial drug. All of these are cautionary tales about simply accepting the current orthodoxy on a current medical treatment.
You'll note that none of these are religious arguments. You don't need to believe in any God to look at the above. You can be a hard atheist and look at the facts above and be concerned because you don't want people hurting your kids for their political ideology. If you think that it's solely due to christianity that someone would look at the above and be concerned then you're fundamentally misunderstanding people around you.
Now to give everything a broad view, just because something ends up being bad in the way that it's implemented doesn't necessarily mean that it is entirely bad. Eugenics taken to it it's extremes horrible and immoral, but some individuals with major genetic diseases choose independently not to have kids because of the risks involved. Prefrontal lobotomies as a carry-all for anything that could heal you is obviously absolutely horrific and terrible, but it is still very occasionally used for very specific situations. I believe that even cocaine has legitimate medical applications, and if it doesn't then certainly it's cousin opiates or something that are quite dangerous and should not be thrown around thoughtlessly but have incredible levels of therapeutic benefit. I would even go so far as to say that there may be situations where very early intervention in transgender cases could be tremendously beneficial, but I think that the data is clearly showing you have to be very careful and being a political topic the way it is I don't think it's being treated very carefully.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Pivot_Counties:_The_counties_that_voted_Obama-Obama-Trump_from_2008-2016
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/22/us/gender-identity-students-parents.html
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/us/satanic-panic.html
[9] https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/06/23/satanic-panic/
[10] https://twitter.com/theJagmeetSingh/status/1753190259343708432
[12] http://www.sexologytoday.org/2016/01/do-trans-kids-stay-trans-when-they-grow_99.html
[13] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21216800/
[14] https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/958742?form=fpf
[15] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/
[16] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0004867413502092
[17] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23387399/
[18] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3926100/
[19] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/hippocratic-oath-today/
[20] https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/tommy-douglas-and-eugenics
[21] https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-55854145
[22] https://www.vice.com/en/article/payngv/how-cocaine-influenced-the-work-of-sigmund-freud
- Comment on Fox show hosts said Taylor Swift "should be conservative" given her background, because to them it's an identity. 4 weeks ago:
Leftists aren't liberals.
The left was mostly aligned with liberalism some time ago, but they aren't the same thing and now the two are mostly incompatible.
- Comment on Fox show hosts said Taylor Swift "should be conservative" given her background, because to them it's an identity. 4 weeks ago:
Yes. The alleged socialists showed exactly what they actually think about the working class.
- Comment on Want a 3D printer in New York? Get ready for fingerprinting and a 15 day wait 4 weeks ago:
lol
And just imagine, you can make a shitty gun for 20 bucks using parts from the local hardware store.
- Comment on Fox show hosts said Taylor Swift "should be conservative" given her background, because to them it's an identity. 4 weeks ago:
It was weird conspiracy theory stuff when the Liberals and NDP illegally invoked the emergencies act to shut down the bank accounts of people contributing to a peaceful protest.
I'll lay off the conspiracy theory channels of... the house of commons video feed.
- Comment on Fox show hosts said Taylor Swift "should be conservative" given her background, because to them it's an identity. 4 weeks ago:
I'd say you have a pretty inaccurate view of left wing politics.
Which is understandable. There's been a major shift in the past 15 years that really fundamentally changed the mainstream left.
You and I probably have similar political views in many ways, but when you stand in a stream, you don't have to move for the water to pass you by.
Better open your eyes before it's too late -- you'll get your bank account shut down for wrongthink.
- Comment on Fox show hosts said Taylor Swift "should be conservative" given her background, because to them it's an identity. 4 weeks ago:
I don't know, it's really tough to say -- If you're reading old texts hoping to glean some wisdom, depending on the context that would definitely be conservative, but depending on the context it might not be. I was just talking about Wang Mang around 30AD, and he spent a lot of time digging up evidence of how imperial china was run 1000 years before he was born based on confuscian teachings from 500 years before he was born. On the other hand, at this point after 200 years of Marx you could claim marxism is conservative (and in fact Xi is really making a conservative maoist argument in his government right now hoping to return to the stricter times of his childhood)
Here's an interesting video on the idea of the left hating self-improvement. I won't claim it's universal, but the argument is somewhat convincing in light of many things I've seen far removed from this particular video including stuff like opposing technologies like cochlear implants that would make a deaf person non-deaf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Vf-ry-3rg
- Comment on Fox show hosts said Taylor Swift "should be conservative" given her background, because to them it's an identity. 4 weeks ago:
It depends which worldview you take on, but things like hard work and staying in shape have been called "fascist" by a left wing that sees any form of self-improvement as counter-revolutionary.
It seems to me that I was reading The Republic a couple weeks ago and Plato 2500 years ago was talking about the need for people to stay in shape in the gymnasium (not the same thing as today, but still a place to hone your body) so there's definitely precedent to call it conservative since it's a value held since antiquity.