Talk:2693: Wirecutter Recommendation

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 13:30, 8 November 2022 by 172.70.86.62 (talk)
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I'm glad the explanation (as of reading, at least) lept straight into reminding me about the website. I initially read the first panel as Cueball looking for a specific item recomendation... 172.70.86.12 18:42, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Soooo.... what sort of dreams would these be? Is Randal talking about the invasive "we control you while you sleep" dystopia, or is he referring to life goals? Cwallenpoole (talk) 18:44, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure he means life aspirations -- even if you could rate sleeping dreams ("Flying -- 5 stars"), how would you make use of them? There are some people who claim to be able to control their dreams, it's not something most people can do. Barmar (talk) 23:01, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Is this fitting for Category:Rankings? —While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights) 21:07, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

I totally misunderstood the first panel as "I just went with the one wirecutter *which was* recommended". Like, there was a comparison of different wire cutters, but only one of them was recommended, and that's the one Cueball went with. 172.69.22.16 21:52, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

As did I. I had never, in fact, heard of the Wirecutter review website until I came here looking for an explanation.172.69.79.196 22:22, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
Ditto. I initially thought it might be another 1036-type idea.Yorkshire Pudding (talk) 22:55, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
Me too, but when I went to panel 2 I realized it must be a recommendation site that I hadn't heard of. Then I came here and got the confirmation. Barmar (talk) 22:58, 2 November 2022 (UTC)
One of most confusing strips to date. Spent good couple minutes thinking just how applying wire cutters to your pet is merely weird but to a site for product recommendations is very bad. 172.68.51.52 10:48, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
Agreed. If "WIRECUTTER" was in italics, then it would have easier to understand it was a proper noun and not "wirecutter". 172.68.70.108 18:59, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Blood-type 172.70.110.237 23:11, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

This was pretty confusing because being outside the US, I had never heard of wirecutter :P 172.68.210.41 23:54, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Specifically for neighborhoods, beyond the easy to compare numbers like property values and crime rates, there are websites that "review" them for less quantitative things like access to community services, traffic and noise, and reputation of nearby schools. It is still normally too complex a decision to reduce to "whichever the website recommends". 172.70.134.13 00:48, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

The title text could be a reference to the regress argument. 162.158.222.239 10:39, 3 November 2022 (UTC)


"Your college major will determine the rest of your life significantly." <- Clearly written by someone who has not gone through college. -- 172.70.131.85 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Or someone who went to a college which taught in a language other than English, or who isn’t very careful when they write on Explain xkcd compared to when they wrote essays in college. In short: Please don’t be rude. —While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights) 17:39, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
You call me rude, yet you're the one making assumptions about me, assuming that my native language is English, or that I went to an English-speaking college. I have been through college, specifically, university. It's a waste of money unless you're going into medicine or law. Other degrees are meaningless pieces of paper and the only things that actually matter in the job market are personal connections.
Well, I have assumed neither your language nor your college. To call someone uneducated is a common insult. —While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights) 19:03, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
I think you're a bit off base here - pretty sure they weren't seriously calling anyone uneducated - simply making a half-joking observation that a college degree isn't anywhere near as valuable as that statement suggested.172.71.178.64 11:13, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
If so I’m sorry. –While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights) 11:53, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
...regardless of all that, a Wirecutter review would be useless, because we already know that 1052: Every Major's Terrible! 141.101.76.166 21:36, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Had to come here to find out why in the world anyone would recommend using one wire cutter (as opposed to more?) on a vacuum cleaner, headphones, or scooter, let alone those other things. I supposed that if headphones stopped working, having one wire cutter might be useful. 172.71.146.65 22:31, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Why is there no reason why you shouldn't base your religious worldview off wirecutter? There (as of now) doesn't seem to be many consequences to your religious worldview, and current methods for choosing your religion are often misguided at best. -- Rayrge (talk) 11:58, 8 November 2022 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

If a choice (as opposed to social inevitability) of religious worldview isn't directly consequential (dietry, time requirements, obligations in other ways) then it may still be problematic when interacting with others of another religion. Or of a slightly different skew of the religion (c.f. being declared "not a dwarf" in Discworld), though whether that's more an issue in 'natural' side-by-side sectarianism is debatable.
If you were to choose a religion (very few people do, I'd say, you either sit stewing in your 'natural' one, give or take, or get nudged into taking a leap over to whatever "something else" happens to pass by at the moment you've decided you don't like your own stew) then you have to know not only what the choice religions do directly to your life but also know how the rest of your world will react to you. (Different if you're in China, the US, various bits of the middle-east, Northern Ireland and almost everywhere will have 'less convenient' choices – albeit differently and to different degrees.)
Even within the US (with the primary Wirecutter-readership catchment) bible-belt/diasporic areas with particular trends to their religious philosophies are going to make it more advisable to account for that community, based upon expectations and perhaps also prejudices. And becoming sufficiently 'acceptaple' for one area's dominant creed might place you out of the norm in another neighbourhood. How a broad-brush review can successfully navigate all these issues (never mind if they covered the variations: can you be happily Jewish in Salt Lake City? Is Buddhism workable in the Projects? Exactly which subset of Evangelical Baptism works best in <wherever>...)
One who is a religion might be Ok in most (societally stable) places, but could still get the impression that you're more in the out-group. But as Pascal's Wager is bunk (for many reasons) there's mostly no way to choose to change to better fit in. Perhaps you can change to somewhere else where you can fit in without changing, but then you need to initially deal with being from elsewhere (with other prejudices), and never really know if you're even as good a fit as you thought before you move there. And Wirecutter isn't covering that under its Religion review, presumably, only a separate Neighbourhood one. 172.70.86.62 13:30, 8 November 2022 (UTC)