Journalism dropout turned philosophy dropout, and that does a better job at defining me than the business degree I do have. I’m an amateur science fiction writer.
polymathwannabe
Karma: 3,862
On the practicalities of catastrophe readiness.
There was a similar post a while ago about the concept of small identities.
There’s this powerful one-page fanfic.
Big news for visibility: Sam Harris is preparing a book co-written with Eliezer (starting at minute 51 of podcast).
I sometimes call myself a progressivist. I don’t think communism is immoral—I see totalitarianism as the thing which is immoral, and you can have totalitarianism with or without a market economy; e.g. Latin American dictatorships that murdered hundreds of protesters while remaining very business-friendly.
You think wars should be abolished. Good. Then why did you include pacifism in the immoral category?
You believe communism, libertarianism, anarchism, ethical egoism, pacifism and realist philosophy of war are all immoral. What are you?
At age 17 I had the common experience of dreaming of my recently deceased mother, but my brain didn’t take long to realize that seeing her was not possible, and I realized it was a dream. For some years I kept that ability to quickly see the inconsistencies in the dream world, but as of now my asleep brain is back to normal gullibility. Because I have a strong preference for living in the real world, I very strongly (verbally, actually) forbade my mind from showing me my dead mother again, and it obeyed.
My roommate died from cancer 3 years ago. It never stops being a sad memory, except that the hard pang of the initial shock is gone after some time. I don’t feel guilty for no longer feeling that pang, because I know I still wish it hadn’t happened and it still marked my life in several ways, so I haven’t stopped doing what I privately call “honoring my pain.” The usual feel-good advice of forgetting it all and moving on sounds to me as dangerously close to no longer honoring my pain, by which I mean acknowledging that the sad event occurred, and giving it its deserved place in my emotional landscape, but without letting it define my life.
Several of my pets died when I was a kid, and at some point I just sort of integrated the implicit assumption that every new pet would eventually die as well. If I began with that assumption, the actual event would no longer be such a strong shock. I no longer have pets, though.
For some years I had problems with the concept of acceptance. It felt like agreeing to everything that happened, and I just didn’t want to give my consent to a series of adverse occurrences that it’s not relevant to mention here. Some time afterwards I found somewhere a different definition of acceptance: it’s not about agreeing with what happened, but simply no longer pretending that the world is otherwise, which to me sounded like a much healthier attitude. With that in mind, I’m more capable of enjoying the time with my friends while knowing that all living things die.
I don’t know whether any of my strategies will work in your situation, but this might: doctors specialized in the treatment of pain distinguish between the physical perception of pain and the emotional experience of suffering. Your dog has no awareness of its impending death; he only knows the physical pain. As strong as the pain may be on a purely physical level, he is spared the existential anguish that worries you. Perhaps making a conscious effort to not project your own emotional experience onto him may make the burden lighter for you.
I hope I haven’t said anything insensitive, and preemptively apologize if it sounded that way.
Create a moral framework that incentivizes assholes to cooperate.
So, capitalism?
There’s the burden of proof thing (it’s the affirmer, not the denier, who has to present evidence) and the null hypothesis thing (in absence of evidence, the no-effect or no-relationship hypothesis stands).
Unfortunately recording was not possible, but the slideshow is here. You have to download it and view it on LibreOffice; it does not look good on Google Slides.
Apparently, there’s a case for detonating more nukes around the world.
I understand aji as potential for future moves that is currently not too usable but may be after the board configuration has evolved.
Me too.
This Saturday (March 12) I’m giving a conference at an atheist meeting in Bogotá, Colombia. I’ll be using a Spanish translation I made of the famous “You Are a Brain” slideshow.
Nick Bostrom in the news.
Uruguay proposes to deploy bats to kill mosquitoes.
Pentagon: “Please hack us.”
Don’t apologize. I’ve been waiting for weeks for someone to complain, to make sure that it wasn’t just me who felt this was an actual problem.