Self Help Books
I’m looking to buy a couple audiobooks from Amazon. Any good recommendations?
Ritalin
Karma: 1,095
So I just finished reading Fate Stay Night, and I feel hungry for more, but its sequels are a lot more silly and laid back, and what I want isn’t the easy familiarity of characters whose tales are already told, but the poignant drama and character development, and the poetic narrative delivery, that I’d never experienced before. Does anyone here know stories that have this type of heart-gripping-ness?
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You know, it may well actually make it to ‘acclaimed univesal classic’ status. It’s tremendously good stuff.
Are you arguing against this?
Most emphatically not. I’m very glad to have discovered that, and I’m grateful for EY’s impassioned preaching, that made it seem immediately, crucially, urgently relevant. By comparison, when I read books like Think Fast and Slow, or watch shows like Crash Course Psychology or Earthlings 101. I feel like I’m just collecting a bunch of interesting, quaint. and curious trivia that aren’t much of a factor in how I think of myself, the world, and my place in it. (And don’t get me started on new Cosmos. NDG doesn’t preach, he lectures. Carl Sagan at least used to wonder )
… Why students specifically?
Well, we’ve never caught Nature glitching or bugging or even simplifying its calculations, and absence of evidence is evidence of absence. That we’re living in a simulation is about as plausible as the Abrahamic narrative, about as falsifiable, and about as proven.
What they believe in, or rather, endorse, and what they end up actually doing or wanting to do have usually been at odds. The ideal solution is different for every combination of individual and circumstance: the ideal universal solution is therefore an superstructural (ideological, legal, cultural, etc.) framework capable of running and accommodating any specific arrangement between interested parties. Objectively speaking, I think the only hard and fast rule is “Safe, Sane and Consensual”.
Weird, I thought that link would lead to Straw Nihilist.
A-ha! That makes sense! Also, it’s actually an important virtue! People judge you on it!
At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don’t recall exactly what. And I said: “You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn’t being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.”
I am aware that some people live in Gor-inspired relationships, that some people are masochistic, that some women want to be dominated, and that more people would like to live that way than those who would care to admit it, or even that those who know for a fact that they would. I still assume these numbers to be small.
Of course people would adapt. That’s what people do. That doesn’t make it right.
This sounds somewhat like a specialized form of the very Christian value of Resignation, specifically resignation towards the Ineffability of God and his Mysterious Ways, and the seemingly chaotic creation.
Then again God often plays a Dao-like “empty center that lets the wheel turn” in these sorts of doctrines.
That’s standard preacher approach. Incendiary accusations to destroy everything you take for granted, then, when you’re in tears and directionless, a promise of salvation if you follow their way.
Come to think of it, that’s a pattern EY has used extensively as well… “Here’s proof that religion is insane and most people are predictably and systematically stupid, including yourself. Now believe in the Singularity, general self-improving artificial intelligence, cryogeny, space expansionism, and libertarianism!”
Depends on how patriarchal the society is. Few women would like to live in, say, Gor. “Please freeze me again while I wait this out.”
originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth
… Actually all of those ideas are considerably older than the Enlightenment, and can be traced to Antiquity and beyond.
A riddle for Lesswrong: what exactly is the virtue of Bissonomy?
When I read the article, I got the feeling that there were enough clues to extrapolate a solution in the same way that EY extrapolated the Dementors’ ‘true natures’. That this was a solvable riddle. I’ve got my suspicions, but I’d like to hear what you guys can come up with.
Well, sorting out system 1′s inconsistencies can help one feel happier and more at peace with oneself. You can’t achieve serenity just by giving in to all your impulses, because they contradict each other.
diffs between the should-world and is-world are defects
My understanding is that defects are like speed-bumps and potholes, pieces where the harmonious flow of reality is interrupted, dissonances and irregularities. Going with the flow and being in harmony with the world requires more sensitivity, training, and awareness than simply letting oneself get carried by the current. It’s the difference between ‘surfing’ waves, and ‘getting engulfed’ by them, yes?
Because there’s a grain of truth in it that extends far beyond its admittedly limited scope.
Right now I think my two weakest points are:
Akrasia: I have a lot of trouble keeping a proper sleeping schedule and not slipping into night owl lifestyle, going to the gym as often as I should, keeping my diet, and, depending on the circumstances, I have a lot of trouble keeping myself motivated, organized, and productive.
Relatively poor social skills. They’re not nearly as bad as they once were, but I still find myself somewhat clumsy and awkward, in the way high IQ people tend to be. Out of synch. Having different priorities than the folks around me. Coming up with stuff out of left field. Spacing out, being prompted to explain, retelling a train of thought that to them seems convoluted and to me seems natural. Having a terrible time maintaining proper etiquette, especially table manners.
Either I’m put down “crazy” or put in a pedestal as “genius”, but I’m always put aside, and have very few friends. Love life is similarly disastrous, but I don’t think there’s a book for people who fall in love too hard, too soon, and too easy.