I drink to make parties with friends tolerable because after an hour there is usually an infinite amount of things I’d rather be doing...
TeMPOraL
Karma: 195
You win rationality(1) points for being honest with yourself :).
Even in Europe, places where you don’t have to drive in traffic / door zone are incredibly rare. Bike paths are cool, but as currently implemented they mostly serve to annoy both drivers and pedestrians alike, and there is still a default assumption that where there is no bike path, you’ll be driving with traffic.
tens of thousands of lives per year
Try hundreds of thousands per year from just accidents, before even counting health benefits of reduced emissions and smog saving more lives.
I suffer from severe case of Akrasia that makes me work at 10% of my capacity most of the time; here’s something I discovered that made me believe problem is actually in me: my closest friend. I know her for many years, and I never ever saw her working at less than 110% of her capacity. She worked in groceries, online bookshop, sold LED bulbs and furniture, managed people, did customer relations and even social media marketing. She wants to be a writer; she hated almost every one of those jobs, felt they’re hindering her development, and yet no matter how tired she was, how annoyed or abused by her bosses, she could always find the strength to focus and do her job at scary efficiency. And given all the people I ever worked with, who never had problems with focus or productivity in the ballpark of my own, I can’t conclude otherwise that it’s me who is just wired wrongly. I wish I had even 5% of professionalism of my friend, I could do so much more than I am able to do now.
-- Mother Gaia, I come on behalf of all humans to apologize for destroying nature (...). We never meant to kill nature.
-- You’re not killing nature, you’re killing yourself. That’s what I mean by self-centered. You think that just because you can’t live, then nothing can. You’re fucking yourself over big time, and won’t be missed.
From a surprisingly insightful comic commenting on the whole notion of “saving the planet”.
Thanks for your long and insightful comment. I think it should be edited and put as a top-level article. It’s something that I’d personally love to link my friends to everytime they start strawmanning Freud.
A great article, Eneasz.
Reminds me of something that is sitting in my quotes file, apparently coming from a Navy SEAL:
“Under pressure you don’t rise to the occassion, you sink to the level of your training.”
It’s a rephrasing of Kant’s categorical imperative.
Well, historically in case of basic subsistence activites, winning meant surviving, and loosing meant dying a horrible death. There are likely some strong adaptations in play here.
It’s really, really hard—I would say impossible—to prove that variations or changes have not been introduced since the time of a hypothetical original text, copied from handwriting scribe to handwriting scribe.
It might be hard or even borderline impossible, but I do respect people who honestly try. I know for instance, that Jehovah’s Witnesses did a lot of work in cross-corelating as many different copies of the scriptures as they could get their hands on to weed out mistranslations, copy errors, etc. when developing their own translation. So for whatever it’s worth, it’s nice that some people at least try.
What to do when “bum comparison principle” argument stops working because the internal, emotional pain won’t leave you alone no matter where you go and what you do, and you see no way to stop it, and you gradually, over the years, build an immunity to this argument?
Was it ever socially acceptable?
I’m reminded of movies where people in impossibly tough situations stick to impossibly idealistic principles. The producers of the movie want to hoodwink you into thinking they would stand by their luxurious morality even when the going gets tough.
Strangely, most of the recent movies and TV series I saw pretty much invert this. Protagonists tend to make arguably insanely bad moral choices (like choosing a course of action that will preserve hero’s relative at the cost of killing thousands of people). Sometimes this gets unbearable to watch.
I think it’s entirely wrong for Americans to sympathize with Boston victims while disregarding and in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes. It’s hypocrisy at its finest and especially rich coming from self-proclaimed Christians.
That is exactly the problem with nationalism.
I suspect you’re probably saying that it’s understandable for Americans only to feel the reality of this kind of cruelty when it affects “their own”, and my response is that it may be understandable, but then so are the mechanisms of cancer.
Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design are full of amazing quotes. My personal favourite:
6) (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
(See also an interesting note from HN’s btilly on this law)
Similar thought:
16) The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.
Relevant link from just yesterday: http://hackaday.com/2013/05/28/shocking-your-brain-and-making-yourself-smarter/ :).
FWIK, some universities allow you to get PhD in computer science by submitting PhD thesis for review and paying some amount of money (~$1200 on my university). This way, one can follow your advice and still get PhD.
Another n=1: I like the way intoxication feels when I’m intoxicated, but over last couple of months I’ve gone from wanting to enter that state often to avoiding all alcohol on purpose. What changed was realizing on an emotional level that I have tons of interesting (or necessary) things to do and alcohol limits that by taking away evening (to drink) and the next day (I feel cognitively worse ’till next afternoon, even if I didn’t have a hangover). At some point the prospect of drinking became anxiety-inducing for me.