Do the same feelings get evoked when you think about the heat death of the universe? (I am actively curious)
weft
Karma: 906
It seems like the usual solution to this is to ACT appropriately contrite to the police officer/ teacher / boss, while maintaining whichever internal narrative you prefer.
Community Capital
Ballooning events make money from the $35 that everyone pays to attend. Most of it goes to pay for the venue and the ingredients for the food, but anything that’s left over goes to the Ballooning group that hosted the Ballooning event.
They use it for things like: events that operate at a loss, buying balloons to give to new Ballooneers, buying an air pump for use at future Ballooning gatherings.
But anyways, I obfuscated Ballooning because I’d rather talk about the general thing of Community Capital than get into the specifics of how my random hobby functions.
ETA, because I think I didn’t specify well enough:
Social Capital: Alice is travelling to Snoodsville. She acquires crash space with her friend (or friend-of-a-friend) Bob.
Community Capital: Alice is travelling to Snoodsville. She doesn’t know anyone there, but acquires crash space by asking on the Ballooneers of Snoodsville forum. All her hosts know about her is that she is a fellow Ballooneer in good standing with the Ballooning community.
Perhaps an Epistemic Status marker would be useful, because I don’t actually feel like I have it nailed down as much as my declarative sentences might convey.
Community Capital could ALSO be the resources that the community itself has. Or it could be an interconnected network of social capital. It could be like a bank where you put resources into the community-as-a-whole, trusting that the community will be willing to pay you back somehow.
Am I conflating two or more ideas into a single term where I shouldn’t be? I don’t know!
Putting it in the post makes it sound like a Decision Has Been Reached, whereas leaving it as a comment makes it feel like A Discussion Topic Has Been Opened.
That is a really good summary, elizabeth!
The specifics of Ballooning itself is rather irrelevant, but not quite.
All Ballooning takes place under the umbrella of the Ballooning National Organization. All Ballooneers are automatically a member of their location’s Ballooning group. So the attendees of the event are either members of the hosting group, or of nearby groups.
I think one of the results of Escalating Asks is that instead of a community being something you put work into FIRST in order to be paid back LATER somehow, that most community members actually start out in debt to the community. If they hang around a while and become regulars then they break even, where they are starting to do their equal share. And it’s only until they’ve been around a long time that they are net contributors that are paying it forward.
A dojo isn’t a good example for this, because new members are paying money to compensate. But for a free martial arts club: A new person is receiving instruction and maybe some free nunchuks. They are in debt to the community. A regular helps out the new people, but gets helped by older members. They break even. An older member is putting more resources into the community than they take out, but in exchange they tend to have large amounts of social status given to them.
A strong community has the resources built up to invest in many new people, even if only a fraction stick around to be net contributors.
If it’s helpful, in my head I was thinking like “blowing up (regular) balloons” and then making balloon art or something. I could change it, but I don’t know if that would be the most useful now, since a lot of the comments mention it.
I think that the general idea of Signal Seeding is both useful and true, but I agree that sleeping late is not a great example (although for different reasons than quanticle).
I used to have the belief of “who cares when I sleep, as long as I get the same amount of work done?” But now I think sleeping late is actually inherently harmful, and pointing to an unhealthy state of being that isn’t just from signalling or other social reasons.
Times when I have been depressed it is really hard to both go to bed and get out of bed. Times when I am well functioning, it’s hard to sleep late. If I am camping or spending large amounts of time outdoors it’s also hard to sleep late (so I don’t think this is a product of the Industrial Revolution).
I downvoted, because for an hour long video that doesn’t have a transcript, I’d expect a front page link post to have at least a decent summary. If you add a few paragraphs of summary, I’ll switch it to an upvote.
Rare Exception or Common Exception
I find something offputting about covering things up with sheets, and am uncertain why. A large part is possibly along the lines of unfolding all my sheets, and then having to fold them back up later. Also, I’ve worked moderately hard to make my room a nice and comfortable living space. It might be that covering everything up with sheets is better than being surrounded by a cluttery mess, but making your space actually nice and clean with clear surfaces is best.
One thing that works for me when there are skills/ projects that are hard to get started on is to have a day where you get together with friends and work on <x> all day. This presupposes that you have friends who also want to work on the same sorts of thing you want to work on.
Offloading Executive Functioning to Morality
Thanks for the response!
Can you expand what you mean by internal violence? If it means what I intuitively read it as, then it hasn’t been my felt experience (though there’s always the possibility that it’s occurring and I’m not recognizing it, and if so I’d like to know)
From the inside, it feels like setting up my life so that it’s natural to act. I sometimes do fall short, but I don’t beat myself up about it because I feel like I put in the appropriate effort. I don’t blame myself if I get sick and can’t do something, or forget something on a one-off (particularly if I figure out why I forgot and make actions to change it.)
Rationality/CFAR instrumental techniques such as urge propagation or TAPs or whatnot never worked for me. They felt like fighting myself and then feeling bad for failing.
To get past it I had to go through a time where I completely gave up accomplishing anything but basic Adulting, and learn to be completely okay with that. “I went to work. I paid my bills. It’s totally okay if that’s all I accomplish this week. Anything else is extra.” During this time I got really annoyed at anyone pushing productivity techniques because it was actively harmful to me.
It was only once I totally accepted low level functioning that I was able to add more on. Everything I do today, I do with an acceptance of being low level functioning, even though in practice I manage to generally not be.
Firstly, thanks Ben for promoting this, because I hadn’t seen it the first time through.
I don’t know if the thing I am doing is too unrelated, but often when I notice myself feeling something generally negative, I will trace it back to its root cause. These are usually specific things that happened or that I’m worried about, and not big overarching things.
But figuring out what it is or naming it doesn’t make the feeling go away. I’ll KNOW why I’m feeling anxious/ frustrated/ whatever, but there doesn’t generally seem to be anything useful to do with that information, and I have to continue feeling the negative emotion until it fades away on its own with the passage of time.
If I could upvote this twice, I would.
I think it’s a common-but-harmful thing when people choose a community by maximizing along the “people who think like me/ are similar to me/ are interested in similar things as I am” axis. I posit that many people would be much happier if they instead chose the best d*mn community they can access (most functional, most fulfilling, etc.), and just satisficed along the “people who think like me” axis.
ETA: I specifically got back into Ballooning after about five years out of it because after I moved to a big city, I was dissatisfied and unhappy with the level of commitments and intertwininess in interpersonal relationships and communities. I thought “What is the strongest community I have access to?” and that’s where I joined. If one of any number of other activities I enjoy had better communities I would have gone there instead.
Thank you for this.
When I first discovered LW and rationality culture it opened up a new way of thinking to me. But this post is one of the first times that reading something here instead makes me feel *heard and understood* (even though I didn’t say anything), and I deeply resonate with it. This is how rationality plays out *for me* and it feels validating seeing someone else write explicitly about it.
I am going to be sad to see your 30 say challenge end.
I support NSFW filters that are opt-in-able, because I don’t want other people to feel uncomfortable browsing LW. However I appreciate this style of writing. It reads as more natural to me, and is therefore easier for me to parse. And if I personally had an interesting insight I wanted to share, I’d rather not have to worry about signalling class here.
I’ll also note that I had a strong emotional reaction against the “anti-vulgarity” posts here, because I’ve had people explicitly tell me I need to change the way I talk if I want my ideas taken seriously (in a casual, non-work-related setting), in ways that made it obvious that they were trying to gain social status over me and not actually trying to be helpful (I do not at all think that is what is going on here). But I will note that a handful of people supporting anti-vulgarity policies makes me feel like I don’t belong, even though I don’t think I ever posted in vulgar or natural speech on LW. I do not necessarily endorse this emotional reaction, just pointing out that it occurred.