JhanicManifold
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User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
thanks for the reply, everything seems to be good now.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I don't think that conservatism is the relevant factor that is lowering the birth rate of Asian countries. For Japan and South Korea in particular the insane work/school expectations are probably much more to blame. There's also the various ways in which young men are becoming more unattractive to women (video games, porn). The decision to have kids is influenced by such a large number of factors that I don't think it's possible to come up with a fast explanation for the lowered birth rates.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I think it will depend mainly on how the issues of "AI racism" and "AI profits going to top 1%" end up playing out. The left is the party of regulation, and there is plenty that they'd like to regulate here. Generally the left's stance towards things they want to regulate is not especially friendly.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I think that's a great point, but the difference is that steroids are much more effective than adderall at their respective jobs. Steroids can essentially take people in the bottom quintile of muscle building potential and take them to the level of the top 0.1% natural athletes, and they take people in the top quintile and make them completely superhuman, they are freakishly effective. If something of this magnitude existed in the realm of productivity, it wouldn't matter that the best people left google, because the drug is doing so much of the work that those who take it become the best because of it.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I'm not sure if that is supposed to be an argument against my position, but yes, elderly men in particular should definitely be taking TRT (I'm not a doctor, just my opinion), I think the overall quality of life calculation is completely unambiguous in favor of taking low to moderate doses of steroids.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Alternative: within some bounds of acceptability, there is no such thing as objectively good code, and you three are just trying to push your personal tastes onto each other. This would explain why no one seems to be able to convince any one else of their point of view, even in as seemingly objective a domain as CS.
Either ghost writer or publishing your own books on amazon, it takes almost zero initial capital (just paying someone 50$ per book to make you a professional cover if you're not confident in your abilities). There are some channels on youtube that specialize in this stuff, the niche has gotten pretty saturated because of it, but if you're a decent writer you can still make money that would be good for the third world.
Everything depends on the dose and your general experience with drugs, if you're used to having your consciousness significantly altered outside your control, then you probably wouldn't have a problem with mushrooms either. I don't drink and never did any drugs before I tried psilocybin alone for meditation purposes, and I had to start very slowly. If you're someone who feels the need to control everything, be very careful and start slow. The entirety of the difficulty of psychedelics is in not trying to control things you can't control. Weird unfamiliar and maybe unpleasant things will happen, and you can't control any of it (the lack of control scales with dose, culminating in no control whatsoever at 5g or more), but if you try you'll make everything worse.
The way to minimize bad experiences is to start with 0.8g the first time, then 1.6g the second, then 2.4g and 3.2g, all weights in dried mushrooms. Leaving about a week between each dose, done in darkness (sensitivity to light increases dramatically), in bed possibly with headphones listening to classical music, with locked doors, close access to a bathroom, plenty of drinking water (you will pee a lot during the trip, and must not forget to drink water), and in a good mood with clear intentions for why you're doing this and what you aim to get out of this.
edit: some more specific details: the psilocybin content of dried mushrooms varies dramatically, even within a single mushroom between the stem and the cap. So if possible get a large quantity (like 14g) of dried mushrooms and grind them in a coffee grinder to homogenize them. Then buy a milligram scale from amazon and carefully weigh out your dose and put it in boiling water to make a tea out of it, all the psilocybin will dissolve in the water and you won't need to actually eat the mushrooms. This way also avoids the nausea that some people get at the beginning of the trip.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Ah, then things seem have changed since I last looked at this stuff a few years ago, and OP's only option is to get hired as ghost writer for those people throwing money at it.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Oh, very true! I honestly forget that people do these recreationally and not to understand the nature of self and sensory experience. Though I personally find it hard to think of anything less pleasant than doing shrooms in public.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
"Tolkien was heavily critical of people who discriminated based on race", there, no weirdly ambiguous and political word needed.
But that's not the path that they're trying, this is:
0.Define "anti-racist" ambiguously so that people not in the know think it's reasonable
1.Use "anti-racist" in Tolkien article
2.People not in the know associate Tolkien (a respected figure) with anti-racism
3.The prestige of specific anti-racist groups is increased
4.Specific anti-racist groups get more money
It isn't Tolkien that gains in prestige from being anti-racist, but the anti-racist orgs. It's like elevating yourself by claiming that all the greats of history agreed with you.
So basically: "men search to self-improve, women search to recognize that they are already perfect".
I think your comment illuminated for me a weird fact that I've noticed about the meditation community and the distribution of male/female meditators among the different techniques. One set of meditation techniques heavily emphasize linearly developed skills: there are specific tasks that you must accomplish, and those who can't do those tasks are "worse at meditation" in a very straightforward way than those who can do those tasks well. Put in the time, do the work, and you get better at meditation. This would be the male approach to meditation, and it's the one that I see most guys who pick up meditation gravitate towards. Yet, there is another set of techniques that reject the very premise that there is anything to be done: you are already perfect, exactly as you are right now, you just need to recognize it, any skills you try to pick up and improve are distractions. But in a weird way any attempt at trying to recognize this goes against the point, you must be totally effortless in recognizing you are already perfect, here and now. Trying to do anything at all is useless and against the point. Going on this path requires a weird sort of mental flexibility and intuition, you need to recognize something without trying to do anything at all. Women seem to like these techniques much more than men do, and now it makes sense why they would. In the meditation world both paths ultimately lead to the same place, and it's very hard to get to the end without practicing both to some extent. I think there is something archetypally profound here.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I was pleasantly surprised to find that on Android Chrome, choosing "add to home screen" in the top right menu on themotte.org essentially produces a decent mobile app.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Is any part of your body vibrating while you're praying and meditating? Or are you seeing bright lights behind your closed eyelids when you get at your absolute calmest?
I can feel time stop and experience God
How literal are you here? Is there an instant where you honestly could not tell how much time has passed? Like where you actually have to look at a clock because you couldn't know the difference between 3 seconds and 8 hours?
If not, you're underestimating God, and there are yet many more levels of divinity to find, each one more mind-blowing than the last.
And just to let you know that there's a pretty well-known level in the meditator's journey where people seem to get very zealous and evangelist. If you've discovered what seems like the most wonderful thing in the world, and can't bear to see your friends and loved ones not experience it too, be careful not to alienate them and be too annoying. In my experience evangelizing this stuff too aggressively pretty much never works, and you'll just seem weird to your friends.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
The available negentropy of the universe still places fundamental limits on the number of humans that can exist. Even with absolute control over all the matter in humanity's lightcone, the accelerating expansion of the universe ensures that we will only ever have access to a finite amount of matter-energy. Even if we run everyone's consciousness is maximally efficient simulations, the total number of subjective-human-experience-years that can exist is not infinite, and eventually the malthusian condition emerges back.
My weird unorthodox opinion: I think a large-dose 5-meo-dmt trip should be mandatory right before assisted suicide. That drug is basically subjective death in molecular form, and at the right dose it brings you right up there to the stratosphere of sublime meditative states, I personally know of 2 people who were completely cured of suicide ideation from one dose of that stuff. Let them experience Death before death, and see if they want to live after that.
(Warning: not for the faint of heart, ptsd possible for the unprepared and you could choke on your own vomit at extreme doses, this is a last resort in case you really want to die today)
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
I think 5-meo-dmt is so weird and specific that it's technically legal (if not, there are other chemically distinct drugs that are legal but have pretty much the same effects). But that website also sells shrooms pretty easily. Psychedelics are just not a priority for law enforcement, and I never had any problems ordering from them.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
If a good friend asked this of me in an apologetic way, emphasizing that they wouldn't ask if it wasn't important, sure, I'd call them whatever they want.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
To be honest, your initial instinct of "only losers would spend so much effort at something that matters so little" was completely right. I myself don't spend all that effort on all my ideas to improve trivial things in games because the time and energy that would go into that is so much better spent improving other things in my life. I suppose you should have one, maybe two "useless" hobbies where you spend this much effort to improve things, but no more. Money matter a lot to a lot of people, so it's not surprising at all that you'd get crazy effort going into optimizing its generation, and it's also why there aren't many easy-to-think-about ideas for making lots of money, but there's loads of those for getting better at stuff nobody cares about.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
The really hard part is figuring out which 75% to fire. Twitter can certainly be run very lean if you clear all the deadwood and you keep everyone who actually has the implicit knowledge required to run the whole thing, but all the employees are trying to convince you that they're the ones who are very important, we'll have to see if Musk manages to correctly pick the people to keep. It doesn't help that social media companies are especially vulnerable to downtime. If your fishing company gets a 2-month period of downtime while they figure out how to slim down, no problem, you just lose 2 month's revenue, the fish will still be there waiting, but twitter's users will move on to other things after any sort of prolonged downtime.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
There will be no progress on bot problem though.
Ship physical pieces of paper to physical addresses with an authentication code for every user? Use the existing giftcard stands at Walmart to distribute them even cheaper? The bot problem is pretty easily fixed if the will is there.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
No, literally just free physical letters to everyone who requests it, like all banks do. Twitter should have more than enough money to do this for all US users.
JhanicManifold
1yr ago
Okay, but the Terminators themselves look silly. Why would a superintelligent AI build robot skeletons when it could just build drones to kill everyone?
Nah, a superintelligence would more probably build a virus (or multiple different ones, to make sure really no one survives) with a built-in clock, so that everyone gets infected without showing any symptoms, then suddenly everyone dies in the same day and no valuable infrastructure is destroyed. The fact that humans became aware of Skynet in the first place is the most unrealistic thing to me, surprise is the biggest advantage against an intelligent adversary, and a superintelligence who is carrying out a human-extinction plan would never reveal itself at all, and especially not in such a visible way as literal walking robots. In the real world we would all die without having any idea what happened.
To be honest, meat just tastes good, and I seem to value my immediate comfort more than I value a distant animal's life. I wouldn't sacrifice my mom's life to save a billion faraway humans, and I wouldn't sacrifice the pleasures of my life to save faraway animals. I am very much in favor of developing artificial meat, just like I'm in favor of finding methods of saving those billion humans that don't require my mom to die. I won't sacrifice the things that make life worth living for the sake of faraway beings.
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