Obsidian
6mo ago
Social policing only works to the extent the polity is culturally homogeneous. CS is fucked.
A late reply to @urquan on assisted suicide
A close family friend has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She cannot drink without choking, she cannot move through space without falling, she cannot manipulate objects. Her life is miserable, and every day that goes by she loses further capacities.
Her options are something as follow:
-
Enlist the help of someone, potentially the state, to kill her within the next few weeks;
-
Tough it out until the line on the graph for "care necessary to life" crosses the line for "care available from friends and family and oupatient caretakers", and allow herself to die of neglect - I'm guessing by suffocation, once her diaphragm stops working - within more or less the same timeline as the previous;
-
Engage with the medical system, which will do its very best to keep her going, until even the best medical technology our public system can buy cannot keep her blood flowing, probably before Christmas this year, and she expires after spending her last few weeks highly medicated in a sterile white prison.
I understand what your Christian ethics say in general, as you have beautifully laid them out for us. But in the specifics, in full contact with reality, if this were you or your mother or your close family friend, what would you say or do? Where would your heart be?
Obsidian
1yr ago
Very happy to see you here. This series is one of my favorite fixtures of this space.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I fucking love olives. I would eat them all the time if they weren't so expensive.
Kalamata olives, olives stuffed with garlic or pimento, olive bread, olives in greek salad... holy shit dude
Obsidian
3mo ago
I need the same speech but spoken by a hotter guy so I can send it to my girlfriend.
(On second thought I'm going to speak these words to her myself instead of outsourcing my masculinity)
Obsidian
1yr ago
I predict that this is a false dichotomy, and that AI is going to lead to a reorganization of American political coalitions such that the red and blue tribes will not exist in recognizable form. There will be schisms, alliances of convenience, and especially the rise of currently non-existent or occluded political interest groups.
Obsidian
4mo ago
gotta tax the rich to give more to the poor so the poor don't revolt
Powerful hyperstition. If there were ever a step decrease in welfare, would that be taken as the signal to break shit?
Obsidian
3mo ago
Obsidian
1yr ago
The only thing I'd push back against here is early specialization. The edifice of human knowledge is becoming very dense, and you need deep knowledge and experience in a constellation of neighbouring fields if you are to merely catch up with the state of the art in one field, much less make valuable original contributions.
This is exactly the upbringing I've wished I'd had. No one asked for context, but let me grudgepost a little:
Everyone agreed I was gifted, and then did nothing to act on that. I wasted ten years of my early life, in full conscience of the fact, waiting for the autonomy and resources needed to push myself.
I hit thirty this year. There's something special about that number: it cut through any internal narratives I may have had about stuff I want to do later. Well, good morning and happy birthday, we are later, later is today! You are on the downslope now, your cognitive and physical capacities are going to get monotonically worse until the day you expire. You're not going to have any more free time or energy or drive than you do right now. This Is Your Life, this is your cruising speed, get what you want out of it now or forever hold your peace.
I've experienced this as a second childhood.
After a difficult first go-around, the primary enterprise of my adult life has been to surround myself with people who are capable, trustworthy, who will invest in me and who are worthy of investing in. And boy have I lucked out. I enter this phase of my life surrounded by brothers, and quite a few sisters, who elevate me and whom I can help elevate.
And though I am paying it forward already in some measure, I hope to go further, through the same kind of life journey that Hoel describes.
What you call raising a genius, to me seems to be merely honouring a child for who and what he is. Through this, even a phenotypically unexceptional child can be made exceptional by bringing him to recognize his own worth, and understanding the kinds of expectations it is reasonable to have of himself. Part and parcel of this is integration in a rich, multigenerational social, physical and intellectual life.
I like the Orthodox imagery of saints coifed in gold leaf halos. Surround yourself with gold-coifed men and women. Raise each other up, and your children as well.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I went to choir for the first time last night. Seriously one of the most elevating experiences I've had in the past ten years.
It compares favorably to psychedelics: same category of experience, but lower commitment and more materially meaningful.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Did anyone else get cold sweats, shivering and nausea since this morning? Just me?
Obsidian
11mo ago
I've been circling this idea of a "government bank account", for allocating resources to government services in an equitable way.
The idea goes, just because services are government-administered doesn't mean they aren't subject to scarcity. And the disconnect between user and payer means that people use services with no regard to cost, and providers operate with no regard to quality. If only we could subject this to market dynamics!
The libertarian runs with this and says that all services should be paid for in cash (and removed from the aegis of the government, for good measure). But then people are shut out of public life, compounding inequality and misery over generational time scales.
If we're not going to entirely jettison the idea of a welfare state (which I would rather not; alle Menschen werden Brüdern and what not), then I would suggest a second currency, one which accrues regardless of work or merit, and which legally cannot be traded away.
This puts to the people some interesting questions. Would you rather go to work via the toll road, or heat your home hotter? Would you rather cash a welfare check, or receive end-of-life care?^1
The parallels to the Chinese social credit system are elucidating: whereas they've turned their whole society into a prolonged exam (they love taking exams), I'm proposing an exercise in private property x inalienable rights.
This also opens up more palatable avenues wrt congestion pricing, private/public competition, etc. Probably does interesting things to the meta of democracy but I haven't thought that part through.
^1 Yes, we Québécois receive electricity and healthcare as government services. To be frank, I don't know why you'd do it any other way.
Obsidian
1yr ago
You're probably missing some important machinery around time preference and tradeoffs.
Obsidian
1yr ago
But I actually think this may be an accidentally brilliant choice.
Nope, it was very intentional. Reddit political echo chamber dynamics are well-understood, and we doubled down time after time on the megathread format because it introduced friction in those dynamics the way you describe.
Obsidian
3mo ago
About to go on a one-month "digital declutter" in the style of Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism. 6/10 book, worth reading if you're suffering from screen addiction. Dovetails well with Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head.
Obsidian
4mo ago
Quebec would fit in nicely as yet another ethnic/language minority in the US
Historically the rent and lifestyle would have been good enough that we'd have been immediately flooded with Americans, destroying the local culture.
As it is, Rest-of-Canadians have been doing this all by themselves.
Obsidian
4mo ago
The effect is so strong that at some point pictures of single young white urban men in advertising have become gay-coded. Usually if I see such an ad on my commute it's trying to sell me PrEP.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Rephrased: there is no such thing as "merely" homeschooling. It's a big fucking decision with big fucking tradeoffs.
Obsidian
1yr ago
This is my first choir, joined because I'm trying to learn music. I got some extraordinary resources for self-study from a fellow Mottizen (Gary Karpinski is the absolute goat) but it was time to take it social. I heard the choir at a friend's Orthodox church and decided I liked it.
My choir is over a hundred people strong. We learn the lines in-person, barely anyone knows how to sight-read. I'm going above and beyond by doing any amount of solo practice.
The first time I heard the sopranos join in I was slammed by a mystical experience, comparable to calmly stepping into a cold shower or being on psychedelic mushrooms.
Would be pretty sad if you saw yourself as too old to be bothered to learn music. We have a bunch of seventy year olds singing soprano, though maybe that's easier to learn. (I sing bass, which is mostly a combination of tonic/subdominant/dominant. And then there's Handel, whoops.)
Back when I entertained the idea of staying in the US for good, I bootstrapped myself to a passable credit score using a Chase secured credit card. Took a few months but everything else fell out of there.
Generational disadvantages in credit scores are downstream from generational disadvantages in executive function and time preference.
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