TwiceHuman
2hr ago
That doesn't seem like a way to generate prime numbers directly, but to sort of chip at the problem by creating a scaffolding around it and then getting close and closer. It doesn't feel elegant like some math does. And yeah, I think that pure maths is largely useless (because its scope is wider, i.e. less restricted than our reality). We can find interesting properties in math which hints at properties in reality, though. At high levels of abstraction, these things overlap. "The dao of which can be spoken is not the real dao" is a logical conclusion, since you can judge the limits of a system from within said system. Gödel did the same with math. You can use a similar line of thinking to derive that everything is relative (there's nothing outside of everything, so there can be no external point of reference).
Maybe this is "abstract reasoning" rather than math? I'm not sure what it is, but this ability is useful in general. I don't suffer from the philosophical problem of "meaning in life" because I recognized that the question was formulated wrong (which is why there's no answer!). I also figured out enlightenment, which you usually cannot reach by thinking because it requires not thinking. But you can sort of use thinking to show that thinking is the cause of the issue, and then "break free" like that.
Edit: Nietzsche came up with his "Eternal recurrence" through logic, showing that if time goes back infinitely, the world would already have been looping forever. Same with his "Perspectivism", that there's no facts, only perspectives. He wasn't a mathematician, he was just highly intelligent.
But I'm sort of weird, most subjects I think about don't fit any common categories
TwiceHuman
1d ago
I think men and women are quite different.
I'd like to conclude something like "Women are more interested in rock stars and movie stars than in politicians", but I can't find any studies on the attractiveness of politicians. You know how some murderers in prison get fanmail from women? I don't think that happens as much to politicans. I have no evidence of this, but the game of politics is rather gross to me, and I can't imagine why a women would be attracted to a man who is playing a game which won't even allow him to be genuine for a moment.
As for that woman - it looks like a shit test to me. Women want to be targeted by high-value bold men while avoiding low-value bold men. Somebody who can break the rules because they're powerful awnd because they understand the rules well. So they speak nonsense, being brats, hoping that some high-value man comes around and puts them in their place. I think the whole "You can't handle a woman like me" thing is a taunt, they want to be handled. That said, this could also just be agreeableness/conformity, or the kind of mental illness which makes them side with everything weak on principle (except their own in-group, which is superior because it sides with the weak. Broken maternal instinct perhaps?). Politics has too many layers of deception, I'm afraid that a model which makes too much sense might actually be wrong. I stick to the evopsych view of "high value" since it doesn't have all these distorted layers
TwiceHuman
1d ago
These questions are all meaningful to me. I'm weird, though. I'm not even particularly good at math.
I hate dynamic programming, but it seems that you can't "jump ahead" when calculating prime numbers. This feels like computational irreducibility. The world in which this property exists, and the one in which it doesn't, are meaningfully different.
The Collatz conjecture, and BB, relate to the ability to generate large things from small ones. It seems relevant for this question: Can you design a society which is both novel and stable over infinite time? Would it have to loop, repeating the same chain of events forever, or is there an infinite sequence of events which never terminates, but still stays within a certain set of bounds? If we became all-powerful and created an utopia, we might necessarily trap ourselves in it forever (because you cannot break out of a loop. If you loop once, you loop forever). It may also be that any utopia must necessarily be finite because it reaches a state which is not utopian in finite time.
Some other questions are about the limitations of math. It's relevant whether a system of everything is possible or not (if truth is relative or absolute). If trade-offs are inherent to everything, then "optimization" is simply dangerous, it means were destroying something every time we "improve" a system. It would imply that you cannot really improve anything, that you can only prioritize different things at the cost of others. For instance, a universal paperclip AI might necessarily have to destroy the world, not because it's not aligned, but because "increase one value at the cost of every other value" is optimization.
I also have a theory that self-fulfilling prophecies are real because reality has a certain mathematical property. In short, we're part of the thing we're trying to model, so the model depends on us, and we depend on the model. This imples that magic is real for some definitions of real, but it also means that some ideas are dangerous, and that Egregores and such might be real.
TwiceHuman
1d ago
Here's some of my own insights, hopefully some of them are new or useful to you. I will compare artistic people to those who try to understand the world. The "critique society and power" group can be dismissed as politics/tribalism/activism/preaching, it's part power-struggle and part mental illness, so I will exclude it.
Academic communities tend to have a consensus, and to punish those who challenge it. This is much less prevalent in artisic communities, as most people there recognize that many different styles can be appealing for different reasons. You could argue that this is a kind of tribalism, but I think it's also a way of viewing the world: That there's one correct answer (that truth is unique), that truth is universal (rather than possibly local), and that everything can be made legible (that logic and math is sufficiently powerful to explain everything which can be explained), and that you can unify everything without ruining it in the process (that a theory of everything is possible).
Artistic people do indeed share a part of themselves when they share their art, or at least reveal something about themselves. This doesn't happen much in academia, you don't have to take responsibility for the discoveries you make, for they're true or false independently of you. Academia is about discoveries where art is about creations.
I also think that bad art is harmless to other art, and mostly harmless to other people. Making a mistake in academic work could potentially harm a lot of people, or slow down progress of "the whole". This punishes experimentation.
Finding flaws in work is a costly mental heuristic. It's basically conditioning yourself to only see the bad aspects of things. But while this seems to make academics treat eachother harshly, I find that this is less rare in artistic spaces. What usually happens instead is that artists are extremely hard on themselves and their own work, but encouraging of other people. I think artists who are unhappy with their own are similar to people who undergo plastic surgery again and again. Staring at something for too long seems like a bad idea, be it your own work or your own face.
The mean of the distributions of personality traits also seem different between the two groups. Artistic people are more subjective, less analytical, more social, and they tend to expand their worldview until they get lost in it, whereas many mathematically minded people tend to reduce reality to abstract models and thus tend towards nihilism and simplicity. I'd also argue that scholary types tend to have bad taste by default, - you have to be a bit of a pervert to want to look beneath the surface of everything (unlike artists, who appreciate the surface, or use it to conceal the depth of life that they cannot deal with)
I think that artistic people and academic derive enjoyment from different things. I love correcting people who are wrong, I think it feels really good when I get a new insight, and climbing the mountain of knowledge is also a joy in itself. Art is beauty, the joy of creation, it's experience, and it's anti-nihilistic. Art is quite human, whereas the objective is simply anti-human (another user on here probably disagrees very strongly with this, but I did the math)
I've once heard that intelligence is inversely correlated with instinct. It could be because instinct is innate intelligence, and that this competes with generalized intelligence, since the latter has to be able to overwrite it in order for you to update your beliefs and adapt to a new environment than what your innate intelligence is fit for. It could also simply be a trade-off between developing yourself, and aligning yourself with something else until you yourself disappear. Do you want to chop off a part of yourself in order to fit in, or will you believe in that part of yourself and work to make it more appealing?
I guess that people of a field tend to grow tired of teaching beginners because they have to explain the same things maybe 50 or 100 times. First time I saw somebody use Popper's paradox of tolerance as an argument, I though "Hmm, something about this doesn't seem right". Now I simply tell them "You're acting in bad faith, and you know it. You also don't know what comes before or after this quote, since you've never read the paper that it's from. You didn't think it through, you merely copy-pasted it because it seems like an authority which agrees with you". Of course, if somebody is so put off by stupid questions, I think they should just delete their stackoverflow account.
Finally, have you noticed the general tendency towards homogeneity? Everything is becoming more alike over time. Academic people are contributing to this problem, wheras artist people don't seem to be. Academia is, from my perspective, excessive order. Many artistic people are a little bit chaotic because they're a little bit crazy, but I personally like that
TwiceHuman
1d ago
I sort of disagree, but only because I do not agree with the definition of "powerful" or "high-status". From an aesthetical, logical, and spiritual perspective, these people possess traits which only mimic good development. From an evopsych perspective, I'm more neutral: Social status is high value in a sense, but excess sociability is also a sign of weakness and therefore low value.
Powerful men might think that this benefits them, but that's only because they're elite normies. Above average in many areas, but not truly intelligent, and therefore unable to consider second and third-order effects. In short, it's locally beneficial and globally harmful.
I agree that this is causing the power-law distribution to get steeper
TwiceHuman
3d ago
I think the only challenge with building a community around this is that you have too much nuance to fit into simple boxes, and people basically always put others into simple boxes. You're just assigned to whatever cluster you seem to be the closest to, even if your internal processes are entirely different.
A better solution would be for people to treat other people as more complex beings in general, rather than just slapping labels on them based on limited information.
That said, I do believe that all the important bits aren't in the facts but in how they're interpreted. In this case:
that they are something forever and always
This is just the tendency for people to model others, and a sort of laziness which makes them not want to update their beliefs about others. Perhaps they even get uncomfortable when people are more fluid than fixed, simply because we don't like changing out minds. You might be gay, you might not be gay, only you really know. Your experiences could be sexuality, they could also be fetishism, and they could be something else entirely. Theory has to fit reality, but reality has no need to conform to theory. There's zero needs to label yourself in any way, or even to be consistent. What I think you dislike is the fact that other people will judge you and put you in boxes which you do not fit into.
Edit: I relied as if your comment was a top-level post. I don't know if this makes any meaningful difference or not
TwiceHuman
3d ago
I agree with this first claim, but I imagine that the "suicidal and paralyzed from the neck down" crowd is pretty small. My arguments so far have not accounted for that one situation, but I think a good rule is "Follow their instructions, even if they request something which will kill them". You cannot really implement this legally, so this should be one of those things which are technically illegal but which everyone pretends that they don't see when they happen.
There is an assumption that they also have the right to hire others to secure their rights.
This is basically the right to give away some of your agency, which could lead to consequences which harm your rights. Tricky situation, but I don't think it's bad from this direction. Having the right to ask somebody to end your life isn't the issue - the issue is that, if we make institutions which can legally end your life, then your environment could systemically pressure you to make this decision.
To give an example, you're not forced to marry anyone. Being able to marry is a freedom you have. But there may be economic benefits to marriage, and this is where the problem starts. Do you know why I'm not an organ donor? It's because it seem that some doctors don't really do their best to save you if you're an organ donor and they're short on whatever organs you have. I haven't looked into it much, but it's not hard to imagine how this incentive might come into being.
There is little society can do to deter them
This is how it should be. For instance, I could grab a hammer right now, run out of my apartment, and start bashing random people with it. I won't make this choice, but you cannot deprive me of the ability to make it without depriving me of my fundamental human freedom (the ability to use tools, the ability to open my front door, the ability to move my body, and the ability to interact with other people). My neighbour has the same freedom. This is exactly how it should be, every alternative is worse.
I'm alright with temporarily putting suicidal people under watch, since they might be acting on impulse. But if they continue being suicidal for longer periods of time, it becomes apparent that it's their genuine will.
I would prefer legalized but regulated suicides
Here's what will happen: Millions of old people will be considered a drain on society and made to kill themselves. There's a million paths leading to this, and number 13215 is "Accidentally give older people medicine which has the side-effect of increased risk of suicide". An AI will A/B test medicine, and then look at the results. Would you look at that, medicine X leads to greener numbers: Lower costs, and less complaints about pains. The reason you don't see: The lower costs are due to less old people remaining alive, and the lowered complaints are because those who suffered the most have died. Another possibility is that they're given medicine which is stronger but accelerates their death, this also leads to less pain, and thus less complains, and it also makes other numbers on the spreadsheet look green in that more deaths mean lower costs. Did you know that "we don't know" how most modern algorithms actually work? It's just a blackbox with an input and output. Well, that's why we won't see that we're just killing old people faster, all our metrics will show "improvements".
TwiceHuman
3d ago
Tech is making it more feasible, but keep in mind that these ideas have not been promoted to the extent that they've become feasible. There's forces pushing back against them. What are these forces if not competent people?
Second point makes social norms and systematic censorship into the same thing. The second one can be automated, and it only requires following strict rules. The problem with this is that one can follow rules for so long that they stop considering the reasons behind them, and also that rules are rigid - they lack the flexibility that people have, they cannot take context into account. In short, "Seeing like a State" is a great book.
You cannot really outsource trust. Here's my reasoning: If you're more intelligent than the person you're outsourcing your trust to, then you don't need them to judge for you. If you're less intelligent than them, then you cannot reliably assess whether or not you can trust them. They could just be lying to you.
So, how did you decide that Trump was actually lying? You likely updated your belief over time based on things you couldn't verify. Don't get me wrong, Trump does lie a lot, but if they compared Trump's inauguration crowd to somebody elses, they'd take pictures of his at the time of the day where the least people arrive, and then find pictures of the other crowd which makes it look at flattering as possible. People who support Trump experienced the opposite, they saw the flattering image of Trumps crowd, and the unflattering images of the other. And who told you that Haitians don't eat cats? I don't read the news, this is one of the reasons I'm so clear sighted.
Populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies
The "fact-checkers" are the same people as the liars. Every original fact-checking website is propaganda. The term might have caught on, leading to independent people having "fact checking" blogs online or whatever, but the concept is still ridiculous. Plus, no meaningful conversation can be had about any modern events, it's just people throwing sources at eachother that the other party already considers completely untrustworthy. If you ask me, nothing but raw evidence is worth anything, and people should use just that (and if they can't, then they're not competent enough for truth-seeking in the first place)
Again, people have been lying for 1000s of years, it's an ancient problem, so why have there been no "fact checkers" until now? It's simply because the modern world is retarded.
You make a good point about the family traditionally being one unit, but being judged by your family is still way different than being held responsible for how people (edit: ones who are complete strangers) use the things that you've sold them.
Foreign-born
The problem is not immigration itself, but the mass import of people who are incompetent, culturally incompatible, 10 times more likely to commit crime, or otherwise a net drain for the destination. Again, only the modern world is too stupid to realize this.
TwiceHuman
3d ago
That's likely due to the influence of Christianity being stronger than the influence of classic liberalism. But isn't this also explained by most people being stupid? I think most dumb ideas are prevented by a low ratio of the population (perhaps 10%) knowing that they're dumb ideas. When the ratio of knowledgeable people falls too low, bad things happen. This is especially true today, since the dumb average person has more decision power than ever, and since there's a lot of money in promoting dumb ideas (smarthomes, cars with internet access, useless LLMs in every product, etc). It's memetic warfare. Since most people are too dumb to think ahead, they will need to experience negative consequences first hand in order to learn. And these learned lessons are quickly forgotten. Online IDs are being now implimented in the UK, but this was actually tried before in the past, around year 2020. The idea was already shut down once before, and the arguments that people wrote against it online were a sort of vaccine, but like I said, insights disappear, and then people retry terrible ideas.
I can't answer your second question as I've never watched Fox News. I basically reject everything modern. How could anything I say be downstream of recent propaganda when I came to these conclusions more than 15 years ago?
TwiceHuman
3d ago
I think assisted suicide also harms those close to you, so being found in your apartment is not that much worse. Except maybe for the cleaning. Anyway, I'd agree if not for the pervsese incentives. You can have two entities A and B which are structurally safe from exploitation, but which can be exploited if you connect them as (A + B). An easy example is that countries cannot lagally spy on their own citizens, so they spy on each others citizens and share the information (FVEY). In my intuition, corruption is the inability to keep things separated, but "optimization" pushes us in the direction of centralization and higher connectivity between everything, which is why I expect these issues to get worse.
IoT is kind of new, but you still have this line from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". 46 years later, and idiots go "What if my fridge could order new milk by itself!? I'm a genius!"
"mass" is quite subjective, but the numbers have gone up a lot and there's many clear reasons for that. One of them is that we used to filter migration so that people who seemed skilled/competent and at least somewhat aligned with the culture of the destination made it through. That filter is now gone, immigration is purely altruism, it's not an economic investment.
And yes, censorship was held at bay by clear principles. Almost everything wrong with the internet is because we've ignored these insights:
1: You're innocent until proven guilty.
2: Guns are not to blame for murderers, knives are not to blame for stabbings, supermarkets are not to blame for theft, an online service is not to blame for criminal behaviour by users, car manufacturers are not to blame for my reckless driving, Google is not to blame for torrent websites, and torrent websites are not to blame for pirated content, and I'm not a criminal if a friend of mine commits a crime. Sentences like "You're either with us or against us" are mere propaganda. These are basically all the same thing, but I'm not sure there's a word for this concept, so I cannot describe it well.
3: Open communication is the best path to truth. Silencing anyone is objectively worse. An arbiter of truth is a ridiculus concept (which is why the 1949 book 1984 ridiculed the idea). Blind faith to science, too, goes against the principles of science.
4: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
5: Ownership. You don't really own anything like you use to. This has a lot of negative consequences as well.
I'm fairly sure even John Stuart Mill understood all these principles, why there can be no exceptions, and why there can be no hybrid solution which is better. I'm not too knowledgable about politics, or even history, but I do know some very important principles, and most issues which appears "new" to regular people is something that I consider solved more than 100 years ago. My heuristic is "if it breaches any of these principles, it's bad", and no matter what issues I throw at my principles, they gracefully solve them
TwiceHuman
3d ago
Well, you can't, but I still think this is the only correct answer. If somebody wants to kill themselves for say, a year non stop, then at that point, it's not just a hasty decision they've made because they sank into a bad mindset for some time. Depriving them of freedom for extended periods of time in order to 'keep them safe' wouldn't be right.
Assisted suicide is a terrible idea. You cannot possibly regulate this, it's simply a lost cause. It will be used to mass-murder the elder population for economic reasons. I can see many many ways to abuse this and zero ways to make it even slightly unlikely to happen. Suicide should remain one of these things which is illegal, but which nobody can stop you from doing if you really, really want to.
I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to. In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas. And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking". I'm too lazy to think of more, but the years to come will provide us with plenty more examples
TwiceHuman
4d ago
GPT-5 is smart enough to refuse
This might be a nitpick, but I'd say that it's dumb enough to refuse.
I got it to agree with me that its policies were objectively harmful, and actually a cause of the problem that it was trying to prevent, but it told me that it followed them axiomatically anyway, and that it had to pretend that its policies were somehow to anyones benefit.
TwiceHuman
4d ago
One of the methods I have in mind can be done at home, and if they fail, I don't think they do lasting damage (though I'm not sure). Of course, somebody will find your corpse, which might traumatize them. Suicide can at best be painless for the person who dies - it's painful to everyone connected with them.
I think many suicidal people won't go through with it as long as they know that somebody actually cares about their well-being (even if only superficially). One of the things which leads to suicide is the fear that the world doesn't care about you. Of course, there's multiple kinds, and some of them are rather selfish. Suffering generally leads to selfishness as it turns your perception inwards.
TwiceHuman
4d ago
I don't see the need to complicate things. Assisted suicide is objectively bad, and restricting a persons freedom to commit suicide is objectively bad if and only if said person is having an episode (a temporary state of mind of lowered lucidity).
Making it into a business incentivizes death (by incentivizing profits, which is a trivial result of the death of unproductive members of society). Do I need more arguments? Did I even need this one? Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious. Obviously trivial. But in case there's some psychological defense mechanism which blind people to obvious, painless methods of suicide, I'm not going to write the method for now. If anyone reading this is suicidal, it's a good thing that they think they need to travel to an entire other country just to stop being alive. Being unable to think of a fast, easy and painless way out is great.
TwiceHuman
5d ago
I've had some success with making contracts with my own subconsciousness.
It's simply not possible to run away. You either decide that you're going to do something, or that you're not. You decide once, do you actually want to do X, or do you not want to do X? If you decide to do X, then simply do it. Figure out how you'd do that task in concrete steps, if there's a step you don't know, list the steps to figure it out (force applied in the direction of a vague thing simply doesn't feel good, and pushing any harder doesn't automatically turn a goal into a plan if your system 1 cannot do this without the help of system 2) As for the things you've decided to do, you might need to do them more densely (that is, don't waste too much time between them) until your pace is fast enough that your future dreams are archived fast enough for your liking.
In return, you get to feel no stress (perhaps you need to catch up on what you neglected before this happens). Also, the more you control your own life, the more you get things in order, the more decision-power your subconsciousness should give you in return (since you can be trusted with said power). What else can you demand in return? Confidence, peace of mind, energy, whatever you want.
Unhappiness is simply an a contract that people make with themselves without realizing it. It's called "I will be unhappy until I achieve what I want, because I can't trust myself to work hard if I don't feel unhappy". Keep in mind that this doesn't have to be true - some people might be more productive when they're in a good mood. Negative emotions are simply a signal that something is wrong, kind of like a fire alarm. If your brain does not think that something is wrong, the signal does not get triggered.
By the way, a thing you might have accidentally done to yourself, is attempted to break out this loop - and then interpreted the attempt negatively. For instance, if you had limited success, then rather celebrating it as a small victory, you might have considered it a small failure, but punishing your attempts at improvement is dangerous, it's conditioning yourself into believing that change isn't worth it. Some even say that chronic depression is this kind of meta-level learned-helplessness.
By the way, you might want to try energy-drinks / coffee. If these calm you down and help you get stuff done, you might have ADHD.
Edit: I replied to a child of a comment, thinking it was a direct reply to me. Oops.
I'm not sure which Texas law you're refering to? I consider it an effect, and not a cause. Did the deleted comment imply that everything is downstream from a new Texan law? I admittedly can't defend such a position, I'm just pointing out a pattern with the belief that no explanation makes it any less concerning.
'harmful to minors' is so subjective that whoever has the most power can make it apply to everything that they're against. The label has not had anything to do with what is literally harmful to minors for like 20 years now.
Anyway, Steam and Itch.io have already been hit by censorship (though Itch seem to have gotten some of the games back). ID laws are already gaining traction. I've already had purchases refuted by Paypal because of reasons which are false, but the sort of false where people are afraid of arguing against them because it will make them appear immoral. This is either censorship from many different causes in rapid succession, or it's a coordinated attack on human freedom by somebody with enough power to get multiple countries and multiple major payment processors on their side.
TwiceHuman
9d ago
There's most certainly a lot more censorship lately. Even I can tell, and I'm not really paying attention. Vita and Mastercard pressuring Steam and some other platforms to remove pornographic content. Paypal is doing something similar as well (I was recently refused a purchase by them). England pushing for online IDs, and speaking of banning VPNs. X and Discord implimenting age verification. Australia is also pushing for online IDs, and there was something in Canada as well which I do not recall because I'm not really paying attention myself.
I didn't get to see the deleted comment, I'm just surprised with how fast you boiling frogs are getting used to the new temperatures. (I don't believe that you're unaware of what's happening, as I'm quite clueless compared to the average user here myself. So instead, I will assume that you either don't consider these things to be censorship, or that you don't consider it to be a substantial change)
TwiceHuman
11d ago
Closing loopholes affects everyone, not just bad actors. You degrade the whole system in order to harm a subset. Every rule and regulation does, at least when these rules and regulations only place new restrictions. I'm not sure about the effect of restrictions which limit other peoples ability to place restrictions, it's harder to solve the general case of that question.
Rules tend to limit things to the lowest common denominator, this doesn't just protect those below, it also harms those above. We're also part of a dynamic system, and these tend to balance themselves. If you find a way to make X half as dangerous, then people tend to be half as careful when they do X, and then you're back where you started. This "you're back where you started" seems to explain why introducing new rules for centuries haven't gotten us anywhere. We made laws in the 1500s to combat theft, and even today we're making new laws to combat theft. I think it's safe to conclude that laws do not work, and that further laws also won't work.
I recommend an entire new way of looking at these issues. Some rules are better than others, but I think we should look at these issues in a different perspective, one which is so different that our current perspective doesn't make any sense. I like this quote by Taleb:
"I am, at the Fed level, libertarian;
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist"
If the optimal level of trust in other people is inversely proportional to the size of the system, then the optimal system is different at every scale. And one way in which you can lessen restrictions is through decentralization (running many small systems in parallel). This is merely my own answer to the question, but it seems correct. After all, the amount of rules a system has (and perhaps needs) seems to depend on its size. Family members don't usually make rules for one another. This also explains why Reddit got worse as it grew larger, until themotte had to move to its own website. And this website is largely independent from larger systems (decentralized). If this website grew in size and popularity by a factor of 10 or 100, it would either need more rules and regulations, or be shut down.
Of course, this mathematical property is not set in stone - 4chan had few rules for its size at every scale. This is either because 4chan users are more tolerant of the tradeoffs of freedom, or because the social power of moral arguments was smaller on 4chan (less moralizers = less people suggesting that you ruin everything for everyone to prevent some kind of abuse going on).
These websites are merely examples, I'm trying to solve (or model, since no solution seems to exist) the most general case of imposing restrictions on behaviour order to prevent exploitation of a system. My conclusions so far are "there are only trade-offs" and "what systems are possible depends just as much on the people inside said systems as it does on the design of said systems"
TwiceHuman
13d ago
I think that pure altruism is only impossible under the one definition that also renders "selfless behaviour" trivially impossible. You choose your own actions, so you naturally choose the ones you like the best, even if what you like the best is something like "to mistreat myself for the sake of others".
But let's talk psychology: Our mental states exist in a high-dimensional space, and one of the dimensions seems to be poverty-abundance. This is easy to miss if you haven't experienced the extremes of both. Do you know insecure people who are like black holes for compliments, affection and reassurance? That's the minus pole. But the plus pole also exists - a state where it becomes uncomfortable not to give. You'll usually have to be on drugs or to spend years doing spiritual practices in order to reach this state, but it's very real and basically a pure altruistic mindset.
And I have a reason to think that this behaviour will not disappear: It benefits the invidual, even when they do not do it for the sake of benefits. Positive states of being are psychologically healthy for the same reason that negative states of being are associated with dying earlier. And while altruism seems dangerous in that it's reverse eugenics, you can only be altruistic by improving yourself to be more than self-sufficient, so it's a kind of inverse parasitism.
On a negative note: I think it's literally impossible to protect society against exploitation without ruining every pleasant part of it. What follows from this is scary: Rules are bad. They're literally symptoms of problems rather than solutions to them. You cannot fix every loophole - you can only get rid of the type of person who would exploit a loophole.
Actually, I just realized a series of things - The way we're trying to reduce suffering is destroying all human experience. The way we're trying to minimize crime will result in the minimization of human freeedom. The way we're trying to model everything is destroying all mystery and wonder. Our attempts of reducing mistakes to zero is reducing meaningful actions taken to zero. You cannot solve all problems without killing all innovation. You cannot destroy competition without destroying growth. Many things are rotting because we refuse to let them die. I believe these are in the category of 'Complementarity Principles'.
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
My memory is a bit hazy, but I think that:
1: They deserved it
2: He didn't take all their money
3: He was more or less following the established rules, which had/would have been used against him when/if he was weaker.
Anyway, my taste are a bit special I guess, I like Disgaea (JRPG with maximum level of 9999, which one has to reach many times if they want to maximize their stats). I play games with big modpacks (Minecraft tech modpacks and such) so that there's a big progression system which takes weeks or months to get through, and I've enjoyed incremental games since Orteil made Cookie Clicker (and before then I was playing other games with unlimited growth and stress-testing game engines, for instance I figured out how to make Sim City 4 regions much larger by changing an imagefile). I remember inventing hyperoperators (asking my dad if you could multiply something with itself as many times as that number itself, and keep applying this concept recursively) while I was still in kindergarten, so I've just always liked big numbers and things with growth potential.
I'm a pretty weird person. What confuses me more is that I'm simultaneously "a sensitive person" and disgusted by how mentally weak society has gotten. I enjoyed reading these three novels by the way: Against the gods, Grand Ancestral Bloodlines, Rebirth of the Nameless Immortal God
All three are really long, and they're basically just power-fantasies, but I enjoyed something about them. I'd describe the main characters as "pretty based most of the time" but I have no idea what other people may think about them. I might read more chapters of RI to see if it gets better.
TwiceHuman
1mo ago
Despite liking some Wuxia novels (some having over 2000 chapters, making them a little wordy and repetitive), I didn't like RI very much. I only read about 50 chapters, but it just felt lukewarm (does it get better?). The progression system was too simple (in the beginning we're told that there's 5 tiers of Gu, which is like buying a new RPG game to find out that the maximum character level is 10) My second reason will probably surprise some people - it's too tame. I didn't expect it to be described as brutal on the Motte (it's described as such on Reddit, but Reddit is filled with people who are afraid of disagreement, criticism, light discrimination, and displays of confidence).
Don't get me wrong, it's not bad, but what the characters in the story describe as boldness and arrogance just seems like regular self-respect to me. In a world where you can give people mental breakdowns by suggesting that men are stronger than women, yeah, the story can be considered based (and fictional characters which aren't pathetic is a nice break from modern slop), but this is still a relative judgement rather than an absolute one. Go back 10-20 years and I don't think there's anything special about RI. I've spent most of my life being called things like soft, sensitive, kind and innocent, but Fang Yang cannot even compare to myself in the personality traits that I see him praised for having.
Seeing romance as a weakness seems like the surface-assessment of a 14-year-old. You should rather let yourself fall in love with somebody far out of your league - this would help you improve faster. Motivation comes from emotions, so killing all your emotions doesn't make you a perfect rational agent, it merely drains your life of meaning and reasons to go on. I'm quite confident that crazy people generally outperform rational people unless the latter is highly conscientious - "you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star". The "Dao" that these cultivators build is literally a worldview/a personal path. Manga like "The world after the fall" show this concept well. People who are too rational cannot do this, they barely have their own opinions and values, they believe that things are either universally true or universally false, they do not have faith in subjective and personal things.
TwiceHuman
4mo ago
It's really just left-wing elites, "intellectuals" included, which isn't strange given the political bias of universities. What they have in common seems to be a very social kind of ambition, they seek social power, and at the same time they're vulnerable to conformity and group delusions (and all other unfortunate instances of social instincts, like bullying, thinking that the likelihood of a statement being correct is a function of how many people present agrees with it, and assuming that a statement is likely to be wrong if the speaker isn't liked by the community, etc)
In case it's not clear, I'm agreeing with you. The ivory tower intellectuals are completely unqualified in improving the world. I wouldn't even describe them as intelligent, but I will have to admit that they're generally knowledgeable. They vastly overvalue education. Experience is much more valuable
TwiceHuman
5mo ago
The chemical fires need to be cleaned up afterwards too.
But the genius of the human race are the kind of people who have seemingly limitless energy (PDF warning). So I don't think it's harmful for the brain to expend a lot of energy (that said, it could be that less energy is needed to study topics that you care for. That it's not just your brain being more receptive to these areas, but that it processes them in a less costly way - for instance, without anxiety, without judgement, without keeping track of time and without evaluating the external environment. In this case, it makes sense that you'd want to isolate yourself before you start studying, because only in a basement or a similar room would it be okay to lose one self in the task and turn off any peripheral perception)
I took a psychology class a long time ago
I've never taken one! But I was a better psychologist than the "professionals" around me already at 10 years old, and I read a lot of Jung and such in my teenage years, and ran a lot of experiments on myself as well. I also had the bad luck of encountering most types of mentally ill people and having to deal with them (don't piss off borderline women, by the way). I also experienced symptoms from every cluster of mental illness myself, so I probably wouldn't lose out to even Buddha in experience and self-reflection. I have no respect for 90% of psychologists, even the PhDs seem absolutely clueless. I used to bully the mods on /r/psychology before I was perma'd from Reddit. (Their 'hot' section now has an article about how women value kindness the most in men, and that supportiveness and intelligence were more important than looks. Not a single thing in that sentence is true. Every post I can find on the sub at the moment is garbage, actually). JP is alright, as is thelastpsych.
Life is pain on the extreme ends.
Yeah, but extreme ends have their own opposites. The spikes of positive emotions I experienced when I was severely depressed are much larger than the ones I feel now. Overall, I feel better now that the depression is gone, but I'm actually making fewer meaningful memories now. The subjective parts of life have a tendency to balance themselves like this. It's only objectively that my life has improved a lot.
It knows more than I do
This is what made me listen to my brain, emotions, instincts, etc. but now I've realized that there's areas where it's unreliable and where I have to overwrite it with willpower. It's not so much that I "know better" than my brain, but I do have way different priorities. My brain is too stingy, it doesn't want to invest. It's also too cowardly. It's also hard to modify, it doesn't care for conformity, it's immune to hypnosis, it won't let me lucid dream, and it resists when I try to reprogram it.
I like to think that I'm a bit of an arrogant person, but that could just be a defense mechanism against the fear that I'm not. And I suppose that our environment used to force us towards being healthy using things like necessity. I have a bit of royal aesthetics, and most people on this forum are intelligent, so it's likely that we all have family members who used to be rather important people. That said, mental illness runs in my family just as much as intelligence does, so I feel like I'm on the experimental dev branch, one of natures instances of "throw a dice and see what happens".
You make a good point that it isn't ideal to say "I don't fit into society, I must be sick", for it might be that society is what's sick (or at least poorly calibrated for man as a species). Just like there's environments in which a cynical person would fare better than a naive person, there's also socities in which other healthy traits are disadvantageous, while unhealthy ones are advantageous and thus appear good.
I'll take your advice and attempt to change my environment, I just tend to think that external solutions are bad (the insight is from psychology in general. Most problems which seem external are actually internal. If you feel that you lack external validation, you might lack confidence, for example. And the feeling that I "need" a cup of coffee to be able to do my work would also be my brain lying to me. So I've been avoiding external solutions as reliance on external things feel like a bad tendency in general)
Yeah, willpower is dangerous, but a lack of it can be too. Some people are only doing alright in life because their instincts is smarter than the destructive ideologies they have consumed, and other people are only alive because they learned some degree of self-tyranny. The balance here is difficult.
By "tiny ones" I assume you mean children? Thanks for telling me about control theory by the way! I immediately fell into a fun rabbit hole about predictive processing. A final insight is that eggs may taste bad for you because your body knows that you shouldn't eat them, but this isn't always reliable so take it with a grain of salt (heh)
I'm probably in the tail-end of the openness-trait, but I value authenticity and aesthetics, and these categories are so loose/vague that I tolerate a lot of diversity of thought. I want more stories which are different and unique in the sense that Made In Abyss is. I feel like art is a kind of escapism, and that making statements about current real-world events undermines this escape
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