TwiceHuman
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
11mo 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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)
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I don't think you have to be in a constant unpleasant state to grow. Growth is unpleasant in some ways, but pleasant in others. It's especially pleasant when you cash in on it, for example becoming rich and then going on vacations a lot. But I do generally agree that "suffering is the root of growth", meaning that it requires great conflict between yourself and the world, or between yourself and other parts of yourself, to grow the most. The greatest growth also puts the individual at risk of destruction.
I'm not puzzles much by competing instincts. Even craving dopamine seems somewhat justifiable to me. It's the craving for what destroys you, or the craving for nothingless, which seems weird. The former might be a way the body is forcing itself into growing, but this mechanism seems more destructive than constructive. The latter seems like the "death drive" or nihilism, but it might be similar to going into a coma, with the body simply wanting rest.
I read in some of Nietzsche's work that people keep themselves ill, and that this triggers healing. Kind of how fasting and cold showers increases longevity. If this is true, then it makes sense that people keep themselves in a constant "just barely surviving" situation. It just seems irrational from the outside, since it's less pain overall just to do something about ones problems.
Your comment seems correct overall, but I don't think that pro and anti-social instincts explain everything. I'm autistic, so the social instincts in me just aren't that strong. I don't care too much what other people think, and I don't even do good things because I felt that I should. I just do what aligns with my sense of aesthetics.
I don't like the idea that the body is bad. I have to agree with Nietzsche that instincts should be tamed rather than suppressed, and that he who says human nature is bad or evil is merely projecting. Rather than "If you're a good person, you will be happy", Nietzsche's stance is "If you're happy, you will be a good person". Merely being in a good mood tends to make you treat other people better. So when other people fear my nature, they fear parts of themselves which they perceive in me. Anyway, this would be the "good/evil" perspective. My confusion is about the "good/bad" perspective. A good way to put it is "One seeks that which tends to be bad for them, and in nature, this works out, because it's gated by that which is good for them". For instance, you want to relax, but you must first work. You want to waste resources, but you must first accumulate them. You want peace, but you must first win it through war. In the modern world, wire-heading, self-hacking, artificial rewards, etc. become possible, and we sometimes manage to solve some of the problems which exist to make us healthy. "We did it, we overcame the need for hard physical labour!" excellent, but if exercises is no longer required, what will stop your body from breaking down? We're meant to try to win, not to win. We're meant to fight for peace, not to achieve it. But I guess this partly answers my original question, thanks for your thoughts!
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
You have to work hard for food, so if you felt like staying home instead of going out to hunt or pick berries, wouldn't that be a bad thing? I think there's a point where this laziness can be said to be pathological.
I'm quite thin, but even in overweight people, laziness seems dominant. I think optimism and confidence "ought to" modulate laziness (since it would hint at abundance, or tell ones body that one is the pack leader). But personally, my appetite is low no matter my mood.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
Were they ever so scarse that people would be "lazy" like the modern human? It seems even more wasteful to let your own body decay and die than it does to take at least some care of it. It could also be that I still have some lingering depression, or that something else is wrong with me. After all, despite having food, I don't have much desire to eat.
It's good that I do have a strong willpower. I've just listened too much to my body since I expected it to be a little more trustworthy with my future than what is the case. This is after all the same body which can wake up 2 minutes before my alarm because it knows the time so well, and which can tell me insights about my problems in dreams just because I ask nicely.
I'm still a little puzzled, by the way. I think I waste 500 calories a day just being anxious, so it's not all about energy reduction.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
Yes. Perhaps I should have phrased my question better, I just wanted to keep it short.
I know why death exists. But I don't know why people become hedonists by default. Why you have to fight against yourself in order to wake up early, in order to study, in order to exercise, in order not to get distracted. The body seems to want to do nothing at all, or to do the bare minimum when things have to be done. It seems that, if you follow what your body wants, you die. Isn't this terrible design? Anyone can become a great person, you just have to steer yourself manually, while your body yells at you to do otherwise. It's like our bodies want us to live in poverty, to not become anyone special, to be too weak to be helpful to others, and to die without realizing our dreams. How did Darwinism cause this? I don't understand.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I have a very weird question for you all. I think it's too much of a question to fit the wellness thread, but it doesn't fit in well anywhere. That said, this is the most intelligent forum I'm aware of.
Why would I waste into nothing and die if I followed my natural inclinations? How did darwinism possibly select for that?
I have to use my willpower and overwrite what my body, ego and drives want, in order to have a good life. Surely it would be more better if nature just gave us all strong willpower? Or if our natural urges pointed us towards that better life in which we're successful all on its own?
There's times where there's a lot of wisdom in the body too, when it actually knows better, and when overwriting it with your willpower is stupid. But I have hurt my own progression a lot by focusing too much on these cases, as the opposite cases are even more common.
So, why? The desire to be a loser, and the hatred of my own inadequacy coexists in the same body. The only theory I have is that life requires resistance in order to grow strong (trees grown without wind do not become strong enough to support themselves, for instance). So, human beings fight themselves in order to create this resistance when it does not exist externally (which is why people who don't know real struggle seem to become insane and invent problems where none exist). When I had my depressive episode, I noticed that it felt like my body was trying to kill itself, but also to stay alive at the same time. And like how a fever hopes to kill the bad parts in your body before it kills the healthy parts, what profound suffering does it that it increases internal pressure hoping that the weakest part breaks first (leading to those turning-ones-life-around stories). But hedonism and other such tendencies do not seem to bring any advantages at all.
The tendency to mediocrity does not make sense to me. It does not seem beneficial. Humanity is capable of so much greatness, but 9 out of 10 end up quite pathetic, seemingly by design or by choice (rather than actual external limitations). Are we sick? Even "The natural environment had limited resources" doesn't seem like a good enough reason for the desire to self-neglect and to avoid opportunities which are obviously good just because they're a little bit difficult.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I disagree. Any technique which Tiktok uses will only accelerate our collective brainrot. These techniques actually work, but I don't think that's a good enough argument to use them.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
You're likely making a reference that I'm not getting, or hinting at the limits of subjectivity?
I could can answer the question as long as I have a set of constraints (what would you like to optimize for?) but I assume you asked me this because you assumed I couldn't answer it. After all, it takes quite a bit of arrogance to think one can answer such a broad question
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
I do agree with your take if we stress "The person actually victimized". I dislike it when people are offended on other people's behalf. Some take it further, and look for signs of flaws in others, scanning them for traits that they can "expose" to the world, as if they were "moral police". The Nietzsche quote I'd choose here is "And some who cannot see the high in people call it virtue that they see the low all too near, thus they call their evil eye virtue" In either case, I consider revenge to be rather imperfect. Even if you had a society in which one could always get the perfect amount of revenge, I'd still not want to be there if the crime rate was high. Rather live in a country with little crime. Prevention is simply better. I can only speak for myself though - maybe there's people who enjoy revenge so much that it makes up for the events for which they take revenge.
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
"Justice" often just means "revenge". Nietzsche wrote some great takes on this, I can dig them up if you want, from a psychological perspective his takes were really good as far as I remember, and I could probably defend them.
For now, though, I want to say that I do see the logic in murdering the murderer of your father if the system fails you. But this would be a personal revenge. Those that I find the least justifiable are those who take "revenge" on others behalf - "cancel culture" is one manifestation of this, but there's more, and they're all based in aspects of mob culture/herd morality/social dynamics which are closely tied to malice and which can be prevented by the slightest bit of wisdom and self-understanding. It's a simply form of stupidity, holy simplicity if you will. I know that the left are not religious, but they're bigger moralizers than those on the right, and their values come from the bible even if they do not realize it. Or at Nietzsche said:
"We see: an authority speaks - who speaks? - One may forgive human pride if it sought to make this authority as high as possible in order to feel as little humiliated as possible under it. Therefore - God speaks! One needed God as an unconditional sanction, with no court of appeal, as a "categorical imperator" -: or, if one believed in the authority of reason, one needed a metaphysic of unity, by virtue of which this was logical. Now suppose that belief in God has vanished: the question presents itself anew: "who speaks?"- My answer, taken not from metaphysics but from animal physiology: the herd instinct speaks. It wants to be master: hence its "thou shalt!"- it will allow value to the individual only from the point of view of the whole, for the sake of the whole, it hates those who detach themselves-it turns the hatred of all individuals against them"
And this would explain why the death of god has not lead to the death of morality to the extent that one would expect. The morality was grounded more in instincts than it was grounded in religion. Religion merely served to legitimize it
TwiceHuman
1yr ago
It is meaningless, as nobody was ever interested in figuring out who was oppressed in the first place - they merely wanted to legitimize giving power and advantages to specific groups that they either identified with or felt sympathy for. This sympathy depends on the perceived strength and the perceived morality of the agent in question. There's little empathy when women attack men, since men are seen as stronger. There's no empathy when somebody accused of (insert social taboo) is attacked, because they're perceived as being evil. The judgement of evil is perceived as the lack of innocence, and the lack of innocence is proportional to the perceived free will of the doer (and to the extent to which they understand what they are doing). This is why we punish accidents and mentally unwell people less harshly. It also depends on the perceiver, as it gets harder to hate people and judge them as evil as you grow wiser and realize that we're just products of our circumstances (because this understanding of ours results in attributing less free will to others).
Some day I'd like to put human nature into equations, just simple, imperfect ones.
Provided we are careful to measure the "extent to which they're against you" by actions more than words
I personally just thought of it as (actual, not apparent) hostility. Actions and words are both downstream of that.
But if they don't actually do anything about it, then it's all just surface level talk
Yes, but again, situations like this arise because it's all a sham. A thing I've noticed is that most people who complained that X group is oppressing Y group hates group X more than they like group Y. So if somebody hurts a child, it envokes aggression towards the person who hurt the child, much more than it envokes the desire to protect the child. People rarely differentiate between the two when they think about such situations.
Many people also just want a socially acceptable victim to went their negative emotions at. Others want to think of themselves as being "good people". Others still want to show other people their values, and signal virtue or in-group membership. These selfish desires pretend to be altruistic, and the vast majority of people do not have enough self-awareness to notice themselves doing this.
So by "public sentiment" is mean the true sentiment, not the apparent one (which is misleading, which is why I find joy in exposing it like this)
And a problem needs to be solved
People do not want this problem solved in general. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be pro-freedom when it's to their advantage, but also to decrease the freedom of those who have different values. The public support for "colorblindness" on the political left disappeared because it was true neutrality, and that's not what they want, for that would disallow them from fighting racism with racism. They're opposed to freedom of expression too, also because it's neutral. If 90% of people hate the KKK, they will say "The will of the people have spoken, this is democracy, the majority is right". It was probably the same when a majority oppressed homosexuals in the past, it's just viewed differently in retrospect because, and only because, the majority is against it now. The majority can only disagree with the majority across time. The public could only start to agree that discrimination against homosexuals was bad when it stopped being much of an actual problem - for the two are one and the same thing. This is also why feminism is the most popular in the countries which need it the least - the more feminist a country is, the more power woman have, and the less women will be oppressed.
But it's logically possible
I think it's only possible in the map (the political consensus based on nonsense). In the territory, all of this is nonsense (meaning that it cannot be true in reality. My map of our social reality shows that our social reality is dishonest, and the "real" version which I claim to be true has a lot of tautologies, but I believe that speaks in its favor. Tautologies eat themselves, right? Like circular logic, I think they evaluate to nothing)
We have rules like "You're not allowed to discriminate against inherent traits" and yet we don't treat health, beauty, and intelligence like they're protected traits at all (which is why attacking these traits in opposing ideologies is so common). In fact, our set of "protected traits" is politically biased, and our enforcement of our own rules is biased as well. I'm curious what would happen if we made ideologies protected as well - they're not really different from cultures and religions anyway, they're all just worldviews with a set of values embedded in them. We didn't really improve anything when we changed from religious wars to culture wars, I don't even think the irrationality decreased much. Hell, to be against biases is impossible, as it's a bias in itself. One cannot have a strong preference for the equality of preferences.
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
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