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coffee_enjoyer

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joined 2022 September 05 11:53:36 UTC

				

User ID: 541

coffee_enjoyer

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7 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 11:53:36 UTC

					

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User ID: 541

I’d argue that the human mind does not like “complexity, action and fast paced strategy”, instead it likes learning, risk-taking and figuring things out. Learning to play music is going to be more satisfying in the long run than a video game, because while you’re learning and figuring things out you’re also expressing the best emotions communicable (plus cognitive enhancement, plus a social dimension if you want). And if you want fast-paced action, there are sports for that, which again promote other benefits.

Similarly, we aren’t drawn to “immersive world building”, we are drawn to beauty, and I don’t think a lifetime of final fantasy could compete with an hour under a waterfall or in an Italian city. It lacks so much of the sensory. Walking in a pixelated world does not compare with walking through Reykjavik half-drunk with friends or family.

Now there’s also a second-order analysis. You should consider what the activities you do afford in the future by way of implicit practice. After a few months of final fantasy, you’re going to find it difficult to shlep to the bars to meet chicks and friends, or to decide to enroll in a course that requires boredom and travel. But after a few months of arduous but rewarding trekking in the wilderness, you’re going to find you have the energy to pursue all manners of outside enjoyment. If you can have fun while increasing your physical health and mind (and walking is excellent for the mind) this will pay off invisibly in the future.

Then there’s a third-order analysis: what memories will we remember? We remember the most sensory memories. In fact, we often forget the arduous parts of life and selectively remember the greatest parts (eg nostalgia). So if we want to collect enjoyable experiences, then we should be looking at collecting the most memorable and optimal experiences, which would involve sensory novelty and other people interspersed with long periods of waiting / wakeful rest to devote to memory. I actually wrote a post on here a bit ago about how the optimal life certainly consists of optimal memories; if all we wanted was pure pleasure then we would simply inject heroin and then die, because time/memory wouldn’t matter, but we don’t do this.

A fourth order analysis would be, like, what will produce less guilt? Society judges people by experiences and creations. You can play zero games and never have a wince of guilt, because society will likely not judge video games as a facet of a fulfilling life.

I’m pretty sure videos games are objectively inferior to their real life equivalences always. So, permitting you can do the real life alternative activity, you shouldn’t play video games. The competitive fun is best found in team sports. The adventure is best found in nature and one’s own life. The memories are best made with friends. The novelty is best spent on wisdom.

Productivity doesn’t factor into this at all. If your object of life is Superior Enjoyment, then it’s simply the case that real life offers superior enjoyment. Because when you’re done playing team sports, you have had fun plus some. You had a fun experience you don’t regret, and you’ve also had necessary socializing, sun light, nature exposure, and exercise. An hour spent on team sports is always going to be better than an hour (or even three hours) of gaming, in your unhealthy room, staring at pixels, not moving your body, alone, unchallenged, etc. The memorable adventures in reality are always better than in video games or books. The exploration of wisdom is always of greater benefit than anything in Oblivion.

Note that Abrahamic religions are against gambling and other vices, but don’t have a word to say on productivity. Christ doesn’t care whether you work hard at your job, and in one parable even seems to commend a man who wastes his boss’s money to make friends. The argument against video games is all about the fact that its enjoyments are base, lowering, and fleeting. They are inherently inferior than real life alternatives, and the base pleasure lowers your sum total enjoyment. In a year’s time you will be measuring your real experiences, not your dumb video game exp.

I think many Arabs look like they have African admixture, and indeed the evidence says they do:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707606302

We have analyzed and compared mitochondrial DNA variation of populations from the Near East and Africa and found a very high frequency of African lineages present in the Yemen Hadramawt: more than a third were of clear sub-Saharan origin. Other Arab populations carried ∼10% lineages of sub-Saharan origin, whereas non-Arab Near Eastern populations, by contrast, carried few or no such lineages, suggesting that gene flow has been preferentially into Arab populations. Several lines of evidence suggest that most of this gene flow probably occurred within the past ∼2,500 years. In contrast, there is little evidence for male-mediated gene flow from sub-Saharan Africa in Y-chromosome haplotypes in Arab populations, including the Hadramawt. Taken together, these results are consistent with substantial migration from eastern Africa into Arabia, at least in part as a result of the Arab slave trade, and mainly female assimilation into the Arabian population as a result of miscegenation and manumission.

Ambition is a strong desire for socially-evaluated achievement, almost always involving peer competition. Some of this is probably personality, and some of this is probably learned and honed. It’s a useful construct, why not? There’s a nice documentary on Netflix about Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is the embodiment of ambition. His entire life was about dominance over competitors, many of whom were peers that did not necessarily see themselves as competitors. This “ambition” drove him to be a top bodybuilder, then a millionaire in business, then a top actor, then governor of California.

Ambition, then, is the overzealous pursuit of gain. It’s going full Conan the Barbarian. The problem with ambition is that (1) it’s zero sum, and (2) it’s narrow-minded. A society filled with Schwarzeneggers would terminate itself. The dominance-hungry who fail would self-implode and lash out, and all the necessary thinking and consideration outside dominance would not get done.

I don’t think there’s much utility in having information memorized versus having it nearly organized in your phone by topic, but for maximal memorization you’d have to go the route of

  • Anki, or other spaced repetition software

  • Memory Palace

The memory palace method was common among intellectuals memorizing information for almost two thousand years, and Anki is used among doctors.

Right, I’m obviously not going to watch a random YouTube video, but here’s the archival research of a top institution in foreign policy studies

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early

U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University

Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” (See Document 6)

Afterwards, Baker wrote to Helmut Kohl who would meet with the Soviet leader on the next day, with much of the very same language. Baker reported: “And then I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? He answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real thought to all such options [….] He then added, ‘Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’” Baker added in parentheses, for Kohl’s benefit, “By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.” (See Document 8)

Do you want to provide your ideas instead of linking to YouTube videos?

The idea that one is not threatened by a neighboring state because there are other neighboring states unaligned with Russia doesn’t make sense. I am not threatened by five enemies because I have four? But it makes especially little sense given: the important of flat eastern Ukraine for invasion, and the importance of the Black Sea for Russia. America may very well have been threatened by the Saudis funding radical Islam, but that doesn’t mean they can just blow up Saudi Arabia. Instead we settled on lesser Arab countries.

neutrality would have meant that Ukraine will always remain weaker

Ukraine is small, it will always be weaker, but now it will be destroyed. This argument doesn’t hold up to either the predictions made years before (they will be annihilated), or the present data (look at the birth rates). “I will either attempt to be more significant than I am or be destroyed” is a recipe for narcissistic ego death.

Russia violated the

NATO violated the promise not to expand east as part of the negotiations involving German reunification.

No, the invasion has.

Yes, the invasion that was promised for years because of the sequence of actions that NATO + NATO-influenced Ukraine took. This is like when the Mongels invaded Iraq and destroyed Baghdad after Baghdad slew their emissaries. Sorry Baghdad, you don’t get to “be sovereign” against the Mongols, just like Cuba and Iraq don’t get to “be sovereign” against America. This isn’t how reality works, and indeed it has never worked like this in the whole history of nations. Cause and effect is a much clearer way to understand what is best for America and/or Ukraine.

Can you flesh out your argument for why it was the smart thing to promote Ukraine entering NATO, rather than negotiating Ukraine as a neutral region? Given that this was their red line since the early 2000s, I have no idea how someone could consider it “appeasement”. It seems to me that the worst case scenario has transpired: our continual pressure and influence in Ukraine has destroyed the country, probably forever (given fertility rates), has cost enormous sums of money, has wasted American influence in Ukraine, has pressured Russia into developing better drone technology, has finalized the alienation of Russia from the West, has influenced Arab nations into cozying with Russia, and all we get in return is some dead Russians, and maybe we will increase German weariness to America given we destroyed their pipeline. This was a bad decision, unless we only care about dead Russians. What will we gain in five years from it all?

I think what’s missing in your worldview is propaganda. Their point is really that Americans should focus on the Hunter texts; by accusing this as a psy-op they are drawing a connection between the Wagner events and the Hunter texts. They are claiming it is a distraction but what they mean is that we should be focusing on the evidence that our President is woefully corrupt.

Whatever patience I had with American "anti-establishment" right-wingers

Probably very little to begin with if you’re conflating millions of people with a discursive propaganda technique of a few Twitter accounts

TheMotte is probably going to be self-selecting for the cohort least likely to have an imaginary friend, in a similar way that 19th century scientists self-selected for those who did not typically visualize with the mind’s eye (see Scott’s essay on that, whose title I forgot). A hyper-rationalist offshoot is probably genetically influenced to be less social, or at least not so social that their mind creates for themselves imaginary companions. How many of our parents were hyper-social butterflies who conceived of the world in primarily social relational experiences?

https://dacemirror.sci-hub.ru/journal-article/d377cfd09d86cd27a6b469d4af9998be/klausen2007.pdf?download=true

Metaphysical explanations for pretend companions are not at all limited to the wast because, to some extent, they have existed even in recent times. Studying pretend companions in the early 20th century, Harvey (1918) found that many parents provided spiritual explanations for pretend companions. Even at the end of the century, some groups within America still described pretend companions in terms of possession and as preternatural powers that sometimes "will result in spiritual bondage" (Anderson, Vanderhook, & Vanderhook, 1996, p. 196) or that need to be exorcized (Allison, 2000). Perspectives on pretend companions from before the Euro-American repudiation of metaphysical explanations may also be inferred from research conducted in villages of Northern India (Barker & Pasricha, 1979): Pretend identities, a phenomenon similar to pretend companions in which an imagined personality is assumed rather than projected by the child, were explained in terms of spiritual connections with previous lives. Research in India on pretend companions suggests another reason why few reports of pretend companions have survived from previous centuries. Mills (2003) reported that there is no recognition of the concept of pretend companions in India.

Even when allowing for the belief that some children have interactive memories of past lives, the prevalence of pretend companions was calculated to be only 0.2% (Barker & Pasricha, 1979).

Early research in 1930s reported a 13% prevalence: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1935-01508-001 . 1969 reports 30%: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1970-02218-001 . We also have a study from 1930s (Harriman) alleging one-third of all children have imaginary friends

So I’d say that there are three possibilities:

  • The first is that this is learned from media (very unlikely given that the earliest research shows a prevalence despite its absence from media)

  • the second is that it is culturally transmitted and children are “practicing” the skills in the form of play, because Western culture was more friendship-oriented than other cultures, and permitted children to play

  • the third is that Europeans are genetically oriented to be more social in the form of fraternal bonding. This would fall in line with what we know about European history, religion, art, dance, and music culture. There’s also the prevalence of blue eyes in Europeans, which is found only in domesticated animals [goats, dogs, some foxes], and blonde hair, which is found in the more social and friendly dog breeds [compare: “golden retriever boyfriend”].

The Titanic heroine is every woman’s dream. She is a wealthy and sought-after nubile. She has a wealthy fiancé who represents maximal resource and power, a wealthy father as well, and gets to have an affair with the handsome DiCaprio who represents maximal youth, vigor, and primal sexual desire. This is a combination of Zeus, Apollo, and Adonis, the children of the Titans all on board the Titanic. Our heroine gets to choose the best of all worlds. She has the affection of the two competing interests of the fertile women.

But the movie doesn’t end there. The smut (and the movie is emotional pornography) piles on. Because our heroine has all the right decisions made for her. She is captivated by DiCaprio, her interests momentarily cut in two like the Titanic, but she gets to leave him frozen in time while her “heart goes on”. She gets everything out of him that she wants while getting to keep her privileged status. The iceberg and the icy sea represent this process of freezing into memory. The female viewer takes away that she could have his child, while also retaining a powerful and resourceful upper class position.

Lastly, she’s the victim, while also looking superior to her peers. What more does a woman want than this? All the money, the vigorous male, the damsel distressed, and finally the superiority over the men guiding her. There is nothing more to add.

Obligatory Zizek: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9DocwBZyESU . The true tragedy would be if Jack survived, they had sex for a month in New York, and then she is hanged to try. Lastly, this emotional processing in the Titanic allows the modern woman to put Jack to death in her own life, much like the Christian can behold the Passion and put sin to death. You have been baptized in the frozen sea with Rose and buried with Jack, and now you can put away forever the delusions of youth.

This would be excellent PR for Zuckerberg.

Fun article I found: East Asians rarely have imaginary friends as children, whereas Westerners have imaginary friends at a prevalence of 50%. On the other hand, East Asians are more likely to personify inanimate objects. The authors say that this is for cultural reasons, but i’m actually leaning toward deep genetic differences in tendency — Western religion, poetry, and music are much more likely to extol brotherly affection than those of East Asia, which (imo) favors an emphasis on place, natural objects, and strict hierarchy.

If I’m a person who rides the bus daily, the thought is not trivial

I would argue that it only appears axiomatic because it was useful for the millennia humans lived in tribes where a small action to a neighbor or stranger benefitted the group’s sum total good (including expansion of lands and progeny down the line). If the well-being of my descendants is inherently tied to the well-being of the person down the street, which it is in pre-modernity, then the rule of always helping neighbors or strangers is optimal for the group’s good. Today, spending even an iota of thought on a stranger is worse for your own group’s interest, unless you are picking and choosing who to help.

Perhaps an equivalent example would be how there’s a difference between doing extra help in a group project, and then secretly helping a competing project.

No, see:

as they have a natural interest in colorful things and unique identity marks that give social reinforcement

Re:

There is a huge difference

But therein lies the rub. It’s not a huge difference at all. It’s a little difference. The difference between being molested by a gay man physically, and being put through a gauntlet of pro-homosexuality propaganda, is not actually different from the standpoint of “how reinforcement works psychologically”. If I watch Alizee’s performance of J’en ai marre as a boy I may become hopelessly infatuated with dancing French brunettes, for no other reason than an association was placed in my mind. This happens all the time: associations predicated on reinforcement.

The alternative is that we demand native birth rates to increase, or, you know, East Asians and Hindus and Igbos

Conservatives should restrict mainstream Muslim immigration because (1) mainstream Islam is impossible to reform, (2) mainstream Islam believes that music is sinful, (3) there is no proven longterm assimilation of mainstream Muslims, (4) Muslim nations oppress Christians and so why on earth would we allow any to migrate to predominately Christian lands. Of course, this has nothing to do with LGBT stuff, but it’s vastly more important, isn’t it? Imagine a religion that would gladly burn every trace of Bach and Mozart. I would gladly burn any trace of that religion!

I’m expanding on my comment because you asked a question, and in any case the rainbow flag is a symbol of the whole LGBT enterprise. The question is whether childhood experiences and culture can influence sexuality. There’s evidence that it does:

  • gays are more likely to have been molested in childhood

  • boys like the bachi bazi culture in Afghanistan, who are picked regardless of orientation in childhood, grow up to be gay: According to Khan et al. (2009, p. 24), bacha bereesh appear to predominately “grow up to follow a sexually active pattern as receptive males, self-identifying with their femininity and receptive role” as a “third gender” within a trinary gender system of man/woman/non-man

  • it’s common knowledge that childhood experiences can result in lifelong philias, whether this be the appearance of a mate or a sexual activity

So, IMO, it is established that childhood sexual experiences mold adult orientation. The remaining question is whether reinforcement of sexuality in childhood molds adult orientation. This needs to be studied, but I am positive that it does to some degree, because that makes sense based on what we know about reinforcement.

I’m positive that in the formative years where their sexualities and preferences and philias develop (remember it’s not unusual for people to have fetishes they trace to childhood), that these things are causing some percentage of boys to become gay:

  • Having special days where you show only the positive role models of gays, no evil members, and no positive straight members, which artificially increases gay positive valence

  • Having a colorful flag for gays and no colors and no flag for straight people. For children, color = objectively better. Color is an objective “attractive marker”

  • Giving special esteem, attention, and “interesting points” to gays

Not only is it public obedience, but it’s public obedience that is inherently interesting for children, as they have a natural interest in colorful things and unique identity marks that give social reinforcement. It is certainly making some percentage points of the children gay, the only question is what percent.

[5] Tax the extremely wasteful top 10% of urbanites that exist in every country, who spend their money on lavish vacations and hedonic treadmilling, and instantiate a subsidy for healthy food stuffs so that that every family can buy cheap healthy food.

If it’s a small island nation, it probably does not need to protect the environment like a nation like Brazil. If it’s prosperous, it doesn’t need to grow its own food. The national security vulnerability can be dealt with by simply stockpiling non-perishables.

The original Halo, playing it in like 2002. The story was super compelling and thrilling. The beginning of Kingdom Hearts, the island where the protagonist lives, was a great part of the story

The Terror, Chernobyl, Utopia (the UK channel 4 show from 2013), season 1 of Twin Peaks, Scrubs for its moralizing.