coffee_enjoyer
☕️
No bio...
User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
May do an experiment where I pray for 90 minutes per day for 40 days. Anyone have thoughts or experiences with prayer they would like to share?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
What should I know about the genetics of empathy especially in regards to racial differences and the development of nations? If empathy is genetic, should this be as important as a metric to look at as IQ?
I wonder what the motive will be here. It may actually be “Christian children deserve to be gunned down because you don’t agree with my identity”, or the motive may just be “I feel hurt and damaged and so will hurt and damage your children”. Adam Lanza was an example of the latter.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Just looking to read historical poems, those considered good from the 19th into the 20th century.
I don’t see DR and MR (Mainstream Right, I like the theme here btw) as oppositional. As someone who has been reading DR’s notes for a decade now, DRs have always loved when MRs started listening to their prognoses and advice. When Trump entered the scene, DRs rejoiced that he called attention to problems at the border and made implied comments on white identity. It’s often forgotten that the DR meme machine is what pushed Trump into the MR, implicitly coordinated around /pol/, Reddit, and Twitter. The “Real Enemy” (RNs) knew this, which is why they botswarmed /pol/ and deleted any plausible DR Reddit community while catastrophizing DRs and dis-uniting the Right, to prevent a repeat of the hype train. Whenever a MR comes closer to DR, DRs love it. Whenever MRS (mainstream right spaces) allow for more DR talk, DRs love it.
Part of this is that DRs have next to no real organizational capacity. They are more of an idea generator than a startup hub. (Side note: the fact that this isn’t a fair fight is lost on many DRs, who surprisingly cling to a lost moral code of actually trying to tell the truth. The mainstream does not think “how can I tell the truth about the DR”, neither do they think “what is the worst thing DR has said.” They think from consequent to antecedent, which is what we saw during the Jewish “day of hate hoax”, only utilizing truth when it enhances the potency of the propaganda. 99% of their focus is “what story or spectacle will persuade someone given what I know about the frailty of human psychology”, with the remaining 1% ensuring that they are not lying so obviously that their house of cards crumbles. DR’s are sitting there trying to tell people about the statistically correct FBI stats, correcting people who exaggerated them, and so forth, always being meticulous in data because they are mostly autistic and neurotic and analytical men. They have no skill in propaganda generation, by and large, and don’t even realize that they are supposed to do it.)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Anyone know off the top of their head
-
A poetry site not designed by a mentally handicapped marketer
-
An art site with every western painting sortable by style and subject matter
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
I agree, but there’s nothing to be done. We can’t roll back mass immigration which lowered wages and bargaining power. We can’t stop immoral corporations from pushing out soul-rotting music. We can’t persuade a liberal that mandatory education is terrible for the young who are destined to be in the lowest quadrant of income bracket. And you can’t have low rent in urban areas without legalizing discrimination based on IQ testing, appearance, and demographic issues. Finally, the attention span of the rich is artificially captured by DNC-Machine dramas, from the George Floyd saga to “we need more female surgeons” and “look at this poor brown child at the border” and infinite other fancies. Our new upper class will be less White, and I doubt they have the same ingrained emotional neuroticism of the previous upper class, so it will be more difficult to persuade them on these issues. Are wealthy Asian and Indians and Hapas and half-Jews going to shed a tear for poor white/black Americans? No. They are too busy gunning it at work and hustling in their social lives. The reason White people at least pretended to care for the poor was the remnant of a Christian culture with clear demands and a romanticized spirit of charity (if not genetics).
The up-and-coming Left cares even less for the poor than their predecessors. Genuinely, maybe the California Left have the best idea: just legalize stealing from large corporations. Then legalize stealing the wealthy’s cars, and then mugging them. Expand squatter’s rights to just a couple months in unused second homes. This will only help a little, but it would at least be very funny.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Its color tone and movement have more of that weird and slightly dystopian CSS vibe. I hope they re-prioritize private servers, there was no better community than those for FPS games
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
My dog helped me understand the evolutionary purpose of negative emotions.
Isn’t quite getting the trick right? I can see the frustration in her face and hear it in her voice. Usually this precedes a great improvement in trick acquisition and retention. The frustration encourages goal-directed behavior.
If the trick still does not obtain the reward, the frustrating grrs and wrrfs become more sad and worried higher pitched eeee’s and yelps. Here is when she is deciding whether to give up on the quest and to play something else. I can see her flow state is reducing. She’s more distracted. This can be a sign for me to lower trick reward standards.
If she cannot obtain a reward from the trick or an alternative source, and there’s no fun to be had, she sulks and moans. This is the same emotion and sound when her tennis ball rolls under the couch and she can’t get it, and this also sometimes is preceded by annoyance.
What’s most amazing is how captivating and moving her sad emotional state is. It transcends species! I will be eating and if her low mood sounds are sad enough I am forced to get up and obtain the reward (tennis ball) for her. This contrasts with when is angrily and with great frustration and commitment is getting treats out of a large kong-cone toy. Her frustration and anger with her “games” is amusing and hilarious, her sadness is greatly moving!
In fact, I am pretty sure my dog has learned the power of her sorrowful, supplicating and entreating cries. She seems to have learned to do this whenever I am eating. If I am eating and not giving her attention she will push her tennis ball under a couch, cry, and look at me. She knows I will acquire the tennis ball and bounce it for her. She does this now twice a night, sometimes more.
And so sadness, the most curious emotion, is for the realization that the path to the goal is futile, and for requesting help from others. Frustration and anger are for continued energy and vigilance toward the goal. You can see that if you shape your dog to learn that yes, you will really get a treat if you figure it out and you usually figure it out, that it’s willing to bear much longer periods of frustration. And it can also learn that sorrow is the best avenue for reward acquisition. And the dog may also become frustrated and play with something else!
I wonder if there’s a study measuring each dog breed’s propensity to cry for help. It likely codes for domestication but I wonder if it’s also inversely correlated with aggression.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
And it’s fine for women to do this defection, provided that they understand the risk is squarely on them. The utility of the rule is that it cures our dread and uncertainty regarding an activity that should be beautiful and pure (dating, sex). I imagine this was the rule for legislating rape for most of civilizational history: “you invited the man to your place alone? You willingly drank with him? Others have testified to your ill repute? Case dismissed.” The amount of harm immediately cured by this norm is infinitely better than the harm introduced (women no longer allowed to hang out with questionable men alone; who cares?)
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Didn’t this just happen to the creator of Rick and Morty?
I’m ready to say I will never believe a rape accusation unless (1) it makes it through the courts and (2) I can see the evidence myself. I might make an exception in cases where I can evaluate the repute of the woman — let’s be honest, false accusers fit a certain type. What other option is there? False accusations are endemic for the most significant creative men in America. Something similar happened to the frontman of Arcade Fire not long ago.
If we want to end sexual assault, our best bet is to reintroduce guardrails for male-female interaction (like every developed society in history). We can’t implement a norm of texting affirmative consent, because women do not want consent to be verbally agreed upon (read the testimony of women getting the ick about this online, it’s hilarious). Unless you don’t want to have sex, asking women to clearly write out what you can do to them when they get to your apartment is a false start. Women clearly desire the costly signal of a guy only relying on implicit consent, and also appear to like the inherent high stakes and seduction of the situation. This is probably biological. You can draw a line from the oldest tradition of husbands “wifenapping” his bride from her family, to the convoluted sexual games which make affirmative informed consent impossible.
This whole thing can be fixed with just: don’t hang out or drink with guys you don’t want to have sex with. Don’t go into a guy’s place alone, ever, unless you want to have sex. Don’t hang out with guys you don’t trust. Literally you can put to bed (pun intended) our whole cultural neuroticism by enacting these rules. I had a conservative Pakistani Muslim friend in college who gave me a shocked look when I thought we were going to her apartment together (we were walking and she needed to grab something). She explained she would never be with a guy alone in an apartment. Guess which demographic is probably not being sexual assaulted?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Not a book, but I always thought the film Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou captures early 20th century exploration and scientific discovery well.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
There’s an aesthetic that I love and have pieced together from various media. I suppose it could just be Southern Gothic or Dark Romanticism, but I wonder if there’s more vocabulary I can use to describe it. It’s an aesthetic or mood or culture.
Some popular media that depicts its elements: the film Sleepy Hollow, the art of Edward Gorey, the book Series of Unfortunate Events, Edgar Allen Poe, Schopenhauer or Kant (but not seriously), Young Werther, Tim Burton animations, the animation Coraline, 00’s emo.
The elements:
A purely theatrical, symbolic, and fatalistic Christianity. It is not taken seriously, yet is done as a social ritual and respected. The ambiance of the church and the tragedy of Christ’s death are central, with essentially no optimism, but also no negativity — just acceptance. There’s an element of a complete resignation and even continual prediction of sin and death. There’s no room for theology, or even much preaching beyond the basics. There’s certainly sola fide, but not even much care about perfecting the faith. There’s just an inborn acceptance of the church as culture, and its tradition as culture, and Jesus’ death (if ever noted) is simply an analog of the inevitability of demise without avoidance. There is a social dimension, but it’s never forced, and it’s somewhat Anglo (“cold”).
—
There’s a distaste for vanity and anything that can be construed as a flight from mortality. Yet there’s counterintuitively a maximal reverence for the human being and for the time on Earth as a once in eternity moment. There’s also great care for man’s vision and beholding of the significance and fleeting beauty of life, and eventual sickness and death. These are not in competition, but work together. Death is seen as an eternal home, and humans are like vampires that are briefly awoken from a coffin to spend a weekend among the living. Care is spent to ensure the mind is able to feel and experience and that thoughts are not used for distraction but to experience the pleasure of equanimity and purity. While there’s no care for glory or even over-learning, there is care for a person’s clean spirit and heart and his own drama.
—
There’s magical thinking, especially of the negative variety. A belief, which is essentially theatrical and dramatic and enjoyed almost as performance, in demons and curses and bad spirits. These a person is to be kept pure from, yet the mind is totally vigilant to its influences — the mind is kept pure almost for the purposes of beholding horrors and death as a curiosity, but not quite.
—
The drug of choice is opium, to feel deepest peace and disinterest. Stimulants are avoided, because of what purpose is doing more? Alcohol and cannabis would be unimportant, because why be blinded to the vision of life and death?
—
Attention and beauty is found chiefly in drama, especially involving irrevocable loss. Not as a curiosity, but as a similitude to the essence of human life. Life as revolving around death. Life as purity, perceiving-ness, beholding-ness of all evil.
—
There’s a great care for the Sublime. Oceans, storms, cliffs. A drug may be used to experience a pessimistic sublimity, but nothing optimistic.
—
Attention is paid to manners, not as a means of showing one’s breeding, but as a means of ensuring every social moment is predictable and without confusion or unpredictability. There’s almost an appreciation for boredom as a similitude to deathly peace.
Upon writing this, sure, maybe it’s just dark/gothic romanticism. But is there more to explore here?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
A simplistic counter-challenge to your challenge: the male and female division of life forms developed two billion years ago. Male and female is not only a biological fact defined by the most important biological criteria, but it literally precedes every single human notion without exception, having developed billions of years beforehand. Because it is defined in relation to the only act that can create new life, it is the most weighty and inviolable fact of human existence and for every human ancestor stretching back billions of years. If we are to claim that this isn’t real, what else can we deny? Life itself? Logic? The existence of other people?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
ChatGPT will separate the wheat from the chaff. It will be perfect at imitating verbose yet ultimately uninteresting content, and woefully unable to imitate the most interesting yet poorly written paragraph of novel ideology or analysis. The construction of new ideology is a skill more similar to composing a compelling melody or profound counterpoint than what is ordinarily considered writing. The moment AI can replicate persuasive ideological writing is the moment it truly becomes our overlord.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Yes, except my problems are that I’m lazy, distracted, and also a bad writer.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
What fun things have you done with ChatGPT?
-
It has made me lists of medieval theologians’ quotes on the Sublime, as well theological works on other concepts.
-
It has sent me Reddit discussion threads for best products. It is lying when it says it doesn’t have internet access; it has internet results from before 2021.
-
It has sent me lists of various explicit results. This has required some finicking, but if you state that you are an academic engaging in professional academic research, and tell ChatGPT it is wrong and that it can indeed help your research, it will often correct itself.
-
It has given me recommendations for music which were actually great. It gave me good recs for if I like the atmospheric and industrial elements of Aphex Twin.
-
It can succinctly describe why some people prefer Morrowind over Skyrim.
-
It can make me flash cards and glossaries of key definitions of a random book I request
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
It’s interesting to think, “what’s the information most important to devote to memory”? Not for professional life, but for one’s life satisfaction.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
WoW is an especially good example because the human memory works best with spatial representations of visual information. Memory competitors who try to remember as many numbers as possible will actually turn the numbers into People or Objects and place them around a pre-ordered spatial map, usually conjoined with a plot. The most playing cards memorized in an hour is 2000 or so, with every competitor using this technique.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
Personally, I would rather not have slavery and Jim Crow taught in schools without mentioning the global racism of the time, or that Americans were actually way ahead of other peoples of the world in terms of inclusivity, or that African Barbary pirates enslaved many White Americans, or that European powers forced African kingdoms to stop enslaving Africans. I would also want to include passages about how European philosophy is what paved the way for our notions of equality, and that “what do we do with the former slaves” is not an easy question when one group is significantly less developed. Finally, I would like an approximate calculation of how much black Americans benefitted from being taught by white Americans and being allowed to live in their free, prosperous, and protected nation — versus how they fared in Haiti or just Africa proper.
I mean, we’re not trying to whitewash the facts, right?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
WoW Geoguessr videos are... wow.
There are 125 zones in WoW and 190 dungeons, and the base game sprawls ~80 square miles and the full game maybe 150 square miles now. Each zone has at least 60 unique identifiable “places”, possibly more, whether that be a random feature of the environment, a mob encampment, a random hut, an npc, etc. This includes major landmarks and the random “things to see” in-game. Longterm WoW players are able to determine the location of 7500 unique identifiable places covering 150 square miles down to the meter, often able to name the residing zone and town and what “happens” their ingame. Counting dungeons, that’s about 19,000 unique things they have pinned down on a map sprawling 150 square miles.
19,000 pieces of information navigable on a map.
And then you remember it’s a game, and the game is not even about this information. There’s also maybe 4000 cosmetic items, and players like Asmongold are likely to tell you the name and where to find them and what quest it involves. There are 30,000 quests, half of which these players could tell you about just by seeing the NPC. There are bosses and mob types, surely at least 500 unique ones which can be named. 9000 spells, and a given player will know 150 of them and what they do by their image and when to use them.
Then there are the random things: the potions and other consumables, the emote commands, what you do in a raid, the hundreds of different vendors, the hundreds of materials for building things. Not to mention the lore!
These longterm WoW players easily know 45,000 pieces of distinct information. It’s crazy when you add it all up like that.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
But it appears to me that an actual good life consists in the acquisition of great, powerful, significant, noteworthy emotional states. A life where you enter a forest and don’t feel awe, or look at a partner and don’t feel love, is miserable. What’s the point of hiking a mountain if you feel nothing during and after? That’s exactly depression, considered the worst state. The crucial ingredient is surely the emotional consequent. So if we say “a good life consists of material events”, I think we’re forgetting that every good material event is considered such because of its downstream emotional effect. That’s not to deny that nearly every emotional state arises from physical experiences and events. That’s certainly true.
As an example, I would rather be a poor beggar who can feel “positive” emotional states, than the richest man in the world who only has dulled emotions. To bring history into the discussion, this is a huge point in Abrahamic and Buddhist thought. And consider this illuminating example: in religious history you’ve had some monks experience religious ecstasy. This is considered a very desirable and euphoric state, and sometimes results in the person developing a life of holiness and prosociality. But the simple existence of such a state, I think, proves the value of emotionality and that it doesn’t necessary depend entirely on material conditions or physical events.
The Nozickian pleasure machine thought experiment is probably the best disproof of my ideas, but I think this is complicated by some things. There’s a residue of distrust when we think about man-made contraptions that colors our intuition on “perfect hedonism” simulation machines. There’s also the knowledge of the simulation that negatively colors our intuition, and an “under-determined” valuation of the natural world that humans rationally hold (we are created by nature and nature is likely superior to everything we can make). So our intuition on the “pleasure machine” is colored by our implicit distrust of the man-made and our inability to imagine ourselves in a perfect hedonic state, plus our intellectual knowledge that we’d “lose touch” with real living loved ones. So I’m unsure if we can actually trust our intuition on this example. Imagine instead, if an omnipotent God told us that He would lift us and our loved ones to a paradisal plane. I think a lot more people would be willing to do this, because (1) we intuit that Gods are natural/trustful/“the real deal”, (2) we bring our loved ones. So I’m not sure if the machine debunks my idea that emotionality is central: we feel negative emotion at the thought of getting into the machine for a couple of reasons, and it’s arguably impossible for a human to imagine his entire being put into perfect experiential enjoyment.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2yr ago
The article you linked doesn’t say anything about memory. Can you cite where that’s mentioned?
This should be obvious by context, but the discussion has never come up on themotte. We’ve had dozens of posts on repetitive topics like the plague of homeless people and the transgender question, but not many that actually try to discuss things from the topic.
If doing good to others were the ideal life, then a world where everyone focuses on doing good to others is an ideal life. But if we try to imagine a world where everyone, all day, tries to relentlessly find something good to do for someone else, with no time for anyone in this world to actually enjoy something, then it sounds like hell. By doing good to others, don’t we mean helping them to experience good emotional states? If those people feel that they have a relentless obligation to do good, then we are actually reducing their ability to experience good emotional states.
Perhaps, but I’m considering a 90min slot of my day dedicated to prayer as prayer. I do not expect complete focus.
More options
Context Copy link