nebuchanezz4r
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User ID: 4014
nebuchanezz4r
2mo ago
This is one of those moments where you realize how exposed we are to overconfident talking heads who either calculate how much they can get away with or genuinely believe what they're saying and are unwilling to tread lightly, because who's going to retroactively audit all of their claims?
nebuchanezz4r
3mo ago
Just started Machiavelli's "The Prince". Man, it is dry, but it's fun to read about someone hundreds of years ago giving advice on imperalism. Some of the doctrine you can still see in action today so I guess certain things haven't changed.
nebuchanezz4r
4mo ago
Glad to hear you're doing better!
I just wanted to say that over the years I've realized we all need different things. I'm someone with an addictive personality, who soothes their anxiety with high dopamine habits. Leaning into the habits causes me anhedonia, and so I work to avoid these super-stimulations. When I recognize these unhealthy practices and reduce their frequency or dispel them altogether, I am a lot happier, more social and more productive. It can be difficult to avoid what we gives us pleasure, but if we know it's unhealthy for us, that means there must be other things out there that we can enjoy more without making us depressed.
Those depressive states are hard to recognize and act in, but perhaps something triggered it, and then perhaps a cascade after that. Recognizing that could help. I'm happy to hear you came out of it.
nebuchanezz4r
4mo ago
Spot on! We haven't even perfectly defined consciousness ourselves. If we could theoretically map it, and then compare that to an LLM's "map", we could say "Our latest model captures 33% of base human cognition. It possesess 34 billion cognitive nodes with an average of 7,000 connections each, at a 95% efficiency transfer rate. Using our latest measurement tools, Qualia are now consistently detected at low level wavelengths, along with intuition and mortality salience."
Unless there's a freaky discovery that points to some quantum soul or unreplicable uniqueness that humans possesss it's just a matter of time before our tools catch up with our reality and we start representing our minds with numbers that will map them in totality.
nebuchanezz4r
4mo ago
Refreshing take, if for no other reason than to oppose the thousands of overly-confident analyses flooding my media everyday. I too think that there are a lot of things we don't know, and that time will tell of the true downstream effects. By that point however, many will have forgotten who made what claim and the cycle of opinionated arrogance will continue. I don't have the knowledge to discern if your take is more or less accurate than what I read but it's simply nice to hear.
nebuchanezz4r
5mo ago
I've been training Muay Thai for 10 years and coaching for 4.
Not only do men start at a higher baseline, they also respond better to training over a set period of time. If you take a man and a woman of similar height, weight and age, the man will have advantages in three traits:
- Raw strength
- Bone and Muscle Density
- Explosivity
The first means that any strength for strength activities will go the man: grappling, jostling, pinning, etc. The second means that men can dish out more damage, because force = mass x acceleration, and denser bones and muscles mean more mass. It also means that men can take more damage, because density resists manipulation, i.e. muscles don't tear as easily and bones don't crack as easily. The third and most important trait means that not only can men express more force in a shorter amount of time, resulting in more damage, they can also perform other fighting actions quicker: movement, defense, reactions, etc.
As I mentioned before, this is just the baseline. Over time, men will respond to training better than women on average. They will become more dangerous, able to express their advantages in more effective ways. And these are just the physical explanations. Mentally, men seem to have an animal like ability to deal damage, take damage, and enjoy it.
All this to say, the deck is stacked against women. In order to overcome this asymmetry, the skill differences needs to be significant, which I have seen plenty of times to be fair, but it's not common. These differences are important to know so that training can be shaped accordingly. When men and women spar together, due care and understanding is paramount so as to prevent injury. When women compete against other women, strength and conditioning makes a larger difference than when men compete with other men.
I agree with this. Hindsight is of course 20/20, but travel back to the pandemic itself where government officials had insane levels of pressure coming from every direction. In a pandemic under a democracy, how do you keep:
- your economy running
- your health infrastructure from collapsing
- people from panicking
- approval ratings from falling
- your politcal party happy
- the infected from entering your country without pissing anyone off
- the infected from leaving your country without pissing anyone off
Add to this the crazy amount of data coming from every which way (including social media stoking the fire) and the constant comparisons to neighbouring nations who were either doing it right or wrong and it's no wonder that such a shit show of half-measures ensued.
The IRGC’s grip on power has strengthened, or at least not weakened. In Khamenei’s son it has its preferred candidate in power, at least nominally (it may be the institution rather than the man who is in power, but it doesn’t really matter).
Is this true? I thought most of their leadership has been completely wiped out, and that the state of Khamenei's son is dubious at best.
According to various sources, more than 80-90% of Iranian mine laying speedboats and other platforms are still operational.
That does sound annoying, but a coast / strait seems easier to police than a bunch of caves on land. How long can Iran disrupt a very important shipping lane while the US navy is hanging around? France just sent an aircraft carrier to the Mediterranean and the UK is sending an air defense warship. This play also seems like all that Iran has left. They aren't launching as many missiles anymore. I will concede that on the ground, I don't know how regime change will happen without ground forces. Unless there's some internal militia that can force IRGC out, someone is gunna have to go in.
If anything, this is good practice for the US military should China try anything in the near future. Weakening Iran not only strengthens America's and Israel's position in the Middle East, it also disrupts China's and Russia's. This joint-operation between the US and Israel seems like a huge power-play set to benefit both. In the last year, the US and Israel have showed that with intelligence and airstrikes, they can basically swoop in and smoke air-defenses and dissident leaders within a week of operation (albeit, not against a major power yet). The only question I have is, who is set to benefit from this more, the US or Israel?
nebuchanezz4r
8mo ago
Although I agree with the fact that either end of the doomer spectrum is probably wrong, I have a hard time feeling good about AI and the future.
I will grant that the benefits of AI could be massive. Breakthroughs in the right hands will yield almost infinite positive possibilities. But how do we get to this altruistic future when so many nefarious actors are in the way? There are already some very rich and powerful people who wield techology to influence the voting habits of entire countries. Think of the possibilities for healthier food, efficient supply chains, medical breakthroughs, solutions to societies burning issues, yes, but also think of the possibilities for deception, social hijacking, wealth disparity, monopolies, and any other tactics used today, but multiplied by the power of AI.
I currently don't see how things will settle into a peaceful and supportive existence for all.
I think something as fundamental and rich as social interaction needs to be treated as sacred. There are very clearly people in the world who, for any number of reasons aren't interested in or cannot interact socially in a skillful way. Some of the reasons you've touched on and ones that I've thought about are:
- Genetics
- Trauma
- Social Environment (did you grow up in a setting with skilled socializers? is your current setting conducive to positive socialization?)
- Awareness (could be related to the above as well, but are you aware of how you socialize and what do you think of that?)
- Current physiological state (stressors, psychological weights, health, etc.)
- Indifference (they know and they don't care / it doesn't affect their survival)
I definitely think that our world is supporting in-person social interaction less and less as the years go on. I mentioned "rich" earlier because I believe that physically being around people has way more nuance and minutiae than it's virtual counterpart, which I'm sure isn't even controversial. Body language, tone of voice, the physical space, the collective energy. So we must support positive Social Environments (which is a TALL task).
But I think an even taller task is dealing with trauma and awareness. You mentioned people talking over on another, only relating to themselves, something I experience everyday and it drives me mad. To me that means they aren't at all genuinely interested in the other person. They are only interested in surviving the social interaction by trying to relate things to themselves rather than expound upon what the other person has to say, which is what's important and fun for that person. Now of course, this could be a function of the other person being unpleasant to interact with. Maybe they are a selfish and shallow socializer, so why would we be interested in them? I think this touches on your point about "nutrition". Social health is a matrix that everyone participates in and if you find yourself shouldering more of the load you'll adapt to the people around you by either becoming them or hiding from them.
Even though Bourdain was the reluctant champion of wannabe vagabonds everywhere, I don't think this travel writer's Come to Jesus moment makes him a loser. It's no secret that he struggled mentally and his lifestyle offered a soothing escape, but after becoming close with a few bohemians over the years I think their brains are just wired different. There's less overthinking and more acting on impulse and desire. They are well traveled, and often end up spending large chunks of time in other places. They take on projects related to food or crafting much easier than I do, and they spend more time with people or pursuing their interests like thrifiting, gardening, or random stuff around the city. It seems to me that they are just following their natural inclinations.
It is of course, a double-edged sword. They aren't as financially stable, and with the risks they take and the analysis they forgo, they make mistakes, get burned, and suffer the consequences. But they are always experiencing and learning. They seem more grounded in lifestyle and conversation than your typical type-a desk-sitter. I'm currently trying to take some of their mentality into my own thinking so that I can expand my life experience.
It may be attractive to limit Bourdain to a mentally-ill escapist, and reduce his followers to misguided idealists who run from their problems and look down on the well-adjusted, but as always, the picture is much more nuanced than that. I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking. Ideas are getting tortured down into their simplest form so that they can be packaged neatly and shipped to their loyal customers.
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