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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Following the recent discussion about LSATs on X I tried taking a practice one and, without any preparation etc. skimming through it, got a 176. I have a GPA of 3.5 (could probably be raised to 3.7ish).

  • What are my chances of getting into Big Law?
  • With that in mind, what are my chances of accomplishing anything? Putting aside money etc. I see lawyers in the US as to some extent modern warriors--they are the front line against government overreach. Is there a real possibility to contributing there, or is this a course that should only really be pursued for the money, unless you're at the extreme limits of talent?

Perhaps someone at the FedSoc can help you work backwards from your career goals to the necessary law school application.

How old are you? If you can raise it to 179 or 180 you have a solid (say 30%) shot at the top 6 if you’re also charismatic and good at interview, which in turn means that you can hustle for the top tier of clerkships, big law jobs etc.

But it’s still insanely expensive, 2 years of not making money or developing a career, and no guarantee of wealth, power or (particular) status.

25. I've actually been working as a software developer for a few years--this would be a return to college. Have maybe $300k saved up. Though, I think I'd be better off investing that money and taking out a loan to pay for the law school.

I don't think it would make sense for me to do this for money; tech is an easier road for that. It would be more to contribute to the conservative lawyer army. If I didn't make it big I'd be seriously curtailing my potential (my current tech job is already better than the average lawyer job, and that's before going to school for another 4-5 years), and if I did I'd probably make a little more money than I do now and have much worse quality of life. It's not worth it unless I can meaningfully affect public policy, which is why I ask how much of a need there is for that in the first place, and how talented one needs to be to compete at that level. Extremely talented, like the average Harvard graduate whose LSAT I can probably beat, or off-the-charts talented?

Demographics are pretty much worst possible. Straight, white, male, Christian (Mormon, so I expect little help even from most Christian orgs), etc. What I have going for me is my work experience in crypto, my intelligence, and a pretty strong inherent interest in law. And some reasonably good connections with established lawyers I could probably leverage.

Fwiw, there is no conservative lawyer army. At best a division. Political donations by attorneys go 10:1 to Democrats. Law school professorships and biglaw very much reflect this. The 9% of non-left attorneys trend libertarian more than conservative.

The upshot is that if you somehow navigate the scylla/charybdis of top law schools and biglaw with your politics intact, and can land a clerkship with a conservative justice, you can probably turn that into a federal judicial appointment because there just isn’t that much competition.

That's pretty much what I want to hear. The less of an army there is the more they need me.

If the process really is

  • Go to school for a year or three to raise GPA
  • Study to get 179 or 180 on LSAT
  • Practice interviewing etc.

All for a 30% chance of having a chance at clerkships, though, that's pretty miserably unlikely.

A 179 or 180 is more than a 30% chance of admission. Stanford median LSAT score is 173 and median gpa is 3.8. They love 180s to counteract some of the legacy 165 scores. I’m not sure what the methodology is, but lsd.law/rankings says you’re guaranteed to get into Harvard Law with a 3.5 gpa and 179 LSAT.

Even if you don’t shoot for a top-10 school, you can turn a high LSAT into a full scholarship at a top-25 school. Some of the biglaw firms have HQs outside the Acela corridor, and they tend to recruit from well-regarded regional schools. E.g. some of the big Chicago firms prefer Northwestern or Michigan over Ivy League. Vanderbilt and UGA grads generally don’t have problems finding work in firms based in the southeast. You are also much more likely to make the network connections to conservative judges if you aren’t in Massachusetts or NY.

To follow on from rockbier1218's excellent question and the responses below, does anyone have experience or advice with joining a church as an atheist (or more generally, how I might get more community in my life?)?

I'm looking to get more community in my life, and the two realistic ways I can see to get it is either through church or through some sort of interest group. I've largely ruled out the second since I don't really share interests with the people in my area and most of these groups end up pretty transient in my experience. I do have a friend that would likely introduce me to their church if I asked, I just want to think it through before broaching the question.

To be honest I think I would have a happier life if I had the capability for religious belief. The below thread was quite thought-provoking, but ultimately I don't think I can convince myself out of materialism and this really isn't the sort of thing that it's possible to force, even if I don't have any issues with the orthopraxy.

Is it heretical to be interested in religion only for the material benefits? I'm not sure, perhaps this is the cross that I have to bear.

Have you considered joining a fraternal or service organization e.g. Freemasons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Rotary Club? They don't have the influence or membership they used to, but many are still around and eager for recruits. Some may require a basic profession of belief in a higher power to join, but it's a lot more vague and open to interpretation than becoming part of an established religion. Now it's possible that reaching out to one of these groups could result in a few elderly stragglers dumping the responsibility for maintaining a centuries-old fraternity on your shoulders, but that would still leave you with more to build on than trying to create a community completely from scratch.

If you’re ruling out interest groups because you don’t have the interest, you should rule out religious groups where you don’t have the religion.

Have you considered volunteering? Pick something that’s not too stressful or depressing, maybe gets you outside of the climate allows. My sister joined some sort of local team which cleans and landscapes the local parks.

I vaguely recall hearing (I think from Russ Roberts on EconTalk) that there is some debate in Jewish communities about whether belief in god is necessary for practicing Judaism. I vaguely recall him saying something about how there is no command in the Hebrew bible that people need to believe. I haven't done a whole lot of digging in to these schools of thought, so I don't really know if there are any communities like this or what they're like.

I had similar thoughts as you a while back. And I have decided against it. Although I do not lack community as much as you seem to. Personally, if you do not think you are capable of belief I think you shouldn't go there. Or at least not with the idea of it being permanent.

You may ask you friend to show it to you. But make it clear you are probably not gonna be religious. And may be you may find some folks who you befriend and then you do stuff with them outside of church?

I have attended a theological seminar instead of church. By the way it was majority atheist I think. It was very interesting. As a life long atheist I learned a lot about Church, faith, bible etc. But it had no affect on my faith. And in some cases the beliefs of religious people felt so alien to me. I learned that even though I usually agreed with them broadly, the reasoning or something felt a little off.

What is the best way to follow the Xiaohongshu excursion (short of signing up for and immersing yourself in it directly)? Is there a good window into it that has emerged yet? Some twitter or youtube account sampling it representatively?

Did anyone ever sample TikTok or Instagram representatively? What would they measure?

xiaohongshu
小红书
"little red book"

What did they mean by this?

Andrew was born on 1896-07-26, he celebrated his 7th birthday on 1903-07-26, when he was 2555 days old.

Bob was born on 1904-01-19, he celebrated his 7th birthday on 1911-01-19, when he was 2557 days old.

Charlie was born 1904-01-19, he celebrated his 1st birthday on 1905-01-19, when he was 366 days old.

David was born on 1904-07-26, he celebrated his 1st birthday on 1905-07-26, when he was 365 days old.

Did I make any mistakes?

That would depend.

Old style or new?

Checks out in lubridate, which I'm very confident works back until at least Friday 15 October 1582. I think it might even work before that, but would have to do a bunch of digging to be 100% sure what the first epoch it can check is.

You also picked the golden era where the Gregorian calendar reformations were locked in, but you don't even have to deal with leap seconds, UT1, UTC, ... etc if you want periods down to the second.

Given that you didn't correct me, I assume you think I am right. Thank you for taking the time, but precision to the day and dates in the 20th century is all I need.

Yes, your examples are correct. At least according to the date package I used:

> library(lubridate)  
> all(c(ymd('1903-07-26') - ymd('1896-07-26') == 2555,
+       ymd('1911-01-19') - ymd('1904-01-19') == 2557,
+       ymd('1905-01-19') - ymd('1904-01-19') == 366,
+       ymd('1905-07-26') - ymd('1904-07-26') == 365))
[1] TRUE

Any reason why we don't use laughing gas for executions? All you need it hermetically sealed chamber, throw the convicted inside, throw couple of whipping cream cannisters - like two or three gallons. Open them remotely. And it is anesthetic. Easy to procure and cheap.

Gas chambers got a bad rep. Also it's clownish and unbefitting.

More seriously, executions aren't complicated. It's pre-bronze age social technology. There's nothing in practical terms that makes it difficult or costly, it's a political and social construct to make them slow and expensive. Other people have different social constructs.

See what they do in Taiwan:

Executions are carried out by shooting using a handgun aimed at the heart from the back, or aimed at the brain stem under the ear if the prisoner had consented to organ donation prior to the withdrawal of legal death row organ donation.[27] The execution time used to be 5:00 a.m., but was changed to 9:00 p.m. in 1995 to reduce officials' workload. It was changed again to 7:30 p.m. in 2010.[28] Executions are performed in secret: nobody is informed beforehand, including the condemned. The condemned is brought to the execution range and the officers may pay respect to the statue of Ksitigarbha located outside the range before entering. Before the execution, the prisoner's identity is confirmed by a special court next to the execution range and chooses to record any last words. The prisoner is then brought to the execution range and served a last meal (which usually includes a bottle of kaoliang wine).[28] The condemned prisoner is then injected with strong anaesthetic to cause unconsciousness, laid flat on the ground, face down, and shot. The executioner then burns a votive bank note for the deceased before carrying away the corpse.[28] It is tradition for the condemned to place a NT$500 or 1000 banknote in his leg irons as a tip for the executioners.[28]

I was so disbelieving I checked the wikipedia source, apparently they really do tip the executioner (specifically the guys who take the shackles off the body after the shooting).

a bottle of kaoliang wine

How big a bottle?

It doesn't specify. But it's not weak liquor.

The perfect mix of religiosity and stone cold pragmatism. So Chinese, I love it.

Tipping your executioner is historically normal.

This is extremely based, although I maintain my preference for public executions for at least the more heinous class of crimes.

Hlynka-watch. Multi-agent environment.

There are at least two other relevant players exerting agency here. First is the group of folks who are simply opposed to any sort of death penalty on principle. One strategy they've taken is, instead of letting the argument be directly about the principle of the death penalty, focusing everyone into arguing about methods of execution. That you are even asking this question is a testament to their success on this goal.

Now, once they've gotten the focus onto methods of execution, they can focus on any extreme outliers. If there's even a 0.01% chance that someone will have an adverse reaction to something in some way, feel any anxiety or pain above the typical level, they latch onto it. They treat it like it's "possibly" the rule rather than the exception. They don't ever directly claim that it is such; they just say that perhaps sometimes things go poorly and hope the reader imagines statistics that aren't really plausible. See also arguments about unarmed black men being killed by police, abortion due to rape, or the focus on complications in the operating room preventing medical providers from providing prices.

The other relevant players are the executees. They don't want to die; this is only human. If they are aware that it is coming, they likely will have some amount of anxiety or negative psychological affect, and this may naturally lead them to struggle in any way possible in what may or may not be a vain hope that someone will make it stop.

Now back to the folks who are against the death penalty in principle. It takes no effort at all for them to interpret any outward sign of struggle as pain or whathaveyou. When Alabama used nitrogen hypoxia, a method that is used in Canada for doctor-assisted suicide specifically because it is so gentle, peaceful, and low risk1, you saw it all on display. An executee didn't want to die and knew he was going to die, so he struggled. Onlookers who don't like the death penalty can interpret that as something going wrong, pain, or whatever. So they write about how terrible it was and how everything must have gone so wrong compared to what they expected.

So unless you can win the argument of, "Yes, people may choose to struggle against their execution, even when there is no pain being imposed, and everyone just has to accept that and shut up about it," this is the problem that pro-death-penalty people have to solve. Unfortunately, the typical solutions to that are actually pretty ugly. See also ISIS, who would perform many mock executions that they wouldn't go through with, so that the executees would simply lose the will to put up a struggle every time, and hopefully they wouldn't realize which one was the real one in time to turn it back on. (Also heavy drugs; they definitely used heavy drugs which wouldn't be acceptable in the US.)

There are other ways to get around this, modifying your own protocol. Put someone in a room where you control the air content. They can even know that this is "the death room". Maybe they'll jump around and scream and put on a show, but your task would be to be able to clearly demonstrate to observers that during that time, they are absolutely receiving 100% pure, regular air, so that it is only a show, not any sort of 'execution gone wrong'. Then, when they've given up or maybe even gone to sleep or something, you turn on invisible, odorless gas, letting people observe that nothing wildly obviously painful occurred. Even if you did this, it is almost assured that the anti-death-penalty people would yet again move the goalposts, saying that it's not about the pain, it's about the psychological effects of however long they're in the room before they die, knowing that they're going to die in that room. There will always be a new set of goalposts and always a new impossible 'problem' that one has to solve.

It really is one of those, "JUST FUCKING TELL US HOW WE'RE ALLOWED TO EXECUTE PEOPLE." In a bizarro but hilarious world, the "King" would round up all of the most ardent opponents, lock them in a room, and say, "You're not allowed to come out until you tell us which method is the best method according to you. 'No method' is not an answer."

1 - You can see an example of the typical affects of hypoxia here. People report feeling perfectly fine and capable. My understanding is that even after the event, if you ask them to reflect on it, they think that everything was just fine and that they were perfectly fine; it's only when they go back and look at their own video that they're like, "WOW! I had no idea that it affected me like that!"

First is the group of folks who are simply opposed to any sort of death penalty on principle. One strategy they've taken is, instead of letting the argument be directly about the principle of the death penalty, focusing everyone into arguing about methods of execution. That you are even asking this question is a testament to their success on this goal.

You are wording this as if the underlying intention behind arguing about the execution methods were necessarily just to muddy the waters, sabotage the discussion or otherwise manipulate the majority into accepting what you believe to otherwise be an unpopular proposition (categorical prohibition on the death penalty). It doesn't need to be. A significant strain of categorical opposition to the death penalty is based on the belief that it taints and corrupts the society that enacts it - every murder you performed, endorsed being performed in your name, watched and enjoyed conveys upon you (whether as a metaphysical taint or a mundane acceptance of killing and torture, which could contribute to antisocial behaviour in extremis) a bit more of the murderer nature, regardless of how deserving the target was.

To be concerned about this in principle is hardly the innovation of an overly soft modern society it is made out to be - in fact, there are examples of medieval societies all over the world forcing executioners and sometimes even butchers to live outside the city walls and forbidding them from freely mingling with regular citizens. But if your primary concern with the death penalty is the psychological effect it has upon law-abiding citizens and you don't have the political power to prevent it outright, it makes sense to at least argue about the ways in which executions may be performed: surely a drawn-out sadistic public spectacle feeds the bloodthirst more than sheepish and clinical backroom euthanasia.

You are wording this as if

I would say that you are inferring it, instead. Everything you've presented is compatible with what I wrote. You described a plausible motivation for why such a person might take such a strategy.

...there is one quick check one can do, though.

surely a drawn-out sadistic public spectacle feeds the bloodthirst more than sheepish and clinical backroom euthanasia

One can simply ask such a person how they would feel about something like the nitrogen hypoxia room method I mentioned.1 Or to describe what they think would be the most sheepish, clinical, backroom euthanasia possible. Their answer (or non-answer) will likely be revelatory of their beliefs and views. It is left as an exercise to the reader to gather data and estimate relative population fractions.

1 - Could even go all Jewish on it and have the room be equipped with a fully autonomous random timer with some expectations on frequency so "no one is pushing the button"; could even just have no one watching the room at all if you want; could just come back to the room after some specified waiting period with some certain or almost certain probability that the deed was done. How sheepish can you come up with? Do you think your solution can satisfy folks who are motivated as you describe?

I personally am opposed to death penalty, except maybe in very exceptional circumstances like Nazi war criminals (where the process is kinda outside regular judicial system anyway) - but the situation right now is indeed ridiculous. That said, if I weren't - I would wonder why anybody needs to be able to observe the execution at all. I mean, I realize for example the victims may derive some feeling of closure from it, but I think if they want the guy (it'll be a guy, only one woman had been executed since 1953 in the US) dead, then they'd prefer that done unseen rather than not done at all. And, for better or worse, something that is not on TV (or now youtube) is something pretty much nobody cares about. I mean, horrible things may happen in prisons, but they are mostly undocumented, so people ignore it or make jokes about it (prison rape is one of the favorite targets). Not that I am endorsing any of it or am happy about it, but looking objectively it'd probably make it easier for people to accept.

Somebody has to confirm the process happened as intended- the law was followed, the person(and the right person) actually died, etc.

That happens anyway - prison medics confirm the death, prison guards ensure it goes as planned, etc. I am talking about involvement of people who aren't prison personnel that deals with the technology of it.

Are you suggesting that surviving relatives of a murder victim are legally required to view the murderer's execution? Because I would be surprised if that were the case. If you're simply questioning why these people would be granted the choice to view an execution, I think you've answered that by suggesting the right to be granted "closure," or, if not that, a sense of finality, or justice served--something they can see with their own eyes.

I think you've answered that by suggesting the right to be granted "closure,"

It's not a "right". At least not in any of the existing legal frameworks on the West. There are other frameworks where the kin of the victim had various rights as to prosecuting the murderer - from wergeld to vendetta, but in our Western tradition there's no "rights" with regard to that. It may be a custom, but customs can be changed. If the criminal is sentenced to prison, the victims do not get 24/7 video feed to his prison cell to enjoy his suffering, and do not get to control any details of his imprisonment except possibly in the parole hearing, so there's nothing that demands that this specific custom should be followed forever. I think for the proponents of the capital punishment it is an own goal to insist on keeping this custom.

In an bizarro but hilarious world, the "King" would round up all of the most ardent opponents, lock them in a room, and say, "You're not allowed to come out until you tell us which method is the best method according to you. 'No method' is not an answer."

After the words “round up” I thought this was going somewhere else, along the lines “You all will be executed by the method you yourself choose. The most voted for method gets adopted as the official standard.” Maybe pardon the subgroup who voted for the winning method? Need to game-theory this.

This will immediately be classified as a cruel and unusual punishment.

I can imagine a failure mode in that they could all discuss amongst themselves and agree to vote unanimously in favor of a painless method that creates gruesome results, in order to further discredit death penalty.

I'd say tell them that half of the people rounded up will be executed by the top method and the other half with the runner up. Do the executions one at a time, forcing the whole group to watch, alternating methods. After each two execution, have every one vote which one seemed to be the best, telling them that if either method gets a clear lead over the other (over 2/3 votes after at least 3 rounds / 6 executions), then everyone will get executed all at once with that method. Once that clear lead criteria is achieved, pardon everyone left.

The usual answer is that it’s easy to kill people cheaply and humanely in all sorts of ways, but most people don’t want to sell stuff for the purposes of executing people and the ones who are willing to get boycotted.

It's this.

Anesthesiologists know exactly how to kill someone reasonably cheaply and in a painless and not distressing way, it's why they have such a high suicide rate.

But finding people to sell the stuff required (and getting requisite professional staff to assist) is hard.

Then you add on the "finger on the trigger" problem (who wants to be the specific person who killed someone on purpose? Nobody you want doing it).

All this adds up to the weird dance we have.

In Utah, the condemned is offered the choice of execution methods(from a small number). All of them choose the firing squad, and firing squad executions are carried out by four volunteers from the police force, one of whom shoots a blank.

This seems like a way around both of these problems.

Huh. That's fascinating.

I wonder behind the psychology of that - wanting to stare death in the eyes?

They are usually blindfolded I think. But firing squad is also how I'd choose to go. Bullet to the brain seems like a quick and painless way to go. Most rifle ammunition is also supersonic, so you wouldn't even hear the shot. It also seems more dignified in a weird way. Its not laying down to go to sleep, its not sitting in a fancy looking chair. Instead it is standing until you are dead and then crumpling into a lifeless heap.

Mormonism requires the shedding of blood to atone for murder; I’m doubting that these death row convicts were practicing Mormons prior to conviction, but we can probably expect the condemned to engage in religious bet hedging.

ah, makes sense

What are the other methods?

Lethal injection authorized by law, probably hanging on a technicality. It's worth noting that executions in Utah are very infrequent, due to a low crime rate.

Then you add on the "finger on the trigger" problem (who wants to be the specific person who killed someone on purpose? Nobody you want doing it).

This specifically has a known solution, though: you take a citizen draft of say, 10 people, and you set things up so that they all have to take an action (pressing a button for example). Only one of the buttons actually works and it’s random every time.

It’s how they used to do firing squads: most of the rifles are loaded with blanks so nobody knows who the real killer is.

you take a citizen draft of say, 10 people, and you set things up so that they all have to take an action

Why not make the jury that condemned the person do this?

I’m (perhaps incorrectly) recalling a story of how they used to do it in Utah. I imagine because they want juries to deliver the correct verdict without worrying about having to carry out the execution.

Got it reversed- firing squads have one blank among several rifles.

Right, I think it works well for firing squads but as soon as you have ten people pushing buttons and only one of them work.....it just kind of looks stupid. Since the whole issue here is optics I'm not sure how to make that shake out.

Aesthetic reasons? Executions are srs bsns: it'd be undignified, and maybe a bit grotesque to carry them out with laughing gas.

Agreed. I favour long-drop hanging or firing squads (I would also include the guillotine, except that it's French) on the basis that they kill cleanly and reliably, avoid excessive pain, and make abundantly clear that what we are seeing is authorised violence, which it is.

Capital punishment is not a medical procedure and you shouldn't make it look like one. Capital punishment sometimes is a show, but it shouldn't be optimised for entertainment value.

Capital punishment is not a medical procedure and you shouldn't make it look like one.

Why not? When guillotine was invented, execution of the enemies of the state was a public spectacle that was explicitly designed to terrify and intimidate the population (and, to some measure, entertain it, with the idea that however bad you've got it, at least it's better than that guy). I think the government has since improved to a point where it has much more widespread and efficient methods to terrify and intimidate the population, and does not limit itself to the worst of the worst of the criminals anymore. So there's no point in spectacle, why not get rid of it and get to the end point of it with minimal amount of hassle?

I said this last time, but the main reason for executions requiring injuries "incompatible with life" delivered while conscious is to prove to the observers that a) it's really him, and b) he's really dead.
That's why even when hanging breaks the neck they wait ten+ minutes for the heartbeat to stop, then leave him a bit longer until everyone goes "yeah, he's not coming back from that."

I also suspect it's why beheading was a thing for the nobility. No conspiracy theories about how he paid the executioner to fake his death when you hold the head up afterwards.

a) it's really him, and b) he's really dead.

A body can be easily identified using DNA test. And the death can be established by any half-competent medic. If the victims are suspicious, they can get their own medic to check the body. Neither requires contemporaneous observation by any third party.

No conspiracy theories about how he paid the executioner to fake his death when you hold the head up afterwards.

Sure, it was tougher when you couldn't establish the identity easily. Any random asshole could declare himself miraculously rescued king X, and create a lot of mess. But now we can identify people. It's a solved problem.

Can people suggest a good way to learn the ropes of finance and playing markets? I am shamefully un-learned in these things. I would like to learn about how modern finance, investments, banking, markets, financial regulations, etc. all work. More from a pragmatic than from a theoretical motivation (I want to start being more of a capitalist and less of a wagie), but theory is good too.

From a pragmatic viewpoint, figure out how to buy index funds if you don't already know. Some questions to ponder: why do people prefer index funds over actively managed funds? Why is diversification good, and why is it bad? How do most actively managed funds perform compared to say the S&P500?

The personal finance subreddits have decent resources and wikis. To be explicit, if you are young I would suggest investing in an index fund, either US equities, S&P500, or a global tracker, and investing with the intention of staying in the market for at least 5-10 years.

First do that, then learn about calls and puts and leverage and alpha and beta and P/E ratios and all that stuff

You should read books.

I recommend Peter Lynch (One Up on Wall Street, amusing as well as informative) and Howard Marks (Mastering the Market Cycle) for starters.

Others have hopefully properly warned you off from becoming a day trader, YOLOing on 0days and HODLing TVIX. As for "modern finance, investments, banking, markets, financial regulations," a couple things I would recommend are Matt Levine's Money Stuff column in Bloomberg and Patrick McKenzie's Bits about Money. They're not what you would get if you pounded the textbooks, but they cover a pretty wide array of random happenings, at which point, they dig in enough for you to get a sense for how such folks think. Then, if there are any particular areas you're interested in, you at least have some of the right terminology to help you dive in more. They're also both hilarious.

Ah, the days of TVIX. One of my most interesting experiences in finance was the presentation by the risk manager who had stopped my then-employer from offering a TVIX-equivalent explaining just how XIV and TVIX died.

a couple things I would recommend are Matt Levine's Money Stuff column in Bloomberg and Patrick McKenzie's Bits about Money.

I second this recommendation, and add Byrne Hobart's The Diff.

There are various "stock market games" you can play online where you make investments with fake money and software tracks how you're doing. You'll quickly realize how quickly your money disappears when you put it in the market expecting quick returns. Unless you're looking to put your money into traditional investments and wait decades for it to grow, you might as well start playing ponies since they're about as predictable.

I don't think this is totally true. Unless you go full degenerate, the modal outcome of self-directed investment is lower returns while having wasted a bunch of time, or a level of outperformance so low that doesn't justify the amount of time invested, not ruin.

you might as well start playing ponies since they're about as predictable

As the old saying goes, if you want to bankrupt yourself, horse bets are the quickest way, women are the nicest and agriculture is the surest.

In the words of Sam Altman "you can just do stuff".

Of course, in the words of another sage "experience is a dear school", so don't expect the lessons to come cheap.

Playing the markets is probably negative EV, so I'd advice you to read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" before getting started.

So this is the opposite of a small-scale question, but similar to what I posted below, I’ve been going through somewhat of an existential crisis about mortality and the purpose of human life.

I want to hear all of your beliefs about the big mysterious questions. For my entire life until now I have been the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists. Surprise surprise that at 32 that doesn’t fill the god-shaped hole in my heart anymore.

I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is. Is the universe an eternal thing? Is it a simulation? How do you actually handle the hard problem of consciousness? The Fermi paradox?

Something that has been tempting me is Michael Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation, very similar to nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Essentially the bastardized argument is that if the universe is infinite in both temporal directions and you already were plucked from nothingness and given consciousness once, it will happen again even if the probability is infinitesimally small (because if time is infinite it’s bound to happen).

So what do you all think? What gives you comfort when pondering mortality?

As I see it, materialism is just confusing the map for the territory. Technically, everything is connected, so everything is one, and you cannot talk about anything in isolation (the thing-in-itself does not exist, it can't).

The concept "truth" only means reality (and this reality cannot be spoken about) or else it means the value "True" in logic, and all such truth values are just tautologies, and these tautologies follow from assumptions. In other words, you have a closed loop, the only kind of logic which exists is circular logic, it has no connection to reality, it's self-contained, which also means that it adds up to zero.

The only thing which actually exists is experience itself. It's not that our senses deceive while rationality helps us live in reality. What's the actual case is that everything comes from human senses, and that we made up rationality.

I've realize these things, and a bunch of similar things, so all the worries you have are syntax errors to me. There's no problems to solve, and all the questions are wrong. There's only a reality of which we cannot speak, but that's not even a problem. Millions of species have existed even before intelligent beings came to exist, so intelligence is clearly not needed in the first place. I think that wanting answers to questions is a symptom of anxiety, which results in a desire for certainty. It's easier to learn how to accept uncertainty than it is to bother yourself with impossible questions that even the most intelligent people in the world have struggled with. I don't even think you struggle with mortality, but rather with the idea of mortality or a perspective which is so zoomed out that it makes you appear small and meaningless (in which case, I recommend going back to experiencing life from your own body, with yourself as the center)

Edit: Also, aesthetics is enough for me, beauty gives me meaning. And if I'm not happy about life, I consider that a psychological problem and not a philosophical one. Existential questions are the symptoms and not the causes, I think.

For whatever reason, I never struggled with these questions as much as others seemed to, but I eventually settled into a Daoist sort of framework of "the world just is the way it is and what can we know about it?" Whether things are pre-determined by physical laws or whether I have a soul with free will or whether there are infinite copies of me out there someplace has no bearing on how I live my life or get on in my little corner of the universe. Or, as the Bard put it: "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances." Maybe some find it sad that there's no great cosmic destiny in store for them (but hey, I'm sure someone out there will be be the lucky one), but I never harbored any such delusions of grandeur.

That being said, if you truly want to feel a connection with the Way or God or whatever you want to call it, there are options such as meditation (the hardcore monastic kind where you fast and don't speak to anyone for days) or doing psychedelic drugs, but I can't tell you what sorts of answers you'll get or if they'll do you any good.

In 1921 Wittgenstein wrote a nearly incomprehensible book that, if i understood it correctly, puts forth the idea that trying to find definitive answers to questions like 'what is truth?' and 'what is justice?' is stupid. We might come up with a definition that we find personally amenable, but in creating this definition we have not made a discovery about the world itself. In rat-speak Wittgenstein might have said that trying to find answers to big mysterious questions is trying to map an unseen territory. My personal answer to the big questions is that the questions are stupid.

Despite this Wittgenstein did believe in God, and passionately, but rejected intellectual proofs. Whether that's enough really depends on what it is precisely that you're grappling with. Do you want assurances of immortality? Comfort in mortality? Belief that what you do matters?

In my opinion, it's relatively easy to "debunk" materialism. I'd recommend watching Bernardo Kastrup's playlist, he's the leading proponent of Idealism these days. In his version, which he calls Analytic Idealism, consciousness is essentially all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness instead of the other way around. This is the view I subscribe to now. Some version of this view has popped up throughout human history and across cultures, it's arguably the mainstream view amongst the more philosophical strands of Hinduism (like Advaita Vedanta), Kabbalah has some overlap, the German Idealists mostly believed this (especially Schopenhauer who wrote clearly enough to remove any doubt about the content of his beliefs). Unsure how respected Kastrup is in academia, but he's definitely the person responsible for popularizing it in the last 10 years. Philip Goff is another recommended watch, his interview on Alex O'Connor's channel makes his case for panpsychism, a slightly different view that is essentially physicalism but with the caveat that consciousness is an inherent property of matter and not an emergent property of the interactions between certain sorts of matter. I think this view requires more assumptions than analytic idealism so I don't subscribe to it. That being said, it does address some of the major problems with materialism.

The basic case for Analytic Idealism goes a bit like this (this is far from a rigorous philosophical proof but it will suffice for now, will try to answer any questions about it):

  1. We should prefer monism to dualism because it requires strictly fewer assumptions. Any dualist ontology has to explain how two fundamentally different substances interact with each other according to a set of laws, which suggests they might actually be the same substance.
  2. That leads us to the question of what the fundamental substance of the universe is, for which matter/energy and consciousness/spirit are the two leading candidates, where one has to be a phenomenon of the other
  3. The mainstream scientific view is materialism, the view that matter is the fundamental substance (FS), and consciousness is a phenomenon of matter. This leads to the Hard Problem of Consciousness as you mentioned. As I'll explain, I don't think the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a real problem that humans need to solve, just a problem for Materialism as a worldview. It's like saying "the Hard Problem of Geocentrism is explaining why Mercury is in retrograde if the Sun revolves around the Earth". The answer is that the assumption is wrong, the sun does not revolve around the Earth.
  4. The main problem with materialism is that epiphenomenalism, one of its corollaries, doesn't have any good explanation for it. Epiphenomenalism is the view that physical events produce consciousness, but because physical events are all that occur (under materialism), consciousness itself has no impact on physical events. But if consciousness doesn't "do" anything, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we should be conscious. If seeing a tiger produces a feeling of fear, and the fear triggers a response (us running away), then it makes perfect evolutionary sense why we're conscious (to experience fear, for example). But if the process of the photons bouncing off a tiger, hitting our eyes, triggering an electrochemical response that leads to our leg muscle fibers twitching is sufficient, the fear we experience is just there for no reason. This is where physicalists tend to disagree with me. They are content to say that the electrochemical response in the brain that eventually leads to us running away simply is the felt sense of fear. Why should this particular physical process also be a qualia whereas, say, a clock ticking isn't? It's not even clear what in principle we could discover that would explain this sudden appearance of 1st-personness from 3rd person phenomena.
  5. If Analytic Idealism, the monist view that consciousness is all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness, doesn't have an equivalently hard-to-explain problem, we should prefer it to materialism. The Idealist equivalent to the hard problem of consciousness is the Hard Problem of Matter: if reality is fundamentally consciousness, shouldn't there only be a single "self" and not seemingly separate selves? This is nowhere nearly as problematic because we have an example of a single field of consciousness segmenting itself already: dreams. In your dreams, a single field of consciousness (your mind) localizes a "self" within itself that experiences phenomena as being external to it. We can extrapolate that it's possible for a universal field of consciousness to segment itself into selves that perceive themselves as separate from each other.
  6. Therefore, the most likely ontology is Analytic Idealism

Something else worth considering are theories of personal identity. Who are you really? And what makes you you as opposed to anyone else? This link does a great job of summarizing the three primary categories of views: Closed Individualism (CI), Empty Individualism (EI), and Open Individualism (OI). The last of which I subscribe to now. OI takes the position that there is a single self. Every experience in the universe is experienced by this Universal Subject. It should be worth noting that these views are ontology-agnostic. This video by the late Mario Montano makes the case that Open Individualism should be the default perspective under physicalism as well as Idealism. Practically what this means is that "you", that is, your deepest identity and not just the one associated with the human reading this now, will never die. But you should live as if everyone is you, that is, the difference between you and your father and a dog and your worst enemy isn't meaningfully different than the difference between you on your last birthday and you on your next birthday. Torturing your worst enemy is the moral equivalent of torturing your future self.


I'll second @Magusoflight 's suggestion that you look into NDEs. In particular, I can recommend the book Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists by Jens Amberts. It makes the case that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife because:

  1. Hundreds of millions of people have had them
  2. Pretty much everyone who has had one comes to believe in an afterlife
  3. No religious group is more likely to experience them
  4. There is a lot of overlap in their phenomenology and semantic content

One thing that stands out is just how profoundly meaningfully they feel. Just as your friends feel more "real" than the characters you meet in your dreams, the entities people meet in NDEs feel like the closest, most intimate friends, that they've known for an eternity. If the primary purpose of the brain isn't to produce consciousness, but to sustain the ego in attachment to our bodies, then it seem plausible that NDEs, which occur during periods of extremely low brain activity, are peaks at what the afterlife.


As to what I believe, there's things I'm sure of and others that are more speculative. I'm 100% sure consciousness does not end at death. Reincarnation in the traditional Hindu sense, I think, is plausible but unlikely (20%). But what really inspires me is the evolution of humanity. It seems implausible that one species of mammals can so dramatically develop their understanding of the universe that they can bend the world to their will and improve their lives by leaps and bounds without being somehow divinely ordained. So if I had to integrate all of these observations into a single belief system, it might look something like this: We are all God in potential. The purpose of life and history, the telos of the universe, is for God to develop a fuller understanding of itself to reach increasingly more intense, wonderful states of being. To approach what Plato called The Form Of The Good. Everything we do is, in some twisted sense, in service of this goal. Failure in this life can be a temporary setback. But with intelligence and perseverance, and a deeper understanding of our shared being, all will eventually taste the fruits of heaven.

I’m a Catholic. These kinds of metaphysical questions don’t keep me up at night; they’re answered. And I don’t need to explain the answers on my own, either- the saints explained them well enough.

I suggest you do the same. There is a niggling doubt because your heart it restless until it rests in God.

I mean, I work for Odin. Dude hung himself from Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, for $Diety's sake. I totally respect your search for wisdom, and I'm sure the Boss Man would approve in his own right, but me? I've got waaaaaaay too much personal experience to take to the materialist/atheist viewpoint, though I would point you towards Good Omens (the book, don't bother with the show, not because it's necessarily bad but because it doesn't really get into the metaphysical like the book does) or, if you're even more of a Pratchett man, Small Gods for your answers.

Yes, it's turtles all the way down. You knew that before you hovered over this, didn't you?

When ancient humans encountered something like lightning, they probably thought the same thing about mundane phenomena. "We have no explanation for this sudden bolt of energy... so it must be Zeus!" We know they were obviously wrong now. We know what lightning is, after science has advanced sufficiently to explain it.

The metaphysics questions you asked are mostly like that, to the extent they're falsifiable at all. The only correct answer is to say "we don't have enough information right now to know". You're not a truth-seeker if you just default to "it must be proof of God" when you encounter any difficult question.

Regardless of the numbers we plug into Fermi's equations, the best evidence that we have no competitor civilizations contesting the observable universe is the fact that most stars still shine, instead of glowing dull in infrared after every available erg of power has been used and reused. Or the fact that we're around to ask that question, instead of Sol being munched on by Von-Neumann replicators. If there's pond scum out there, what of it? It would be even more unlikely that we do have near-peers out there, since the window for a civilization to not have noticeable impact on the wider world is narrow in geological time scales.

As for questions of being in a simulation, or a Boltzmann Brain, our decision theories are simply not up to the task of handling such infinities and infinitesimals. As far as I can tell, in such epistemic uncertainty, the way to act in a manner that minimizes hindsight regret is to act as if our existence is as real as it gets.

If the universe is an illusion, then so am I, hence it is Real enough for me

This is, of course, more applicable at the individual rather than civilizational level. A sufficiently advanced civ should absolutely do everything they can to poke at the universe and see what happens, but that's not your concern today, or mine.

If this approach seems unsatisfactory, I can only apologize sincerely. A god-shaped hole is one of many human design flaws we have yet to fix. Cheer up nonetheless, we're busy making entities that may end up to us as we are the butterfly is to the dreamer, and they might have answers. May said answers be within our ability to grasp. Perhaps making our own Gods can fill that hole instead? I'd rather not worship them myself, but each to their own.

RE: infinite reincarnation, it's just plainly, mathematically untrue that infinite time guarantees the that infinitesimally small probabilities must occur, much less that they must occur infinity times. You can demonstrate this using a simple mathematical model (see "AI slop" below), but it should be a natural conclusion given the increase in entropy over time. Our current configuration has a certain value of entropy and saying that we should see that value of entropy (followed by the same characteristic increase we observe today) violates thermodynamics. And frankly, I don't find "when you're dead you're dead" to be a big hit against pure materialism. If anything, it's a bit motivating.

###Claude chat###

User: Consider two objects that each have a position on the integer number line. At t=0, both objects are at position=0. At each discrete time step, object 1 has a 90% chance to increase its position by 1, and 10% chance to decrease its position by 1. Conversely, object 2 has a 90% chance to decrease its position by 1 and a 10% chance to increase its position by 1. Give a function of discrete time, t>0, that describes the probability that object 1 and object 2 have the same position.

Claude: Let me solve this step by step.

  1. First, let's understand what needs to happen for the objects to be at the same position:

    • Given their movement probabilities, Object 1 tends to move right while Object 2 tends to move left
    • To be at the same position at time t, they must have made the same net movement
  2. For any time t, let's consider:

    • Let X₁ be the net movement of Object 1 (positive = right)
    • Let X₂ be the net movement of Object 2 (positive = right)
    • We want P(X₁ = X₂)
  3. For them to have the same position:

    • The number of right moves minus left moves must be equal for both objects
    • Given that they start at the same position (0)
  4. Key insights:

    • At each step, Object 1 has p₁ = 0.9 for +1 and q₁ = 0.1 for -1
    • Object 2 has p₂ = 0.1 for +1 and q₂ = 0.9 for -1
    • This means Object 2's movement is the negative of Object 1's distribution
    • Therefore, X₂ has the same distribution as -X₁
  5. For time t:

    • X₁ follows a binomial distribution with parameter p₁ = 0.9, scaled to ±1 movements
    • X₂ follows a binomial distribution with parameter p₂ = 0.1, scaled to ±1 movements
    • The probability we want is P(X₁ = X₂)
  6. For the objects to be at the same position:

    • The total number of rightward moves (k) for both objects must be equal
    • Given time t, k must satisfy: 0 ≤ k ≤ t

Therefore, the probability at time t is:

P(same position at t) = Σₖ P(Object 1 makes k right moves) × P(Object 2 makes k right moves)

This can be written as:

P(t) = Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)(0.9)ᵏ(0.1)ᵗ⁻ᵏ × (t choose k)(0.1)ᵏ(0.9)ᵗ⁻ᵏ

Simplifying:

P(t) = Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)² (0.09)ᵏ(0.09)ᵗ⁻ᵏ = (0.09)ᵗ × Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)²

This is the exact formula for the probability that the objects are at the same position at time t.

As t increases, this probability approaches 0, which makes intuitive sense as Object 1 tends to move right while Object 2 tends to move left, making their meeting increasingly unlikely.

User: What is the mean number of times object 1 and object 2 will have the same position integrated from t=1 to infinity?

Claude:Let me solve this step by step.

  1. This is asking us to find E[number of meetings] = Σₜ₌₁^∞ P(meeting at time t)

  2. From our previous derivation: P(meeting at t) = (0.09)ᵗ × Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)²

  3. A key insight: this sum is equivalent to counting the expected total number of times the objects will ever meet.

  4. This is related to a classic probability problem. When two random walks with different drift eventually separate (one going mostly right, one going mostly left), the expected number of meetings has a closed form solution.

  5. For simple random walks with transition probabilities p and 1-p, the expected number of meetings is: E[meetings] = p(1-p)/(p² + (1-p)² - 2p(1-p)) = p(1-p)/(2p² - 2p + 1)

  6. In our case:

    • For Object 1: p₁ = 0.9
    • For Object 2: p₂ = 0.1 = 1 - p₁
  7. Plugging into the formula: E[meetings] = 0.9 × 0.1 / (2 × 0.9² - 2 × 0.9 + 1) = 0.09 / (1.62 - 1.8 + 1) = 0.09 / 0.82 = 0.1097... ≈ 1/9

Therefore, the mean number of times the objects will meet after t=0 is approximately 0.1097 or roughly 1/9.

This makes intuitive sense because:

  • The objects start together at t=0 (not counted in our sum)
  • They have strong tendencies to move apart (0.9 vs 0.1 probabilities)
  • Once they separate by a few positions, the probability of meeting again becomes very small
  • The geometric decay of meeting probabilities ensures the infinite sum converges

###End chat###

I find Claude's answer pretty satisfactory. I know there's a lot of criticism here about the use of LLMs for checking your intuition about things, but my feeling is that it does quite well as long as you want reasoning rather than pure factual recall and you know how to prompt it well.

A simple example:

A random walk in 1D and 2D space is recurrent, and the odds of returning to the origin over an infinite amount of time approaches 1.

On the other hand, a random walk in 3D space converges to a finite, <1 value. The space of possible outcomes expands faster than you can explore it.

"A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever."

I don't, however, think this is a rebuttal of a Boltzmann Brain. For any given volume of space-time, there is a finite set of distinct structures it can take, and over an infinite amount of time, the odds of instantiating one approaches 1. The key difference here is that we are concerned with finite volumes with a finite number of potential arrangements over infinite time, as opposed to an infinite volume in the case of random walks in three dimensions.

( @faul_sname , if you're still around, care to comment?)

A random walk in 1D and 2D space is recurrent, and the odds of returning to the origin over an infinite amount of time approaches 1.

An unbiased random walk (where each direction is equally likely) in 1D and 2D space is recurrent.

Take a look into quantum mechanics and accept the many worlds interpretation as probably correct.

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.

Practice "pure" semen retention for 6-12 months and note down all the stuff that happens to you that's atypical. Check out /r/semenretention.

I'm not asking you to believe anything you read there I'm just asking you to self experiment. Use that sub to have an idea on what to look for.

You are kind of trapped in a materialist/physicalist box. So it's hard to break you out of it. I've given you stuff that you can research yourself that doesn't seem too outlandish from a materialist point of view.

There is a lot of discussion about the universe that is not materialist but it's happening in spaces, YouTube channels and websites that you probably don't respect.

All I can say is if you're truly after the truth you must question if you have any biases. You must question every single belief that you have. You must ask yourself "How do I know this to be true?". "Do I believe this because I did the research myself or am I just parroting something I heard from someone with higher status than me?"

GL

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

It doesn’t seem like a particularly partisan and inflammatory claim, though- the partisan and inflammatory claim of that would be ‘the scientific establishment is suppressing biblical truths because they’re godless commies’. It’s certainly an unpopular claim here, but so it ‘anti black racism is a problem in American society’.

Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation? Is there an equivalent mode for non-semen-makers? Are women constantly enjoying the fruits of semen retention?

Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation?

Clearly, the only solution here is to epoxy your penis shut. Only then can you reach your true seminal potential.

To open your third eye, you must seal away the one-eyed snake.

Not a final solution until you master your cummy innards perhaps.

Semen has potent energy, and there are reliable reports from eg several West African nations of semen autonomously teleporting itself to places it's not supposed to be. Much mischief is created this way. So for this reason alone I wouldn't recommend superglue on one's member.

Can the semen even escape the bonds of JB Weld? I didn't think such a thing was possible!

Electron tunnelling. We’re going quantum, boys!

Practice "pure" semen retention for 6-12 months and note down all the stuff that happens to you that's atypical. Check out /r/semenretention.

How are you supposed to do this with a wife/gf?

Don't have sex with your wife. Don't ejaculate when you have sex.

I'm not in that position sorry.

Ask for it back . "I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence."

Do the benefits still apply if you drink flouridated tap water or filtered alcoholic beverages? Ripper only drank spring water and pure grain alcohol.

If you have convincing evidence that humans, despite several millions of years of fossil evidence demonstrating likely intermediate ancestors, couldn't have possibly arisen naturally, pray tell. You could get a Noble or three out of it!

Semen retention? C'mon dawg. If being sexually frustrated is a strict necessity for your third eye to open, it's a rather perverse one.

Why don't you lay out your arguments instead of vaguely waving in their general direction?

Why don't you lay out your arguments instead of vaguely waving in their general direction?

I was a materialist until recently and the transition was not a straightforward path. All the atheist vs theist arguments in the world had no effect on me, my worldview was set.

Until certain things happened in my life and a little bit of randomness/luck I began to start thinking differently.

I don't think its a good use of time and mental energy to get into the weeds of things because I experienced being a materialist and I had an answer for everything. It's going to sound cliché but the search for truth is a personal one and so arguing back and forth is not going to be productive for anyone. We both won't budge. There's literally no point.

However OP mentioned that he feels there is something missing in his model of reality. He mentioned that he was a materialist and so I made some assumptions and gave him some pointers on where he can continue his search for truth.

My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.

You are almost certainly correct that we're not going to change each other's minds. That is not an excuse for not even sharing even the barest shreds of a coherent argument beyond "look at the amazingly counterintuitive outcomes if X was true, which this margin is not large enough to contain."

The Motte isn't so full of itself that we expect even well-intentioned and earnest people to consistently achieve consensus from reasoned debate. We achieve that more often than most of the Internet does (an admittedly low bar), but that is a surprising outcome, one only maintained through blood, sweat and effort on the part of its posters. (And a strict moderation framework and moderators to enforce it). You're defecting, since you had the time to type up 5 paragraphs of text but not even give a bullet list or TLDR of why you hold the beliefs you do.

I rarely open our volunteer janny page these days, but I did so today, and was happy to mark @coffee_enjoyer 's comment below as being high quality. That's despite it being frankly alien in some important ways to me, and somewhat painful to boot, not in the sense that it's unintelligible or poorly reasoned, but because he and I are both intelligent, earnest humans who can't see eye to eye and disagree on the basic axioms required to do so. At the very least, he articulated his standpoint and doesn't rely on obfuscation or mysticism. Your comment, not that it requires moderation, is awful in comparison and dodges all attempts at explaining itself.

Evidently something turned you from a materialist to.. a semen-retentionalist. You even resort to hinting at materialistic reasons for that conversion, or at least materialist arguments that you must be correct, but I don't think that change could possibly have been for the better, and your inability to defend it does you no favors. I hold this belief for much the same reason that I look at people who fry their brains with psychedelics or were one-shotted by ayahuasca with pity, though I have no idea what could have led to you to where you are now.

I'm not the person you were responding to, but I have to agree with him.

I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true. And whatever the truth is, is simply the truth, so it's silly to demand an explanation, for it assumes that reality needs to justify itself. He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.

If you're building your own worldview, you have no need for something like a consensus, and a consensus is not necessarily true, it's merely a form of coherence. In the first place, I don't even believe that "truth" is very valuable, nor that people are inherently interested in it. And to me, it seems like "truth", in the form where it matters, is context-dependent, and therefore finite, meaning that nothing can be universally true.

You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.

I agree that coffee_enjoyers comment is good, though. It says something similar, but in a more engaging way which is more likely to cause a long-term influence on a person. If you were to argue "If you give the correct answer, don't do so in a way which makes it unappealing", I'd have to agree with you

I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true.

I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real because I haven't toppled over and landed on my ass. Or, to gussy that up, concordance between my priors and ongoing sensory input.

You are correct that some beliefs are fundamentally unjustified by further reasoning, but those are far fewer in number than the beliefs that are contingent on more load bearing ones.

Someone might be a Communist not just because they believe in equality, but because they genuinely believed that it was a more economically productive regime. The numbers of those who weren't True Believers in the innate glory of communism fell drastically with the wall.

He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.

I have met, just today, someone who is convinced he's a deep cover MI5 agent and someone who believes their mother is alive and in urgent need of their help (despite being 95 years old themselves). My profession has me running into people who hold all kinds of deeply seated beliefs that can't be dispersed by abundant evidence. They're delusional, and usually legally detained by the time I see them.

Someone holding something to be true is often a terrible argument in favor of those beliefs being true.

While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.

You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.

Maybe doing jumping jacks for an hour while blindfolded would lead to instant enlightenment. Doesn't seem dangerous if you take proper precautions. The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.

As our rules gently suggest, it's good form to affirmatively produce evidence for your claims in proportion to how controversial or inflammatory they are. Semen retention is a kooky idea, and the bare minimum downsides, not getting laid or going on a date with Rosie Palm and her five sisters, requires quite a bit of justification.

I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real

You're sitting on something, but there is no such thing as a "chair". Luckily, this doesn't seem to matter. Communism seems to be positive associations with sharing. Even an animal can recognize somebody who is willing to share with them vs somebody who does not, and to dislike the latter in the same way that a communist would dislike a capitalist. So neither of these concepts exist, nor do they need to exist. There's also no need for logic and reasoning, unless we just assume that even animals are capable of reasoning, and that 'thinking' itself means something like 'to reason'.

While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.

If somebody stops masturbating and feels better as a result - it's true that they feel better, even if that doesn't make any sense. If one were to say "That's nonsense, they should go back to feeling bad", then that would imply that reality has to conform to our theory, which is backwards. If our theories of reality does not explain reality, then our theory needs to update.

The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.

If there was 100s of people online who had tried this and had positive effects (by which I mean ones which sound like enlightenment, and not just cardiovascular benefits), I'd actually give it a go.

When I watch less porn, I personally feel better in general. Here, feeling better is reality (something true to me), but any explanation I come up with will be guesswork, and therefore weaker than my experiences. Saying "It's probably because of a spike in testosterone" will make me look sane again, but I think it's weaker evidence than raw experience since it comes after. That said, experiencing that a family member needs your help is not solid evidence that they need your help, but the experience is just as real as if somebody did need your help.

The rules are useful, but the more pragmatic you get, the less true any statement is. If you keep going you will find that the world is absurd, that you can't know anything, that every model is wrong, and so on (you're probably even familiar with these ideas). But how can I say for certain that nothing can be said? I can only arrive at a contradiction and cancel out everything, which brings me to zero/nothingness.

Anyway, I think that, as you become enlightened, you stop caring about things like proof. Just like you might cure anxiety and find that you don't really care what philosophers are saying about the meaning of life, or that you might fall in love and have no time to waste on people trying to explain to you how love is just chemicals and therefore not real. Finally, I don't think coffee enjoyer's comment provided evidence or proof (though I don't remember exactly). It was just a likable comment for human reasons?

Actually, I once almost screwed myself over with my mental models. My mood got really good, and then I remembered that I had no reason to feel good, but before that made me stop, I luckily recognized that I didn't need a reason to feel good. I also realized that if you don't need a reason, the reason can never be taken away from you, meaning you've "won". You won't need validation ever again. And since at least one person can live without needing a reason, it proves that the idea that we need reasons to live is wrong, that it's a fabricated limitation, it only exists in the territory and not in the map. The problem is the idea that there is a problem. If living required meaning, then life must be meaningful already, or else we wouldn't be alive to ponder the meaning of existence. Of course, I still argue and use logic even now, but the sheer amount of troubles which goes away when you think like this is so incredible that I, a former "intellectual", dare to throw it away and to call former self silly for taking concepts like truth seriously. (I do get your point though)

My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

I don't think that's what the rule means. When there's nothing you could say to someone that will change their mind, it's better not to engage. It would be as unwise as wasting time trying to prove the Holocaust really happened to certain Motteposters. They believe that it didn't, they know that it didn't, and they have a humongous army of soldier-arguments they're willing to throw at you. They will never believe it happened. Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?

The vast majority of posters here (and everywhere) aren't willing to change their mind about anything they have strong pre-existing convictions on. Discussions are still worth having regardless.

Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?

I feel there should be more affordance for orthodox ideas to skip debate on some of the assumptions than for heterodox ideas. Otherwise we could end up with situations like the following:

"I believe elites are all pedophiles who rape children in the basement of a certain pizza parlor. I'm not willing to debate this. This discussion is only for people who agree with me on this point. With that said, how do we stop these evil elites from doing this???"

I suspect it's going to be hard to convince the entire Nobel committee to practice semen retention before they make the call.

Especially the women. It would involve a lot of clenching.

Haha!

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form. I'm curious. Do you have specific problems, questions in mind?

All of those questions are absolutely and infinitely beyond human comprehension. A human can no more understand the nature of the universe or consciousness than a genetically engineered worm can understand the human mind. This “answers” the difficult question. It’s like if someone with down syndrome asked you about the nature of financial markets — the correct answer is the most beneficial answer. What answer promotes the holistic good in his life? Whatever answer gives him comfort and motivation, and which turns him away from investing time or money into something beyond his understanding. Even if high-powered AI provided we mortals with a definitive answer, some long equation stretching five miles wide when written, this wouldn’t do anything to satisfy our need for an answer, because the answers we are looking for are human-digestible answers just like we look for human-digestible food. The way science is going, material developments on the universe are going to require so much training and intelligence that no one will understand it holistically; it will be specialists working alongside some holistic AI.

Now, once we confess “I am not high-minded”, and declare to ourselves, “I do not exercise myself in great matters which are too high for me”, we can begin our real song of ascent, and “quiet and calm our soul, as a child is weaned from his mother”. You are a designed organism, whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist. This is why you have a need for purpose and clarity. But your need for purpose and clarity is not for things beyond your understanding, because that is not its design. Its design is to obtain the Good, which is evident by results, consequences. This Good can only be obtained in your sphere of concern. Our instinct for broad purpose is to align ourselves with a collective, and our instinct for clarity is to ensure that the path ahead of us will provide a good life.

Surely this is the real answer you are looking for, because imagine if God gave you, and only you, the definitive answer to the universe and consciousness. After a few days that will cease to be interesting, and your instincts will rear their restless head and you will once again be left with an interest for more purpose and more meaning and more clarity. “Okay, I’m happy I have understood the whole purpose in life and science, but now I really have to understand why my boss is mad at me and why my stomach is acting up and why my character’s build isn’t working as I thought…” The answer will not be satisfying. What you want isn’t an answer to this particular question, but to enjoy some designed pattern of life which routinely provides satisfaction and interest, more than other possible life patterns.

Putting it one more way, imagine you sacrifice everything in your life to understand the universe. You understand it, then die. You arrive in some heavenly place but the gate doesn’t open for a few hours, so you sit alongside some Hadzabe hunter from undeveloped Tasmania. You tell about all your suffering and toil and then the answer you found, and he is momentarily interested in the answer (he figured it had to do with the sun god). But then he tells you about his life: the wild hunts of animals, how he met his wife, the feuding tribes and the taste of raw honey, the ways in which he pleased the sun God. Who is really more satisfied? Where did your answers get you? Was it not vanity of vanities?

So IMHO the answer people should be looking for is, “what belief and answer winds up optimizing my life for value”, and this value is in an evolutionary sense, the joys which all of us are evolved to favor: safety, interest, paternal love, friends, helping others, healing the world, and fulfilling our biological role. The optimization of our evolution is something religion-like, because it allows us to perceive the vastness of the cosmos as the expression and handiwork of your loving Father’s glory, and not a dark cold alienating backdrop to a confusing life upon a floating rock. We want an Edenic walled garden. Let the scientists continue working and in 4,000 years perhaps they will find some interesting material answers which can take us to a new earth. But even the scientists when they are off the job should have their walled edenic worldview, as (if what they value most is maximizing scientific knowledge) the stress-reduction and purpose-maxxing and honesty-enhancing benefits of belief will enhance the quality of their output.

As a last note, really, look at how our atheistic age spends their time without religion, and you see that it’s just as fantastical and delusional if not more — playing fantastical video games where they are the hero who must heal a fallen world, reading fantastical mangas and erotica, listening to rappers extol a life of abject hedonism, over-concerning themselves with political drama — but it lacks all of the invisible benefits of religion. This tells us something about what we crave as humans. There’s no use in being “scientifically accurate” if we wind up wasting even more time on stranger fantasies without reaping any benefits. I lied, I have one last note: do you really want a world where every human has long periods of existential dread and confusion? How inefficient, yet this is any world without irrational dogma. Irrational dogma is good! Which dogma most efficiently promotes scientifically-evident good behaviors and feelings?

Exceptional comment.

I'm not worried about death. That's inevitable.

Post-pandemic worried me. I heard a lot of stories about how people were profoundly affected by COVID & the lockdown. I...wasn't especially. I worked, I shopped with a mask on, I went home.

If my lifestyle was such that a national state of emergency barely affected my weekly routine...what parts of society have I missing out on all this time?

Dying? It sucks, but it's not a problem. Living on a pandemic-proof autopilot? Problem.

This may not answer your question about the Big Stuff. But hopefully this will help answer why I'm not especially interested in Big Stuff questions.

I don't remember whether I've seen the infinite reincarnation somewhere or arrived to it myself, but I have also been thinking about it for a few years.

Have you looked much into NDEs? That’s probably the best proof of an afterlife, science really has a hard time explaining whatever this phenomenon is (there are explanations but in my opinion they are pretty weak)

As you might have found out I ended up converting to Christianity. I’m more of a mystical Christian though so I do still contemplate these questions.

I believe God didn’t give us answers because He wants us to wonder.

He wants us to wonder.

If you would, during the next prayer, do use your psychic link to relay to God that Exotic_cetacean from the motte dot org is having a rather bad time with the wondering!

Doesn’t work that way. But I can pray for you if you want to DM me your name.

Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation

I didn’t know that Huemer had written about this, but this same exact thought occurred to me independently. It seems somewhat obvious and I’m surprised that more atheists/materialists don’t bring this up when discussing the possibility of life after death.

If it happened once, it can happen again. Very simple argument.

I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is.

This here, this is a great place to be. When the world feels weird, that's a palpable sign that something is the matter with my internal model of the world. And that's as it should be! If my internal model of the world is so snug and secure that I feel not a twinge of discomfort, of puzzle, of wonder, that's when I am most in danger in getting blindsided when that internal model falls short of reality. And the plain fact is that my internal model of the world will always fall short of reality. So the best I can do is to hold my model lightly, play with it, and always be willing to adjust it as new information arises.

As to a story that places my consciousness into the grand scheme of things, I am quite partial to the one from "The Elephant in the Brain". The "I" -- that feeling of consciousness -- is not the captain of this mind/body, is not even the team leader, but is rather the spokesman--the spokesman of a generally disorganized cabal pretending to be a well-organized administration. The cabal does something, and "I" stand in front of the members of the press and spin it as best as "I" can.

I like this story because, paradoxically, it gives me agency.

"I" can't compel the cabal against the cabal's wishes. "I" am not even directly privy to the inner politics of the cabal: "I" don't really know why the cabal did what it did. But "I" do have influence on the cabal, because the cabal cares about self-image and public-image, and "I" am the one who goes in front of the members of the press and spins those stories. So if, as part of a story about "myself" (especially to actual other people), "I" commit myself to some action in the future (an action not immediately salient so as to not step on any of the cabal's current sore points, and one that's not too difficult), then the cabal is incentivized in following through that commitment to avoid negative publicity.

I got into the habit of daily jogging this way.

It's not easy to start jogging. The inertia of habit is against you, and the activity isn't rewarding. If you aren't already used to it, sustained cardiovascular exercise feels bad. You are out of breath, you feel nauseous, and (at least for me jogging) you feel distracted by the jagged vision produced by the bouncing eyeballs. That's quite a barrier to overcome.

So "I" spun it, and "I" spun it hard. "I" told stories of heroic effort, of commitment, of taking on the unpleasant hard tasks for the greater good. "I" advertised my intentions to my spouse and my friends, and "I" updated them on my progress and setbacks. Two months it took me to stop hating the actual act of jogging (though even then I felt great afterwards). After another two months, jogging got kind of enjoyable. Now, it's a habit, and I get the jogging itch if I skip a day.

I felt the same way at about 25. After thinking about things a bit, and reading some of the history of materialist thought and argument through the last couple of centuries, it became clearer to me that physicalism is limited. It doesn't explain where the universe came from, and it assumes away the possibility of non-material, super-natural entities or phenomena as an axiom rather than proving that such things don't exist. Likewise the behaviourists 'solved' the hard problem of consciousness fifty years ago by decreeing that consciousness didn't exist - since it was not scientifically measurable, it would be presumed not to exist by fiat.

The materialism that we grew up with is a set of assumptions, axioms. Occam's razor, Betrand Russel's teapot. As a belief system it's perfectly acceptable, it holds together, but it's one among many and cannot be proved to be true, nor disprove its rivals. Believing in physicalism, in materialism, is a choice not an inevitability. And once I realised that I had the ability to make that choice, I decided to use it. I cannot prove that Christianity is true, but I decided to hope that it was, and to act as if it was.

Now, I don't know if that gives me the comfort that you're looking for. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to grow up a materialist, and live in a materialist society, and not have the tenets of materialism burned into you at a fundamental level. I know perfectly well that I can't prove my current beliefs any more than I can prove materialism, and they may well be wrong. But I choose to try and believe, and I find it helps a bit.

Why would you waste time pondering the imponderables? You know you are never going to think your way to an answer to these questions.

Anatta gives me comfort re: mortality. It's never personal.

As a neurotic, the best thing is to figure out some way of not thinking about this kind of stuff. I really think this is the key to TMI style Buddhism, the deep metaphysics are irrelevant, the real benefit is in anatta, in detachment, in meditation, in letting go. The happiest people don’t care about this stuff. (You could say the same about political debate forums, but I’d (a) disagree and (b) think some kind of intellectual stimulation is important).

This is a depressing answer, but as the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists, I don't have anything to soften the blow. I can't convince myself of there being any observable meaning or purpose to human life, some metaphysical telos behind everything that would impart order onto it all. I think life is pure, unadulterated chaos, a blur of noise and fury that mindlessly hammers away at you until it all finally stops. My death will have meant nothing at all when it happens, and the world will go on without me.

How I find comfort in my inevitable death is the fact that I already feel tired, even at the age of 23. Somehow I have become ridiculously jaded, and I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. I've become deeply cynical of the idea of effecting any meaningful change on the world, which is part of the reason for my slow withdrawal from political discussion on TheMotte and elsewhere. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. Celebrations, for example. Birthdays feel... annoying, frankly. Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, you're anchored down by a million life obligations that keep you in some mildly uncomfortable local minima that requires a lot of activation energy to escape, and regardless of how much you try to take comfort in the small things you can't avoid the fact that your life is running on an endless loop.

It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days already seem impossibly distant and out of reach, and I wonder what would happen if I added 1000 years on to that. Every finite physical system has information-storage limits (see: Bekenstein bounds), and the limits of memory exist far below that. How long would it take for me to forget my childhood completely? How tired and jaded would I get seeing empires rise and fall, people slipping into the same failure-modes over and over again; what happens when I experience everything there is to experience?

This isn't to say that death is a desirable condition - for most people, it's unwanted and it comes far too soon. But at the same time endless life would be an interminable, inescapable hell, and I can't think of any condition where that wouldn't be the case unless I, myself, changed via genetic modification or augmentation sometime far in the hypothetical future - at which point, I would have been thoroughly ship-of-theuseused, and I wouldn't be me anymore. Somehow, that makes me feel better about eventually not existing someday.

Others have commented advice and armchair diagnoses. I would agree, and suggest you stay talking here even if you're not slinging it out in the political threads.

Your ennui is familiar to me and appears in cycles. The difference (perhaps) is I have spent another decade investigating what can pop me out of it. I have a suite of activities and people that are reliable sources of semi-religious joy, and have mentally exercised enough to silence or survive the yawn of the god-shaped hole when it appears.

Put another way, it could get better. Even if it involves some lame bullshit like medication or therapy! I'll echo self_made_human and say it's worth a shot.

I agree with @Corvos that this is a clear ringer for clinical depression. I'd know, I'm clinically depressed and a psychiatry resident.

The facts are facts, but the implications can vary widely. Do you want to spend your life feeling li