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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Notes -
What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.
I think there's some validity to it, but it's not in the muscles themselves.
Imagine you could run scans through my body to figure out exactly how muscled I am, down to the gram and square millimeter. A boxer with the "exact same" stats is still going to hit way harder because they have a massive advantage in more ephemeral elements, like muscle memory and training their body to work together in a certain way.
Just so with manual labor. I did it for years, and I can do the thing where I can heft up some enormous, heavy object and casually walk it a hundred yards. But the thing that lets me do that isn't exactly being strong. It's having an intuitive, pre-conceptual understanding of torque and leverage and balance and how they interact with my body.
I had an incident last week where a young, scrawny employee expressed some degree of being impressed at me raw carrying some large object. And I paused, holding it up with one arm, and explained that my arms really weren't doing much work. I was just holding it steady so that the center of mass was balanced over my shoulder and aligned with my core.
I think that's where the discrepancy comes from. It's not that one "type" of muscle is different from the other, but that you develop different suites of subconscious support skills from different activities.
I believe that your assessment is correct.
To put it in slightly different terms when you workout you are training procedural memory in addition to physical strength. Procedural memory is knowing how to do learned tasks (like riding a bicycle) without conscious awareness. If you do isolation exercises the procedural memory being trained is mostly going to be tied to that specific exercise (e.g. you will learn the form for bicep curls without having to think about each time, but that memory won’t generalize to working with heavy objects).
When you do manual labor (and to some extent compound exercises) you are also training procedural memory on balancing different parts of the body that is more generalizable to many other situations.
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Yes, I think your intuition is basically correct. Neuromuscular coordination and power across a variety of tasks is likely improved by doing a variety of tasks compared to specifically training at the tasks that are moving fixed, specific shapes with predefined appropriate motions. We can see something similar to this in endurance sports, where athletes become specialized at the specific thing they do to a much greater extent than sports that are seemingly similar at a glance - you're not going to see the differences between cross-country skiers, cyclists, and marathoners just from looking at their literal muscle mass and aerobic capacity, but they're differentially efficient at their sports of choice and require less energy to accomplish the same tasks. Compare all of these linear activities to the versatile endurance of a soccer player and they'll all seem mechanistic and rigid by comparison, because that's exactly what they've trained themselves to be. Similarly, the manual laborer that needs to carry shingles up to a roof and nail them down develops a more versatile set of muscle movements than the powerlifter.
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A theological inquiry: what do you believe were all of Christ’s personal motivations to be crucified, and what was the overriding motivation? We have, of course, brotherly love (John 15:13). But there’s also the motivation to live so as to exemplify the glory of God (17:4); to receive glory for himself from God (17:5) (5:44); consequently, there is the interest to always do God’s will (5:30) and work (4:34). There is also the intriguing verse that His motivation was for his own heavenly joy (Heb 12:2), as “for the joy that was set before him he endured the cross”, which I think is the only verse which directly links personal motivation to the cross. This joy is not necessarily mutually exclusive to God’s glory, because glory itself is a supreme joy.
Regarding the overriding motivation, I am partial to Heb 12:2, that Christ was motivated by the glorious “joy set before him”, because the whole passage reads almost like a doxological summation of the faith (“let us look to the founder and perfecter of our faith”). It ties in neatly with a different underrated verse: “Those who, through patience in well-doing, seek for glory and honor and immortality, God will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7), while the “self-seeking” face wrath (2:8). This is somewhat tricky because we no longer talk about glory as an emotion today. But if you understand that glory is a feeling that always emanates from a person’s assessment, then seeking God’s glory is not self-seeking, because all of the “social valuation” exists within another person. Seeking one’s own glory would mean something like “wanting to believe oneself to be glorious”, which is different and to be condemned. “Seeking that God give us glory” is equivalent to just “wanting to do our best so that God gives a ‘well done’”.
What’s the general consensus among your kind of Christian on Jesus’ theory of mind on this? Since he knew he was divine, the Son, part of the trinity, was he not simply fulfilling his destiny, living out an inevitability of which he was fully and consciously aware the entire time, an actor in a play whose audience were mankind - for the benefit of their own salvation?
My own thoughts on this question are far from the mainstream, exactly because of the things you mention, which I don’t believe were the original intention. Mainstream theology makes Jesus out as inhuman, and no amount of saying “he is 100% human as well as 100% God” can change that visceral feeling. So in my view, his theory of mind was just that of the most realistically perfect righteous person, and in some mysterious way he learned over time that he was the destined messiah. Per Luke 2:52, as a child “Jesus increased in wisdom and in favor with God”, which precludes the possibility that he always knew his destiny. There is a manuscript variant of the baptism in Luke where God’s voice says, “you are my son, today I have begotten you”, and as this is the oldest variant quoted by the Church Fathers, it could indicate that the full understanding of his divine role occurred at the moment of baptism (occurring sometime in adulthood).
How did his purely human theory of mind sense with certainty that he was the Messiah? I think a combination of things: the testimony of John, whom everyone believed was sent by God; the voice of God heard aloud at the baptism; his ability to heal various impossible physical conditions, and to restore life to Lazarus (this would kind of be a dead giveaway); his biographical details fitting the Messish. Lastly I believe there were events of anamnesis which occurred during his periods of solitary prayer. This would have occurred like your typical fantasy “recollecting past memories after amnesia” plotline, which sounds so contrived, but it’s actually the best way to make sense of Christ’s certainty and doubt coexisting, and his mortality coexisting with “God dwelling in Him” (as an understanding and a love in his bosom only). Because a real human often changes from a sense of perfect certainty to a sense of doubt, and this would occur even in the most realistically perfect person. This isn’t because we have “two natures” or any other spurious theological mindfuck that theologians love to apply.
All of this is to say that his theory of mind was exactly like ours, if we were perfect and given intimations of a cosmic destiny. This means he is infinitely relatable, infinitely human, infinitely engaging. Rather than being more God than us, he is more human than us, and that’s actually more important for the religion to have an effect. He was human because
And as a consequence of this full humanity,
That Jesus was fully divine while on earth and had a perfectly divine prediction of what will happen is disproven by a careful study of Hebrews 5:7
Reverence = fear; and the word supplications here is ἱκετηρία, which is only used in contexts where a person pleas with utter submission (eg a surrendering enemy). Jesus would not have loudly cried and pleaded for salvation from death while on earth if he was certain he would be saved; and the passage indicates that he saved because of this plea.
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Simplistic, but my atheistic interpretation was always just this as well.
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Anyone else feeling particularly cyberpunk?
Even normies online are talking about 'clankers' (humanoid robots out in the wild, not ASIMO scripted performances). I'm giving vague orders to Claude Code and watching it go. People are actually having relationships with digital waifus like Ani (not in the news media sense like 'Japanese man marries hologram girl but company is discontinuing the service' but in a more organic sense). The most valuable company in the world is a near-equivalent of 'US Robotics' from the Asimov novels.
Feels like there's been a step change in just the last few weeks.
I felt this a couple months ago. Ozempic, self-driving cars, LLMs, humanoid robots, and Mars-capable spaceships all in the past 3 years. We're in a new era, no getting around it.
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Yes, and I absolutely love it. It seems all the sci fi I consumed when I was young is coming to life.
I like fitness and learning which means I'm going to go down the biohacking route more so than the fall in love with non-human minds route. (I'm not judging, I think it's good people find comfort and companionship no matter how it's delivered.)
If this is not a worldwide technological false start and we are turning into a type II civilisation, I'll probably have at least 3 non organic body parts within the next 40 years.
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Spiked has a lengthy write-up about the Zizians, whose intended readership is normies who've never heard of rationalism, Eliezer and so on. I'm glad that people are still talking about this story, I think it deserved to be a bigger deal than it largely was.
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Let's talk about sources of information. GDP, CPI, Employment data, Inflation - important economic indicators of how the US is doing. Trump fired the BLS head after they published numbers he didn't like. I don't care about the real reason, the point is the perception. If for some reason, people decide the economic data has partisan spin (or is incompetent because it's being done by seriously underqualified people) and is no longer reliable, then what data will economic forecasters begin to rely on? Will they just shrug, report the Trump administration numbers with a giant asterisk? Will other independent orgs spring up to publish similar data but this time it's unbiased?
And are there any of you who think, "Good, the data was biased all along, it was never free from partisan meddling, it's just that now people are aware of it"? In which case my question still stands, what data do you trust and how do you get the right decision makers to use the right data to make sound decisions?
I feel like the question is most pressing with regard to medicine. If RFK's HHS and the CDC formally make recommendations that absolutely go against what the rest of the developed world considers settled science, what are doctors to do? Will insurers stop insuring proven interventions or procedures because the HHS is putting pressure against them? Will doctors no longer be allowed to administer medications even though they know they would work? Or would people instead start citing UK or the EU data on the subject? I guess really my question is, if US economic and public health guidance is no longer seen as trustworthy, which is seeming increasingly likely, where else would that data come from?
I think the numbers have always been gamed. CPI and inflation in particular. It's hilarious that the US talks so much shit about the lack of transparency in China when it's a half step better here at best.
There are independent analysts who do a decent job of telling a more realistic story. Someone has value for reality - consider the Harris campaign's internal polling algorithms who knew she'd lost weeks in advance. Mainstream polls have been just worthless propaganda for more than a decade but the real thing is somewhere.
It's frustrating though. Knowing we have the technical ability to tell the truth, but choose not to. Having to expend the extra effort to find where it's hidden or synthesize it against the dishonesty in the official system.
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