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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2718 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

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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Are there any other sites that you suggest with similar themes as here? Not necessarily forums, blogs or substacks are good, and not necessarily with the same politics, even better if it is completely different from here.

Watering holes with similar discussion norms: DataSecretsLox, /r/theschism (slowly dying)

Blogs: I interpret 'similar to here' as trying to understand the cultural moment at least one layer of abstraction deeper than Current Thing, and making observations besides the most obvious talking points from their political perspective. AstralCodexTen (obviously), PSmith's bookshelf, Ecosophia, Scholar's Stage, EXIT podcast, Richard Hanania's Newsletter.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Watering holes with similar discussion norms: DataSecretsLox, /r/theschism (slowly dying)

Yes, I knew them and seeing the slow decay is somehow more painful that a clear cut end.

EXIT

Are you a member?

I have been for a couple months.

What is it? A PR service that helps "repair" the reputations of "cancelled" people?

The main goal is to help people build their own businesses. Side goals are things like homeschooling, homesteading, and otherwise working to raise a family outside the grasp of the state. So it's pretty much a chat group and 10-15 weekly zoom calls where people offer each other their help and expertise working towards those goals.

The idea is pretty great, and there are some pretty successful guys in the group willing to lend their expertise, but I can't say I've been too impressed so far--certainly not enough to justify the $100/month price tag. Nobody is really operating on the scale I'd like to see, and nobody seems ambitious enough.

Still, it's less of a LARP than any comparable group I can think of. These guys are acutely aware of @KulakRevolt's point that most modern-day prepping is LARPing, and any societal disaster is a lot more likely to look like a communist revolution than a zombie apocalypse.

Thank you for the insightful context. $100/month membership sounds very steep, especially if the goal is for men, as you said, to build their own businesses.

I could see the price tag being justified for those who seek a group chat that is an active, free speech haven.

It's a group chat too, moderately active and imo fairly insightful. I'd be fine with the price tag if I felt like I had ownership in the group--if it was a club, rather than a corporation, building things together--but as is it's too much for me.

Are you a member?

I wouldn't provide value to the group, nor do I think the group would provide value to me (I'm not much of a cancel target). If one of these two variables changed I'd consider giving it a shot.

Ymeskhout has a Substack and he usually cross-posts his articles here: https://ymeskhout.substack.com/

Those Who Tremble is a bit hit-and-miss but can be interesting https://thosewhotremble.substack.com/

If you'll forgive me for promoting myself: https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/ A lot of my posts originate as comments I've posted here before I flesh them out for general consumption, and I generally try to cross-post.

Thank you. I really like your essay about Unfalsifiable Aesthetics: it summarizes many of my intuitions about music as a classical trained player.

Thank you! Which instrument?

Follow up to my question from last week looking for an emulator, I purchased a Miyoo Mini Plus. It runs games up to GBA and PS1, has a fun nostalgic form factor, and came pre-loaded with a ridiculous over-large quantity of games. I bought it primarily because I did, in fact, own a gameboy pocket and it got good reviews. While I've used emulators on my computer and tablet in the past, I valued the physical buttons and having a purpose built item for it, and getting everything in a plug-and-play package rather than needing to hunt them down online and load them on a device was nice. I'm sure I could have dug around and gotten the whole thing cheaper with a little more work, but I valued the simplicity and ease.

My question: how is it that something like this is sold openly on Amazon, with hundreds (they claim over 1000, but obviously I haven't tried more than a dozen yet) of copyrighted games on it? Why is it that Emulators and ROMs have always been so easy to find online, where music and movies and even books have always been hit or miss, subject to constant DMCA wars online?

It seems to me like an MP3 player being sold on Amazon with thousands of 90s-2000s top-40 songs pre-loaded would be taken down in days, as would a thumb drive loaded with every Oscar winner from the 90s or even a flash disk loaded with 2000s best-sellers, but the Mini Plus is sold for a reasonable price and shipped in two days. It's not like Nintendo has stopped marketing Pokemon or Yoshi, they've even occasionally marketed their own retro devices!

I've been playing around with it for a day or so, and it's pretty fun, works well, easy to use interface. Plays gameboy advance games pretty perfectly, PS1 games it performs well enough but the screen size makes it somewhat difficult for some games that were built for a TV. I've never been a serious gamer, the latest console I own is a PS2 I received for Christmas when it was the new thing. The typical amount of vidya I play in a week is zero, but every now and then I get an urge and want to play a video game, and wanted something handheld I could play while my wife watches TV, that kind of thing. I anticipate playing through Pokemon Fire Red and Sapphire, plinking around in DOOM, playing Yoshi's island.

And clearly if in my limited gaming time I'm playing Fire Red or Twisted Metal 4 on my Mini Plus I'm not going to be buying whatever version of those games they're on now. It's not going to have value for me, really, over the free version. So how is it not seen, at the very least, as competition?

how is it that something like this is sold openly on Amazon, with hundreds (they claim over 1000, but obviously I haven't tried more than a dozen yet) of copyrighted games on it? Why is it that Emulators and ROMs have always been so easy to find online, where music and movies and even books have always been hit or miss, subject to constant DMCA wars online?

Eventually, some of these products do get smacked down: there's actually a pretty big snafu right now over the explosion over the Yuzu emulator, and ROM sites as wackamole has been pretty constant.

((There's also a little bit of squish in US laws, in the archive exception, though I doubt it plays a particularly big role. Semiconductors don't have similar protections, and there's some spaces where it's hard to avoid -violating clones.))

But you're right that a surprising amount don't. This video is from 2021, and you can still buy both of them: a few Amazon store pages have closed, but even then it's hard to tell whether they've been closed-by-horse's-head or just had a vendor swap for some tots-legitimate-better-reviews, or even more esoteric reasons. Wouldn't recommend it, though, given how much better stuff is available since.

Which is the Charybdis for a serious legal threat. These companies aren't irreplaceable: the vast majority are -- at best -- circuit board designers and integrators, polishing a bit of UI on open-source or mixed-source code that does the heavy lifting. That's not a minor skill, especially at bulk production and dealing with decoupling capacitors, but ultimately it's a maybe a couple weeks of time for this sort of device, and perhaps more importantly there's new ones coming out every month. At best, killing one simply means buyers have to jump into the scary void of low-trust purchasing, except even the big-name vendors here often have occasional goofs.

The Scylla is that almost all of the immediate vendors aren't even those designers and integrators: most are warehouses, drop-shippers, cut-outs, often for manufacturers that are in countries with more laissez-faire opinions of US copyright law. Sometimes they're intentionally shell LLCs, but more often they're 'real' -- and sometimes even lucrative -- businesses that exist solely to turn around the 30-day shipping time from Aliexpress or the 60-90 day time for actual in-country-of-origin purchases, from the smallest batch-of-ten on eBay to ARTIVIEW selling 700 on Amazon. Getting them kicked off Amazon or sued in court isn't going to get much money back: no small portion are judgement proof.

In theory, you could sue Amazon to put the fear of god for every potential pirate, rather than just asking politely and smacking one pirate at a time -- there are some relevant exceptions for CDA230 -- but then you'd be a media company suing Amazon.

Why doesn't this exist for other media? To some extent, it does; you can buy storage, media players, or more often Karaoke machines that play fast and loose with IP for music or video. Books are famously prone to getting Print-on-demand cloned, especially more technical and recently-published works. But it is genuinely much less common.

The pirate claim is to borrow from Gabe Newell: "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". You can't buy many of the games people are looking for, and if you did you might still have to break out a soldering iron to play them 'normally'. Even games that were lucky enough to get a re-release may end up with that re-release having aged out and/or were worse. ((Some, hilariously, are freely available in ways that are more annoying to play than the pirated/ripped version.)) And that's not really true -- there are things I won't buy, and others that I won't buy at prices big game corporations want to sell -- but it's not entirely false, either.

The more cynical approach is just that the others are just not that valuable. Even if a video isn't available from a sane streaming service, or music on youtube/spotify/whatever, the next-best-thing is fine, for enough of the population that the remaining demand can't bring blood from a stone.

I figure music and movies have large consortiums like RIAA and MPAA which can develop and focus take-down campaigns on behalf of vast swaths of rights holders, whereas there is no equivalent for video games.

I would wager it's because most old games you would need to emulate are de facto abandonware. The studios might have dissolved, who holds the IP might be unclear, and even companies like Nintendo are often lazy about making their cold cuts available to customers.

As opposed to music or movies, at least examples that aren't ridiculously niche.

And emulators are not necessarily illegal, endless DMCA litigation and baseless lawfare aside. A clean-room implementation would be entirely above board, and some of the more popular emulators, especially for more recent platforms, take pains to keep it that way.

Because rationalists love all things IQ, I wanted to ask something here.

Is there reason to think, and is there support for, the idea that people with low intelligence simply lack or rarely develop some of the ways of cognizing, modeling the world, modeling other people, moral cognition, granularity, etc, that highly intelligent people have? Qualitative differences, not just less speed, less depth and breadth of knowledge?

Feel free to point me at research papers or relevant chapters of books if you don't want to write at length. Thanks!

From my experience, the higher the IQ, the more likely someone is to build up abstract concepts in their thinking. These can be scientific models, but also psychological models, historical models, etc. Lower IQ people struggle to pick up mental models, so when you talk to them, you'll notice they generally only think or speak about what's right in front of them. They don't really wonder or daydream much, unless you suggest something for them to think about. So their faces are always a product of their surroundings, typically relaxed, while intelligent people are often lost in thought and gain a poised/intense look to their face as they age.

There's no categorical difference between quantitative and qualitative differences. "Sometimes when I talk to other people they talk back to me" is a form of "modeling the world" that dogs and even the dumbest humans can do. Everything beyond that is just more "depth and breadth" of knowledge.

But very dumb people are observably worse at all of the things you describe than very smart people, so that "depth and breadth" is all there is, really.

I guess that's a way to say I don't understand the question, or know if it's well-formed.

But different traits scale disproportionally with respect to each other, so I think you can meaningfully translate quantitative differences into qualitative differences in practice via orders of magnitude difference in ability.

That is, if someone with an IQ of 120 can throw a football 2% more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then we'd say that football-throwing skill does not scale meaningfully with IQ even if there is technically a minor improvement. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve simple arithmetic problems 40% faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, then this would reasonably be considered a quantitative difference. If someone with an IQ of 120 can solve problems related to hierarchically nested hypothetical scenarios 50 times (5000%) faster or more accurately than someone with an IQ of 80, (which is realistic if the latter can barely handle them at all), then this would reasonably be described as a qualitative difference despite technically being quantitative in the details.

Clearly there isn't a well-defined bright line distinguishing the scenarios. But there are cases which fall unambiguously on one side or the other, such that it's meaningful to discuss.

edit: mixed up the words "quantitative" and "qualitative" in some places

Yes, well said.

Have you heard of the models of mental development in psychology? In one of them, Piaget's model, the formal operational stage of reasoning, logic and abstract thinking of several possible outcomes, hypotheticals etc, is supposed to develop around 12 years of age or a bit later. But I've heard it said that not everyone succeeds in ever reaching that stage. This is the kind of thing I want to hear more about.

The only thing I can think of that's related is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_developmental_framework Kegan stages, and David Chapman (rat adjacent)'s interpretation of them - https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge

You're not teaching the average person Quantum Mechanics. You're not teaching someone with an IQ of 80 how to code or calculus, at least not beyond rote memorization.

My experience with dumb people (as patients) is that they have a worse time keeping track of multiple, interacting bits of information, an inability to predict what seems like obvious interactions and consequences, and worse memory in general.

When it comes to moral cognition, that obviously makes them worse consequentialists, and to the extent that Deontology is unworkable without a mechanism for breaking ties, bad at choosing what to sacrifice. They are also less likely to notice positive sum opportunities and defect, and while more intelligence does offer more opportunities to get a fast one over other people, it also usually makes one notice that life is an iterated game and that in most cases that's not the best idea.

I am skeptical about the "how would you feel if you if didn't have breakfast" meme, at least for 80 IQ people. Lower than that? Almost certainly. But 80 IQ people are slow but largely functional and capable of independent operation in complex society, and can probably manage that, most of the time.

It is worth noting that there are functional complex societies where the average IQ is below 80 (I live in one). In a society where the average IQ is 100, having an IQ of 60 or 70 is more likely to be due to gross cognitive issues manifesting as retardation. Whereas in a society where that is the norm, they're still functional, just dumber. In other words, something deeply broken versus something that is working as intended, just subpar in comparison.* There can also be enclaves of higher IQ people capable of running the place even if the masses are dumb (India is incredibly heterogenous due to millenia of endogamy. Brahmins are almost certainly smarter. TamBrams are notoriously so. Modeling it assuming a normal distribution of intelligence here would be a gross error)

*Racism not intended, but that is the difference between a healthy chimp and and a very retarded human. They might perform similarly on IQ tests, but one is a functional animal operating comfortably in its niche, the other isn't.

Yes.

In my experience, being from a low IQ part of the world, they seem incapable of contemplating hypotheticals, "what ifs"... The only things that can be discussed are things experienced (even vicariously through movies). In general I noticed a certain difficulty with language: I need to speak simple sentences without subordinate clauses otherwise it's like their brains cannot handle the cognitive load.

This is one I hear a lot and, coming from a low IQ part of the world myself, I've never understood. It never occurred to me that people literally couldn't hold hypotheticals in their head.

There are many bits of conventional "wisdom" I see in DR circles that I can at least relate to some experience IRL, even if they're unflattering or exaggerated. This one is just totally baffling.

Maybe it's hard to tell when you're in the boiling pot because you're all low IQ and within the same range. But I've lived in the West for about an equal amount of time now and, while many other things pop out, this was not one of those things.

Well, they can contemplate hypotheticals if they already lived a certain experience, like they can answer questions like: "Would you like some tuna in your salad?" because they've already eaten tuna and already eaten salad in the past. But anything more abstract, like: "What would you do with 1 billion euro?" it's like I'm asking to interpret the fundamental metaphysical substrate of reality. The answers I receive are like: "I don't have 1 billion euro!". Ok, but can you imagine? Well, somehow they can't.

That's nothing to do with IQ, though, and more to do with being pragmatic versus being imaginative. Like, I could imagine having morbillion dollars, but what would be the point? Is there value in daydreaming about something so unlikely? Or is it just a distraction?

Like, "what Twilight character would you be" is a thought exercise. It's also a game for children who don't have anything better to think about.

One could offer the person a hundred bucks in exchange for writing an essay (of some clearly stated minimum quality) on "what would you do with a morbillion dollars". Presumably, that would offer an incentive to a pragmatic person who normally refuses to indulge into such daydreams, while accurately accessing their capacity for contemplating hypotheticals.

My experience of low IQ people is that all of them know what they would do with a billion dollars, and those that know what a euro is know what they would do with a billion of them, at least in vague terms. They might not have a great sense of the purchasing power of a billion dollars, but the idea that dumb people aren't capable of knowing what they would do if they had a large influx of cash is easily falsified. Just go talk to some hobos.

Look, I'm an HVAC tech working for a company whose clients are in large part institutional kitchens. I deal with working class blacks, who statistically have an average IQ in the low eighties with a big left tail, every day. They get hypotheticals. They're often dumb, sure, I wouldn't ask any of them for math help. And I can tell from talking to them that they're usually not the sharpest knife in the drawer(usually trouble keeping track of language or changing the subject rapidly. Especially pronouns- particularly dumb people have a lot of trouble keeping track of pronouns/antecedents). All of them can answer the breakfast question.

I strongly suspect that what's happened here is some claim about time preference ( you ask prodigal poor people "what would happen if you saved X% of your paycheck?" and they might give the correct answer but then never do it in practice or constantly have excuses) has become garbled in transmission until we get the idea that people literally cannot respond to hypotheticals.

Then I guess the segment of the poor population that favors the lottery has to be relatively high IQ, or I have even more questions.

What's the deal with Kate Middleton? I can't make heads or tails of it, I think because of the culture gap. Feels like there is a subtle difference between the Bounded Distrust rules in America and the rules in Britain. Give it to me in freedom-speak.

I'm also a non-royals understander, and what I've gathered is that Kate Middleton has a long history of being extremely consistent with and open about her public role and the paparazzi, to the extent of standing for pictures less than a full day after giving birth to each of her children. It's now been several months since her last public appearance, which is apparently extremely not-normal. To add to the confusion, the only explanation has been a vague "abdominal surgery", despite the King Himself openly talking about his enlarged prostate. What could she have undergone that she and the family would want to keep it more under wraps than the state of the King's prostate? And now this strange seemingly AI-genned image purporting to be a recent photo. It makes it look like they have tried and failed to make things look normal when they're not, which just further fuels the rumor mill that she's dying or getting divorced.

There are sometimes details that the foreign (typically French or American) gossip press reports that the British don’t, not because the royals might sue but because it might compromise their access to future pictures/interviews/photo calls set up by their press office. This extends to the general agreement not to print paparazzi pictures of their children, in exchange for photo calls at specific times (first day of school, graduation, family vacations).

In this case, though, neither the foreign nor domestic press has any idea what’s actually happening, which means that speculation has entered a kind of mania.

It's all part of the game at this point. The recent "leak" of the "Royal racist" in Dutch translations right when Omid Scobie's book was coming out was basically PR while maintaining the illusion of respecting the rules.

She had some kind of surgery and they released some bad photo manipulation of her to dismiss conspiracy theories. Epic incompetence or they're using this to distract from something.

It's a pretty weird image -- aspects of it look like something an imagegen would do, while other parts look like incompetent photoshoppe work. (and why do the kids all have their fingers crossed?)

But even assuming nefarious grand conspiracy, I struggle to think of realistic potential motivations -- incompetence is always the best bet, but this does seem extraordinarily (and publicly) incompetent. Shit is weird.

She might be literally dying. It’s not uncommon for relatively young people to get a metastatic cancer diagnosis and try to hide it from the world. Maybe it’s embarrassment, maybe it’s some deeply-felt sense of regal responsibility.

While the palace is being coy as to exactly what's going on, they have specifically said "not cancer" -- which would make everyone involved look pretty bad if it turned out to be a lie. "Fatal infection" is a possible complication of abdominal surgery though -- but I still don't see the point in covering it up, you're gonna have to come clean eventually.

@DradisPing like I said incompetence is always a good bet -- but this doesn't really explain the things that look more 'AI' than 'PS'; like, parts of the kids. Are there any AI compositing tools that some harried photographer might have been tempted to just throw a couple of photos into? (and would produce a fairly high-res piece of output, and be easy enough to be worth some harried photographer's time?)

more 'AI' than 'PS'

Photoshop has AI generative fill nowadays. I can easily imagine someone not particularly competent with it just circling those areas and hitting generate.

Yeah, but it seems to have been applied to weird areas like the kid's sweater and one of Kate's (?) boots. I could see it happening if you handed an AI two images and said 'put the head from image A into image B', but I didn't think the tech was quite there yet?

Adobe has been working on integrating their own AI tools for a few years now. Plus I'm sure there are plenty of plugins with exiting support.

eg https://youtube.com/watch?v=c1Z-449UIBg https://youtube.com/watch?v=pLRLJbvVUiA

I haven't found an exact video on Frankensteining people together and smoothing it out, but it seems like something AI tools should be able to do a this point.

"Does Kate Middleton have cancer? No. A spokesperson for the palace confirmed to NBC News that the condition that prompted the abdominal surgery is not cancerous."

I notice that the palace statement is oddly specific and does not explicitly preclude the original question. It would be quite odd for cancer unrelated to the presenting condition to be discovered during surgery, but not unheard of.

If it was an infection she would be in the hospital on IV antibiotics. That doesn't make sense either.

She's probably looking tired and bloated at the moment and wanted a photo where she looks pretty and all of the kids are smiling.

She likely has her own staff, but it's a few people not some huge department. They probably hired an outside photographer who they usually work with.

So the photographer sent over the photos he took. She didn't like any of them. One of her staffers said "I know photoshop!" and did an unprofessional job comping things together.

There used to be a blog called "Photoshop Disasters" that showed bad photoshops that had actually made it into print ads. So it could have been a bad job by someone who was allegedly a pro.

The UK has very strict libel laws, but royals don't sue because shitting on the royals is an established press freedom.

So a big chunk of what would be celebrity gossip columns in the US gets shifted to royal gossip.

There are many celeb gossip columns in the UK. Peculiarities around the UK’s libel laws just create an underground economy of gossip-trading in which the implicit threat for anyone suing is that more damaging secrets will be published next. The libel laws are also what encouraged the obsession with undercover filming, phone voicemail hacking etc so that the claims can be ‘proven’; you never know before you sue what the paper actually has on you, for example. The actual payouts are considered the cost of doing business, and most celebrity publicists prefer to deal with the tabloids than to make them their enemy anyway.

The other thing to note about the UK libel laws is that truth remains an absolute defense (apart from certain technicalities about old minor criminal convictions), and having the libel proved true in open court is absolutely catastrophic for a plaintiff. Everyone in British public life knows that Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Aitken, and Jeffrey Archer ended up with long jail terms after suing for libel over true allegations, but the utter public humiliation of Gillian Taylforth is even funnier.

How does one find purpose/meaning? That is, what gives you a "reason to get out of the bed in the morning"? Particularly when "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" seem particularly aimed your way.

(More specifically, with neither the usual standbys of "faith and family," and while being too anhedonic for hedonism?)

Edit: to put it more simply, how do I find a reason to keep struggling through another 30+ years of miserable, pointless, futile existence, rather than just skipping to the end?

One fun and cheap pastime is converting books from print or PDF to HTML+CSS (using Markdown as an intermediary if you don't care enough to learn HTML+CSS). Imagine Distributed Proofreading (the input for Project Gutenberg), but entirely on your own terms, modifying the original text to suit your personal preferences.

If you care about providing a meaningful service to other people, then making illegal high-quality digital versions of older works that (1) still are under copyright but (2) have not been made legally available in electronic form by their publishers (examples: 1 2 3) may fit that criterion.

Adderall works pretty well.

Do you know a bit of programming and a bit of higher math? Project Euler is not a permanent fix, but it certainly helped me in the depths of depression, and it may well be a step to something good.

Been looking for an answer to this question for the past 25 years... Seemingly, some people just have a raison d'être and others don't.

Jebus Capital,

I'm sorry you're going through this. Is there something I can do do help? Edit: Maybe that came across as condescending, it was really just concern. I hope you're feeling better today.

Is there something I can do do help?

Probably not.

If you're worried about life I can teach you how to live an enjoyable one.

I'm skeptical of this, particularly given that I'm probably older than you (I'm 42).

(As for connecting, I'm not on discord, and I don't think I want to be openly posting my phone number on the web.)

I blinked and my comment got eaten. TLDW find a practical project that puts work in your hands, not your head.

TLDW find a practical project that puts work in your hands, not your head.

These tend to be quite costly, particularly given the materials wasted in all the failures due to my lifelong fine motor skill issues.

Ah, I was going to suggest something small scale to reduce costs (electronics, crafts, etc) but motor issues rule that out. Gardening might have been a good substitute but if you live in an apartment in Alaska then that's probably not going to work either.

Still if you can think of something that suits your situation I think it can help with the "why get out of bed, what's the point" problem. Seeing something that makes physical progress, that you direct, that presents discrete problems to solve, and that you can point to whether to show other people or just to yourself provides hard evidence that you're making an impact on something. It also gives you a clear objective where upon completion you can make a judgement of whether you've succeeded, failed, or can improve. I think all those aspects are valuable to mental wellbeing and not half as legible in areas like religion/community, exercising, or creative-aesthetic-intellectual activities.

Edit: Reading more of your replies (not much money, government hand outs) maybe consider starting a cash-in-hand pressure washing business? The equipment is cheap enough to make it low risk and small scale, the work isn't fine skilled, you can earn some money, you leave things noticeably better for your efforts within minutes, you can work alone part-time or build it up into a legit business, and having seen a few pictures of Alaska it looks like all the slush makes everything constantly flithy meaning repeat business. Sure it's not a "higher" purpose but keeping things clean and getting paid is a positive sum contribution and should be sufficient for basic self/social esteem. If you're really savvy you don't even have to buy any equipment to start, just make some flyers and see if there's any interest before you lay out any cash.

maybe consider starting a cash-in-hand pressure washing business?

First, "Cash-in-hand" could end up being a violation of SSI rules (and SSI fraud can come with Federal prison time). Even if it isn't, there's still "welfare cliff" issues, where the reduction in benefits can offset much of, all of, or even exceed the money made working. Second, given that most look to be in the area of ~$900, that's well beyond my price range. (What part of "I'm dirt poor" is not coming through on my posts?) Third, how would I manage to transport it around on foot to potential jobsites, given that I doubt they'd let me take it on the bus with me. Fourth, it looks like I'd have a bunch of experienced competition in place already, while I've never used one before, and am not sure where I'd get the practice.

I think you're being overly cautious and perfect's-the-enemy-of-good but fair play, you've considered that suggestion and it doesn't work for you. All I'd say is that for any bootstraps enterprise to work you're better thinking of it like a penniless illegal immigrant would approach it, ie bending the rules, delay spending until you've got the work assured, bargain hunting for materials, and starting with the small jobs no one else wants.

Magic man repairs, maybe? That looks like a basic/niche kit could fit in a backpack, there's no end of broken shit for free you can take home to practice on and then throw out again, and people pay top dollar to avoid redoing expensive work. Just an idea.

My underlying point was that identifying practical issues and potentially overcoming them to achieve a material result is more productive and stimulating than reading a book, writing a song, lifting some weights or listening to a preacher. It's about finding something external to focus on that you can effect a direct meaningful change upon. Admittedly that's a lot harder if you need it to be profitable but it's potentially more rewarding too. Chin up.

Magic man repairs, maybe?

My Dad did building maintenance from before I was born up until he retired a couple years ago, so I'm familiar with what it entails… and why I'd not be much good at it. Not enough to compete.

It's about finding something external to focus on that you can effect a direct meaningful change upon.

Exactly, the problem is that I've never really found anything that I can do, mostly because I'm just too broken and defective of a subhuman; a useless, worthless parasite unworthy of life.

If I'm effort-posting, I regularly save all the text to my clipboard or use a notes app.

I'd love to have drafts auto-saved, and it's something that's been suggested to Zorba, but he's got enough on his plate as is.

IIRC from seeing your previous feedback it seemed to happen to you quite often. This was the first time it's ever happened to me, but on the other hand I don't post much.

On the other other hand I sometimes draft long posts that I never submit and leave them for days and they're still sitting there waiting in their tab.

The screen scrolled without me touching it and then when I got back to where I was the comment was gone. Bizarre.

Your specific issue hasn't cropped up for me. In my case, it's because I'm on mobile and frequently need to change tabs to hunt down links and citations, and when I return to my comment it's been flushed from memory.

Feel free to report your specific instance as a bug on Github, though I think it's rare enough that I'm not sure it'll be easy to reproduce reliably or fix.

I'm content to attribute it to a glitch on my end. Just checked and I do indeed still have an unposted draft reply to another topic in a different tab that was unaffected.

If you're using Chrome there's a million extensions to autosave, e.g. this one I have no personally tried. On mobile, your options are more limited, but IIRC firefox mobile has extensions, or yandex.

Have you looked into John Vervaeke's series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis? He goes in depth into outlining the problem, and possible solutions. Although the latter half where he gets all into psychological concepts is skippable for sure.

Long story short - you have to have a lot of things to find purpose. You need a community, people around you that care about you and know you and will help you improve towards your purpose. You need some psychotechnology like prayer, meditation, et cetera to keep your mind focused. You also need to work on getting into the flow state, et cetera.

Idk man, it's not easy. I've been trying to find something like this myself, and it's a tough road but there are bright spots. Progress is possible.

One way to find purpose is to look at your life, and figure out where you've been hurt by other people or the world. What problems exist that made life harder for you? Then try to work on fixing those, to help others in the future who may be in your same situation. Just a thought.

Another thought would be to read great literature, like Dostoyevsky or Paradise Lost or Faust or whatever. Just check out some of the all time great works in the Western canon. A lot of them have themes around purpose and meaning in life, how to deal with it's loss and how to find it again.

Wishing you luck brother.

You need a community, people around you that care about you and know you and will help you improve towards your purpose.

How do you get that?

You need some psychotechnology like prayer, meditation, et cetera to keep your mind focused.

Well, I've been through some cognitive-behavioral therapy and dialectical-behavioral therapy, both individual and group, so there's some "mindfulness" and "distress tolerance" exercises I have — though, as a schizophrenic, full meditation is strongly discouraged.

figure out where you've been hurt by other people or the world. What problems exist that made life harder for you?

Most of those come down to either the existence of "faceless bureaucracies" that are, per Max Weber, an inevitable product of the "rationalization" that is itself a core part of the "Enlightenment" project; or else being born broken and defective.

Neither looks particularly fixable, and to the extent they could, there's nothing really for me to contribute. (For example, I'm not going to be whipping up a cure for autism in my apartment any time soon.)

Another thought would be to read great literature, like Dostoyevsky or Paradise Lost or Faust or whatever.

Read Crime and Punishment back in high school, Paradise Lost in college.

If you're in Alaska then you definitely haven't been getting enough sunlight over the past few months. It's a good time of year to visit Sedona. Hawaii is close but that can be pricey. Vitamin D & SAD lights are supposed to help but never did much for me.

Try taking care of animals. A litter robot gives a cat a fantastic joy / effort ratio.

If you're in Alaska then you definitely haven't been getting enough sunlight over the past few months. It's a good time of year to visit Sedona. Hawaii is close but that can be pricey.

Anywhere is pricey to travel to when you're living on government handouts, and getting food regularly from the local food bank.

Vitamin D & SAD lights are supposed to help but never did much for me.

They've helped me some.

Try taking care of animals.

Another expense I can't afford — and thus another thing where my parents will be dipping into the funds they're trying to save for their retirement home to spend money on me they can't afford. (I already owe them thousands of dollars.)

You sound real fucking depressed. Normally I'd say try to be more active, but as far as I understand you, you're already not terribly inactive. I'm a big proponent of building a family, but you specifically mentioned this is off the list (though I'd strongly urge you to reconsider).

Next on the list is imo leaving Alaska - northern regions are notorious for causing depression, try living in the south for an extended time span, at least several months, and spent as much time outside as possible while there. This is not easy depending on your monetary situation, but as a single guy you can almost certainly make it work.

If that doesn't work, try meds. I know it sounds stupid, depression always feels like a true fact of life when you're in it, but imo it's primarily a chemical imbalance. Problem is that most meds have serious side effects, so I'd try to avoid this if there's other options.

I'm a big proponent of building a family, but you specifically mentioned this is off the list (though I'd strongly urge you to reconsider).

Again, it's not a lack of interest, it's that as a 42-year-old virgin loser, my prospects are non-existent — unless you've got some some sort of new advice how to remedy that?

Next on the list is imo leaving Alaska

Financial reasons and what little family I have prevent this

If that doesn't work, try meds.

I've been on meds since my first suicide attempt back in 2004. This is me on meds.

Again, it's not a lack of interest, it's that as a 42-year-old virgin loser, my prospects are non-existent — unless you've got some some sort of new advice how to remedy that?

That's certainly problematic, but imo not as bad as you think it is. As a man it's easy to fall into a life where your contact with the fairer sex is minimal, and dating events/apps do not suit everyone. But to turn it around, you're basically dating on hard mode. Alaska does not have as bad of a sex ratio as I remembered, but it's still pretty lopsided, it's not exactly known to be full of extroverts and depending on where exactly you are there might not even be that many people in total in the area. As a (presumably white?) US citizen there's a long list of countries where it's extremely easy to find a partner even if you're arguably a loser. Latin america & eastern europe are good options, and asian countries are amazing bc asian women are really, really into white guys.

Financial reasons and what little family I have prevent this

You don't need to stay there forever, nor do you need to go there as a tourist. Unless you're the only carer for someone close, in which case I truly feel bad for you; I've seen a few cases where someone was stuck in a place they hated with no way out for 10+ years because they were the only one giving a shit about their sick mother/dad/grandparent/whatever.

Given that you're clearly reasonably intelligent, and even assuming that you're unreliable, lazy and/or physically disabled, I admittedly have a hard time believing that you can't find some (no matter how marginal!) employment to save up some money. In the worst case Mechanical Turk or such. Plenty of countries are ridiculously cheap in terms of both getting there and in living expenses if you're a childless western single eating regular supermarket food and staying in private accomodation. I read that you have some debt to your parents, but as a parent myself I can confidently say that if my chronically depressed son suddenly tried to get his act together and save up money to life somewhere else bc this place is killing him, I wouldn't mind just writing that debt off. Not claiming that any of this is easy or guaranteed to work, but remember, if you end up offing yourself you'll hurt your parents by far the most compared to any other option.

On the other hand, if you think you're incapable of living on our own due to mental issues and the government agrees, are there any options at all for shared living arrangements in your area? I know it's not ideal - even if you get a spot most people there will be noticeably mentally handicapped, which can be frustrating for someone who isn't - but it gives you a community, which is imo critical, and there is a good chance that you can help the others there to some degree as well, and they also often offer government-supported employment for people who are normally difficult to employ.

Lastly, have you ever tried online gaming guilds and similar? Again it's not ideal - you don't even attempt to be a productive member of society in that case - but it's another good way of finding community for the struggling. Also, it can be an OK-ish source of untaxed, albeit usually very marginal, income depending on the game.

I've been on meds since my first suicide attempt back in 2004. This is me on meds.

Yeah, that sucks. Depression meds are notoriously unreliable, with a side dish of occasionally making people suddenly kill themselves even if their depression hadn't been that bad beforehand. @self_made_human is of course correct that you sometimes have to cycle through a lot of meds until you find something that works for you, but I can understand wanting to stick with a med that is at least tolerable.

to save up some money.

SSI forbids this — it is, in fact, a big part of the issues I've been having with Social Security for the past year thanks to the Covid lockdown times. I'm forbidden from having more than $2000 total assets at any one time — if I go over that, my SSI drops to zero each month until it's back under.

save up money to life somewhere else bc this place is killing him

The problem is, I like it here — everywhere else I've tried to like has made my mental health worse. Plus, I leave, I lose my apartment subsidy, and if I have to move back, then it's a multi-year waiting list to get back on.

they also often offer government-supported employment for people who are normally difficult to employ.

I've been through my state's Department of Vocational Rehabilitation twice. The first time, they finally just printed me up some business cards as a private tutor and pushed me out the door; the second time they declared me unemployable. I also tried the local mental health services vocational assistance program… until they shut it down not long after (it was costing too much money for too little results).

Lastly, have you ever tried online gaming guilds and similar?

Not great at video games, and my internet is too lousy for that.

Edit: Also, I'm a right winger, and video games are not for right wingers ;-).

Okay, now for my actual edit:

As a (presumably white?) US citizen there's a long list of countries where it's extremely easy to find a partner even if you're arguably a loser.

I once had a therapist (an older, left-leaning woman) suggest something rather similar: that I somehow get a wealthier friend to pay for me to spend a few weeks in the poorest, most wretched country I can get to, in hopes that while I'm there, I'll find a woman desperate enough to marry me and have my kids for a green card. (She then, of course, went on to assert that, of course the wife and I would then need to raise those kids to be good mainstream American liberals, because giving children non-mainstream views would constitute child abuse, since "fitting in" is literally the most important thing in life.)

Plenty of countries are ridiculously cheap in terms of both getting there and in living expenses if you're a childless western single eating regular supermarket food and staying in private accomodation.

Edit 2:

nor do you need to go there as a tourist.

…

Plenty of countries are ridiculously cheap in terms of both getting there and in living expenses if you're a childless western single eating regular supermarket food and staying in private accomodation.

The problem is that no country would let me in except as a "tourist" or similarly short-term. Because not even US immigration law lets schizophrenics become long-term residents. Too much risk of ending up unable to support oneself.

Ah, schizophrenia it is. That's certainly harsh. In this case I admit that changing countries is questionable independent of legalities and finances - even the most functional schizophrenics I know have had issues that required assistance by family, friends and/or the state. You don't want to become a crazy homeless guy in latin america. I guess you've already been to different places inside the US itself? I've heard about a similar dynamic in southern US, where it can be a lot easier to find a hispanic wife, and they often are surprisingly right-leaning and becoming more so with time. Sure you might have some ... disputes on immigration law, but agreeing on everything is boring anyway.

SSI forbids this — it is, in fact, a big part of the issues I've been having with Social Security for the past year thanks to the Covid lockdown times. I'm forbidden from having more than $2000 total assets at any one time — if I go over that, my SSI drops to zero each month until it's back under.

Oh man do I hate SSI laws that are structured like this. But you can subvert this, depending on the way the law is written - in the most benign way if you're owing debt to your parents anyway, you can just pay them whatever you earn extra, and then ask for money again once you need it. Depends on the relationship with your parents and their attitude, but if I was them I'd be more than happy with such an arrangement. Next on the list would be to spend your money on easy-to-claim-worthless assets, such as trading cards (also a good source of companionship for losers, though you probably should avoid talking politics with them). This is technically breaking the law, but extremely unlikely to be caught (how many policemen care to look at your trading card collection?) and very plausibly deniable - you can just claim you thought of it as consumption. Further is just good ol' working black labor and keeping everything in hard cash - at least in my country, as long as you're just doing some odd jobs here and there for like 200$ a month, not a full-blown employment, nobody really gives a shit in practice. Private tutoring is ideal and very common for this in particular. But I guess you've probably considered this last one already.

Not great at video games, and my internet is too lousy for that.

I guess Alaska in general does probably not have the greatest ping even if the connection might be good otherwise. I'd consider it anyway, looking at my acquaintances who are very much losers it seems to be one of the most reliable ways to find companionship and even some respect for them. And to be frank they often also weren't actually very good, plenty of online games are structured so that the time you put in is more important than the skill you have (though it obviously is beneficial). In general given your age it's not unlikely that you're primarily bad since you never got into the habit. There is plenty of right-leaning spaces in gaming also, especially if you just stay in modding/clan discords and choose games appropriately (who would think that a WW2 tank warfare game where most of the best tanks are german would be absolutely dominated by right wingers? pikachu face). There is a decent number of games that do not require a good internet connection, such as turn-based games.

There are better meds. Ketamine is promising for treatment resistant depression. There's transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroconvulsive therapy.

If your meds aren't working (well, maybe they are, but you certainly don't seem to be not depressed), then alternatives exist. I look forward to getting ketamine treatment when I move somewhere where that's an option.

electroconvulsive therapy

Sorry, but I've read too many accounts of the damage done — to memory and otherwise — to risk it.

Plus, I'm limited to what Medicaid (if I ever get it back) will cover.

Look into awakening, and you can start with /r/streamentry, which is a mostly secular approach. By awakening, the idea is that you have a visceral experience of how your mind actually operates, in a way that will reduce suffering the remainder of your life. It’s also called enlightenment in popular culture, but that word is so loaded it’s not a great idea to use it.

Sometimes people use psychedelics as a window to this experience, but it’s helpfulness/harmfulness is somewhat debated.

Any of the dharmic traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc.) hold some approximation of this experience to be a major (if not ultimate) aim of human life.

This “new awareness” which follows this awakening is described as free from delusion and often times hugely relaxing. It’s usually entered through the paths of meditation, devotion, service to others, or self knowledge, depending on the specific path you follow. While details differ from tradition to tradition, the idea is that your “self” concept and related thought-baggage are the source of much misery, and when it takes a backseat through practice and reflection, peace and bliss will follow. Life becomes a piece of art unfolding, instead of a mundane and bitter slog. Though this is easier said than done, hence why the paths and practice.

Michael Singer’s two books, The Untethered Soul and Surrender Experiment, are a clear and approachable starting point to the concepts above, imho.

Edit: also should add /r/streamentry might be overkill if you are unfamiliar with meditation (in fact it’s not what I practice myself, though it opened many interesting concepts for me early on). I would recommend the Singer books to get started.

Sometimes people use psychedelics as a window to this experience, but it’s helpfulness/harmfulness is somewhat debated.

Any of the dharmic traditions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, etc.) hold some approximation of this experience to be a major (if not ultimate) aim of human life.

Like I've said to others, this sort of thing is all strongly warned against when you're schizophrenic, because it's pretty much guaranteed to make the schizophrenia worse.

Yes, the spiritual traditions are usually against the use of substances for this purpose, for anybody really, regardless of mental issues. I just bring it up because it seems like a common entry point among a number of Western followers of these paths.

Not just substances — any kind of "meditation experience" is contraindicated.

True, which is why there are other paths like bhagti and karma that would likely yield better results.

I enjoy feeling like I've accomplished something and learnt something. Find tutorials, online or in real life, about how to gain real skills like programming or wood carving.

Go do things that are viscerally enjoyable. See some mountains, or the ocean. Go for a walk in the woods. Do some star gazing. Take a trip to a national or state park. You can't see or experience anything cool after skipping to the end, so enjoy the ride. You'll get there eventually anyway, no need to be hasty.

Go do things that are viscerally enjoyable.

That's the thing — nothing's really enjoyable.

See some mountains

We've got plenty of those right to our east

or the ocean

Not sure what the big deal about that is supposed to be — but then, the ocean here looks so much more gray and dull than the blue I see on the screen.

Go for a walk in the woods.

I do that pretty often — there's a ski/hiking trail through some woods near my apartment that work for getting in some exercise.

Take a trip to a national or state park

Like, 90% of Alaska is composed of those two things. It's a bit hard to get out there without a car, but I've done that.

Look, "touch grass" is not a purpose.

You'll get there eventually anyway

After possibly several decades of further suffering. What reason do I have to put myself through such misery?

Move states. A change in scenery can help. An honest consideration might just moving somewhere with more sunlight. Places that are cold and dark most of the year don't help anhedonia.

Or take the opposite route and go volunteer for something purposeful. What purpose? Whatever you want. Don't want anything? Try something arbitrary that other people want, and maybe you'll see what they see.

Or invest in bettering yourself in some pursuit. Running, lifting weights, origami, piano tuning... whatever.

But I don't think there is any way for people on the internet to convince you of meaning, purpose, or enjoyment. You have to venture out and do things.

Doing things hasn't worked? Do new things.

In my case, I think the near future is probably going to be really fucking sick. AGI. Full immersion VR. Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy. Immortality in one form or another. The best fucking movies, video games, books and music you can imagine, delivered custom made and nigh instantly on demand

As far as I'm concerned, there's no other period in time I'd rather have been born, and even as someone who is rather depressed and gritting his teeth to pull through more days a year than he'd like, especially when so much of my hopes and dreams have been sabotaged by circumstances outside my control, I still have so much to look forward to that even at my lowest I have no real desire to "skip forward to the end". They'll cure my depression and ADHD sooner rather than later. And even if I get paperclipped, we're far too close to the end of an era for me to bear missing out on that closure.

At any rate, the human body and mind was designed to keep trucking through far worse. Most depressed and unhappy people don't kill themselves. Even if you don't have a "reason to live" (and I cherish life for its own sake), you'll find that you keep on rolling, if only slightly downhill. It is what it is, but will probably get better.

The best fucking movies, video games, books and music you can imagine, delivered custom made and nigh instantly on demand

This is nothing exciting for someone who consumes no media. I've stopped watching TV, playing games and reading books (going out with friends, running, cycling, lifting and working on programming projects is better).

I'm a programmer so there is a lot of exiciting projects that can be done though. The new embedding models made text classification a solved problem.

Given how much programmers like to complain about programming, rejoice! You won't have to much longer 🙏😩

On the other hand, I am perennially plagued by niche tastes and an acute absence of good media of the genre I like to read, so I will gladly take my obsolescence as a writer if it means I can read more quality stuff. I wrote a novel precisely because it was the kind of thing I wanted to read, and I'd rather not have to, it's a lot of work you see.

(One minor annoyance I have is that SOTA models often have knowledge cutoffs that are just before recent library releases, especially knowledge of the latest updates. Less of an issue when you can throw the entire documentation into the 1 million tokens, but still annoying all the same. Can't wait till we have online learning.)

I think most of that tech-optimism you lay out is unfounded to the extreme (except the VR bit, but that's just more escapism). If "AGI" is even possible at all, it's not happening this century. Aging and lifespan has been so deeply ingrained into us by countless evolutionary trade-offs to a degree that pretty much any "life-extension" project is almost certainly doomed to failure, let alone "immortality." "Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy." Not with chemical rockets, are we doing that any time soon. We're not going to figure out the brain well enough to cure depression or ADHD. There will be no "singularity," no "end of an era," not even the "closure" of "paperclippingm," just slow civilizational decay.

Even if you don't have a "reason to live" (and I cherish life for its own sake), you'll find that you keep on rolling, if only slightly downhill

I've been doing that for ~20 years now. It's never getting better.

Sure, you've got nothing to look forward to then. Luckily I entirely disagree, and humans keep on trucking nonetheless.

If "AGI" is even possible at all, it's not happening this century.

Have you seen Claude 3? It's going around answering PHD-level questions in a bunch of different fields. https://twitter.com/idavidrein/status/1764675668175094169

Five years ago we had none of this. The whole field of chatbots was a joke: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6rEkKWXCcR4

If you weren't predicting five or six years ago that we'd have AI this capable, how can you possibly say 'it's not happening this century'? You think you can predict 75 years into the future?

Claude 3 (Sonnet, not Opus) gave a PhD-candidate-quality answer to a qualitative applied math question I asked it, so I tried a couple related quantitative questions. The easiest was basically Calc-3, and it made a sign error, and trying to get it to correct that error (it only even admitted it on my third try) made it go completely off the rails.

Formatting its math responses in LaTeX without being asked was pretty cool, though. And it was clearly ahead of GPT4 and Bard, which beat the snot out of GPT3.

If you weren't predicting five or six years ago that we'd have AI this capable

What "capable"? LLMs are a meaningless parlor trick — of little significance, and not any kind of step towards "general intelligence." "The whole field of chatbots" is a pointless distraction.

Not with that attitude. I mean, even if you regard the entire field and its weird inbred offshoots as parlor tricks of little significance (the former I would agree with, the latter I find highly debatable even now, for one it vastly simplifies routine code writing in mine and my colleagues' experience) - aren't you at least a little interested in how the current "AI" develops, even it its current state? In the workings of quite literally alien "minds" whose "thought processes", though giving similar outputs, in no other way resemble our own? In the curious fact that almost all recent developments happened by an arcane scientific method known as "just throw more compute at it lmao"? I don't mean to impose my hobby horse on you but I legitimately think this shit is fascinating, anyone who dismisses it out of hand is very much missing out, and I'm massively curious about future developments - and I say this as a man who hasn't picked up a new hobby since he put his hands on his shiny new keyboard when he turned 12 years old.

More generally, you sound like a typical intelligent man who outgrew his playground and realized existence is a fucking scam, which I think is a fairly common problem (not to downplay its impact, I think many mottizens can empathize, me among them) and you've been given good suggestions downthread. Personally, being the rube I am, I just ducked right back into the playground upon reaching a similar burnout and try to derive enjoyment from simple things - alcohol, vidya, etc. It's not exactly healthy and it does ring hollow sometimes, not gonna lie, but at least I'm no longer paralyzed by the sheer emptiness of the human condition and can ruminate focus on the actual problems I have.

aren't you at least a little interested in how the current "AI" develops, even it its current state?

No, because I don't see them as even quote-unquote "minds".

and try to derive enjoyment from simple things - alcohol, vidya, etc.

Except I don't derive enjoyment from any of those (and antipsychotics mean I can't drink).

"Don't derive enjoyment" as in see no point and don't try, or as in do but it does nothing? I expect the latter (although I really struggle to imagine not enjoying at least some video game, there are so many in existence that at least one is, like, statistically guaranteed to tickle your fancy), but if it's the former, try actually forcing yourself to search for/do something even if you see no point, usually "seeing no point in anything" is a scam pulled on you by your dysfunctional grey matter.

Some years ago when I had a bad bout of depression to the point I didn't want to ever leave my house, I went out on a limb and made a "deal" with myself: whenever my friends occasionally called me out to drink or whatever, I would always comply, even if I don't feel like it, even if it's very inconvenient, even if only for an hour etc. etc. No excuses - you grunt and mumble, but get dressed and go out with hunched shoulders at some point in that day. To this day I distinctly remember that I fucking hated going out every time, imagining how boring it would be and how I would kill everybody's mood, but I never remember actually having some kind of a bad time once I was out. In fact I usually felt better afterwards.

If all else fails, doing anything at all (preferably with your physical body) is pretty much always better than the alternative. Your brain is your enemy at this point and you should treat it accordingly.

More generally, you sound like a typical intelligent man who outgrew his playground and realized existence is a fucking scam, which I think is a fairly common problem (not to downplay its impact, I think many mottizens can empathize, me among them) and you've been given good suggestions downthread. Personally, being the rube I am, I just ducked right back into the playground upon reaching a similar burnout and try to derive enjoyment from simple things - alcohol, vidya, etc. It's not exactly healthy and it does ring hollow sometimes, not gonna lie, but at least I'm no longer paralyzed by the sheer emptiness of the human condition and can ruminate focus on the actual problems I have.

This is the same conclusion that I've reached. I went from: "I should be a productive member of society and study something that will bring positive value and progress to the world", to: "Astrophysics and anime are good enough for me, even if my betters thinks that I'm a man-child, who cares?"

I am perfectly happy with being a productive member of society. I like helping people and being useful.

Unfortunately, I expect that humans will be obsolete in that regard, so you bet I'm willing to be content with mild hedonism and doing whatever I like. Nothing that fundamentally warps my psyche or is of the level of addictiveness as opioids or wireheading, but video games? The ones I like are abstracted away enough from Skinner Boxes that I make the unprincipled exception of being willing to play them forever.

"Astrophysics and anime are good enough for me, even if my betters thinks that I'm a man-child, who cares?"

Except, I don't have an "astrophysics and anime." There is no joy in life. What reason do I have to keep suffering it — because suffering is all there is — if not for some higher goal or purpose?

I understand and I do not have an answer. There have been times in which even my interests were not enough and I would have written the exact same words as you. These feelings are always there, underneath my conscious brain, I will probably bever be a "normal" person and if stretched, I would probably take my own life, I am just "lucky" enough that my despair is fluctuating so I can seem glimpses of hope. As for higher purpose, I gave up on that: I tried religion, meditation, therapy, becoming a workaholic... Nothing is satisfying in a fundamental way. I just concentrate on my daily action because the future fills me with horror and contempkating it it has not been a productive endeavour. I keep living as if everyday will be as banal and worthless as the this one, using my copes until they last. Try some cope, maybe you will find some solace in the scam that is existence, it is not guaranteed though.

If the same program can play chess, can answer maths questions, write fiction, poems, code websites and critique art... how is it not generally intelligent?

You seem to think you can predict 75 years into the future, would you care to back that up with any kind of reasoning, as opposed to scare quotes?

My Catholic instinct is to tell you to Jesus up your Jesus meter until you get a sick Jesus turbo boost.

But, I'm aware that, on the Motte, the kids would say that's "sus" and I may even be accused of "cappin'"

Thus, allow me to perform a sinful heresy on your behalf and secularize what's basically a Christian imperative.

  1. Ask yourself the question "What would you want to have happen in the world even if you were dead?" paired with "What do you want the world to be like 100 years after you die". I'd recommend doing the old trick of asking this question, going on a walk wherein you don't try to direct your thoughts, and then come back home to write no more than a single page (maybe 300 words at the most) to capture your thoughts. Do this once or twice a week for .... as long as it takes!

  2. A little more prescriptive; read Infinite and Finite games by James P. Carse. And then find an infinite game to play.

Do this once or twice a week for .... as long as it takes!

As long as it takes until what, exactly?

What good does it do to have an answer to "What do you want the world to be like 100 years after you die," if it doesn't give you an actionable goal? What does it matter to have such a picture, if there's nothing you can do to affect whether or not it comes to pass? (Or maybe you just can't see any such actions.)

What good does it do to have an answer to "What do you want the world to be like 100 years after you die," if it doesn't give you an actionable goal?

You will start to move towards better things that may reveal not only a single, but multiple goals. The pursuit of truth isn't a single path. There are many branches to it and finding the one or the several that best accommodate you is an important part of the process. It's what some of us would call "discernment." If you're waiting around to discover not only (1) THE big goal and (2) a perfectly linear prescriptive algorithm to accomplish it ... you're waiting for revelation. If so, prepare for even more doubt and feelings of existential dread.

What does it matter to have such a picture, if there's nothing you can do to affect whether or not it comes to pass?

Sorry to be trite, but; have faith.

Or maybe you just can't see any such actions.

There you go!

As long as it takes until what, exactly?

Exactly.

You will start to move towards better things that may reveal not only a single, but multiple goals. The pursuit of truth isn't a single path. There are many branches to it and finding the one or the several that best accommodate you is an important part of the process. It's what some of us would call "discernment."

I'm not sure I understand what any of this means?

Sorry to be trite, but; have faith.

But I don't, and I don't know how to.

There you go!

That's not an answer

As long as it takes until what, exactly?

Exactly.

Nor is that.

Have a religious revival.

If you can’t do that, take up chainsmoking so the thought of your morning cig gets you out of bed.

chainsmoking

Isn't vaping a much less unhealthy way of consuming nicotine?

Yes. The maximum bound on the "badness" of vaping is about 5% of that of cigarettes for equivalent use, IIRC. That is the maximum, there is evidence the net impact is close to nil.

Suffice to say I did read research papers before I decided to take it up (from being an adamant non-smoker) because I was convinced that barring nicotine addiction, there are no significant downsides. Nicotine isn't even notably bad for you, closer to caffeine.

If you’re chronically depressed, that might be a point in favor of cigarettes.

Have a religious revival.

Would require one to have a past religion to revive

If you can’t do that, take up chainsmoking

Expensive and unpleasant a habit.

Would require one to have a past religion to revive

You could always pick one up.

I'll return to my broken-record endorsement of running. Why roll out of bed and run? Well, if I don't, I'll be slower than I was before. But if I do, I'll be faster than I was before. Sometimes I'll beat people in races and sometimes I'll lose, but I will be satisfied with being able to compete either way.

If competition holds no appeal to you, we're too far apart in natural inclination for me to offer anything of use.

I tried running for 4 months. Like proper HIIT, not just a light jog (insert 4chan greentext about Anon who doesn't realize that runners don't normally run, and is disappointed when he can't sprint several kilometers a day as he thinks the guide he followed demands of him a few weeks in).

Suffice to say I did not enjoy it in the least, and all I had for competition were curious villagers, cattle, small motor vehicles and cobras, not necessarily in that order. I didn't even notice any massive changes, I was still as conked out with sore legs on my usual route 4 months in as I was at the end of the first.

Ah - the problem there is that you were doing proper HIIT, not that you weren't. If you're wanting to physically develop to the point where running isn't miserable every time out, it requires lot of easy effort, not lots of high effort. Elite athletes that put in huge miles are typically running about 80% of it as a fairly low effort. The majority of aerobic fitness gains come from relatively easy effort, with higher effort providing additional VO2Max, lactic threshold, or neuromuscular power (depending on the workout). For me, a typical week during a non-marathon training block is something like:

  • Monday - Recovery day: Easy 45 minute bike ride, easy 4 mile run (9:00/mile pace)
  • Tuesday - Track intervals: Warmup (3 miles, some strides mixed in), 12x400m (start at 10K pace, progress to 3K pace by last interval, 400m easy jog recoveries between), cooldown (2 miles easy)
  • Wednesday - Recovery run: 6 miles easy (8:30/mile pace)
  • Thursday - General aerobic: 10 miles at moderate effort (7:40/mile pace)
  • Friday - Lactic Threshold: Warmup (3 miles, some strides mixed in), 3x2 miles@LT (6:00/mile pace, 2 minutes float recovery at 7:00/mile pace), cooldown
  • Saturday - General aerobic: 8 miles at moderate effort (7:40/mile pace, but feel free to pick it up if I feel good)
  • Sunday - Long run: 14 miles @ moderate effort (7:40/mile, likely to run harder the last few miles)

If you've developed the fitness for it, all of the recovery and general aerobic feels relaxing and not very difficult. Pop in a podcast, spend an hour outside, drink a beer when I get home. The workouts are hard but satisfying.

For someone starting out, I would basically suggest zero interval work. Accumulating base mileage just has a much larger impact on aerobic fitness with much less risk of injury and burnout. If someone isn't consistently running ~30-40 miles per week, they will probably gain more running fitness from adding more time and mileage than from running harder more frequently.

Hmm, you probably have a point here. I hated running, so I thought that if I could get the whole thing over with quickly with HIIT instead of ambling along for hours, it would get me fitter and faster.

Rest assured I run around enough at the hospital, or so my sore legs, ass and back tell me today.

How fast would you say an average man should jog?

A while back, I started one of those couch-to-5k routines. It was all intervals. Great, I’m ramping up jog time, 3 minutes, 5, 8. Then suddenly—20 minutes, 2 miles. Huh? I wasn’t even doing my short intervals at 10-minute-mile pace. It was like a cliff for me.

I can’t figure out if I should be pushing up my pace or just reaching for that longer interval.

Longer and easier, the improved speed and fitness will come in time. There really isn't a pace that can be set externally without respect to where you're currently at. Some of the legit fast guys in my running club (roughly 2:35 marathoners, so guys that are running 6:00/mile pace for 26.2 miles) are perfectly happy to trot along at a 10-minute pace on brewery run nights so they can hang out with slower friends. Obviously they do speedwork as well, but there's a lot of value in low aerobic effort running all the way up the ladder. Getting to the point where you're genuinely comfortable at literally any pace that is still a running gait for a half hour is a better starting point than getting frustrated by the fatigue of going too fast. If that pace is 11:30 miles for the moment, then the pace is 11:30 miles for the moment. In a couple months, it'll be 11:00 minute.

I cannot overstate the extent to which comparison is the thief of joy. There's always people that are faster, don't worry about what you feel like you should be able to do. For a guy that didn't pick the sport up till later, I'm pretty decent, occasionally win small races, and it's still super easy to get sucked into being bothered that I'm not as fast as the other guys. The only solution to it just getting accustomed to that.

Thanks.

I’ll try to push up my duration while holding the current pace.

If competition holds no appeal to you, we're too far apart in natural inclination for me to offer anything of use.

Males typically enjoy competition provided they have some chance of winning. I've never met a male who continues to enjoy a competitive activity in which they consistently lose. (For footraces this means near last-place finishes.)

To find meaning it's important to find a competition within an arm's length of your competency. See: eudaimonia, or flow state.

You're never going to win 'em all, or even win above some level of competition, but for the average random guy, it's entirely feasible to become reasonably competitive in small local races. Probably more importantly, I have plenty of fun competing in things that I have zero chance of winning - I'm still racing against the people that I'm closed to, and we've run together enough that we all know each other at this point, so it's all in good camaraderie.

Obviously running specifically won't be for everyone. If someone else wants fighting, lifting, or whatever other sport, more power to them. I do think there's something special about endurance sports, but I have a fair bit of bias in that direction that isn't objective. In any case, pick a sport, work hard at it, compete and build friendships, and that's a pretty good way to find day-to-day purpose.

reasonably competitive in small local races

If you have those in your area.

I'm still racing against the people that I'm closed to

Requires having such people.

If you live in the United States or United Kingdom, you probably have small local races at least somewhat nearby.

But sure, it is true that some locales are better than others for this sort of community, as with all types of communities. It's one of the things that I love about the city I'm in and would be disinclined to tradeoff for the advantages of other areas.

You have to create purpose / meaning.

Why are faith and family unavailable?

Hedonism is mostly meaningless.

You have to create purpose / meaning.

And how does one do that?

Why are faith and family unavailable?

For faith, raised pretty irreligious, have never found any religions possible (unless you count Xunzi's strain of Confucianism as a religion), none of the churches in my area seem like a "good fit."

For family, while I do get on well with my parents and two brothers, that's the whole of our family, and it's going to end with my generation.

Hedonism is mostly meaningless.

I know, but sometimes online I get people going on about how they avoid suicide by looking forward to the next Marvel movie, or the next World of Warcraft expansion, or whatever. And a bit more often I get "find something you enjoy doing, and then make your life about doing that," which both tends toward hedonism, and which doesn't really work when one doesn't really enjoy anything.

Check out Jordan Peterson's lectures if you haven't already. He helped me learn to accept religion from a sort of symbological point of view. Worth a shot.

And how does one do that?

For me, it was marriage, family and community. Though I tried hedonism for a decade before I married.

Part of the benefit of religion is the community / fellowship. You can experience something similar and secular organizations, Rotary Club, Lion's Club etc.

Why is family ending with your generation? Is it related to your ahedonia?

For meaning and purpose; something you enjoy is likely insufficient. I think you need to be part of a larger whole where your absence specifically is noticeable and detrimental.

Does anyone or anything depend on you?

You can experience something similar and secular organizations, Rotary Club, Lion's Club etc.

Wouldn't know how to join one, nor why they would want me as a member — plus, how I'd afford membership, transportation, etc.

Why is family ending with your generation?

Neither of my brothers want kids, for different reasons, and I'm a 42-year-old virgin who's never even been on a date.

I think you need to be part of a larger whole where your absence specifically is noticeable and detrimental.

And I have none.

Does anyone or anything depend on you?

Nope.

How long have you had the anhedonia? Any medication that may be contributing?

Do you have any plants, pets or livestock?

Have you discussed any of this with your brothers?

How long have you had the anhedonia?

Decades.

Any medication that may be contributing?

Well, I thought my antidepressant was supposed to be helping, and I don't think my antipsychotic or beta-blocker are contributing. (Though, I might find out soon when I run out and can't get refills because of issues with my Medicaid, because this state completely fucked up dealing with post-COVID backlogs and the current aftermath.)

Do you have any plants, pets or livestock?

A couple of simple houseplants. Livestock? In a tiny (subsidized) apartment?

Have you discussed any of this with your brothers?

Which part?

For faith, raised pretty irreligious, have never found any religions possible (unless you count Xunzi's strain of Confucianism as a religion), none of the churches in my area seem like a "good fit."

Have you considered talking to an actual apologist?

For family, while I do get on well with my parents and two brothers, that's the whole of our family, and it's going to end with my generation.

It doesn’t have to end with your generation. You can marry and have children.

Have you considered talking to an actual apologist?

Well, I do have a friend who is a tradcath with five kids…

You can marry and have children.

I'm over 40, unemployed (on disability), and have never even managed to successfully get a date.

Well, I do have a friend who is a tradcath with five kids

Give it a shot- there’s no shortage of very smart tradcaths who can explain reasons for why we believe what we believe.

I'm over 40, unemployed (on disability), and have never even managed to successfully get a date.

Ah, I take that back.

Give it a shot- there’s no shortage of very smart tradcaths who can explain reasons for why we believe what we believe.

He has. And has given up on trying to convert me — he once made a comment that it would probably take God Himself directly appearing to me and telling me to join the Catholic church to get me to believe, and maybe not even that, so now he just prays for my soul.

I meant you give it a shot- you want a community and a purpose and that would get you those things.

I meant you give it a shot

What, just show up to a church as a total unbeliever, and… then what?

More comments

https://old.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1bb3kpz/rule/

What do you think of that model of social interactions? It says it's a model of autism, but I think it works for people in general. Most people are always trying to elevate their status, or at least prevent is from dropping. They may accept the friendship of people one step below them, but almost never two steps. Creating awkward situations when someone one step below them befriends someone who is one more step below them.

Personally, I find I've mostly withdrawn from the game and enjoy my time by myself. I'm comfortable that I'm close enough with coworkers and other acquaintances I have a little bit of an emergency network, but otherwise I enjoy spending most of my time alone.

I think that the kind of ""autism"" that shows up in very-smart-people isn't autism at all, it's (even if "unconscious" or unexamined or explicitly believed to be otherwise or learned-over-time-and-burned-into-instincts) an intentional rejection of some or many 'normal' social games because they're judged to be bad, counterproductive, stupid. This is very different from the kind of "autism" that's a neurodevelopmental disorder.

I'm not really claiming that said autists are better. The actions taken as a result of said "autism" are not uniformly good, or better than alternatives - being able to participate in the 'normal' stuff is both instrumentally useful and useful as a way to pick out the parts of the bad-social-thing that are in fact good. And if everyone's playing a game, even if the game is 'bad' in a broad sense it might still be a local optimum to go along with it, and if the rejection is unconscious or unexamined it might (and often does) lead to outcomes worse than not rejecting the thing in the first place.

But, like, the fact that a lot of very smart people and contrarian / independent thinkers seem to have an issue that makes them have trouble with social interaction is quite odd, because 'social interaction' isn't something removed from causality, it is something one could understand even without all the relevant instincts, and very smart people should be well placed to do it. So it's more likely that they, in some sense, don't want to understand it.

Most people are always trying to elevate their status, or at least prevent is from dropping. They may accept the friendship of people one step below them, but almost never two steps

It's not just 'status'. If humans didn't have 'status hierarchies', we'd re-invent something related purely out of, i guess, 'instrumental convergence'. Some people are just more ... some of useful, funnier, better connected, hotter. (there's a correlation between individual but it isn't that large). The reason I don't want to be friends with the people several-levels-below me is, mostly, that I find interacting with them to be relatively less fun, productive, (...) than interacting with my current level. And people several above me make the same judgement. And if there's someone several-levels-below me that I would get something out of interacting with, I (maybe moreso than others, but it's not rare) do it! And you can see this as 'raising that person's status a little' too, I guess.

Personally, I find I've mostly withdrawn from the game and enjoy my time by myself

Again, just instrumentally this is suboptimal IMO. Even if all I want to do is code, I'll be a better coder if I read all the latest blogs, talk with people who do similar things. I'll get opportunities to work with other competent people, either for free or for pay.

There are obviously a bunch of pathologies in social interaction that the above doesn't address, and that cause the supposed autist at the beginning to disconnect, but i've already typed too much. But I don't think it's a reason to reject 'interacting with people' in general. Plus, there are a lot of subcultures that interact in different ways. You could try befriending people more similar to you on the internet, I suppose, it's in some ways comparable to IRL and at any rate better than nothing. Discord and twitter are apparently very good for that.

@bfslndr @curious_straight_ca Guys I figured it out, it's the old reddit link conversion. Just copy+paste 'reddit.com/r/196/s/Qimfce7wOf' into your URL bar.

As for the link, one of my favorite genres of internet content is "Smart autists derive social rules even social butterflies don't know except on an instinctual level". Yes, friend groups are status alliances, and you endanger your own position by trying to bring a low value add into the mix. Never read Diary of a Wimpy Kid though, can't say whether the character descriptions are accurate.

There's something wrong with the link.

Thanks, fixed now

That link doesn't work for me

Thanks, fixed now

So, what are you reading?

I'm going through the Quran. Some themes are emerging. The sight of the unseen, the desire to express things which seem difficult to communicate, the rejection of wealth and privilege as a justification for belief, and above all the adherence to principle rather than expedience because the things desired were themselves provided by their God. Repetition of form but not substance seems like a principal means of expressing subtlety.

There's an evident underlying rage, but I think that we lose much by examining only the words and not the approach. There was a dream here, one which may help fill some of the gaps in my understanding.

Still on McGilchrist and Dumas.

Going on a Jack the Ripper walking tour around Whitechapel in January (after which my poor girlfriend couldn't sleep a wink, God bless her) inspired me to reread Alan Moore's From Hell. I never rated it as highly as Watchmen (which I also reread last year), but reading it this time I think it might be even better. From Hell feels a lot more interested in actually telling a story rather than showing off what can be done with the medium. It's also exhaustively researched: you get the distinct impression that Alan Moore has read any and every book with even the most tangential connection to Jack the Ripper from cover to cover.

The review of Lying for Money (of "the optimal amount of fraud is not zero" fame) posted on Astral Codex Ten is so fascinating that I've read it three times - if that's not a recommendation for the book itself I don't know what is, so I bought it yesterday and I'm going to read it next.

I’ve been getting through quite a few audiobooks at work, mostly sci-fi and horror classics. Recently finished 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Trial. Right now I’m listening to Dracula, despite me thinking I knew the whole story already it’s surprisingly good, so far it’s more impressive than the Cthulhu stories I’ve read.

I’m also working through Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy. Given how little I know of the history covered I doubt I’ll be able to catch any wild claims but I have to start somewhere.

Deciding whether to start I, Claudius or The Darkness That Comes Before. The latter was recommended to me by my brother, but I’m always hesitant to start a long fantasy series. The older I get, the more I want to read books that are one and done. I don’t need to spend thousands of pages in the same world.

I finished MJ and while an interesting chronology of Michael Jackson’s life, it really didn’t give me any insight into what made Michael tick or his core personality. It was a lot more of “this event happened, then this event happened, then this event happened, etc”. It has helped me get more into MJs music, which I have to say, is really really fucking good. Do I feel any guilt about enjoying a kid diddlers music? Not really. Im able to keep the two separate in my mind, but I wouldn’t judge anyone who can’t listen to him.

So many books, so little time!

The Darkness That Comes Before.

Finished this series (The Second Apocalypse) recently, highly recommended for fantasy fans. In terms of word count it's actually only as long as Harry Potter, though obviously a more challenging read. Really not that many characters to keep track of though and there are some handy guides online for it.

Are far-right pagans a thing IRL, or is it literally just varg?

Are they a thing? Yes.

Are they as common as kids on reddit like to pretend? Not even remotely. It's a tiny scene gets brought up only because it's so juicy and so easy to rile up the leftist online troops.

The reason it's always Varg who keeps being brought up is that he's pretty much the only one in the tiny scene who actually did something. Even that something had nothing to do with being far right but was "just" killing his ex-bandmate and burning some churches.

It's tough to code what exactly counts as Far Right once you try to eliminate Christianity, capitalism, and the living memory of traditional morality. Depending what you were trying to do, either left or right could play them as allies or as enemies.

I've definitely met pagans who were racists, so if racist=right wing then yes. But they're also more sexually libertine, so on the sexual revolution they're leftists. They have no interest in corporations, being more in the way of anarchists economically, so that codes left. Etc.

But pagans in general are a rounding error of a group, so you're generally just getting fringe nutcases.

Though this is making me think, what rituals would classical pagans have formed around corporations? Would Walt Disney and Henry Ford and James Pierpont Morgan be deified?

I've not had much direct contact myself, but I have an IRL friend from grade school who knows several IRL.

I've met a couple, though it is unclear to me if they were truly pagans or just atheists who liked the aesthetics.

I've met far-right pagans in the metal scene when I was younger. Far right ideology used to be very present in underground metal, but in person there's pushback so the people I met were low-key and didn't talk about it unless comfortable. Definitely more of a presence online where you could find tonnes of shitty black metal cassettes with undertones of white supremecy amd paganism. Even some larger black metal acts lean into it. Not sure nowadays, I assume it is still present but more lowkey or rare.

If you have a secular ethical framework that is not utilitarianism or something utilitarian-adjacent (eg consequentialism), what is it? I’m having a difficult time imagining a system that can’t be understood through some broadly-conceived utilitarian underpinning.

Rule-consequentailism is reasonably close to deontology in actual practice. Kant is (widely considered to be) a deontologist but his formulation of the golden rule could pass for R-C.

So if you can understand R-C, then you're most of the way to Kant.

The first thing I can think of is that utilitarianism doesn’t have much to say about what happiness actually is beyond subjectively defined well-being. It would seem hard for a utilitarian to say that a state where everyone deems themselves happy should not be pursued, no matter what this happy life actually consists of, but Western philosophy tackles this question very early on (I’ll try and find the quote from Socrates where he flat out denies that the interlocutor claiming to be happy is really happy). If someone thinks that true happiness requires certain prerequisites (say freedom from ignorance or a well moderated character), then schemes for promoting happiness which have the force of moral obligation under utilitarianism can be dismissed as misguided, shallow or evil.

As a thought experiment you could imagine a world where technology has granted the ability to shape the wants of humanity such that everyone can attain maximum subjective well-being. The catch is that this is achieved by a numbing of the feelings that make man dissatisfied with who he is and his lot in life. The current mix of virtues and vices will become all that a man could ever expect from himself and he will be satisfied.

It’s hard to see how a utilitarian would object to this, but it brings to prominence the question of “what are the proper things to want?”. Ironically it was Mill who put this best when he said “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. It seems like there is ethical import to wanting the proper things and a person who is well ordered in this way is on an ethically superior path even if he is subjectively suffering from the difficulty of it.

My framework tends to be a sort of virtue ethics derived from a mix of Aristotelian teleology and Xunzi's atheistic strain of Confucianism, further reinforced by a sort of "natural law" theory with emphasis on the concept of evolutionary adaptations. In particular, beyond Xunzi himself, I find Alexander Eustice-Corwin's "Confucianism After Darwin" particularly insightful.

I don't really live by this system, but for several years now I've believed all ethical frameworks are bunk. That, for all frameworks, if you keep asking "But why do you believe that's good?" you eventually arrive at "Well, it just is okay!" or "Because God says so!" without sufficient proof that God actually exists.

But I don't think that means we should be pure nihilists where no action is any better than any other. That is because, just because we don't know any ethical framework with actual evidence behind it being meaningful, does not mean it does not exist. So I think the only ethical thing to do, in a world where we don't know what is ethical, is to search for what is ethical.

And it's possible perhaps that we can discover what is ethical through standard philosophy that we've been doing since Ancient Greece. But I think it's more likely any new break throughs will come through physics and mathematics break throughs. So in practice, the most ethical actions are whatever most quickly leads to our total understanding of physics and mathematics.

You might ask, what makes me think there's any possibility mathematics and physics could lead to ethical knowledge? What makes those spaces better to search than just choose a random spot in the ground, digging, and hoping I somehow find a note with a complete explanation? That is because physics and mathematics have often found knowledge I would've thought unknowable, yet have proven things true beyond a shadow of the doubt. The nature of atoms, the nature of galaxies, imaginary numbers, etc. all sorts of things that are true and we can use to real effect in the world like making planes fly or creating nigh-unbreakable codes have been found with physics and math. So while it may seem impossible that it could discover an ethical framework, I don't consider "seeming impossible" a guarantee it is impossible.

But in real life I don't want to be too weird so I just live as a rules-based utilitarian.

Consequentialism is generally misunderstood to mean "consequences matter." Really it means "only consequences matter." Pretty much all other ethical systems still care about consequences to some extent.

I think consequentialism is self-evidently wrong--why should an action's morality not take into account the mindset of the actor? If someone tries to kill you, but happens to stab you in a tumor and save your life, does their action become ethical? If someone genocides an entire race out of hatred, but due to the butterfly effect this ends up saving n+1 lives, does this render their action ethical? Actions must be judged, not based on their consequences, but based on their expected consequences, and since humans are not omniscient this necessarily leads to ethical systems such as deontology.

There is a difference between saying "The world is incidentally a better place because Alice stabbed Bob in a tumor" (what Utilitarianism is happy to say) and "we shouldn't punish Alice for stabbing Bob" (what Utilitarianism does not say).

This is because Utilitarianism doesn't justify punishment on the basis of right/wrong or, indeed, even intent. It justifies it on whether the punishment would increase utility (yes, shocking).

It happens to be true, in this universe, that punishing based on intent often yields to better societies than punishing based on results. But if you lived in an upside-down universe (or were governing a weird species, say one that didn't arise from evolution) where punishing Alice increased her propensity for violence, then Utilitarianism gives you the tools to realize your moral intuitions are leading you astray – that the deontological rules that work sensibly in our universe would be actively detrimental if applied to the other one.

So no, punishing based on intent doesn't necessarily lead away from consequentialism, because it's plain that we live in a world where punishing people who merely try to inflict harm (and mitigating punishment when the perpetrator's intent is good) is a more effective social policy (or parenting policy, etc.) than ignoring people's intentions.

Sure, but I didn't mention punishment, what I mentioned was morality. Morality has nothing to do with game theory or with the results of what society decides to call moral vs immoral. Something is either moral or it isn't.

A pure utilitarian view would generally decide an action's morality based on the consequences, whatever the intent.

Morality has nothing to do with game theory

I disagree pretty strongly with that -- I think that "Bob is a moral person" and "people who are affected by Bob's actions generally would have been worse off if Bob's actions didn't affect them" are, if not quite synonymous, at least rhyming. The golden rule works pretty alright in simple cases without resorting to game theory, but I think game theory can definitely help in terms of setting up incentives such that people are not punished for doing the moral thing / incentivized to do the immoral thing, and that properly setting up such incentives is itself a moral good.

To be clear, there's morality, which is sort of the end goal ideal state we're working towards, and there's game theory/policy, which is how we get to that ideal state.

Penalizing murder may reduce murder, or may increase it for some reason, but either way has very little to no bearing on whether murder is immoral.

Punishing intent happens to work, and if it didn't then I'd probably agree that we shouldn't punish intent, but either way I do think intent is one ingredient of morality.

Game theory can help people be moral, sure, but it can't actually define morality.

I think the relationship between game theory and morality is more like the one between physics and engineering. You can't look at physics alone to decide what you want to build, but if you try to do novel engineering without understanding the underlying physics you're going to have a bad time. Likewise, game theory doesn't tell you what is moral and immoral, but if you try to make some galaxy-brained moral framework, and you don’t ay attention to how your moral framework plays out when multiple people are involved, you're also going to have a bad time.

Though in both cases, if you stick to common-sense stuff that's worked out in the past in situations like yours, you'll probably do just fine.

Yeah, I like that comparison more.

You say consequentialism is self-evidently wrong, and then you define morality as “the end goal ideal state we're working towards”? And you say you support punishing intent because “it works” — ie because of it’s consequences.

It seems to me you agree with the underlying framework of consequentialism, you just insist that the label “morality” apply simultaneously to both states and actions, whereas Utilitarians throw a InvalidTypeError for the latter.

If you agree that morality is the end state we want to achieve, how can you apply the same word to apply to actions and not have it be about achieving that state?

I agree that consequences matter, but don't believe they're the only thing that matter, so I disagree with consequentialism. That was the whole point of my original comment.

Pretty much all deontologists, virtue ethicists, etc. will agree that good governance is important. Very few will assert that consequences are entirely irrelevant to morality.

“the end goal ideal state we're working towards” was poorly worded. I just meant to gesture vaguely towards morality and terminal values.

Consequentialism does not demand ignoring intent, because intent is frequently important and not treating it as such would lead to bad consequences in many cases.

That’s the great thing about consequentialism, when it leads to bad consequences you can adjust it to lead to better ones.

Your own thought experiments bear this out. Moral uncertainty and the fundamental randomness and contingency of future events plague all systems.

Rule utilitarianism, or something like Cowen’s “economic growth plus human rights”, attempt to strike a balance between baseline rules and considering the effects of any given act. The US constitution sets forth rules, limitations, and rights in a framework of promoting the general welfare, directly in line with rule utilitarianism.

If your god inspired the US constitution, he’s clearly a fan of rule utilitarianism.

I am a deontologist primarily because I do not think that I'm smart and prescient enought to compute the consequences of my actions: many times actions that I considered immoral brought me success [1] and viceversa, action that I considered good were rejected [2]. My personal rules are generally derived both by my experiences and by "historical" experiences, both fictional and not, by looking at my emotions and reactions at those second hand experiences. The consequences to these rules are irrelevant because, as I said, I do not think that I can predict what things will be good for me, only what have been. And even then, it is possible what was good for me will not be in the future, but at least it is more probable.

[1]During a Physics Lab I started trating everyone as crap (insulting, overworking them) because they didn't meet my expectations. While I regretted it, at the end of the semester my Lab mates thanked my for my "leadership", go figure.

[2]It has happened at least three times, that I can remember: I volunteer to help someone and they reply to me that the only reason I want to help them is because I want to brag how much more capable than them I am. Go. Figure.

With what framework do you establish your deontological rules? How are you smart enough to establish them?

The optimal level of asshole leadership is very far from zero, but workers tend to only tolerate it willingly when there’s a cult of personality.

If the term "utilitarianism" can be extended to cover any ethical system that a reasonable person might adopt, then we run the risk of making the term vacuous.

Suppose we have a person who has to choose between two mutually exclusive options. He can spend his life becoming a great novelist, or he can spend his life working in tech and making a lot of money to spend on malaria nets for Africans. If he becomes a novelist, his work will be regarded by future generations of literature aficionados as one of the pivotal novels of the 21st century, although it will have limited impact outside of academic circles. If he instead spends his life buying malaria nets, he will save some non-trivial number of lives in the DRC (although of course the future impact of these individuals is impossible to calculate).

According to the brand of utilitarianism endorsed by Peter Singer and a number of Effective Altruists, it would be morally blameworthy of the person to not spend his life buying malaria nets and saving other people. I on the other hand think he is equally free from a moral perspective to choose either option, and in fact I'd be inclined to say that becoming a great novelist is the better option, because it would be a shame to waste a genuinely unique talent. How can utilitarianism accommodate my position?

You could say "well you're still basing your decision off of what you think maximizes The Good, and utilitarianism is just maximizing The Good, so it's still utilitarian". But the claim that we should pursue The Good is uncontroversial, perhaps even tautological. The purpose of a moral system is to describe, in explicit terms, what The Good is in the first place.

There is room for both. This scenario also presupposes accurate forecasting of outcomes. There is no way to know if you'll be able to wright the seminal novel of a generation or even be a great programmer. Your position only exists in the fictitious past. If your choice is between working and saving some people people and doing nothing, then you should work and save some people. That is something we can predict the outcome of.

Indoor vs Outdoor cats?

Outdoor. Cat shit might be the one thing that smells worse than dog shit and unlike dogs you can't let the cat out for quick shit and then call them back indoors.

Indoor. It's cheaper/safer in terms of disease risk and thus the amount of vaccinations they require, it's comfier for them in general with respect to weather, and you get to actually encounter them and interact with them more, assuming you spend more time indoors versus outdoors.

Having an outdoor cat is like halfway between having a cat and just feeding a stray cat. Might as well actually commit to having a cat if you want to have a cat.

Depends, do you like feeding birds to cats or feeding cats in the other sense?

Uh, what are you replying to?

To a comment made by @AhhhTheFrench about choosing to get/keep an indoor or outdoor cat?

Why do you ask?

It’s filtered- I presume mods can see it but we can’t.

Oh dear. I just doublechecked and the mod queue is a bit clogged to say the least. Thanks for pointing that out, I could have sworn the filtered comments look different to us mods, but it's probably that we were more on the ball. I've certainly been going through some shit and haven't had the time to contribute.

As it stands, all and sundry may answer his question. I would still vote against an outdoor cat, because my girlfriend has a pronounced tendency to want to steal them if they're cute, even if they obviously have owners. And if you've got a cat, I presume you want it close at hand to do cat things with. (What does one do with a cat? IDK, I'm a dog person)

What does one do with a cat? IDK, I'm a dog person

I had a black cat and I put a black throw blanked on the ledge by the window. I then got a window bird feeder.

The cat realized the birds could still see his eyes so he'd squint to watch them. Then he'd get too excited and thump his paws on the glass.

Basically cats are cute and fairly low maintenance. They don't constantly need your company and are happy to just let you pet them while you use your computer or watch tv.

(I have sorta owned a cat. My mom found a kitten under our car when I was a kid and kept it, though it was more of an outdoor cat*)

Sadly Indian cats are usually not nearly as cozy, cuddly or fluffy as their Western compatriots. Most you see live on the streets, and that makes them lean, embittered and mangy creatures. Seeing the puffy, cuddly and well-maintained ones in London certainly won me over.

But dogs are, from what I can tell, more popular around these parts.

*Autocorrect keeps changing cat to car, and bloody hell that changes the meaning of the quote a bit doesn't it?

Give it catnip to watch it getting high or play with a laser pointer.

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