domain:lesswrong.com
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23hr ago
Your Mormon apologia isn't of much interest to me–I can get similar superficially convincing treatises on why Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam is Actually Very Sound and Rational and The Best Way to Understand God from their adherents. You've chosen to believe, and it looks to me very much like you wanted a religion and went shopping and chose the one that suited your goals and lifestyle. Cool. But choosing which things you believe ala carte is very much against the spirit of most religious practices. That is of course between you and your faith. Whatever.
But your defense of the Noble Lie is profoundly unconvincing and even amoral. Adopting a false belief system and pretending to believe in it is wrong even if you find it instrumentally useful.
If someone accidentally agrees with all of your political positions because he thinks God told him you're a prophet, you might appreciate his support, but it would still be wrong of you to encourage him to believe you are a prophet. Telling an adopted child he's an actual biological child? In fact, I do believe you should tell an adopted child the truth (at an age-appropriate time and in an age-appropriate manner), and that not doing so is, in some sense, evil. There was another thread recently about Santa Claus. I don't have strong beliefs about letting little kids believe in imaginary things, but I will say there is definitely a point at which you should stop encouraging it. I am not saying telling a lie is never, ever justified under any circumstances, but in my opinion, those circumstances are extremely limited, both in situation and time.
If you think religious Noble Lies are good because it makes believers behave in an appropriate manner, I wonder why they can't be persuaded to behave without those beliefs. I am sure you are familiar with the old dialog between a Christian and an atheist: the Christian tells the atheist he's scary because without belief in God, the atheist can just decide that murder is good. The atheist responds that the Christian is scary, because he's saying it's only his belief in God that keeps him from murdering.
Needless to say, I find the atheist position more convincing. I think people should be convinced murder is bad without resorting to "Because God says so." If you want people to live a Mormon-ish lifestyle, you should be able to sell them on the virtues of that lifestyle without fables about Lamanites and golden tablets.
As for measuring them by who hates them, that seems a particularly poor way to choose who's right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. In my blacker moments I won't say the thought of voting to make wokes cry hasn't occurred to me, but I've never considered joining a church to own the libs.
lurker
23hr ago
I don't see how it launders in such a premise, especially if you know that all real world harms caused by witch hunts was caused by the hunters, not the witches.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23hr ago
Bluesky is apparently imploding
One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me (socialised Blue even if reasonably heretical, as evidenced by my presence on here). There's something that registers as blank aggression in the manner of speech - it's the tone of voice that I expect to hear if I pass through a US small-town downtown on a Friday night and a drunk manual labourer stumbles backwards into me, thinks in his drunken stupor that I shoved him and scopes me out for a fight. I can't see myself relaxing and leaving this running in the background, the way I could with a mainstream generic TV announcer voice youtuber. The n-1st time, incidentally, was Lunduke, a right-wing open source youtuber beloved of the Algorithm. Clearly this is not about content, as especially with Lunduke he mostly says things I agree with on topics that are close to my heart.
As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you? Do you actually not get the same "this person is on the brink of engaging in physical violence" feeling from it, or is it agreeable because you figure that it is a topic where wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction, or is it something closer to "the violent vibes are the marker of a particular culture, and that culture is good and precious" (how I figure soypilled left-wingers cope with gangsta rap)?
Pongalh
23hr ago
I actually wrote about this a bit ago: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/3337822/pennies-trump-target-second-term/
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
23hr ago
The meat of the disagreement is what constitutes a "bad reputation". At best it's scissor statements, my "efficient law enforcement" is your "brutal tyranny" but you started this with adjectives like "chaotic" that are pure outgroup messaging, and far from anything ICE is promoting about themselves. Seriously, go look at the @ICEgov twitter feed. The message they want out is "We are always getting bad guys, and if you act like a baby about it, we'll still get you and make fun of you for it, too."
That's a far cry from "chaos marauder stormtroopers".
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
23hr ago
Well, I still haven't hit my 200 rep 54# Kettlebell Snatch goal, but I have settled into two sets of 100 reps fairly reliably, assuming my form doesn't degrade to such a degree I rip my hands up.
Instead, I managed to military press my 88# Kettlebell! I haven't done that in probably 10 years, and even then I could only do it on one side, and not remotely reliably either. So yay! I'm not too old for improvement.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
23hr ago
I am increasingly happy to have turned down invitations from two pairs of hot bubbly blonde Mormon missionary girls in a row, I had an intrusive thought pop into my head, perhaps I should attend their sermon that Sunday, I wasn't doing anything important and it would be funny. I'm glad I didn't, because I look at this and think "there but for the grace of God myself go I".
Oh no, you could have had lots of babies with a beautiful blonde wife. The horror, the horror. So glad you escaped that tragic fate.
If you had been capable of living a lie, of snatching all the benefits of their community without compromising yourself (leaving aside the virtue of not being a liar), then I'd be marginally less concerned. Good luck, I can't really find it in me to condemn you, but I wish you hadn't gone down this rabbit hole even if it has hot blondes and fun, family-friendly activities along the way.
I forget when I heard this, could have been 12 years ago, maybe 15. But it was an episode of Radio Lab about telling yourself a lie to beat addiction. I remember two segments from it, one where two women quit smoking together, and decided that if either one of them starts smoking again, they'd give the other $10,000 or something like that.
The other was about this Russian treatment for alcoholism. They take the alcoholic, and they put a medical implant in his arm, and tell him the first time he drinks after this, he'll get horrifically sick. The second time he'll die. The doctor is laying it on incredibly thick. Then in the back half of the episode, after all this build up, he breaks kayfabe and is incredibly jovial. Admits the whole procedure is a hoax, and the pill they implant in the arm dissolves after a week or two. But it will make them incredibly sick if they drink with it in (which they always do), but it could never kill them. Still, believing it will grants the procedure a pretty good success rate.
If it were easy to Just Be A Good Persontm then we wouldn't have nearly the problems we have, nor would the self help section at book stores be so over flowing. If there were one lie you could believe, and it would make you nicer, give you hope, give you purpose, and generally make every conceivable facet of your life infinitely better and more rewarding, and it might not even be a lie, why not?
Well... I guess for that last part I'm more speaking about my own personal dalliances with Catholicism. The Book of Mormon is still bad bible fan fiction, but I can't judge too harshly these days.
Hey, no time like the present to fix the right’s headstart!
EDIT: Since I figure this’ll probably get caught in the filter like most of my other comments, might as well just leave it there. I stand by what I said, but it’s admittedly glib and not particularly productive, so no point in approving it.
2rafa
23hr ago
There is no panacea for delusion and bad decisions, just actions and traits that make succumbing to them less likely.
Indeed, and the problem is that it’s possible bad decisions are often a consequence of truth-seeking and an obsession with internal coherence. It may be that deep, personal introspection, and in particular a willingness to face the cold, hard emptiness of the universe with a grand disdain for spirituality and superstition is bad for us. Rationalism has no real answer to this beyond ‘nuh-uh’, ‘you’re doing it wrong’ and ‘maybe, but it doesn’t matter’, all of which I find profoundly unsatisfying.
When I think about the most fulfilling and happy moments of my life, none of them had to do with my (lifelong, since I was perhaps three or four years old, and really I have no recollection of ever having any belief in god) atheism. There were no euphoric moments, was no enlightenment by my intelligence. Instead I think of simple company, family and friends, the feeling of being part of bigger and greater things, being at peace with my life, my past, my future, and in time with my passing.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
23hr ago
When I pay with dollar bills (buying General Tso's chicken at a Chinese restaurant or a Slurpee/Icee at a convenience store), the cashier occasionally rounds to the nearest five cents (giving me a free one or two cents) on his own initiative, but I've never seen one round to the nearest ten cents.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
23hr ago
Maybe teens might benefit from prescription desoxyn, which is what we call it when avoiding a prescription for "1 meth please". I'll have to look at the studies.
erwgv3g34
23hr ago
What can you buy with dimes? I pointed out that quarters still have plentiful useful in the laundromat business, among others (parking meters, etc.) I cannot think of any area where dimes are in similar use.
Whenever I give back change at my hotel, and the guest leaves it on the desk, they do not make any special effort to fish out dimes; they treat them the same as nickels and pennies.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23hr ago
I'm pretty sure it is in reference to that meme.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
23hr ago
But I am struggling to understanding talk therapy as falling into the medical category, in part because much of talk therapy isn’t related to the prevention, treatment, or cure of mental illness
Eh? That's plain inaccurate. "Talk therapy" is a broad term but encompasses modalities like CBT which are the first choice for many psychiatric conditions like depression or OCD, even before the drugs. That isn't a whimsical choice, it's based on dozens of meta-analyses and reviews of the literature alongside rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
Currently receiving psychological therapy among CIS-R 12+ = 17.9%.
Currently receiving psychological therapy among CIS-R 0-5 = 1.6%.
Ratio of indicated to no-diagnosis therapy, per adult = 17.9% / 1.6% ≈ 11.2 to 1. If you restrict “indicated” to severe symptoms only (CIS-R 18+), the rate is 22.3%, giving ≈ 13.9 to 1.
In other words, at least in the UK, people are >11 times more likely to be in therapy because of a mental illness than they are just to chat or vent. The latter is practically a side-hustle. I can't imagine the numbers would be totally different in the States.
Some arguments tried to say that talk therapy is medical conduct because it triggers a physiological reaction in the brain, but all speech has the capacity to do that – someone telling you they love you can release dopamine and oxytocin; someone telling you “gross, no” after you ask them on a date can create a crushing response; etc. And yet, speech in a general sense continues to receive protections that conduct does not.
Oxygen plays an essential physiological role just about everywhere, not just the brain. It's not usually considered medical when it's just... in the air, but nobody objects to being billed for it when it's a concentrated canister being given by a mask or tube when your lungs aren't doing so hot.
07mk
23hr ago
IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?
99%, of course. People don't have a responsibility to talk about their opinions in order to hold them.
One can criticize the likes of Singal for being tactically incompetent in terms of how talking about the 1% difference aids the "other side" more than they ought to, or whatever, of course. But that's a separate question than whether or not he holds these opinions, with its own various dimensions, such as the fact that someone like Singal can reasonably (and very possibly correctly) believe that disproportionately focusing his speech on that 1% where he disagrees with his "side" is actually beneficial for his "side" and harmful to the "other side."
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
23hr ago
Well, yes, those are indeed symptoms of the US not being a soccer country, and the situation would thus change if it was one.
Dirty_DemSoc
Registered Demoncrat
23hr ago
You’re being downvoted for it, but you’re correct.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
23hr ago
This is a really interesting point. I really like the proposal to require showing after-tax prices. But this means that businesses have to know what the after-tax price actually is for each customer before purchasing, which is much harder and more ambiguous than doing it after purchase. For example, if customers who live in a certain city have to pay an extra tax, how would the business learn this about customers it's showing ads to? Not to mention the much larger number of ad targets than actual customers.
I think one thing that would happen is businesses would show some price based on predicted taxes, and just eat the tax difference if they predicted wrong. Or an even richer industry of fine print would spring up around price displays.
ThenElection
23hr ago
One possibility is that the Right implicitly accepts that there will always be disbelievers/bad people/whatever, and so the role of the inquisitor is to put them lower on the hierarchy. But the Left believes in the perfectability of society, and there's no room for bad people in a utopia.
Edawayac_Tosscount
23hr ago
Perhaps it's not a good model for the average terrorist, but it worries me that if this kind of violence becomes popular, the uncommon clever terrorist could commit this sort of violence serially; think of an indirect attack with a lethality similar to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting or worse, executed by someone who was justifiably confident they could get away with it multiple times.
KingOfTheBailey
23hr ago
Roses are red
Violets are blue
...wololo...
Now roses are too!
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
23hr ago
They are cultivating a narrative, but
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They are quite constrained in this. In particular, they cannot cultivate a narrative that will make those who consume mainstream-left media not hate them.
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They are trying to be scary at least some of the time. But not hateable. Consider all this handwringing about the Pokemon soundtrack... does the Pokemon soundtrack make them seem scary and hateable? Hardly. It's whimsical; that part is aimed not at generating fear or hate, but at convincing the convincible that they are doing their job.
MollieTheMare
23hr ago
During previous elbow injuries, I've had great success working it out with exercises, either flexing the wrist against tension using rubber bands or getting a Tyler bar. But nothing I've found has really helped with this one.
I'm going to go against the grain of the rest of the advise here and recommend you find an exercise that gets a bunch of blood pumped into the area. I would argue that like a 2/10 on pain, like a knot is getting worked out but not like I definitely am tearing something more kind, is a good sign. I like the Gyro Ball for a good forearm active stretch rehab thing. Hits the forearms from a bunch of different angles. Not a medical doctor, and it seems like this might be higher up than would get hit. If noticeably inflamed maybe contrast baths, starting and ending with hot.
I also recommend forgetting the hammer curl exists as an exercise. Incline curls, chins, and Bayesian curls (I'm sorry I didn't make up the name) as primary biceps exercise. Preacher curls, barbell curls, regular old dumbell curls, etc as secondary biceps exercise. IMO, hammer curl are way overrated with normally a better exercise for any particular objective.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
23hr ago
Imagine you are a dyed in the wool red triber. You agree with 99% of everything Trump is doing. Then one day, Trump decides we should all cut off our dicks. And suddenly you start seeing all your friends at church cutting their dicks off. They're cutting the dicks off their kids too! You might make it your singular purpose to try to lead your tribe, with whom you agree on 99% of all other issues, back to the land of sanity.
I don't envy Jesse Singal. He seems to honestly believe this is a mistake and not a conflict. He honestly thinks he can convince Democratic politicians and policy makers to reverse course, even 20%. If only those damned Republicans weren't also on his side of this issue, making his side all crazy, and doubling down on all the dick chopping.
Wait, I think I mixed up my metaphors there at the end...
Oh wait no, I'm good.
We need a $500 bill. The prior one had Cleveland, who served 2 non-consecutive terms, which means the new one should have Trump. Perhaps not ideal, but the precedent has been set.
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