Jesweez
2mo ago
I think you’re hitting the nail pretty much on the head.
Interestingly, just today I was writing some notes on the importance of pressure in making us humans get things done and become better people.
As context, I’m currently doing a STEM PhD. I’m one of the people who has always been smart enough to have my intelligence make up for poor work habits. That is, right up until now when the demands of my program have become challenging enough that I need to develop my work habits at a much higher level to keep afloat.
Meanwhile I’m advising a bunch of undergraduates on their big year long final project. Maybe 5% of them have good work habits, usually the more anxious and detail oriented types. The rest don’t get started on time, miss important meetings, don’t tend to read simple instructions, etc.
I’m chatting with the professor today, and he’s laughing, telling us about the methods he uses to make the students feel “pain”, get “nervous”, put them under “pressure”. He tells us his catchphrase is “you’re never early when doing a project like this. You’re always late. You need to catch up!” And his demeanor really got me thinking.
Personally, I had a realization that in order to execute my longer term projects I needed to place pressure on myself from the get go. Positive motivations are nice, but they don’t get you out of bed in the same way as pressure does. The panic monster needs to be on my shoulder, and be there, at least in a small way, from the get go. I’m a very relaxed person, I was raised in a very lenient household, and I grew up thinking this kind of pressure was bad. But I increasingly think I’ve been wrong.. in moderation, this pressure is truly good, it’s formative. And that golden mean of moderation in pressure may be much further to the harsher side than our culture currently appreciates.
Our culture has really devalued using pressure to shape people. We look at the Chinese kids being forced to study and exercise for all their waking hours and say.. not us!
But perhaps if not fully to that extreme, we’d do better to go further in that direction.
I’ve come to think of a human being as a system which is shaped by pressures. Long ago this system was shaped… by hunger, by social pressures… into hunters, and farmers, and blacksmiths, and soldiers. But modern society has seen the removal of a great number pressures. And like a body without the influence of gravity, I believe that the system suffers without these.
And going back to your point about status and what society values… if we in the society do not have pressure placed upon us to become better, to do hard things, to face larger and larger challenges, we end up mostly content to just exist. Without an upward force society stagnates. Because in the end, solving problems in the real world tends to be highly challenging and requires hard won expertise.
Jesweez
2mo ago
It’s so intriguing to me how the quality of our art, music, entertainment, education, ability to build things, and political discourse all seemed to decline together.
Fascinating to think about what the underlying cause to the general decline has been.
Jesweez
2mo ago
I felt like it did cool the culture war?
To me it feels like both the left and the right have calmed down somewhat over the past few years.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Sometimes I wonder if part of this is that where I lived during COVID, the measures taken by the government were extremely lax.
Life wasn’t really disrupted all that much, we were told by the governor to go outside and enjoy the open air and hiking trails, although social gatherings were discouraged, I don’t think much of anything of the sort was ever actually banned. There was no curfew, nothing like this. Although there were some limits placed on in restaurant capacity for a while.
When I say “a few weeks”, I’m talking specifically about the period of time in which the local hospital was at max capacity. Since measures of reduction of community spread were mainly up to the individual, then the result here is just a simple question: my community is currently in a wave of a new pathogen and there’s a shortage of beds to treat people who got very sick.
Given that, should I hang back and not go to a big party right now?
For me that’s a simple yes, it’s relatively easy for me to put myself in the place of not having enough beds to treat the sick.
Does that mean I behaved like that during all of the year or so of COVID times? No, I more or less lived normally during most of it.
I do also empathize with people who had their lives severely restricted by the government too, and I do believe that given the nature of the disease what we did was overkill. I remember I visited Peru in late 2021, and wow, in the capital they had implemented a whole host of very strict measures. (To be fair to them, they did have the highest morality rate in the world). Overall our response may have been more appropriate for a Spanish Flu type scenario but COVID ended up being much milder.
My perspective may be biased somewhat in that during COVID for me, I pretty much lived normally and very little changed or was restricted for me. So to the question of “hey the hospital is currently at capacity, would you modify your behavior a bit to put a damper on community spread of this new virus until the surge starts to fall a bit?” … my response is pretty much, yeah. Not much of a problem.
Jesweez
2mo ago
I’m having trouble distinguishing your responses from just garden variety selfishness to be honest. Of course you like the good things in life.
The people who die due to lack of medical care usually like the same things too, so we don’t have to redefine the meaning of human life or anything here. It’s just that since they (in this example) have died due to lack of medical care that now they cannot enjoy those things.
Me behaving slightly differently for a few weeks during a triage event in the local hospital is a pretty small price.
A small bit of sacrifice for the wellbeing of others is a relatively common human characteristic, but there are definitively also a number people who don’t come equipped with that chip.
Jesweez
2mo ago
I’m sorry about what happened.
But denying someone an elective surgery because of some risk calculation to the patient wasn’t really the point I was talking about here.
I’m saying in an actual triage situation it makes sense to curtail elective surgeries, and also it makes sense for regular people to try and not overburden the system even more.
Whether or not COVID was an actual triage situation or a situation that was mistakenly considered as a triage scenario is beside the point.
I care about the medical “system” inasmuch as it prevents people from dying or having severe health complications, so back to the OPs point, I would totally modify my behavior a bit if my local medical system asked me to during a triage type event.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Well, to me the whole point of this conversation is “if there’s a risk of overloading the medical system, should we alter our behavior to reduce that load?”
Your argument is that it wasn’t justified in that case because the system wasn’t truly overloaded.
Whereas the original comment seems to be about even in the case that the system is overloaded.
Jesweez
2mo ago
That’s a shame to know that your father died due to inability to access medical care
However it’s illustrative that the medical system is obviously important, and of what happens when people cannot access it
Jesweez
2mo ago
The medical system is human life.
How can you not equate those two?
If the medical system goes down, you immediately get loss of human life.
Jesweez
2mo ago
It’s just a garden variety situation where you’re asked to pitch in so as to avert larger scale hardship.
Was that so alien to you beforehand?
For example, during the world wars people had to ration their goods so that everyone can eat and so that the soldiers could be supplied.
Would you have pushed back and eaten a second sandwich at lunch because you’re not going to sacrifice your personal enjoyment for some “system”?
Say you’re in a house with 3 other people. You all want a hot shower because you just got back from a long trek. You get the shower first. Are you really going to use ALL the hot water just because you like long hot showers? Or do the preferences of others enter into the mind at some point? Because if so, well it’s just the same logical process.
I know where I was at during COVID, the hospitals weren’t at capacity, but there was a time when it stayed right at the edge of capacity for a few weeks, and they had to roll up a few mobile morgues during that time (air conditioned shipping containers) to process the extra bodies.
I did personally see it as valuable for me and the community I was in to take at least some small sacrifices to make sure that those morgues didn’t fill up too quickly during those few weeks.
I find your comment really strange.
The impetus to not overload the medical system during a given situation is not to benefit “the system” but rather to benefit human life.
E.g., if you get sick enough to need medical care then you’ll be likely to receive that care.
During the early days of COVID when it quickly overran hospital resources in places like Italy, Spain, Hong Kong, etc., this was a very present danger and the likelihood in some cases tipped towards being that no, you might not be able to get a lifesaving treatment had you needed one.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Sex ed is surely good but this is also like saying that D.A.R.E. programs will be a magical solution to all drug use because once you sat through a school program, now you automatically make good choices.
Jesweez
2mo ago
I don’t think there was a single question where Trump managed to stay on topic.
Like I actually believe if you sat and counted every response, the number of responses where he stuck to the topic of the question throughout the response would equal zero.
I’m unsure if this is related to his cognitive capacity, or if it was strategic to talk about what subjects he felt important. But if strategic, it was executed very poorly and each time after the rant the moderator would remind him and the audience what the original question was, it was always comical just how far he’d gotten from it without answering it.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Visually, Trump looked flustered and irritated the whole night. Importantly, he barely even looked at Harris, just started straight ahead for almost the whole night.
Meanwhile Harris had dominant nonverbals. From walking straight up to him on his side of the stage and catching him off guard, to staring at him while he spoke.
On content, Trump got baited several times and also made some unprovoked errors. Harris stuck to the points she wanted to make, seemed to effectively get across the message she intended to get out, and landed a few memorable lines. I don’t recall anything that could be considered a mistake from her.
She wins the debate and comes out of it seeming more competent than I think a lot of people had penned her.
Jesweez
2mo ago
I liked traveling around the Yucatán in Mexico and seeing that in small villages with lesser known pyramids people had just taken the stone from the pyramids in the town center and repurposed it to build fences and mundane daily things.
Jesweez
2mo ago
Any study of Earth history IMO has to come to the conclusion that the planet’s climate is sort of a wild beast,
Just to note I took that part out of my original comment because I felt I was starting to ramble.
But yes, I do see that as the biggest danger. Earth history seems to suggest that extreme swings in the planetary climate have not been uncommon occurrences. Thus it’s pretty imperative to reduce the pressure with which we are poking the beast, IMO.
(Geo engineering may be the most responsible thing to do given that, but reducing greenhouse gas injection is also important).
Jesweez
2mo ago
In the book it’s a heat event greater than survivable wet bulb temperatures in India. Once the grid goes down, 20 million people die over the span of a few days.
India reacts by unilaterally deciding to begin solar geoengineering and declares any attempts to stop it as an act of war.
I don’t know how likely an outcome like this is. (The death number is definitely pretty crazy).
But who knows. We are just at the beginning of climate change after all.
One paper that does raise my eyebrows quite a bit is this, estimating that by around 2070 1-3 billion people will be subject to hot climate conditions currently only experienced by 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface (currently represented by just a few parts of the Sahara).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1910114117
At best that really messes with the economy in those places and the pressure to emigrate skyrockets.
I think humans usually surprise me by our ability to deal with extreme heat. But also, tolerance to any environmental stressor is a threshold function, things can look okay while stresses mount until suddenly at certain threshold we see more dramatic impacts. (Example, rising floodwaters are not a big deal right until the moment the water rises to the level of your front door, then costs/damages suddenly rise dramatically).
Jesweez
2mo ago
The word Hispanic really doesn’t have anything to do with someone’s racial background
Jesweez
2mo ago
There’s a whole cadre of risk averse people who have been putting a damper on all discussion of geoengineering for decades now.
But I think that we will roughly follow the path that’s laid out in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future: we hold off on geoengineering right up until some large scale tragedies happen which are clearly as a result of climate change and then use that as a watershed moment to start spraying stuff in the atmosphere to try and defend ourselves.
The risk reward logic for whoever might start doing it doesn’t work out until there is some terrible event to point to. We prefer the status quo and need a big attention grabbing event to justify any type of big actions that deviate from it.
Of course, once we do start doing it, it’s unlikely we’ll scale up carbon capture technology to truly make that much of a difference IMO, so it’ll just be a game of doing this forever or else deal with the termination shock.
A rational approach would be different than this but our psychology makes a waiting-around-and-then-rushed-panicky-reaction strategy more likely.
Jesweez
1yr ago
University systems now screen out 80% of faculty hires on "diversity" scoring before even passing the remaining resumes on to the hiring committee to be judged on merit.
Source?
You seem to have already steel manned humor, just pointed out that sometimes it’s not appropriate and with a dash of how the internet tends to ruin things
More options
Context Copy link