Obsidian
1yr ago
If this is done at anything less than world-ending scale, technological society will hormetically adapt to prevent future instances. It is all but hopeless.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Social policing only works to the extent the polity is culturally homogeneous. CS is fucked.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I can't parse half of the stuff in this comment but I'd love to hear you go on at length about it. Have you thought of going on The Bailey?
Obsidian
1yr ago
Meanwhile the African Americans at the Top 20% percentile of the income distribution have a higher arrest rate than white American's at the bottom 20th percentile.
Where could I find a source for this?
Obsidian
1yr ago
Because then you're back to giving people money and selling government services, with everything that implies (inequality, disproportionately privileging people with low time preference, etc)
Obsidian
1yr ago
It is paternalistic and egalitarian.
Obsidian
1yr ago
Look into ChatGPT plug-ins, tool-using AIs are already here and it's a matter of years before they're able to replace ~every mid-skill labor job, if not necessarily cost-effectively at first
Obsidian
1yr ago
I've been circling this idea of a "government bank account", for allocating resources to government services in an equitable way.
The idea goes, just because services are government-administered doesn't mean they aren't subject to scarcity. And the disconnect between user and payer means that people use services with no regard to cost, and providers operate with no regard to quality. If only we could subject this to market dynamics!
The libertarian runs with this and says that all services should be paid for in cash (and removed from the aegis of the government, for good measure). But then people are shut out of public life, compounding inequality and misery over generational time scales.
If we're not going to entirely jettison the idea of a welfare state (which I would rather not; alle Menschen werden Brüdern and what not), then I would suggest a second currency, one which accrues regardless of work or merit, and which legally cannot be traded away.
This puts to the people some interesting questions. Would you rather go to work via the toll road, or heat your home hotter? Would you rather cash a welfare check, or receive end-of-life care?^1
The parallels to the Chinese social credit system are elucidating: whereas they've turned their whole society into a prolonged exam (they love taking exams), I'm proposing an exercise in private property x inalienable rights.
This also opens up more palatable avenues wrt congestion pricing, private/public competition, etc. Probably does interesting things to the meta of democracy but I haven't thought that part through.
^1 Yes, we Québécois receive electricity and healthcare as government services. To be frank, I don't know why you'd do it any other way.
Obsidian
1yr ago
I never thought I'd say this - and this is 100% earnest - but the main thing this place suffers from is insufficient bullying.
Obsidian
2yr ago
It's not that I lacked a custom-tailored education. But I was intellectually starving, desperate for things to learn, for concepts to connect together. And adults just told me "just wait a couple more years, it'll come."
If I had another go I would want to change everything after kindergarten. I only skipped one year, and was held back from skipping several more for nebulous reasons having to do with social development - lot of good that did.
Obsidian
2yr ago
The only thing I'd push back against here is early specialization. The edifice of human knowledge is becoming very dense, and you need deep knowledge and experience in a constellation of neighbouring fields if you are to merely catch up with the state of the art in one field, much less make valuable original contributions.
This is exactly the upbringing I've wished I'd had. No one asked for context, but let me grudgepost a little:
Everyone agreed I was gifted, and then did nothing to act on that. I wasted ten years of my early life, in full conscience of the fact, waiting for the autonomy and resources needed to push myself.
I hit thirty this year. There's something special about that number: it cut through any internal narratives I may have had about stuff I want to do later. Well, good morning and happy birthday, we are later, later is today! You are on the downslope now, your cognitive and physical capacities are going to get monotonically worse until the day you expire. You're not going to have any more free time or energy or drive than you do right now. This Is Your Life, this is your cruising speed, get what you want out of it now or forever hold your peace.
I've experienced this as a second childhood.
After a difficult first go-around, the primary enterprise of my adult life has been to surround myself with people who are capable, trustworthy, who will invest in me and who are worthy of investing in. And boy have I lucked out. I enter this phase of my life surrounded by brothers, and quite a few sisters, who elevate me and whom I can help elevate.
And though I am paying it forward already in some measure, I hope to go further, through the same kind of life journey that Hoel describes.
What you call raising a genius, to me seems to be merely honouring a child for who and what he is. Through this, even a phenotypically unexceptional child can be made exceptional by bringing him to recognize his own worth, and understanding the kinds of expectations it is reasonable to have of himself. Part and parcel of this is integration in a rich, multigenerational social, physical and intellectual life.
I like the Orthodox imagery of saints coifed in gold leaf halos. Surround yourself with gold-coifed men and women. Raise each other up, and your children as well.
Obsidian
2yr ago
Rephrased: there is no such thing as "merely" homeschooling. It's a big fucking decision with big fucking tradeoffs.
Obsidian
2yr ago
This is my first choir, joined because I'm trying to learn music. I got some extraordinary resources for self-study from a fellow Mottizen (Gary Karpinski is the absolute goat) but it was time to take it social. I heard the choir at a friend's Orthodox church and decided I liked it.
My choir is over a hundred people strong. We learn the lines in-person, barely anyone knows how to sight-read. I'm going above and beyond by doing any amount of solo practice.
The first time I heard the sopranos join in I was slammed by a mystical experience, comparable to calmly stepping into a cold shower or being on psychedelic mushrooms.
Would be pretty sad if you saw yourself as too old to be bothered to learn music. We have a bunch of seventy year olds singing soprano, though maybe that's easier to learn. (I sing bass, which is mostly a combination of tonic/subdominant/dominant. And then there's Handel, whoops.)
Obsidian
2yr ago
You have to go balls to the wall. 5k runs and vinyasa yoga really do it for me, as do actual sports.
Obsidian
2yr ago
Meditation helps. Participating to a men's group helps. Doing cool shit with people irl helps.
A late reply to @urquan on assisted suicide
A close family friend has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She cannot drink without choking, she cannot move through space without falling, she cannot manipulate objects. Her life is miserable, and every day that goes by she loses further capacities.
Her options are something as follow:
-
Enlist the help of someone, potentially the state, to kill her within the next few weeks;
-
Tough it out until the line on the graph for "care necessary to life" crosses the line for "care available from friends and family and oupatient caretakers", and allow herself to die of neglect - I'm guessing by suffocation, once her diaphragm stops working - within more or less the same timeline as the previous;
-
Engage with the medical system, which will do its very best to keep her going, until even the best medical technology our public system can buy cannot keep her blood flowing, probably before Christmas this year, and she expires after spending her last few weeks highly medicated in a sterile white prison.
I understand what your Christian ethics say in general, as you have beautifully laid them out for us. But in the specifics, in full contact with reality, if this were you or your mother or your close family friend, what would you say or do? Where would your heart be?
it me.
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