ffrreerree
1mo ago
How do you come to terms with the immense amount of suffering in the world?
First, I'm curious if most here would agree that the sum of suffering in the world is greater than the positives of existence, assuming we're just summing up the valence of every second over every human lifetime and not imposing a post facto judgment about purpose or meaning making it all worth it or somesuch. I mostly conclude this from 1) the commonplace observation that pain is more intense than pleasure and 2) despite living an immensely fortunate life, comparatively, I don't find it all that easy, so I can only imagine that what 99% of the world experiences.
And even if you don't agree that the balance of human experience integrated over time is negative, surely no one would disagree that there is, overall, tremendous suffering, and much of it is utterly pointless. There is no need, I think, for me to belabor the cruelties visited upon man by nature and by his own kind. (And that is even before we get to the suffering of animals.)
Here are the possible responses I can think of:
- don't think about it
- declare that I only care about the suffering of myself, those close to me, and my descendants, which might be more manageable
- admit that the world is an awful place, and get on with my own life
- religion
- devote my energies to reducing general suffering, e.g., by being an effective altruist
None is very satisfying. (1) may be the pragmatic thing to do but it's an intellectual cop-out. (2) seems to be a popular sentiment in these parts, but I find it spiritually unsatisfying - not enough somehow, even if correct. (3) seems to lead to the conclusion that if offered the chance to press a button to make the world vanish, I should press it, but it seems most are revolted by this idea so I assume that most don't subscribe to it. (4) I am constitutionally unsuited for. (5) seems unlikely to make a difference to the big picture, and in any case I'm too selfish for that. Maybe we're back at (2). Which now feels like a post-rationalization rather than an actual attempt at a good response.
ffrreerree
1mo ago
This seems to me a somewhat narrow view of gay sex.
For instance, you assume that to bottom is necessarily to be taken advantage of somehow. Just because you don't enjoy bottoming doesn't mean no one else does, or that it is only enjoyable in a psychological way. As evidence consider the market for anal sex toys and prostate massagers, many of which are advertised to straight men. Consider the endless stories of people needing to go to the hospital to remove large objects they've gotten stuck up their butts. These men were seeking a mechanical sort of gratification which may be correlated with submissiveness but which should be thought of as independent of it.
Maybe I'm just autistic or something but I've always thought that gay relationships and sex had a lot more opportunity for egalitarian bonds. To me it seems that in hetero relationships, no matter how loving, there is always the lingering tension of transaction and compromise, given that men and women generally have different needs and desires and often don't understand each other. But gay relationships don't require an asymmetry and can be closer to purely positive-sum, like friendship. Maybe that makes the relationship cheaper in some ways and more genuine in others.
ffrreerree
1mo ago
Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives.
I might never quite understand why it isn't commonly agreed upon that euthanasia should be acceptable in such cases, and that there should be no fear or shame in it. Instead we must have suffering, suffering, and more suffering, without purpose. It makes me angry.
ffrreerree
2mo ago
Our modern world order vastly overweighs 'rational,' left-brained, rules-following, logical types of intelligence. While at the same time totally disregarding and not rewarding intuition, vibes-fluency, social skills, grasping of the gestalt, right-brained thinking, religious thinking, et cetera.
Really? I've always thought the opposite. We generally reward those who are likeable, who are able to get other people on their side. Anyone in a leadership role, for example, needs to have people skills, not the sharpest analytical mind. Isn't it the perennial complaint of the wage slave that those at the top only got there by being smooth talkers or getting chummy with the powerful?
Also you seem to conflate right-brained thinking with being "virtuous", which I find odd. The two seem unrelated.
ffrreerree
2mo ago
Could we perhaps add an "I find this amusing" option to the Report menu? I feel like a little trolling and provocation should be forgiven when executed with sufficient panache.
ffrreerree
3mo ago
Fair enough on this specific case; I'll allow that it's ambiguous. But I want to put the case of "literally" in the category of exaggeration or creative usage. You may as well complain that any figurative language can be ambiguous. Never use hyperbole! Never use metaphor! Never use sarcasm! Never use a colorful idiom! It might be unclear! I think this kind of misses the point. A better approach for a teacher would be to say: text your friends how ever you like, but if you use "literally" figuratively in a business email, you might come off as unserious, because it's not the norm.
ffrreerree
3mo ago
I don't buy the arguments that prescriptive grammar is important for us to communicate clearly and unambiguously with each other.
The peeves of prescriptive grammarians are at best of marginal relevance to comprehension. When has a sentence-ending preposition, a figurative use of "literally", or even a dangling modifier ever actually caused you to misunderstand someone? If such mistakes make communication less "effective" it is mainly by causing educated readers and listeners to do a double take, because they were trained to sniff out such infelicities, rather than by actually causing confusion.
Of course, real confusion can be caused by malformed sentences, such as those produced by language learners. But descriptivism, not prescriptivism, is what foreign language learners need. To be understood, they need to learn how sentences are actually structured by native speakers. Shorn of those fundamentals, what remains of "prescriptive grammar" consists in large part of arcane proscriptions against mistakes that foreigners would never make in the first place. Foreign language teachers and learners understand this: the primary goal is always to "speak like a native!"
Of course, in parts of society where a narrower linguistic standard is observed, the student, native or otherwise, benefits from prescriptivist instruction by acquiring the ability to signal education, propriety, intelligence, and competence to others. (But even here, the student is best served by a descriptive mindset, refined to the set of people they wish to impress: what are the rules that reputable publishers actually follow? Learning rules that have long been ignored even by the educated is a waste of time.)
But moving from the individual to the society, what is the argument for having such a standard in the first place? I think an honest argument has to have something of the flavor of arguments for tradition, etiquette, and decorum, rather than appeal to "clarity" or "effective communication".
ffrreerree
3mo ago
On a more meta level, this seems to pattern match a behavior we've seen from the Democrats a lot. Instead of proactively using openness to refute conspiracy theorists, they seem to double down on secrecy. Why let the rumors swirl?
I'd guess that most White House staffers might not even be aware of this speculation, or if they are, they might consider it fringe enough to ignore. I've only seen this stuff on rightwing twitter.
ffrreerree
3mo ago
Is it possible that Harris is a sort of mirror image of Trump? Both are quirky and memeable and voluble and unintentionally funny but maybe in ways that appeal to (and repel) opposite groups of people. Neither is seen as particularly principled or deep, but their unseriousness manifests in ways associated with their sex and social class: his fragile masculine ego, her giggly femininity; his chest-thumping and locker room talk, her woo-adjacent babbling; his blue-collar affectations, her PMC wine mom energy. He uses his wealth and status to access sex; she uses her sex to access status. (Sorry, I know I stepped away from the Indian thing.)
I just wanted to say thanks for these interesting thoughts - I'd hoped to see more discussion about the misallocation of talent especially since I don't know what to think myself. It seems unlikely people are going to engage on this topic anymore - too bad about the timing.
ffrreerree
3mo ago
Until I started working with geniuses, I never really understood the laments you sometimes hear that go, what a pity it is that our brightest minds have all gone off to Wall Street. I thought, that can't really be the case right? But then I joined a quant trading firm, in a sort of supporting role, and suddenly I also find myself wondering, as I interact with certain people at the office: shouldn't you be uncovering the secrets of the universe or something?
It took a while to hit me. I think I spent my first few months constantly debating people on this or that, convinced I had something to teach them, at least in my little domain. After all, it isn't always immediately apparent when someone is far more intelligent than you. But time and again I would have these epiphanies: oh, he is right, he was right two weeks ago, and I should've just listened then, as it would have saved me two weeks of trouble, and now I have to rewrite this code, and he had foreseen all this, and all this time he's been gently, politely nudging me to understand, as with a child, never brashly asserting his superiority, which must have been obvious to him. And I would feel ashamed remembering all my impassioned but mistaken arguments. After a while I picked up a sort of epistemic helplessness: even if my intuitions disagreed completely with one of these people I knew to be brilliant, I would go along with them. Eventually I would understand.
I'll call one of these brilliant and competent people Mark. I hesitate to say "genius" but I wouldn't object if you used the word. If I had to guess, I'd say he's 4 standard deviations above the mean, but really it's kind of impossible to judge people much smarter than you I think. Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore; he always worked remotely. That isn't normal at my company, but I assumed he must have negotiated an arrangement with the director. Perks of being a star. Was he on some beach? I don't know. He was still on Slack, ready to explain some point about statistics whenever I messaged him occasionally.
One day the midwits of HR took it upon themselves to organize mandatory in-person harassment training for everyone. Up till now, the annual training had been online and easy enough to click through without too much thought. But now we were forced to sit and discuss various hypothetical scenarios aloud, under the guidance of a training facilitator. In one scenario, a black employee is offended when someone describes her as "articulate". I wanted to pull my hair out, listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic. It struck me that our baroque American woke social norms perhaps do more to exclude minorities than to include them, on net. In another scenario, an intern with they/them pronouns is misgendered by those around them. Our guided discussion of this scenario was absolutely farcical. No one managed to utter two sentences about this hypothetical scenario without also accidentally using the wrong pronouns (and amusingly it was always "she", never "he", that people accidentally said), prompting stifled giggles all around. Even the training facilitator slipped up and had to conclude by mumbling something about how “intent matters”. It was as if we all knew subconsciously that individuals such as the hypothetical intern had on some level deluded themselves. Overall, I was (and am) annoyed that HR had been permitted to waste the valuable time of these smart people in this silly way, since the company had otherwise been very no-nonsense. I supposed Mark was somehow exempt from this training.
Weeks later, Mark returns to the office, ending his long absence. Only now he's a she, and goes by Mary.
And now maybe some of you are rolling your eyes at this post: you’ve been duped into reading propaganda. But no, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I’m just trying to reflect on my own perspective on trans people suddenly shifting based on this one person. It’s not that I’d never encountered trans people before, but in the past they were always of the annoying sort, the sort that you could dismiss as a self-deluded victim of a weird sort of social contagion. But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before. Somehow just witnessing one extremely competent and effective person I respect turn out to be trans made it “real” for me, especially after all the other times I deferred to her judgment.
(I recognize that not everyone worships mathematical talent like I do, and you may find my automatic deferral of judgment weird or even disqualifying of my opinion. I know there are brilliant mathematicians with stupid and wacky beliefs in other domains. I do think, though, that the intelligence of Mary and some of the other quants goes beyond the academic; trading real money tethers your beliefs to the real world. She is not some aloof ideas person. She was and is reasonable levels of well-adjusted, funny, and courteous, and unreasonable levels of good at cranking out code that makes millions of dollars. Make of this story what you will.)
Has my opinion changed on any concrete trans issue? I don’t know. If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool. I don’t know if she’d be very angry about it anyway; she’s a level-headed person. What about sex change therapy for children? Still seems bad. Maybe the main change is just that I feel like I should be less quick to judge people in general.
I wasn’t there when Mary walked into the office for the first time as a woman. I don’t think anyone made a fuss over it or anything, and now everyone respects her new name and pronouns, but it still makes me anxious just imagining what it must have been like. Surely a measure of bravery was required, probably more than I’ve ever mustered on any occasion. What compelled her to do this? On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that? I’m inclined to defer to her, whether or not I understand.
I do wish she'd go and pursue science though.
ffrreerree
5mo ago
Are Brits on average more intelligent than Americans, at least verbally (restricting both sets to college-educated people, say)? As an American I know I might be conditioned by silly tropes of British sophistication but I feel like there's something here.
- Based on what Youtube serves up to me occasionally, British talk shows seem more clever
- Prime Minister's Questions, despite being nonsense, seem to require more quick-wittedness than any comparable American political event I can think of
- Social customs seem to require saying lots of things in subtler, more roundabout ways, which is simply more mentally taxing for both the speaker and listener
Not that any of these are amazing displays of intelligence. There just seems to be a greater demand on one's verbal faculties in everyday life.
ffrreerree
5mo ago
What are the current factions of online American leftism? I stumbled on Red Scare's podcast with Steve Sailer. I was aware of antiwoke dirtbag leftism but it was still somewhat interesting to see the audience mostly giving this an eyeroll, certainly not delighted by this guest but also certainly not calling for a cancellation. They seem to reserve their wrath for Israel, capitalism, and fat people. Where does this subreddit fit in in the political landscape?
ffrreerree
7mo ago
the experience on Ritalin is unpleasant enough that I don't bother most of the time
this would seem to sidestep any potential longterm issues of dependency, tolerance, etc. right? I guess I'm more concerned about daily use.
ffrreerree
7mo ago
Has anyone concluded that being on Adderall or other stimulants long-term is the right choice for them? I've been on a low dose for several years and find it almost necessary for basic functioning (having the motivation to buy groceries, go to work, focus for longer than 3 minutes, etc.). I take a day or two off each week, and I basically mope all day on those days.
But on priors it just seems wrong that I should permanently be on stimulants. I didn't have trouble focusing as a child. I find the whole "I have a condition that didn't exist 50 years ago and need to be permanently medicated by something that makes me mildly high" thing just embarrassing and suspect. Also, it's getting harder and harder to get my hands on the stuff where I live.
I tried taking a break for several months and it didn't work out. I thought I would have withdrawal at first and then slowly get back to normal. Instead I was fine at first and things seemed to get worse over time. I was getting depressed from a cycle of not accomplishing anything all week, beating myself up over it, and doing the same the next week. That was kind of what life was like before I started on Adderall, though it might not have been quite as bad - hard to say. I didn't know what else to do other than to start taking stimulants again. Could being on stimulants simply be the right choice?
ffrreerree
2yr ago
I thought I read somewhere that it takes Chinese kids longer to attain an equivalent level of literacy, but I can't find a source right now.
ffrreerree
2yr ago
What is the plan if no one posts here? Would it make sense to announce an impending shutdown of the subreddit so that people actually move?
I wonder what @gorge would make of the conservative argument for gay marriage. @gorge writes:
So promiscuous, meaningless, bohemian gay sex is to be discouraged. Therefore why not promote gay marriage as an alternative? After all, gay people will continue to exist either way, so we might as well attempt to include them as best we can into proper, respectable society, by providing an avenue for them to approach as closely as they can the traditional conception of a household, encouraging adoption, etc. I think Andrew Sullivan made this argument decades ago, and faced opposition from other gay activists at the time who held that gay people should not try to force themselves into heteronormative strictures or whatever.
Gay marriage, or something like it, almost seems like the only workable solution to the problem of homosexuality from the conservative point of view, unless you have some other proposal to make gay people vanish or turn straight or be castrated. If a gay person asks you, "how should I live my life", and the only answer is "sorry, you have no place in my conception of society, unless you commit to lifelong celibacy and loneliness, in which case you may quietly sit in the corner" then can you blame them for turning elsewhere?
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