iprayiam3
1yr ago
Therefore it seems self-evident that a thing has value because someone is willing to die for it: that person, even if he's a deranged lunatic, has staked his life on that thing. The value of it has been upped to "one deranged lunatic" from whatever it was before.
You're just wrong here. Compare: I love my dog, therefore, I would risk my life for him. to I don't love this dog, but I wish I did. If I risk my life for him, it will make it so. you have causality backwards. In the latter scenario, you are de-valuing your life down to what you value your dog. Not the other way around.
Human life has value: the economists put it at around $10 million per head, if we're talking about Americans.
This bit is a nonsequitor. Risking your life for something without value, doesn't give it $10m in value.
It will potentially make me more conscientious: the attitude that lets me survive the Hock might let me pay a shitload of attention in social situations so I don't miss anything.
There is no reason to think it will do anything like this. if you want to become more conscientious, go do something extremely social for 3 months. Go be a missionary in Uganda.
If not net 0, the Hock will make you more detached and withdrawn in social situations. Consider the soldier who comes home from war, and has trouble adjusting back into civilian life. If not nothing at all, you're going to mostly experience a wall between you and others.
Imagine you're at some social event, say some meet-up at a bar. You're standing there, drink in hand, watching everyone else, seemingly mingling effortlessly. Why not you, dammit. You're hyper-conscientious about your own milling around, you try to stand next to others talking to eachother, but feel unsure where and how to jump in naturally. Damn you feel awkward. Still! What's more, now you feel resentful, angry even at the frivolty of it.
3 months ago, you were struggling to get a match lit with your half-frost bitten hands. It was a race against the cold and wind, and you were losing. Once that fire was roaring, your body was still in freezing agony sore all over, but hell, the relief and triumph was simultaneously better and worse than anything you'd ever known.
Back to the room. Fuck these people. You survived that night, and so many other after it. Something significant, something none of these people will ever know. What are they talking about now, some twitter drama? So shallow, they have no idea. Your triumph would humble them if only, anyone cared to ask. If only there was a way into the conversation... fuck it, these people have nothing in common with you. You've been through so much.
This is the optimistic way of it playing out.
Survivormanning alone in the woods will not address social competence in any kind of a positive way or provide any useful frame for engaging social scenarios more healthfully.
Yes. The Hock is going to freeze most or all of the hypocrisy off of me,
I don't know what this means, so I'll reiterate. In small, very temperate doses, it will make you slightly more attractive to women, but not anywhere near proportional to the effort you are putting in.
I'll end by granting you that on some deep level, it's quite possible this will improve your self-possesion and perspective in a way that will manifest much deeper into a relationship in a much more nuanced way. But these effects will not appear (and may appear counterproductively) on a group-level or in initial and high level interactions.
Again to the soldier analogy. The things he learned and survived in the hellishness of war may make him a demonstrably better father, with deeper values and worldly detachment. But those are mostly going to come at the cost of social grease and 'gracefullness' and connectedness to the people around him.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
It doesn't even matter whether it's easier. It will be dramatically more effective.
What's your take?
My take is that I've never seen so comically insane of an instance of Goodhart's Law (When the measure becomess the target, it ceases to be a meaningful measure).
Having values you are willing to die for is getting badly translated into Being willing to die for something gives it/you value. Dude you are way off base, and you should take it as a sign of your ultimate disappointment and disillusionment that everyone EVERYONE has told you so, and you stubbornly refuse to adjust your perspective even a little.
I approve of setting goals and taking on endurance challenges etc, so I have no reason to talk you out of that, generally. But you cannot allow yourself to go do something until you've cleared yourself as mentally competent enough to take on the risk. So here is a quick sobriety test:
1. You do fully understand that completing the Hock will not make you not awkward? It won't directly or indirectly help awkwardness at all.
In fact, I would bet it will make you feel slightly more awkward in social settings because it will be another point of distance between your inner self and those around you. "These people have never been through what I have been through" will become a resentment crutch, when you realize it did nothing to directly affect your social awkardness.
2. Do you understand that it will make you only slightly more attractive to women? Slighlty and in a very limited way, which will be quickly undone and reversed if you try to milk it.
Let me unpack that. I recall you said previously that you used to do competitive downhill skiing in high school. I'd put the Hock at objectively 30% as attactrive as that, but with the compensating benefits of recency. (If, you're say, under 35, I imagine the skiing will remain more interesting). Thriving in a competitive social and physical environment is far more interesting to women than pursing a loner hobby.
For another comparison, it will register as about as attractive as if you've recently completed a marathon. Maybe slightly more if the "I put my life on hold for 3 months" registers as financial secuirty. So, I'd say about as interesting as recently completing a marathon during a trip to Europe.
Now here's why I say it is limited and will be quickly undone, and listen closely because it has everything to do with the awkwardness issue: To present it attractively, you can only bring it up briefly once or twice, and should mostly act uninterested in talking about it, like it wasn't that interesting, so mundane for your life that you're amused she's even interested. Basically, if you harp on it in any way like you have here, you'll be repelling the ladies like youre name is Pepper Spray. Thus there is a hard and very low cap with the usefulness of this bit of 'proof of value' that can be used with any given woman. (Unless she is herself an autistic survivalist, which is fine. Maybe even seek those out after this)
If you in anyway try to: Go into long details about the trip, get too enthusiastic, present any philosophical musings, bring it up regularly, make it obvious that your sense of identity or self-worth is connected to this, call yourself a Hockist etc, you will be flagged (unfairly or not) as weird and unattractive by the average woman.
EDIT: By way of analogy, overall I feel like you're a guy trying to prove he isn't autistic and directionless by... building a giant model trainset in the basement. The harder you go all out on this, the more counter-productive it's going to be.
Don't get me wrong, a giant train set sounds fun and cool, and I endorse it. Just be clear about what it is and isn't going to accomplish for you.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
There's a lot of reasons but in as a hypothetical negotiating tactic, I think this is backwards:
Why would you tell a employee the lower bound?
Suppose I want to buy something from you, (like your time in exchange for money). If I come out of the gate and tell you the absolute most I'm willing to pay, you should read that as a floor. (and in, every one of the 4 full time jobs I've ever had, I negotiated higher than the stated 'ceiling', twice very significantly higher).
As a general rule, pyscologically speaking people don't open with their final offer and it's bad negotiation technique because it's hard to make the other party believe you're being fully transparant rather than unwilling to engage.
This is why usually, jobs don't list salary ranges and the recruiter asks you your starting price before telling you the actual range. They're trying to understand whether your expectations are within their true negotiation band.
When companies do tell you their range (min and max), sometimes it's legally mandated, and other times, it's to signal actual transparency about their negotiation range or trick you into thinking that at least, and bounding your negotiation. If I tell you my range is 100-180, people uncertain about their candidacy are going to ask for less than if I tell them the max is 180. Because the former signals that 180 is for the improbably qualified candidate, the latter could represent a true range of say, 160-180.
Suppose I give you only one number my (supposed) max. What are you going to ask for? Something around the max*. So what's the supposed harm in them giving out a min if they've already given a max? Even in the off chance that you still super lowballed yourself out, you're either an idiot, are hiding something or you've created a flight risk as soon you realize your mistake. Companies don't budget for 'steals' from rubes, and the risk isn't worth the possible reward of a few thousand saved paying under market rate.
*If you've only been given one number (or even a range, and it isn't a legal transparency thing like a gov job), then you should ask for slightly above it, especially early in the process, but convey willingness to lower your expectations if the job seems great. Then after you get the offer, push for a little more than slightly above what you asked.
If you haven't been given a number before they ask you, you should try to guess slightly over what you think the max is.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I don't see how it stands as an example against what I wrote above.
No, I suppose it doesn't. You've sufficiently removed my doubt about how I was to interpret your point.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Point taken, but im interested in what counts in Walterodims heuristic of 'can afford an expensive watch'. I don't think I could really call myself 'broke', as I have quite a bit in net worth and a positive cash flow. But simultaneously I can't 'afford' an expensive watch, in terms of having several thousand to spend on myself.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
The 'For Real For Real' no longer works so well, at least in my area. Any "good" contractor has enough other work to do that they won't play by custom terms of scrupulous project managers.
Re: "For the REALEST", I was on my way to this before having a few kids. The time evaporated to the point that it's no longer practical. Unless you're willing to make that your job, your spouse is willing to not see you in the evenings, or your spouse is willing to live in an endless construction zone, it's just not an option imho.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
It's not even that. Imagine a guy, with 3 kids, who's wife homeschools, who bought a house in say, 2021, paid a fortune for an old house needing tons of maintainance but locked in at a good rate. The guy could be making 100k+ and is likely still living so tightly that he couldn't imagine buying luxury jewlery for himself or adjusting his budget by 5k without significant pain.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
To be honest though, I generally don't have much respect for people beyond a certain age that would have trouble coming up with $5K...I am disinclined to treat them as "substantial" if they're 40 and can't afford to buy a nice watch if they wanted to though.
This seems unnecessarily condescending, but regardless, I wonder how far you define these boundaries.
I'm in my mid 30s, and while I make a pretty good salary, every dollar I have is basically accounted for and then some. I have no debt outside of my mortgage and I'm not living pay-check-to-paycheck, but the productive things that I want to spend my money on far far outstrips my income, to the point that there's plenty of things I can't 'afford' to spend money on, and a nice watch is actually on that list.
By the time I pay for my kids, their preschool school, put money away for thier future years of Catholic schooling, daily living expenses, pay my bills and mortgage, put money into my 401k and other retirement vehicles, tithe, and put money into the savings account for a smallish home expansion (since I'm priced out of ever moving), yeah I don't even have enough income to put as much into each of those buckets as I would like.
My windows need to be replaced, my roof will need to be attended to eventually, there's some other non-trivial home repair to be addressed, and so forth. I'd like be able to afford to to take my wife out on a date and pay a babysitter more often, my phone and my wife's phones are hopelessly outdated. I wish we could afford to go on the same type of vacations our middle class parents took our families on. Our hand-me-down sectional is on it's last leg. Our water heater ought to be replaced soon. There are several hobbies I'd like to invest in with my kids. None of those things make the budget without taking something out of the above list.
This is not to say I couldn't tighten up my weekly expenses. And I could certainly hand you 5k tomorrow if I needed to without blowing up my life. But, no I can't really justify paying for a $2-3k watch, even though I've been thinking about it for some time.
Am I of no substance to you or @FiveHourMarathon ?
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Re 1, I'm mostly where @2rafa is on Adderall. I used it to get stuff done in college on occasion, and yeah it was wild. I also found that I enjoyed it quite a bit, which deterred me from really ever using it anymore or ever trying a stimulant recreational drug.
As I've gotten older, I similarly enjoy the feeling of caffeine buzz, somewhat more in quality (though not as intense of course) than alcohol. Sometimes I'll find myself taking extra caffeine drinks not because I'm tired or need to focus, but for the buzziness.
I constantly have to cycle down my caffeine tolerance, so that I can build it back up again. Possibly relatedly, I can fall asleep on caffeine quite easily, and sometimes if I'm already tired (fatigued or lacking in sleep), it knocks me the fuck out and I'll sleep sounder on a cup of coffee than not. This is supposedly a symptom of ADHD, so, who knows. (@self_made_human is that true or am I mistake?). I don't know how exactly to describe it, but it works both as a stimulant/nootropic and as a sleepy drug sometimes at the same time.
Finally, and this is probably 100% placebo, but am I the only person who feels like they can snap themselves into adderall-esque state (with out the fun / high feeling)? It doesn't last nearly as long and it's not as intense, but on Adderall, my brain was in a state of focus / flow that I remember quite distinctly, and can basically 'recall it' when necessary to focus.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
That said, does "lefty therapy" ever fix these issues?
I'm mean, I am generally skeptical, though I am unfamiliar enough with something as grave as suicide that I don't want to throw support or detraction around flippanly.
That is however, not my point. slider is free to dismiss therapy as ineffective. I was noting his framing of the percieved issue to be addressed was essentially a Russell's conjugation:
Your mental health issues
My real issues of feeling inadequate and emasculated and socially maligned.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
your issues are not lefty mental health...seeing all your dreams disappear...one of the most emasculating things
I don't have a lot of love for the left's frames around mental health and therapy, but this point is just silly. Or rather would be better if you just stopped wtih the real issue of providing monetarily. Are you suggesting that 'seeing your dreams disappear' is somehow a real issue, separate from and contrasted with 'mental health' concerns. Same re: feelings of emasculation. You undermine yourself by begging the conclusion.
I suspect the 'lefty' who advocates therapy very much agrees that lost dreams and feeling emasculated are real issues, and would understand them to be the exact 'mental health' issues you are suggesting aren't invovled.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
With race swapping, the thing is that it's not all bad and not all good and its that simple. People who completely reject or embrace it are wild.
One of the complexities is that it can take a few forms.
One form is re-examine the story in a different cultural / racial frame. This is completely fair, but you have to allow that people who don't prefer the new frame, or lament the opportunity cost of telling that story in the old frame aren't necessarily racist!
I love Cats! and try to see it when it's on tour in my area. If one year, a major production decided to do a hip-hop remix of the musical, I have no fundamental opposition to such a thing existing. But I can practically assure you that I would find it unappealing personally. However in a world where there were infinate Cats! musicals touring my town every week, I would actually prefer some of them be off-the-wall remixes in every way. But in the real world of scarity, Cats! productions are closer to zero sum. I either have to choose to pay to see a production I like less or not see it at all this year. Suppose, due largely to politics, it became trendy to mostly go forward with the Rap Cats version in the future*. Am I not allowed to be disappointed? Movies based on IP are even more zero sum.
(*There's actually a real analogy. Post George Floyd I will essentaily never be able to see the real cats again because songs were cut and rearanged due to 'racial' concerns about pirates.)
The other kind of race swapping is culture neutral. done in a way where the color or the skin is completely immaterial to the character portray. there is nothing at all wrong with this on its face. But there are three concerns.
- It's sometimes just a motte and bailey for cultural reframes. Then all the criticisms above apply PLUS you were lied to to deflect your criticism as racism.
- Immersion breaking. Part of what makes high production quality high quality is the depth of the immerision. Cheap sets feel cheap. Period pieces or blood line unrealism can break immersion and feel cheap or hokey.
- Meta-trends can also break immersion. If you watch 10 films all with race swapped leads and each on their own works just fine, but you know that the studio heads made big noise about race swapping for the sake of it, about representation, and about making Hollywood less white, etc, you might still have your immersion broken by the clear politics behind the trend, even if each one works self contained.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
That's all fair. I can accept that this shouldn't have been a top level.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
But you both basically caused the original thread to fall further. Id get it more if there were like five other posts that buried the original discussion, but there aren't.
The sort by new means that your post would have been second if you had both just posted in the original topic. Does being the second post from the top really make you feel like a thread is buried?
And there is a slippery slope problem here. If you two do it, what if everyone that responds to you also just chooses to post at the top level? The threading becomes a useless feature. Your thread gets buried even faster than normal, and no one is happy.
Three posts on one topic isn't bad for readability, but breaking a suggested rule twice in a row is bad for the legibility of suggested rules. I specifically do not want people to see these two courtesy violations and think "ah I should do that too".
Fair enough
There is nothing wrong with reviving a dead topic from last week.
I didn't mean to suggest there is
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Understood, but meta food for thought:
- when you're responding to two existing top levels at once, it's hard to. Especially when it's increasing branches of generalization. Ben's OP was an analogy for a epistemic process, but delved very densly into a narrow score-keeping point about economics. Sometimes 'thematic' trends are hard to distinguish new topic from old.
- The suggested flow is somewhat less effective than it was on Reddit for whatever reason, I'm not sure of. By the time a topic is a day old and two down, it's effectively dead. This flow strattles the line (poorly imo) evenescent stream of conversation and post-style topics. We end up with, in the worst of both worlds IMO- uncommented on posts, vs fleeting conversations.
To the extreme effect, Ben's own post was a response to a thread from last week. He, correctly I imagine, top-leveled it here instead of responding there because that CWR post was effectively dead. The same effect works at a micro scale on top levels within a post. I don't have a suggestion for how to fix, but I'd be interested if anyone else notices it worse than it used to be?
Perhaps, I've just gotten used to DSL's forum style of functionally bumping discussions with the newest comment to the top. Perhaps some of it the (contentious) hiding of thumbs up for so long, but it ends up feeling like posting anything 'down thread' feels like shouting into the void.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I think the best answer to both @Ben___Garrison and @Frequent_Anybody2984 below is found in this recent NYT article:
New Normal or No Normal? How Economists Got It Wrong for 3 Years.
We can go back and forth one whether the underlying datasets were right or wrong all along, whether the forecast models were accruate within an exceptable margin, and how far out, whether your own prediction or post-hoc interpretation is vindicated.
But the fact is that the 'experts' in their communication, reporting, framing, advisement, and forecasting were wrong. It is plain, and clear and widely known. To disagree, is to disagree with the experts on what the experts believed.
To express confoundedness at this trickling down into people updating priors against experts' guidance or to make silly analogies that this is just 'vibes' from out-of-step, misunderstood lived experiences, is incorrect.
And to alternatively admit, that 'yes, yes experts were wrong for the past 3 years, especially in what they communicated to the public, and in ways very obviously and coincidentally partisan, but please believe the current diagonsis of the economy right now because it's what the expert data tells us', well sure, I'm listening, but you need to do better than make insulting hokey analogies about lived experience or tell me that your Muslim friend is smart, but jihadistic so, I should just listen to the experts now.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
I'm sorry, is this a different take on our initial exchange? I thought we already shared our mutual points fair enough.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Maybe this has already been thought up, and maybe it's already done but there should be multiple baskets of goods, and they get updated on a lag. With all baskets needing to be reconciled.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?
If you beleive Ezra's anecdotes as true, then yeah maybe you should update your simplistic model slightly. I think you're doing some bullshit leading by calling this 'Ezra's lived exerience'. These are datapoints that can help us question other data sets we might be suspicious of, or help us complexify our model.
So if we can accept as true Ezra's claims of several isolated instances of black aquaintances being treated poorly by cops, we can try to better understand those anecdotes:
Does Ezra live somewhere that is typical of the racial crime statistics? Are Ezra's friends a nonrandom selection of black people, especially regarding crime statistics? How much can we tease Ezra's friends' experiences from confirmation bias / misatrributed causes. That is, are white people treated similarly by cops but interpret it differently or report it back to Ezra less frequently?
Notice that these are all increasingly difficult to answer questions and the last one is near impossible for Ezra to tease out. To treat this 'lived experience' as comparative to a much cleaner objective anecdote like my expenses went up by this %, brings serious dubiousness to my accepting your 'analogy', but nevertheless.
Suppose we can answer all of those satisfactorily, and Ezra's 'lived experiences' still disagree with the data.
Next you might be able to come up with some kind of alternative theory that reconciles those experiences within your statistics. Maybe these people are hassled by the police because black people do commit more crimes, so they are more likely guilty than a white person. perhaps Ezra's experiences are true, but his causation is backwards?
I'm not sure what the analagous frame is for economic explanation. But Ezra's second hand experience, if trusted, provide evidence toward how the system works.
Or maybe, Ezra's friends stories are credible examples of black people being unreasonably hassled by police at a rate within his circle quite higher than chance or satisfactorily explained by the above explanation or considerations. (maybe Ezra's lived a few places and this rules out local corruption).
In such a case, if the question isn't whether we beleive Ezra, but whether his anecdata should cause us to update our interpretation / understanding of the actual raw statistics, then yes of course it should. At least to some degree.
iprayiam3
1yr ago
If you're tempted to disagree from your own emotions, then pray tell how Christians came around on IVF.
Oh, Catholicism certainly hasn't come around on that. I am absolutely one of those who welcome hurdle to your technological and human advancement both from within and outside of my Christian faith. I fully understand the animosity toward the religious from your point of view, and of course I understand the metaphorical (and cathartic) language about picking a bone with a god you don't believe in; I simply wanted ot point out that I still find it an offputting frame from the other side (though of course you're not appealing to someone like me when saying it). It's a sentiment meant for one's own side, I suppose.
As I was telling @Meriadoc yesterday, if I ever meet the Omnibenevolent loving Creator who created ichthyosis vulgaris, I'll kick them in the Holy Nuts.
I've heard this sentiment before, and I think Tony Robinson has a bit about this. My question is, would you really? I get that this sentiment is meant to emphaisize the incredible apparent irreconcilability between a Good God and the suffering in the world, which in turn is evidence against the former.
But, as someone on the other side of the belief equation, it screams emotionalism compromising your sense of 'rational' skepticism.
Like I'd take the atheism/agnosticism of someone more seriously who said something like:
"If faced irrefutably with God, I'd be incredibly humbled! My very strong prior against Him would be shattered, and I'd have to acknowedge that a significant part or more of my epistemological model led me astray. I'd like to have that clarified before making any further decisions. Consequently, it's very difficult for me to predict how I'd approach any other pre-existing greivance past that epistemic event horizon."
In other words, if you were faced with being absolutely wrong about your agnosticism, you really wouldn't stop for an instant, temper your contempt for a moment, to scratch the possibility that your view of the problem of evil, of theodicy, was also incomplete?
To be certain that in the event you are wrong about God's existance, you'd simply move down to your next argument - grievance against His supposed benevolence, comes off as a tell against epistemic hygeine.
TLDR; I am always puzzled by people angry at a god they don't believe in. I think the anger and disbelief undermine eachother.
Because it won't make you fearless, it will make you resentful that it didn't work.
Notice in your "presentation Hock" comparison, the thing that made you not fear public speaking was practicing for public speaking? There is no analogy skill transfer between wilderness survival -> improving social awkwardness. You are comparing practicing something that directly improves the thing it applies to, to doing something completely unrelated in hopes that it will reframe you into being better at it. IT WON'T WORK the way you are hoping.
I do beleive that if you went and worked as a mission in a 3rd world scenario, surrounded by others, it would, in fact improve your socialization.
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