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Wellness Wednesday for December 28, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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What does 'morally neutral' mean?

It means this that you said earlier "So if you have one person who dies, and another person is born, that isn't clearly better than just one person who doesn't die" If one state of affairs isn't clearly better then the other then it amounts to it being morally neutral whether people die so long as the number of people stay constant. I think this is a very strange thing to think so if you want to disavow the idea I won't blame you.

I'd expect killing to be bad because it terminates a human experience, with all the complexity and ends that entails, but - that's why it's bad!

Killing is just induced dying. Dying does exactly every bad thing killing does by your justification for opposing it.

Mental changes necessary to upgrade a 95iq person to a 130iq person are invasive enough the differences between that, 'that person living forever at 95iq', and 'they die and a new 130iq person is born' are very strange. And there probably is """value""" in particularly smart or capable people living a lot longer than they do today.

This is charitably giving your life for the sake of people who don't even exist and won't resemble you. Would you sacrifice the life of every human to improve the lives of aliens in a far off galaxy that will never know you existed? For ants and polar bears? Perhaps some exotic utilitarian would demand this but I don't know why anyone would find it convincing and even less the types of people who seem to deny that they're actually giving up something incredibly valuable to this aim. Will you at least admit that aging, decaying and dying slowly in your own filth is a tremendous cost that you are stoically willing to pay for these future people?

I have great respect for people who have found causes that they are willing to sacrifice everything, even their lives for, but I can't help but think this view has it backwards, a felt need to justify sacrificing ones life hopeless groping for a justification.