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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2748 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I just learned that ride-on power trowels exist. What a phenomenal piece of incredible technology. It leaves me with a question. Turning left/right seems obvious. But how about forward/backward motion? In videos that I've watched of them operating, I can't detect something like the machine bringing the rotors to a stop and changing their direction of rotation in order to change from the vehicle moving forward to moving backward. So, what is the mechanism by which it's able to change from forward to backward translation? I'm familiar with helicopter controls, and I can't imagine it's anything nearly that complicated.

I think the levers just change the forward/backward tilt of the blades slightly?

anyone else notice that quality of online discussion has nosedived over the past year, or just me? controlling for topic and community, it seems like just the quality of debate has gone downhill so much. whether reddit, hacker news, or elsewhere, I have observed many attempts at discussion met with curt dismissals, failures to understand, misconstructions, etc. this is why I have been spending less time on forums and reddit. Is it just me? Things could not have changed that much over past year. Maybe elon and twitter has something to do with it. or worse political climate.

I noticed a recent trend where someone will start an invite only Discord or subreddit and start siphoning the smart/desirable members from public subreddits/spaces. The private subs look for people that contribute value to the public spaces and that fit with the private sub's desired culture. Then they just private message them to join the more exclusive space.

The private sub benefits by getting quality contributions and the new member benefits by not having to deal with all the garbage comments in the public sub. This trend reduces the quality of the public spaces because many of the good posters have moved to a private gated community.

I have also noticed I enjoy less some of the places for online discussion I used to frequent. I have asked myself whether it was the discussions that have changed or my perception of them. A general trend of declining quality does match my experiences I think, but again I cannot tell whether I might be a bit burned out with online discussions or whether the discussions are burning out.

For Twitter and reddit specifically, the last year has seen a lot of disruption that has caused a lot of the higher-quality participants to leave. I've never been a big Twitter user so I can't really comment there, but the reddit API/3rd party app debacle cleaved off a huge proportion of the more experienced userbase. I've checked out a couple of subs I used to frequent since the purge at the end of June and the quality of discussion has taken a dive off a cliff.

My impression was that it's steadily getting worse, haven't noticed anything special in the last year.

Then again I abandoned mainstream forums a while ago.

Same here. Many niche nerd interests have turned into mainstream hobbies, and correspondingly volume has gone up and quality has gone down. Additionally cultures and attitudes have changed dramatically in many place towards homogenisation and a certain kind of professional inoffensiveness that is often mistaken for quality.

Why is the US passport application process still so ludicrously, unacceptably, insanely backlogged?

Some friends are considering an international trip during the holiday season so I took a look at how to get a passport. The wait time for non-expedited processing is three months. Paying an extra $60 for expedited processing takes this down to two months if you're lucky. The state department is still blaming covid (which I can understand on some levels; there's more demand now that international travel is allowed to happen again) but this has been a problem for a year now.

Nobody seems to know the specifics as to why this is happening beyond "record numbers of applicants". Asking about this without qualifiers on reddit is liable to get you labelled pro-trump. I'm seeing comments that just a decade ago the process only took a few weeks at most.

I've been meaning to get one for a couple years now simply to have a backup form of ID but never had a compelling reason to apply until this potential trip entered the equation. It looks like it's already too late for me to get one in time. Guess I'll try again in a couple years.

On top of all that, the postal service's online appointment scheduler is either broken or incompatible with both Firefox and iOS safari.

I actually can believe the "record number of applicants" excuse. When I applied for a passport back in 2019 it was easy to schedule an appointment for the application at our city's post office. In 2022 and earlier this year I tried applying for another passport and there were no appointment spots available at all: they were all fully booked for as far out as they allowed you to book them. I had to search through post offices in neighboring towns before I found one available within a week, and that was in a town 40 minutes away.

The speed at which passports are being processed shouldn't necessarily have any impact on the amount of appointments available. It's possible that the post offices in my area reduced the number of available appointment slots, but it didn't seem like they did. Maybe it's as simple as there being a regular number of passports that Americans apply for each year and COVID made people skip a year or two and we're still sorting out the pent up demand?

The excuse I heard when I was trying to get my passport renewed earlier this year was that US Customs and Border Security funding was in a perpetual state of tug-of-war over culture war immigration issues, and that the agency has been deliberately short-staffing the departments that nice, middle-class professionals rely on in order to place constituent pressure on Congress for budget increases (same way whenever National Park Service funding is impacted by debt ceiling negotiations or whatever, the first thing they do is rope off popular monuments on the National Mall as a passive-aggressive protest)

That's insane. By law in my country the passport has to be expedited within 30 days for EUR 33, there is an option to pay EUR 100 and get it in two days. I recently renewed my passport (post COVID), it was very quick with SMS notification when and where to pick it up. All my interaction was basically with people behind plexiglass, COVID is just a stupid excuse.

3 months? Thats bad? US Tourist Visas are back logged literal years, lol.

I've scrapped a trip to the US with friends because of this. God only knows will we ever get our youth back. Thanks China virus.

Guess I'll try again in a couple years.

Why not just get one now and then you won't have to worry about it in a couple years? Regardless of the current length of time, it's only really a problem if you suddenly decide to travel when you had no inclination to previously. They last 10 years, it's not like you need to min-max the duration.

I probably will once I find a browser that USPS.com tolerates and/or they fix their website (uBlock is not the culprit, I already checked). But I'm fed up enough that I need to take a break from trying. Might try county services instead since they're actually closer to me than my post office and it appears that they can handle them.

Lately I've noticed that some websites like Delta, US Census, and Archive.org are IP blocking me because I visit them with Firefox with anti-fingerprinting turned on. I have to turn on my VPN and then try again with Chrome. Annoying.

Because democrats want to incentivize illegal immigration, for some reason.

The real answer is that immigration is one of the hottest CW issues and has been for decades, so nothing gets done and the byzantine system that grew out of bureaucracy is entrenched as hell.

A delay in issuing passports would incentivize illegal emigration rather than immigration, would it not? The US government does not issue passports to aliens seeking to enter the country.

I wouldn't think any of the CW elements would extend to passport issues for existing US citizens with all of their documents and no criminal records but I guess I'm just wishfully naive. Has anybody tried campaigning on this particular issue? (I don't really keep up with mainstream politics obviously.) This is clearly causing serious problems for people that need to travel internationally for reasons other than vacationing.

Oh I totally misread the question OOPS!

Is the ability to conduct yourself like a gentleman while intoxicated around more skin than a strip club something that needs practice?

Unironically yes. Try talking to hippie Burner dudes or something like that. I'm not kidding.

Well, I guess there’s two of you.

I don’t think you have any chance of implementing sharia, so your next best strategy is probably monasticism. I hear avoiding nubile women will let you get pretty good at UNIX.

@JEdwardWoody and I are gonna found the coolest, most awesomest monastery, and everyone who made fun of us and flashed their supple thong-clad ass cheeks at us is banned from even looking at it! Thongcels BTFO!!!

I believe the traditional Latin motto is "Begone, THOT!"

If beautiful women want to wear string bikinis and thongs and allow me to gawk at them (slyly), I can only full-throatedly endorse their decision.

I actually don’t find much of a difference in seeing women dressed in tight, skin-showing dresses vs seeing women in thong bikinis. Either way, they’re still incredibly desirable.

If you’re gawking (slyly), what happens after five drinks?

Part of what made the situation feel so scandalous to me was that so many of us were married or otherwise spoken for.

I'd probably go hang out with my male friends and commiserate about how it's both a blessing and a curse to be in such a situation. I also don't think there's anything wrong/socially inappropriate with remarking upon a woman's body if she's decided to wear minimal clothing. As long as it's done in a joking/non-creepy way. Something like, "GodDAMN Jill, have you been working out?!" This allows you to address the obvious: that there is a woman who your brainstem wants to have sex with, but your frontal cortex knows you cannot.

I'm going to find myself in this situation this weekend, so maybe I can report back my findings.

GodDAMN Jill, have you been working out?!"

That is creepy/gross to say unless you guys are very close friends, IME. Of course, my experience might not be the norm. You can compliment the clothing - say "Cool bikini" - but not her body.

I disagree. Just don’t say it in a creepy/gross way.

If I reply to someone who’s blocked me, do other users see an indicator? Seems like that might protect against the “Parthian shot” method of weaponizing a block. Another reader would see the flag and know not to expect a response from the blocker.

Then again, I’m not sure I’ve yet seen anyone abuse that on this site. So…second question: has that happened?

Edit: I responded to @grognard and got the usual “higher standard” banner. Let’s see if that response shows any indicator.

I thoroughly hate that blocking is even a feature. Writing anything on the internet is already so much screaming into the ether; add a chance that the intended recipient may just not receive the answer and it feels even more like an unjustifiable waste of time. Doubly so if the blocking is stealthy, as it appears to be on this Motte.

The blocking does show up to the blockee with a little red icon, even before I click “reply.” That alone makes it significantly better than Reddit.

In theory, I could abuse that one-way knowledge to get shots in on @grognard or @coffee_enjoyer without them ever seeing. In practice, I don’t expect that would fly here…but I have yet to see anyone try it.

Let’s test it. I’ve just blocked you, chud, and I’ve gotten the last laugh.

Noooooooo! I am defeated!!

Nope, nothing to be seen.

Not seeing anything marking a block.

Thanks, I’ll unblock him.

How about on my reply?

How do you deal with Gell-Mann amnesia? I looked at ACX to see if there was anything new and Scott has been reading Putin's biography by Maria Gessen and suffering from a very obvious bout of Gell-Mann amnesia. Now I am worried about how strong my own Gell-Mann amnesia was while reading Scott.

I get a lot of Gell-Mann amnesia from Scott. Back on SSC, there was a whole post devoted to defending the USAF's bombing of Libya on... effective altruist grounds. He said that most EA orgs didn't have the firepower of the USAF, that the causes they could support and methods they could apply were different and that bombing Libya would likely be a cost-effective humanitarian intervention.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-an-extremely-cheap-way-to-help-foreigners/

And in the case of Libya, this may an underestimate, since it doesn’t take into account shortening the war, or spurring foreign investment, or the fact that Gaddafi probably would have become more repressive after the rebellion, or less tangible effects like deterrence of future dictators.

I'm repulsed by the whole post but this part in particular. Great, mission accomplished! The Russians weren't incensed at all at what the US had done in Libya, that definitely didn't have any flow-on effects in degrading the legitimacy and unity of the UN Security Council (especially when the Russians lost the gas contracts they'd arranged to French companies). And Scott didn't hypothesize any of the realized downsides either, which we now see with hindsight. First and Second Civil Wars? Massive refugee crisis? Literally none of the boons he thought could happen? What a disaster.

I also think this is rather tricky and don't know how to deal with it. To complicate matters further I also don't want to err to much in the other direction where you completely disregard everything a certain source has to say because it made a dumb mistake once while it might still have plenty of worthwhile things to say.

At least for Scott, he followed it up with a top-level post of comments, half of which were calling out potential inaccuracy / bias of the book. That makes it better, at least.

You cant avoid it. Kind of by definition.

Simple: I assume anything political is propaganda. The challenge is to keep assuming that when you're reading something you agree with.

Sunday Fun Thread

Walter Isaacson: I got this text message from Elon Musk at 4:44am CT showing a screenshot of some text messages in which he tells Mark Zuckerberg they should fight this Monday at Zuckerberg’s home in Palo Alto.. The message to zuck appears to be sent at 1 AM.

Is this all just an elaborate joke? If not, it's hilarious that Elon's unparalleled skill at running companies coexists with this.

My position continues to be that Zuckerberg will beat him badly if they actually do fight, because he has strong cardiovascular fitness and seems to actually care about ju-jitsu rather than just doing it because Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman think it's cool. That text chain is consistent with Musk also knowing that's probably true and having no intention of actually doing the charity event that's been discussed. A few years ago, I would not have predicted that my current position would be that Zuckerberg is a pretty respectable individual and that Musk is a complete clown, but I have disliked the Tesla cult enough that it doesn't shock me.

I think he's not a bad person, and I believe Talulah Riley when she said he was actually sweet and very shy in person, but I think becoming a 'media personality' over the last few years has rotted his mind. Some people just aren't cut out to be public figures. They need a PR team, need someone else handling media, need to stay away from directly interacting with the public. The problem is that Elon doesn't seem to realize this, and he enjoys the attention too much.

He clearly needs to lower his testosterone dose, it’s turning him into an asshole.

Funny, I get the feeling he's a great showman, and that his talents are wasted on SpaceX, Tesla, etc.

Funny, I get the feeling he's a great showman

His great show was "shutting the fuck up 50% more and letting people think he was Tony Stark".

This "overly online dweeb gets way too much validation and goes full cringe" arc is nowhere near as effective as his previous branding.

I, for one, believe that Musk getting the shit beaten out of him by Zuckerberg at the Roman Colloseum would have been a great show. I am assuming he's doing the whole thing with a certain ironic detachment, which would make it hilarious rather than cringe.

Oh, I have no doubt that, as an overly online troll, he's at least partly self-aware.

But it brings to mind the ancient parable of the man who only pretended to be retarded.

I just wonder why are all these men on the fringe of politics so obsessed with MMA? Zuck, Elon, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, Lex Friedman, Mark Andreeson. Maybe it’s just my complete lack of interest in fighting or learning to fight, but I find it a bit annoying. Whatever happened to playing golf and tennis?

men on the fringe of politics so obsessed with MMA?

Fringe? MMA is mainstrean, it's just a normal part of dudes rock normie culture. Several of my friends are into it, and even back in high school sime of them were throwing watch parties for big fights. I went on a date the other week at a sports bag where they were playing a big MMA match and everyone was watching and cheering. The general public, in all times in all places, has enjoyed watching professionals fight. The change is that thirty years ago it would have been boxing, whereas now MMA has mainly taken over.

Rogan and Musk et al. probably just represent average dudeness better than, say, Mitch McConnell, Bill Kristol, Pete Buttigieg, or any other normal mainstream male political figure.

I just wonder why are all these men on the fringe of politics so obsessed with MMA?

Some of these guys are more into BJJ than MMA (I pretty sure with at least Sam and Lex Fridman). The two kinda go together though: the founders of BJJ popularized it in the US by founding the UFC to take on challengers and there's lots of crossover.

As for why they're into BJJ? It's a martial arts that's shown effectiveness in competition (so you don't feel like a 90s karate or kung fu nerd), it doesn't involve as many traumatic punches to the face and it has a reputation at least of being more cerebral and lower-impact (and coaches are willing to accommodate at least celebrities here).

You can see the appeal for a certain type.

Rogan is an ex-fighter himself, isn't he? As for the rest, nerds LARPing masculinity isn't really a new thing.

As for the rest, nerds LARPing masculinity isn't really a new thing.

I think when you attain the ability to physically overpower and subdue/KO 90ish% of the male population, you're not really roleplaying so much anymore.

Is the LARPer who actually gets really good at, say, medieval archery, no longer LARPing? (I don't think the answer is obvious.)

I think being a nerd or a jock or something is decided early on in life. Certainly by high school this kind of status is solidified. It's like beauty, which is discovered rather than wholly created. Say you take a plain or ugly overweight 30 year old woman, and you subject her to a stringent fitness regime and several hundred thousand dollars of cosmetic surgery. She might be hot as a result, might have pretty privilege, might bag a 'high value' husband or whatever, but it's never the same as the girl who realized she was beautiful at 12. It just isn't.

Not even that is necessary; if I was a billionaire who wanted to recruit people like this, I'd find a way to screen for women with puny jaws but otherwise good-looking faces. I'd then offer them free jaw surgery and braces in exchange for participating in my study. Picked jaws because clinical micrognathia - to the point where a surgeon's thinking about breaking and resetting your lower jaw or sometimes both - makes you look rather unattractive. Fixing it is pretty easy from a surgical perspective and the transformation is dramatic. Massive weight loss is impressive and admirable but whatever bad habits contributed to the weight are a confounder. Jaws are given out in the genetic lottery.

I think being a nerd or a jock or something is decided early on in life.

Fridman can still be a nerd inside and not be "LARPing" masculinity.

Jocks are masculine but you can be authentically masculine and even active without being a jock.

You can radically self-improve yourself, but you'll always have the "lived experience" of your previous self, which is unchangeable. Goggins was always a jock, yes he radically improved himself after he left the military the first time to become a Navy SEAL, achieved insane physical feats, but his social status as perceived by himself didn't radically change. As he writes, he was always that kid who wanted to join the military. He just did it twice and achieved extraordinary success while doing so.

Goggins is probably the single best human exemplar of human malleability. He's like a fascinating edge case of what happens when somebody just ... has infinite willpower.

@2rafa 's argument can I think charitably be phrased as "The grooves in your psyche are carved by the time you are 12 or so and it's impossible to recapture that time."

But I suspect you have different definitions of identity and different definitions of nerd and jock here.

Excellent post, but I think Goggins is a spectacularly bad example.

First of all, he was an Airforce TACP at 20, then got obese after leaving the Air Force and working a dead end job, before working his way all the way back to the SEALs. The SEALs are obviously more famous/prestigious and arguably more difficult, but it's hardly too big a change of genre from TACP. Reaching the SEALs, and then going on to do various crazy things with ultramarathons and pull up records and whatnot, was arguably a return to form for him moreso than a change in lifestyle.

Second, he is insane. I don't mean that negatively or judgmentally, he's awesome and I enjoy his podcast appearances and I love his challenge heavy gut-it-out approach to fitness. But he's very different from most people. The experiences he's had have carved deep grooves in his psyche, among them is a recognizable insecurity and fear of going back to where he was. I've noticed that among the handful of people I know who have lost similar amounts of weight or made those kinds of fitness changes. One of my best friends throughout my life, we were both skinny teenagers, then he for various reasons (graduating high school and no longer playing soccer, leaving home and eating too much McDonald's) ballooned to 260 lbs. He since has lost a ton of weight, through a tremendous effort of cutting almost all carbs out of his diet for over a year, and while he's no Goggins he went from getting physically carried through a Spartan Sprint to running multiple Spartan Trifectas a year and placing top-10. But the scars remain: I have a very different relationship to food than he does, despite being the same weight today. He has a fear of food that I don't have, because he's seen what it can do to him. Goggins, similarly, is going to have a different mentality than someone who spent their whole life on one track from High School Cross Country star to Ultramarathoner. That difference is visible when you listen to him talk.

As for the prophets, I do think it means something that, for example, Sidhartha Guatama came from a Kshatriya warrior family, not from a Brahmin family of fellow sages or a Shudra family that was pissed on. A sermon I heard many years ago talked about the legends of Buddha meditating under the Bodhi tree, and demons appeared and threatened him with armies and tempted him with pleasures. The sermon talked about how depending on the translation, it's not clear that he was threatened with the armies, but perhaps was tempted by them. "Come on, let's go conquer and fight and rape and pillage like warriors should! It'll be a good time, we'll war and win and bleed." Buddha understood both the temptations of ease and of leisure, and the temptations of strife and of struggle. Both Type I and Type II fun are desires that must be extinguished.

Personally, I think that human identity is based primarily on hierarchy. The question of one's identity is the result of trying to differentiate oneself from others. One isn't a jock because one is big and strong, one is a jock because one is (or perceives oneself as) bigger and stronger than others, and defines oneself by that. One isn't a nerd because one is smart, but because one defines oneself by being smarter than others. As a result, one of my goals is to make sure that I raise my children by exposing them to as many different hierarchies where they will fit in differently and discover and develop different sides of themselves.

Mentality isn't really metaphysical. It is not a novel idea that the way people think is based on the way their youth went and is slow to change afterwards.

Money and muscle, that’s what I want; to be able to do any damned thing I want and get away with it. Money won’t do that altogether, because if a man is a weakling, all the money in the world won’t enable him to soak an enemy himself; on the other hand, unless he has money he may not be able to get away with it.

  • Robert E. Howard

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. It's a good primer for knowledge debates in recent times, and the references are great.

Paper I'm reading: Hannon's Are knowledgeable voters better voters?

Just started Frank: The Making of a Legend by James Kaplan, about Frank Sinatra. It's the first biography of a celebrity I've read with any attention. I think I hold some deep feeling that musicians' lives aren't as worthwhile to learn about as geniuses in science or philosophy or politics. But Frank Sinatra was a kind of genius, and his life is pretty interesting so far. Also, Kaplan is a good writer and sometimes I read the prose aloud to feel it on my tongue. I think it sharpens me in some way to feel how good writing conforms to the breath.

I'm also reading Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. Good Western so far -- it kind of seems like Red Dead Redemption 2 is to video games what Lonesome Dove is to novels: longform, epic Westerns which are modern but don't treat the genre's tropes with contempt. Really, come to think of it, the Western seems to be the one genre which is allowed to have some dignity against the eviscerations of postmodernism. Occasionally you'll get a flat-out anti-western like No Country for Old Men. But then you'll get really good modern takes on the genre which incorporate the spirit of the best while modernizing the trappings of the story, like Breaking Bad or that Wolverine movie Logan.

I finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It was good, but I suspect it shouldn't have been my first McCarthy novel. Yes, it may well exemplify his sparse prose the best. But I feel like even though Blood Meridian is a lot longer it seems to have more in the way of action. Maybe when my docket is free I'll try it out.

I finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

What a great book. Really made me think and feel. It wasn't until I watched the movie years later with my wife, though, that I actually realized what the point of the book was and what the road actually represented. I'd thought it was just an exploration of stoicism and humanity's resilience.

I ran through the newest Red Rising book, Light Bringer, in a couple of days.

Solid book, but just like after Iron Gold and Dark Age, I'm left wanting to know what happens next more than I'm left impressed by what I just read.

Has anyone else read this series, and if so, what are your thoughts on the "sequel" series?

Started reading Wizard's First Rule. Maybe it gets better but the ~100 pages I read were pretty terrible so I put it down.

Got caught up on The Game at Carousel, a horror movie litRPG. It's truly fantastic, the sort of book that makes a part of me wish I could live in the setting (despite all the terrible stuff happening there).

Just started @self_made_human's Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum and The Dao of Simulation. They're pretty good! The latter didn't interest me too much--it may not quite be a typical videogame setting, but I have a very hard time caring about anything where the setting is fake/virtual--but the former is quite fun and interesting so far.

Also started reading The Windup Girl. It was well-written and interesting but the rape scene was much too much for me, so guess I'm never finishing that one.

Wizard’s First Rule does not, in fact, get better. You dipped out before some of the more memorable cringy bits.

Just started @self_made_human's Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum and The Dao of Simulation. They're pretty good!

I'm glad you liked them!

where the setting is fake/virtual--but the former is quite fun and interesting so far.

Would it cause you pain to learn that most of the books you read were fiction?

Jokes aside, I suppose we have very different metaphysics, but in that particular story, the MC faces just as much risk of oblivion as anyone IRL. The Developers are perfectly capable of reviving him on a whim, but they choose not to, since that raises the stakes and draws in more viewership. (I'd point to a parallel to God, who can trivially reincarnate anyone the moment they die, but refrains from it. In this case, he's not even guaranteed a Heaven or Hell to go to, those cost computation and energy, and the region where the story's mainframe is placed is kinda like an Ancap dream/nightmare, where pesky things like rights for baseline humans are minimal to nonexistent, making them perfect toys or NPCs.)

Of course it's a Xianxia setting, so people far up the tree can and do revive or reincarnate, but if the MC needs to, he'll have to figure out a diegetic means of achieving that, without the narrator simply hitting the respawn key!

Yeah, it's interesting. If I learned that we lived in a simulation, that wouldn't change my attitude towards life. It would be just as valuable, "real", and meaningful as I had previously thought it was. Still, reading about it in a story totally destroys any sense of stakes for me, regardless of the other details around it such as how permanent death is.

The one quasi-exception to this is qntm's Ra which handled it pretty well. MAJOR, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD: in the end the main character is attempting to save the world from the quadrillions of simulated humans who already control the sun's power output and want still more power. There are an arbitrary number of them, they have an arbitrary amount of time to consider their next moves, and they already have control of the sun and far more power than the rest of humanity, collectively, has access to. In the minutes between their escape and the destruction of earth, she uses what's left of physical reality's sun-computer permissions to upload the entire earth. It was a fitting solution and really the only realistic one given the situation.

But yeah, for me it has nothing to do with whether death is permanent. I'm not sure I can even articulate a true reason fictional simulations don't appeal to me. They just don't. Not a criticism of your story at all.

EDIT: could we get links to not appear in spoiler text? They show up blue against the otherwise black spoiler highlight.

I'd like the spoilers to work at all, they're always open by default and I can't toggle them @ZorbaTHut.

Did you mean Wizard's First Rule, by Terry Goodkind?

If you think the first 100 pages are terrible then I doubt you'll like the rest. From my recollections reading it as a teenager, books 1 and 2 were good, and the rest were hit and miss. I still maintain that those two books are perfectly good fantasy novels in their own right.

Ultimately Goodkind has the reputation as a knock-off Robert Jordan, and I can't say I disagree with that assessment.

Yes, that's what I meant, I'll edit it.

I liked:

  • The wall, that was pretty interesting
  • Everything involving Richard's brother, who was a fairly interesting antagonist
  • The blood flies and their purpose
  • The secret book which was burnt after it was memorized

I disliked:

  • It was all super predictable
  • Richard was much too much of a blank slate to me. He seemed to basically just be "generic good guy."
  • The world overall felt tiny. It just wasn't interesting. Maybe it opens up more later.
  • Laying out explicitly the main character's whole quest right from the start, plus the main characters, all of whom are just very trope-y

I read the Wheel of Time series about 10 years ago and have been reading plenty of epic fantasy since, so maybe it's just that I read these stories in the wrong order. Certainly the prose etc. was fine, it just felt like a story I'd read many times before.

you haven't even gotten into all the weird sex stuff yet!

It was all super predictable

Well, Wizard's First Rule was 1994 and A Game of Thrones wasn't until 1996. Goodkind was definitely exploring well-trod ground. Martin gets shit these days for not finishing his series, but AGoT deserves to recognized for the sea-change that it was.

The world overall felt tiny. It just wasn't interesting. Maybe it opens up more later.

It does, starting where you quit and further in the second book. There's the wall you need to cross, and then another, and then another. Crossing these thresholds is something of a theme in these books. Willful separation in the libertarian ethos.

Laying out explicitly the main character's whole quest right from the start, plus the main characters, all of whom are just very trope-y

You will never get away from this, unfortunately. The arc of each book is pretty clearly explained early in each book. The main characters don't change much, though new allies and enemies sometimes emerge.

I read the Wheel of Time series about 10 years ago and have been reading plenty of epic fantasy since, so maybe it's just that I read these stories in the wrong order. Certainly the prose etc. was fine, it just felt like a story I'd read many times before.

Yes, Goodkind's work has not aged well. It's been done better and in more interesting ways in the 25 years since. Still, he sold a ton of books, so he was clearly delivering what some people wanted to read. I maintain that he's the poor man's Jordan, which is a backhanded compliment, but still means he writes a decent fantasy story.

For my birthday, a friend of mine got me a golf book, The Eternal Summer by Curt Sampson. It follows the majors in 1960, a transitional period in the professional game where Ben Hogan was waning, Arnold Palmer was at his peak, and Jack Nicklaus was just starting to emerge.

I'm not really expanding my mind with this, but reading about golf is relaxing to me. One thing it's got me wondering about, is why golfers often seem to peak much sooner than their physical abilities do; and then some mental factor makes them decline. The example in this story is Ben Hogan: dominant in the early 1950s, he was still able to strike the golf ball extremely well as he aged into his 40s, but somehow lost his ability to putt. Why does this happen? One would imagine you'd lose ball-striking first and putting last. It's one of the oldest questions in golf, and I don't know if it's ever been satisfactorily answered.

You also have players like Rory McIlroy, who burst onto the scene and won four majors very young, and has not been able to win another one since 2014. He remains an overpowering driver of the ball, and somehow the finesse areas of his game have declined; this, even though he's lost absolutely none of his physical ability. Why would a player of golf, a game which seems to reward incremental improvement over time, peak at age 24?

Someone in the Motte recently observed that people in creative areas are most productive from 25 to 40, and then the rate of new production drops off steeply. I wonder if there is some related phenomenon that happens in golf. Troubling as I hurtle towards 40 myself, lol.

There are plenty of counterexamples, though. Many golfers don't peak until their late 30s or 40s. Some classic examples would include Phil Mickelson (who won his six majors between the ages of 34 and 51), Steve Stricker (who didn't peak until ~45), or right now Lucas Glover who has won the last two PGA events at age 43 and has resurrected his career after a decade and a half of being one of the randoms to win a major.

edit: forgot another great example. The only other player to have a "Tiger-esque" season in the last few decades was Vijay Singh who was 41 at the time (2004). The large majority of his wins came after he turned 40

Ben Hogan was never a great putter and it makes sense that his biggest weakness would be the first thing to go, especially since his car accident did him no favors with respect to his vision. I also think it's unfair to say that Rory McIlroy's skills have been in the decline. Golf and tennis are unusual in that we evaluate players based on their performance in a few selected events rather than over the course of an entire season, even though it's doubtful that this is an accurate representation of overall ability. Mac hasn't won a major in nearly a decade, but he was pretty damn close at this year's PGA. And he's the reigning Tour Champion, and won the Tour Championship just a few years ago. He's currently the No. 2 ranked golfer in the world. Lack of recent major wins is pretty weak evidence that his mental game has collapsed.

I don't know if this is really true among creatives either. It's most notable among musicians who operate in what can broadly be considered the "pop" field, but that's an area where youth is at a premium. It's also a area where more susceptible to fashion, and when styles change it can be hard to keep up when your strengths lie in another idiom. Within the rest of the musical world, this doesn't seem to be much of an issue. Jazz musicians and classical composers don't tend to have careers that drop off after 40, with the exception of some earlier jazz musicians who, for instance, didn't make the transition out of the big band era. For artists, authors, and directors this doesn't seem to be a thing at all.

Golf and tennis are unusual in that we evaluate players based on their performance in a few selected events rather than over the course of an entire season, even though it's doubtful that this is an accurate representation of overall ability.

One of the things about golf is, especially for the majors, anyone who gets in is basically good enough to win if they put four of their best rounds together. And in a field of around 150 players somebody generally comes close to doing that. That's why there are plenty of golfers who were career journeymen with only one or two career wins who randomly win a major.

It was a testament to Tiger Woods' insane dominance that he was winning a majority of the tournaments he played from ~2005-09, because that meant that his average four rounds was consistently better than the rest of the fields' best four rounds.

About 60 pages into Ender's Game. Enjoying it so far, the prose is unusually good compared to what little sci-fi I've read.

Ender's Game remains excellent even years after discovering it as a teenager. You'll also like Ender's Shadow, best read as a companion to the original.

I just finished Plutarch. That was a slog at times but I loved it.

I'm midway through The Dawn of Everything

For something lighter I'm picking up Nightbitch which my wife recommended.

I finished The Power Broker. I’m not sure if it was worth spending 3 months of my life reading versus reading another 3 or 4 books in the same timeframe. But it was one helluva read. I actually think Robert Moses has aged much better than the book portrays him. Because even though he did a lot of negative things, particularly when it came to displacing minorities, he actually got shit done! Freeways, housing, bridges, stadiums, parks, dams, I mean an amazing amount of public infrastructure. He takes a lot of heat in the books because he was so obsessive about building car infrastructure rather than public transport, and rightfully so, but it’s amazing the way he was able to leverage power to cut through red tape and get things done. He’s a complicated figure, no question about it, but as someone who lives in San Francisco, I think we could use a Robert Moses or two.

After spending months on the Power Broker, I ripped through In Cold Blood in less than a week. What a compelling book. It’s as good as any fiction story I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it, especially for a poolside or summer reading list.

I found Caro to be one of the greatest non fiction authors of all time, but I'm midway through The Years of Lyndon Johnson and the one thing that really frustrates me is his authorial Gell-Mann amnesia. In the middle of writing a 1600 page book on how Robert Moses/LBJ was a fraud and everything you heard about him was a lie forwarded intentionally to perpetuate a myth he'll pause to outline another character and give out some real whoppers. Al Smith working in fish markets, Sam Rayburn honest as sunshine, Coke Stevenson studying law by campfire. Watching Caro demolish LBJ one hears about Coke Stevenson accidentally getting into politics and one thinks "What a load of baloney, he made that up himself."

Do the stats on trans people being child abusers pan out ?

More specifically, I am talking about MTF trans people getting into positions of power or supervision (however small, but still) and taking advantage of it for child abuse or sexual crimes in general. The plural of anecdotes is not data, but more than a few anecdotes of a statistically unlikely combination absolutely raises alarm bells.

No value judgement here. Want to start with tallying the numbers first.

According to this report, Table 1: out of 964 registered sex offenders, 7 (0.7%) were transgender. Going off another page from the same org, 0.4% of the U.S. adult population is trans.

That said, the confidence interval for the first survey spans 0.3% to 1.5% due to its tiny sample size. So it may well be an artifact. Notice also that LGBT people are seriously overrepresented on the registry--"almost four times that of a recent national estimate of LGBTQ identification among adults in the United States (5.6%)." It's strange, then, that trans offenders aren't. I suspect this is related to age differences. The average age in this survey was 50, while most trans people are under 25.

Table 2 breaks down reasons for sex offense convictions among the survey respondents. The prevalence of each offense looks pretty similar between straight and LGBT offenders (with the obvious exceptions of sodomy and HIV convictions). Since only 7 of the 192 LGBT respondents were trans, though, I really doubt they change the rates.

LGBT respondents had committed pornography offenses at around the same rate as the general population. But among the subset included in Table 3, they were much more likely to have victims "represented in an image." I'm not sure how to interpret this. Perhaps it excludes cases where the offender never contacted their victims, but includes those which solicited pictures directly?

In short, I think LGBT sex offender stats are driven almost entirely by gay men, just as almost all general crime stats are driven by men. Trans people barely move the needle. The modal offense appears to be a cisgender man abusing a minor, possibly by soliciting pornography, rather than a more elaborate scheme by transgender offenders.

But among the subset included in Table 3, they were much more likely to have victims "represented in an image." I'm not sure how to interpret this.

Is this not evidence in keeping with what I would’ve assumed- that gay men have underaged boyfriends(who they then sext with) while straight men into that see prostitutes?

I think so?

What’s unclear to me is why it doesn’t show up as a difference in Table 2. I would have expected to see more “soliciting a minor” charges. Or more CP charges, but those could be countered by the inclusion criteria for Table 3.

Seeing prostitutes is probably much less frequently caught than other crimes.

Thanks ! That's much higher quality than anything I could find after a cursory search on the open internet !
Sounds like there is no immediate reason for alarm when it comes to trans people and child sexual abuse. At least, no more than the average person.

I’m wondering whether such numbers are actually tabulable, given that ‘who counts as a trans woman’ is controversial in itself.

I'd wonder: if a cis man is convicted of a sex crime and then suddenly "comes out" as a trans woman post-conviction, is the crime retroactively amended to indicate that it was committed by a trans woman? Or are they only so recorded if the perpetrator identified as a trans woman at the time they were convicted?

I'd say, was openly claiming to be trans or dressing visibly as the opposite sex at least 1 year before being caught..... is a start.

  • How many of the people caught for child abuse, were trans ? (photos make this super easy)
  • What percent of trans people in power (small enough number so should be checkable) have been caught child sexual crimes ?

Some phenomenon are impossible to ignore, even without adequate data. Philosophy and culture commentary youtubers being trans (or trans adjacent) is one such case. I was already exclaiming "why are all pop-sci left commentators trans?", and then Philosophy tube and Jim sterling also turned out to be trans. There's something going on there, for sure.

I want to resurrect a variant of an old question that has got me wondering again. Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?

It’s trite to phrase it like this, but the atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose when you dwell on it. Obviously, if you don’t dwell on the facts of life, you can distract yourself with various concerns and pursuits. But what if you don’t distract yourself? Someone with a religious model involving a loving God can ponder his existence forever and be motivated and purpose-filled, provided that they forever presuppose a loving God as an article of faith. But I’m trying to envision an atheist pondering life while still maintaining motivation to live vibrantly and maximally. How do they do it, do they do it, or are they just distracting themselves?

Eg, “an atheist believes they need to make life count” —> count for what? Your life does not count, by your own definition. You will cease to exist, like the dinosaurs, who surely did not count. So why are you programming your own Operating System as a hobby? It doesn’t count! “But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?

I broadly agree, and though I don't have inspiration to say too much, I will leave a quote that captures our atheist condition rather succinctly:

...In such a world, you are living your life inside a coffin. Now, this may be a large coffin, and certain things like love and family and rewarding work or temporary artistic experiences may distract you or please you for a certain time, but that time will pass and those things will fail and die, and you will be in the coffin whether you distract yourself from that horrible reality or not

Why does one need to "distract yourself" or see death as a "horrible reality?" I think this framing is the quote author projecting their own personal fears of their own mortality as something universally shared by others when that isn't the case.

I see this a lot with proselytizers who'll go on about how you need their religious beliefs to cope with fear of death, or to help fill the "hole inside you" or "give purpose to life" and so on like that's something everyone relates to - it's not actually about you, it's about them, their personal insecurities and fears that they misunderstand as shared by everyone else. They reveal themselves to be scared of death, to have a hole inside them, to lack purpose. Then when they encounter people who aren't like them, they work themselves into knots trying to argue that the others must actually deep down feel the same way, be in denial somehow, have not thought things through, etc.

Some of us just don't fear death, and have thought plenty deeply on the subject of life and death.

Idk man, "everything is futile and we are doomed, but it's fine, actually" was never a position I could wrap my head around. It feels...lazy? Indecisive? As if you are shrugging the problem off.

It might be easier for you to relate once you understand that it's not just fear we are talking of. I'm still young and full of vigor and death feels very much remote, but here we are. In the first place, it only took me a couple of years of my adolescence to surpass "obnoxious atheist" phase and think "wait a minute, something's off here"

Maybe our gap in understanding is caused by a missing element, like some inner romantic sentiment, or belief in fundamental human dignity. We are special beings endowed with the capacity to look at the material realm not only as participants, but as observers. And so, I claim, we can look beyond, see the insufficiency of mere matter. We can see that we are in a cage, so we deserve a way out. This here might cause you to raise an eyebrow, and maybe it's not the most logically robust claim, but it's fine. It's my intuitive conviction that comes from deep within, there's nothing I'm more sure of.

If all hopes come to nought and materialism is roughly correct, I'm ready to avow that it is not me, but the entire universe that is sick and misshapen and insane.

For future reference, this quote is from https://www.scifiwright.com/2012/12/how-to-find-god/

Frankly, you seem overly dismissive when people tell you their motivation. You can always ask "why?" until you hit a terminal value, and if you effectively answer "terminal values don't count for atheists" well, what am I to tell you, exactly? For every "why?", there is a "why not?".

For me personally, it seems obvious that the universe doesn't care, that there are no intrinsic goals or values and that as a result you've got to make your own or choose a pre-made team that comes with them such as a religion. I hold very little against religions these days, they are a perfectly fine source to derive values from - they're just not the only way.

Your behaviour strikes me the same way as some people who seem not only incapable of playing sandbox games because they don't tell you what to do, but who also thinks lowly of people who do enjoy them. I like sandbox games. I also have no problem of choosing values in this world for no other reason but their own sake, and falling into a spiral of depression due to nihilism seems just stupid to me. I can enjoy live vibrantly and be motivated just fine without religion. In fact, I think you've already simply done the same by choosing your religion, even if you may be in denial about it. I can dwell on the fact that live is intrinsically without pre-determined values and the only thing this causes is a renewed drive to think deeper about the values I want to live by.

Would you play a sandbox game if what you made is destroyed, and in fact you have no memory of ever having played the game? Well, maybe you would play it to pass the time. Is this how you see life, though? If you see life as a way to pass the time, then my thesis that conscious atheism prevents motivation and purpose would be correct.

choosing values in this world for no other reason but their own sake

Surely you can see how I accuse atheists of not thinking about the consequences of their belief fully. What is the “inherent value” of something that will be destroyed and forgotten, never to be seen or remembered, for all intents and purposes being as if it never existed? There will be no observer, no judge, no human, no memory, no trace. Which value is “inherent” yet becomes valueless and forgotten? If there is a value underlying it, that’s very close to theism, and I would just call if God. If there is no underlying value, then it becomes valueless.

It seems to me, and again I’m just not persuaded by the arguments I’ve read so far (but perhaps I need to reread them), that the way out is necessarily that the atheist creates his own faith — the same process as theism, no more “realistic” — or he falls into hedonism, where the only value is what feels good. If the only value is what feels good, this results in humans lying to themselves and others to obtain what feels good, and ignoring anything that’s for a longterm social good. It means there’s no purpose in any moral training, because we’re only going to do what feels good. And it means ignoring the suffering of others because by ignoring if I feel good.

The sandbox game in this scenario is all I have, pretty good, and I don't remember ever not playing it. Why wouldn't I act as if it's the only thing that matters?

We say that something matters because of its consequences. “Life matters” is obvious from the standpoint of maximizing pleasure — pleasure is real, I like to feel good, this is obvious. What’s not obvious is why a thinking atheist should care about such things as:

  • the lives and happiness of others

  • longterm betterment of humanity

  • improvement in any way that does not lead to more pleasure

  • society at large

  • doing anything “good”

  • “important” issues in politics and culture

The consequence is that I saw it (or foresaw it), and I saw that it was good. These issues bring joy to my heart whether I accept that it's the prosocial genetic instincts and memetic indoctrination, or I don't - and choose to convince myself of religious stimuli instead.

If you’re just assenting to memetic indoctrination, you’re halfway to theism already, because our culture is still upheld by the residue of religion. A “thinking atheist” would not simply do what others tell him. That’s my point.

If it feels good to do good things, I think you’ll find that people choose the goodest feelings over rational analysis. This leads to virtue signaling, people dumping money into failed charitable projects, etc.

A “thinking atheist” would not simply do what others tell him. That’s my point.

Why not, if he finds that he prefers the world where he followed the rules over the one where he didn't? You're just substituting an edgelord psychopath for a "thinking atheist". But even psychopaths understand the value of good habits and good reputation, especially thinking ones. And while religion did take over as the substrate of prosocial memes for a long time, I see no reason to view it as the origin.

Suppose I really do believe that prosociality as I see it will lead to maximal flourishment of humanity, including, yes, more pleasure.

In the absence of objective morality, or in other words, a final judgment, then a thinking person would not “prefer to follow rules”. Why would they? They would prefer to feel good, right? What would be the point of feeling worse, if there’s no reason to? They would not conclude that following the rules leads to feeling good, because every time they have the choice of either following the rules or feeling good, they would choose feeling good. To prioritize rules over feeling good, following the rules must have existential importance. Otherwise what would be the purpose of following the rules?

But, perhaps an atheist can will himself to believe that following the rules actually does have existential importance. I intuit that you might have done this, as you go immediately to “lead to maximal flourishment of humanity”. (There is no reason to care about this in atheism, because it doesn’t matter. It feels good to give to someone you like, due to evolutionary prosociality, but it does not feel good to construct rigid systems of maximal flourishment of humanity, which is artificial.) I suppose I agree an atheist can have this kind of faith. But at that point, they might as well maximize the benefit of faith by believing in a Just and Loving God.

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What’s not obvious is why a thinking atheist should care about such things

It is equally not obvious why a thinking Christian theist should care about any earthly affairs and do not concentrate only on saving souls from eternal fire. In theistic universe, all worldly things will soon perish with no consequence, while hell is eternal.

It is equally not obvious why a thinking Christian theist should care about any earthly affairs and do not concentrate only on saving souls from eternal fire.

Christians do not have the power to save souls from eternal hellfire. Each person chooses whether or not they want to accept salvation, and by far the best influence you can have on their decision is to be genuinely involved in their lives. If they are concerned with earthly affairs, being involved in their lives is going to require you to be at least a little concerned with earthly affairs as well. Being a Christian does involve putting a hard cap on how concerned one is with earthly affairs, though.

Being a Christian does involve putting a hard cap on how concerned one is with earthly affairs, though.

Well, how many Christians' concern with worldly life crosses the line (and by a lot). It seems the case of overwhelming majority of them.

Well, how many Christians' concern with worldly life crosses the line (and by a lot). It seems the case of overwhelming majority of them.

Perhaps, or perhaps not. Certainly caring more about earthly affairs is an error I'm prone to, which I must constantly try to resist, and a lot of people calling themselves Christians don't seem to be on the right side of the line. On the other hand, I'm not confident that either of us can rigorously identify where the line between "making a good-faith effort" and "only pretending to try" is, and I'm certainly not confident that most non-Christians even understand what Christians are aiming for.

A thinking Christian would consult the Gospel as a guide, where he would find that God actually wants us to celebrate and be happy in honor of his glory, as well as to reduce the suffering of others. But a more general point can be made. Can we devise a teleology where purpose and motivation are maximized? Such that a person dwelling on the purpose of things and the nature of life can actually be motivated toward bettering the world, and not say to himself “well I will be dead so who cares”? Yes, we can. The easiest way is to believe in a loving judge, something shared broadly among theistic religions. Another would be a reward or punishment cycle based on deeds, which is the karmic wheel.

In the theist worldview, while the material world is fleeting, human action is immensely important — every action will be accounted for. Therefore there is motivation to behave according to a standard.

drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?

I had the bad fortune to visit my local major city this weekend. I got to see many drug addicts up close. I wouldn't call them happy. If anything most seemed downright miserable.

I think I'll keep living an atheistic life with admittedly finite and temporary meaning and consequence. Not eternal meaning and validation given by God and experienced by my immortal soul, but instead just a limited material life with finite meaning and purpose.

Belief in god is orthogonal to the question of the meaningfulness of life. It is possible that it turns out that there is some absolute discoverable meaning to life that has nothing to do with any god. I don't know what that would be like, but I have had some, for lack of a better word, "mystic" experiences pointing in that direction. And I do not think that all mysticism is theistic. Likewise, it is possible that belief in god actually makes one's life seem less meaningful. Some personalities find the notion of being under the rule of some all-powerful entity to be an unpleasant thought.

Living vibrantly is its own reward, it feels good and, assuming that it does not hurt others, does not need to be justified either by morality or by appeal to some higher goal. The problem with drugs is that they have unpleasant consequences. Also, to the extent that some of them sometimes distance one from reality, they hurt one's ability to enjoy truth.

atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose

Note, Asian religions are almost atheistic and don't give you a particular purpose either. Moksha and Nirvana hardly sound like an appealing motivation. Yeah, let's aspire towards nothingness. It's a hard sell.
As an atheist who derives his atheism by disassociating from an Asian religion (Hinduism) , I struggle to understand why followers of Abrahamic religions think that religion is essential to purpose or motivation.

Your life does not count, by your own definition. You will cease to exist

Yeah. That was still true when I was brought up in a religious household. Would you say that practitioners of Indic religions (hinduism, buddhism, jainism) similarly confuse you ?

drugs will surely make you more happy.

Do they ? In the short term sure, but it's pretty hard to find consistent happiness through drugs or idle consumption of any kind.

Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?

Haven't enough atheists done this already? We have decent stack of atheists around the world, who have thought deeply about life and continued to feel motivated to live well till their dying day. It's not exactly a new phenomenon.

I am an optimistic nihilist. I can see absolutely no reason to believe that humans have any objective "reason to live", but am perfectly content without it. I continue living and seek to live longer because I intrinsically enjoy living itself. If I didn't, I wouldn't aspire to live to at least the Heat Death of the Universe.

In the absence of any objectivity here, nor any reason to think it exists, I have no qualms about taking my own subjective preferences and giving them all my attention. To aim for more is, frankly, a foolhardy endeavor, leaving aside that the comfort of meaning from religion is delusional.

If anyone has a genuine God-shaped hole in their soul, then I can only pity them, and hope we find a way to fix the problem because God isn't real. I'm grateful that I came out of the factory without that particular problem.

It should be noted that there is no reason that these fictions need to be theistic in nature, at least none that I see.

One reason is to motivate groups of people to live out their chosen meaning together. Which is much more powerful than choosing a particular one for your own, in my experience.

“But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?

This is precisely why philosophers go with "human flourishing" instead of happiness.

Once you accept that happiness is not unitary or reducible to just hedonism this hardly seems a question.

I think this just moves the question down the line. Of what purpose is human flourishing? If flourishing is important because it makes humans happy, then happiness is the point. What is this thing that makes humans unhappy that they must do out of obligation, and what underpins it in the face of the inevitability of extinction of all humans across an infinite time span?

Of what purpose is human flourishing? If flourishing is important because it makes humans happy, then happiness is the point.

"Flourishing" is eudaimonia/"happiness", it's just that translating it that way for moderns seems to bring to mind hedonism or fleeting emotions. Which is how you get the drug question. Or humorous misunderstandings like this.

If you don't take happiness to be the mere sensation of pleasure at any given moment (which always abates and you will always want more of) "why do drugs?" has an obvious answer

Well, because part of my flourishing is cultivating a variety of virtues and capacities - health, discipline, familial relations, friendships - that are all correlated with my well-being and, ugh, "happiness" in a deeper sense. Taking drugs provides me with short-term hedons but harms my ability to do that and may make me - and those around me - much unhappier in the long run.

As an atheist, I know that it's possible for dwelling to end up like that, but I don't think it's the only possible result. The key for me is to actually read what other people have said and done, really dig into history and philosophy, and there are endless interesting threads to follow. By contrast I feel like the religious tend (not always) to be in a sort of cloistered existence where they don't really engage with the world and literature in a way that doesn't reassure them of their own faith. That existence seems much paler compared to the richness of being open to all sorts of opinions and experiences. Rather than cancel each other out I think the diverse and contradictory experiences of the world add up to something fascinating, there's just no easy answers and the meaning is harder won, but more real in my opinion than the womb-like experience of the devout.

You will cease to exist, like the dinosaurs, who surely did not count.

Dinosaurs did count. If it comes to pass that 67 million years from now, tiny creatures that I could have eaten gaze upon my remains in awe, I will have considered my life a success. God or no God, this is a fine accomplishment.

“But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?

I do the ones that I think will make me happy. Drinking is fun and I love beer, so I drink beer. Coffee is delicious and caffeine is effective, so I drink coffee. Nicotine is enjoyable and cigars are tasty, so I smoke cigars. I don't think this is all that compelling of a gotcha for the godless. Hard drugs won't induce eudomonia, so I skip them.

I'm sure I miss some important experiences that Mormons have in their belief, but I can't induce that belief organically and I seem to do fine as I am. Just based on observation, I would say that I'm closer to living vibrantly and maximally than the median theist, so I'm more that a little skeptical of whether religious beliefs are central to that life well-lived.

But I’m trying to envision an atheist pondering life while still maintaining motivation to live vibrantly and maximally.

It is completely unclear what you mean by living vibrantly and maximally. If I devote my life to creating art and music for others to enjoy, does that not count? What if I devote my life to reducing suffering in others (human or otherwise, such as people who rescue abused dogs)? What if I spend my life in the pursuit of knowledge? None of those require religious faith.

All of those things require that you believe life has a purpose, or else completely ignore thinking about human life as a whole. A reasonable person does not spend a decade building a house that will be immediately destroyed, draw on a canvas that will be immediately incinerated, or donate a kidney to someone who is immediately going to die. Those endeavors must have a point. Can you explain why an atheist would spend time reducing suffering if none of it matters once all human life has passed away? And if there’s no moral reason to ease another’s suffering, because there is no actual moral judge and in any case no one cares about the moral failings of ancient Assyrians? You can get away with literally everything because you will die and it doesn’t matter.

Can you explain why an atheist would spend time reducing suffering if none of it matters once all human life has passed away?

Even if human life passes away, the suffering is real now. There is no reason to privilege some future state in which the person is dead over the current state in which the suffering exists, as if that future state makes it unimportant to change the present state.

And if there’s no moral reason to ease another’s suffering, because there is no actual moral judge

I am the moral judge. Am I an omniscient, absolutely perfect moral judge? No, but I am a moral judge and my thoughts about what is right and wrong are not irrelevant.

draw on a canvas that will be immediately incinerated

Are Buddhists reasonable?

(Also: high-end chefs may feel they're making art, but it's surely of the ephemeral kind)

Can you explain why an atheist would spend time reducing suffering if none of it matters once all human life has passed away?

Well, obviously because it matters now. And, just as obviously, to an atheist, now (ie, this life) is all that matters, because now is all that exists. You need to try to reason from the premises of athiests, not just from your own premises.

A reasonable person does not spend a decade building a house that will be immediately destroyed, draw on a canvas that will be immediately incinerated, or donate a kidney to someone who is immediately going to die.

"Immediately" is doing a lot of unearned work there. And, under that logic, it would seem to be irrational to buy a toy for a child with terminal cancer. Heck, it would be irrational to give him pain medication. If your logic leads to that conclusion, there is probably something amiss.

Edit: Btw, you seem to have changed the subject. You have not explained why an athiest who spends his life rescuing abused animals is not "living vibrantly and maximally."

“Because it matters now” and “because current life matters” begs the question. I can ignore human suffering and focus on my own pleasure, and then I will have more pleasure, and there will be no consequences because we will all die and be forgotten. And I feel no guilt or shame, because I am doing what I want to do.

That is a good question: why do palliative care to a child with cancer? I mean, I can completely ignore that whole cohort of humans, and be content with my own pleasure. Then that cancer patient will be dead and it will be like they never existed. There is no one to judge me, so why bother? And if someone else judges me, again I can ignore them. If they press on, I can lie to obtain their social validation. This is where thinking atheism takes us IMO. Life becomes like a video game, where people make alliances and then break them for fun. And IMO, atheists find this repugnant and so develop their own faith — disorganized and ad hoc, but of the same quality as theists.

Another question is why we would care about creating new human life. We can take all those resources and make our lives as pleasant as possible, and then humans will cease to exist. But we would live like bachelors.

Well, go ahead. You are making theists sound pretty unappealing as people, though, I must say.

Why would I care about how I make theists look? If nice Christians were all it took to convert then everyone in Amish country would be Anabaptist. In any case I am not trying to persuade someone to theism but explore how “thinking atheism” is inherently non-motivating

You're doing some funky stuff with the definition of motivation. Your promised, never-seen pleasure in heaven is Deep and Meaningful because it won't end, while mine quite obviously existing pleasure on Earth is shallow and hedonistic, is that what you're trying to say?

What I am getting at is that the things which we value most in life — betterment of things, morality — do not seem to value in a thinking atheist worldview. If a thinking atheist wakes up every morning to dwell on the nature of life, there is no reason for him to pursue betterment or morality. A theist who believes in a Loving Judge, however, will be motivated toward betterment and morality. In a hedonic philosophy, if feeling good is the only motivator, then we can do things like ignoring guilt to pursue more pleasure. It becomes very easy to lie to others to obtain what we want. In Abrahamic religion, the very foundation of human life is a repudiation of this temptation — man tried hiding from God only to be discovered, naked.

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“Because it matters now” and “because current life matters” begs the question. I can ignore human suffering and focus on my own pleasure, and then I will have more pleasure, and there will be no consequences because we will all die and be forgotten. And I feel no guilt or shame, because I am doing what I want to do.

I am not sure why you are talking about focusing on one's own pleasure. AFAIK, that is not a principle of atheism.

Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?

Yes, plainly. There are many examples.

It’s trite to phrase it like this, but the atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose when you dwell on it.

When Lacan said "there is no big Other", he didn't mean "God doesn't exist". He meant that, even if God exists, God is not the big Other either. God's just as confused as we are.

It's not clear why the introduction of God is supposed to make life more meaningful in the first place. He could torture us for eternity if we don't follow his commands; but that's just coercion. Similarly, you could be motivated to live virtuously so you can be rewarded with an eternity in Heaven, but it's hard to give an account of Heaven that doesn't reduce to either empty hedonism, or a simple continuation of the types of good things we already have on Earth. Pleasure and pain are things that we already know well; and if pleasure and pain aren't enough to make our finite earthly existence meaningful, why would an eternity of pleasure or pain make life suddenly change from not-meaningful to meaningful? Certainly anyone can see why you would be motivated to avoid eternal torture, but is that the same thing as meaning?

I think we can dispense with the idea that eternity by itself is what makes something meaningful. You can imagine a hypothetical universe that contains nothing but a single electron, and this electron persists for eternity. Is the electron's existence "meaningful"? Doesn't seem like it. So there has to be something else, beyond the mere fact of eternal duration, that makes an existence meaningful. But then we can start to question whether this "something else" might not be available to a finite existence as well.

A more sophisticated theist might say that God is the ground of certain sui generis facts about meaning and purpose, and these facts exist over and above any of his other properties or actions. God simply makes it the case that certain things just are meaningful, end of story. But if you endorse an internalist account of reasons for action, you might question whether such free-floating normative facts are coherent in the first place. Even if you've been informed that God has simply made it the case that some things are more meaningful than others, it seems like there will still always be an open question of why you should care. You might say, "that's very interesting that God has done that, but I don't see how that can be relevant to me personally. If God will torture me if I don't follow his commands, then I certainly should follow his commands; but in that case, I'm responding to the threat of torture, not the alleged 'meaningfulness' of the actions themselves."

All this is simply to say that God is not the big Other. God himself can always take a step back and ask "you know... what is it all for, really?"

An equivalent formulation might say, "there is no escape from philosophy".

But I think you need to start from the presupposition that God is maximally loving as an unquestionable dogma. As this was the dogma of Christianity since its advent, pun intended. Lacan’s construction of post-modern God should be of little interest to us, because a “theist-by-faith” can simply say he is wrong by the very first assumption. Once you define God as loving dogmatically, there’s no room for criticizing God by saying he is confused, evil, etc. Now, I accept that there is room for arguing against the epistemic leap to a God who finds us special and listens to our plea — that this forms something of a special pleading fallacy. But that’s a separate argument.

The angle I am coming at is that in the everyday life of a Christian theist, or some portion thereof, there is a willful belief and anticipation that they will meet their Loving Father and creator at the end of their days, and tell Him all about their life — though He already knows — and all things will be accounted for and made sense of. The description in the Gospel is of a heaven like a mansion with many rooms, which Christ the Friend goes to prepare for us. Now, I am not interested (personally) in the argument for this from deduction. I am just interested in how, if someone assents to a belief in this, they can think about their life forever without ever losing motivation and good spirit. Are they “wrong”? Well, from the atheistic angle it appears that there is no such thing as wrong, that in fact there is no significance whatsoever to being right or wrong because there is no Final Accounting. But the theist can make sense and ponder his whole life and even the nature of life (within the realm of faith) and spend an eternity writing poetry about this. As such, atheism is more wrong than theism, because only theism can define “wrong” from a vantage point of significance.

Maybe another angle is to read your comment, which is logical and well-argued, and say (politely), “so what?” If you have argued against God, you have lost the argument because you have now entered a realm where “right” and “wrong” are undefined. It’s a null zone. Nothing has been solved because there is no Ultimate Solution.

Well, from the atheistic angle it appears that there is no such thing as wrong, that in fact there is no significance whatsoever to being right or wrong because there is no Final Accounting.

No, theism/atheism is orthogonal to the question of morality. An atheist can believe that some things are more morally right than others just as well as a theist can. That is, of course, unless you think that anyone who believes in morality is by definition a theist. But I do not think that this is what you mean in this thread when you refer to believing in god.

Certainly, one does not need to believe in eternal life to believe that some things are morally more right than others.

An atheist can believe that some things are more morally right than others

Can they do this while dwelling on the facts of their worldview? My point is more specifically that while an atheist may perform moral judgment in a distracted sense, being a social organism in a greater whole and internalizing moral judgment as such, their morality is inconsistent with dwelling on their worldview and actually deeply considering its consequences. This is in sharp contrast to theism, where continuing to dwell on one’s worldview is sought out and leads to more motivation and moral action.

their morality is inconsistent with dwelling on their worldview and actually deeply considering its consequences

Why?

Because ultimately all of humanity will be forgotten, meaning what happens has no greater significance, and when you die what you did will not matter, as you will cease existing. If humanity is a temporary blip in eternity, human actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Thus, when dwelling on the grand scheme of things, you cannot sincerely maintain motivation and purpose.

If humanity is a temporary blip in eternity, human actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things.

... Why? Why does moral importance require taking up a share of the universe's lifespan? Human experience is already 100% of what humans can ever experience. Whether you find that imporant or not, I do not see how a long existence of gas clouds before and afterward makes any difference. Do you think your life would be more "meaningful", whatever that means, if you found out that the universe was created 150 years ago and will be destroyed in another 150 years? Do you think a person who lived in the Upper Paleolithic, when there was only about a million people on Earth, had 8000x the moral value of a person living in the modern world, with its eight billion inhabitants?

If the whole human endeavor disappears without a trace, leaving no influence, and no one remembers them, then by definition it has no impact or significance on the universe. In human life, when something has no greater significance, like we make a medicine that was ineffective or we build a building that collapses, we say it was meaningless. If I give someone a kidney but they die immediately, it had no greater significance. In other words, it didn’t matter.

If I will die, and every human will die, then what I do has no greater significance because it is only temporarily affecting things that will disappear shortly. Those “good feelings” I create in others will cease to matter one day, so what were they for? It’s almost the same thing as if I do heroin and then face withdrawals — temporary happiness that doesn’t matter. What’s more, my moral intuitions have no greater purpose and are just an accident. This we know from science. So I have no need to listen to my moral impulse and can completely ignore it for my own gain, as if I’m playing GTA. The only duty remaining is to feel good, because only pleasure is real. If someone tries to shame me (which feels bad), I can pretend that he is wrong and that I am right. We already have humans doing this today in fact!

It’s a worldview that can’t help but breed dysfunction if you actually dwell on it. Like yeah, you can ignore the atheistic truth, but then you might as well develop some theistic view for fun. An atheistic man who confronts the ultimate purpose of things head on would say: “I exist as an accident, there is no greater significance to morality, morality is an accidental instinct that I can ignore, and I need not care about humankind because I won’t be judged for it.”

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There's no such thing as the grand scheme of things. We are our own infinities of the highest order.

There is a techno-optimist narrative that there is a real possibility, large enough that a VC would bet on it given the size of the payoff, that the Great Filter is in our past (or is in the near future, with a slim-but-real chance of crossing it - the Yudkowskian view on AI), we see no other signs of a civilization that has crossed it, and accordingly given the potential impact of a supercivilization, humanity is the most important thing in the observable universe. This is a major source of meaning to the longtermist-EA crowd in practice, and in a weaker form is a very obvious source of meaning that everyone involved is space exploration talks about.

The fundamental narrative is more general - most religious source-of-meaning narratives are of the form "humanity is special because God made us special" and this is a secular version. It can be relied on by anyone who is part of the load-bearing infrastructure of human civilization (including parents) or who thinks they are.

The old jaibot blog (jaibot was the bard of the early Berkeley rataionality community) recently disappeared, but he had some excellent inspirational posts of this type.

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Speaking as such an atheist (or something close to an atheist), well, yeah, there is a portion of me that sometimes thinks about life, and comes to the conclusion that life is all about distracting yourself. And I choose to distract myself.

I don't think drugs or most things that will make you "happy" easily are that appealing, because they don't really make you happy. I know this because there were times when I drank or smoked too much in college and felt strung out. Anything that's addicting starts to feel bad in some way, you feel bad when you see you are acting differently and shamefully, and you feel that the happiness it gives is short term and false in some way. You can feel that your brain starts to crave and expect it more, and you can't keep up with it all the time, and if you try, you suffer physical effects. Heck, even watching porn or playing video games too much will make you feel that way. It's pretty apparent to me that if I did harder drugs, it'd turn my life into a nightmare, and the pleasure it gave wouldn't last long before turning into pain and problems. It is not pleasurable at all to spend all your money on drugs, live on the street, resort to prostitution, and have to struggle to try to live another week.

Then there's also pride and shame. Even if we know all of it may be constructed and somewhat meaningless, we are social beings. I respond to the thoughts that if I killed myself or became a druggie, the people I know would be ashamed of me. I don't really want that, even if I think that their lives are as meaningless as mine. It's just the way social animals are, we are optimized to care about that.

I should also say, for what is worth, that I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I do have pascal-wager-like thoughts. But I sort of think that if my life is going to end anyway, why end it now, and why have it be shitty? May as well at least try to live a "good" life if all of it may not matter anyway, but also may matter.

Does anyone else really dislike people citing video-essays as proof of their argument? I find them to be a really poor way of expressing information compared to text. The amount of time needed to watch it is very long. No ctrl-F either.

Plus looking at youtube transcript is a very user-unfriendly experience. I'm happy with video for visual things like 'Shanghai is a really pretty, advanced looking city from the perspective of people walking through at night' or 'this is how some criminal accosting happened'. But for expressing arguments it's not in the same league as text.

Yes. Mainly because I do most of my online reading on my commute or on public transportation and I don't always feel like plugging in earphones to accommodate a video. I can read much faster than these people talk, especially if they're being circuitous. In addition I find most video makers pretty narcissistic. As others have pointed out, other rhetorical devices are involved in video than those suited to text.

At this point I often don't even like when people cite textual essays that take a long time to get to the point. I can appreciate a good bit of extended writing very much, but usually not when I'm trying to get up to speed on it in order to participate in a discussion.

The audio format isn't the main problem imo, if you were citing a lecture in a university course it'd be annoying to read the transcript but fine. The real problem is video essays are universally uninformative because they're made for the kind of people who watch youtube. I can't think of a single 'video essay' that isn't strictly inferior, purely by information content, to a piece of text.

Yes. Video is unacceptable in my mind because it is lazy. It takes less time to produce but more time to watch, saving the creator a few hours but costing the audience in aggregate thousands of hours. I don't consume content that doesn't respect it's audience.

Strongly agree. Also in a counterpoint to @ymeskhout's recent cross-examination post, I think video or spoken content makes it much harder to catch errors. A lot of obfuscation can hide in tone, pitch, volume, rapidity of speech, etc.

This problem is even worse in longform video!

I agree with this criticism, which also means I disagree that it's a counterpoint to my post! I never tried to claim that video > text in all or even most instances. I demonstrably vastly prefer reading and writing than any other medium. My point was very narrow, extolling the virtues of real-time conversations that exist with the ability to tease out someone's position with higher precision, and a better opportunity to root out dishonesty. Beyond those two specific aspects, it's hard for me to think of other advantages.

I would cite a video essay if it provides video examples of a particular individual lying or contradicting himself/herself. Things you can't prove with text. But for a scientific or philosophical argument, text is more efficient.

I agree. I can tolerate a 5-10 minute video if it’s well produced and looks interesting, anything longer I don’t bother with. And it actively annoys me when someone links an hour long ramble and tells me to watch it to understand their argument.

One thing I have noticed when looking up GDP per capita statistics is that many countries seem to have a peak and then decline between 2008-2011. This gives the effect of flat GDP per capita for the last decade or so in many places.

My question is, is this an artefact of the strength/weakness of the dollar relative to the country's currency? For example, the World Bank lists the UK's 2022 GDP per capita as $45,850, the same as it was in 2006. Yet, measuring in GBP (inflation adjusted) seems to show actual (albeit uneven) economic growth between 2006 and today, from £30,800 to £32,900. Certainly not strong growth, but growth nonetheless.

Basically, is measuring GDP per capita in dollars really the most objective way to measure economic growth?

All rich countries had a recession in 2008-2011, because of the global financial crisis. The UK and, for different reasons, the sunnier EU countries, show the pattern you mention of never really recovering from it, but most other places don't. If you look at the US, Germany, Poland, or any rich Asian country, then the 2008 recession looks like a blip with growth returning to trend. (A painfully slowly-growing trend in Japan, but not the kind of stagnation you see in the UK or Spain) For example, see this graph

My question is, is this an artefact of the strength/weakness of the dollar relative to the country's currency?

Yes.

Basically, is measuring GDP per capita in dollars really the most objective way to measure economic growth?

No. Purchasing Power Parity is better. Not perfect, but better. It's less volatile year-to-year and it has a higher correlation to other measurable things such as life expectancy.

I mean, the peak and decline is probably an artifact of the global recession.

Purchasing Power Parity is better IMO, constant USD 2017 might be a good option. The World bank usually has that. In this case it's basically the same as what you said: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB

It's a bit of an approximation (just what specifically makes up the 'basket of goods' that prices are compared for is open to manipulation) but all economic statistics are a kind of nonsense.

There was also the GFC in that period.

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