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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2301 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 13, 2023

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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They say man plans and god laughs.

I think I’ve been pretty in-tune with the techno-capitalist zeitgeist.

Any philosophical framework needs to address death—as much a constant of life as the sun setting each day.

How does the rat-diaspora do this? Rationally of course! With statistics. But the lower parts of our brains don’t understand statistics, so the real message is this: if you’re 64 you’ll get another 16 years according to the actuarial tables. If you’re completely healthy, run daily, have a highlighted and annotated copy of your medical records—if you’re literally doing everything right and within your power to take care of yourself—you can shade that up a couple years.

But that’s not true—you can do everything right and be perfectly healthy and suddenly die anyway, as the statistics tell us.

Have you ever experienced real “denial”? When the facts tell you “1+1=2 and also fuck you” and you just shake your head and think “no, that can’t be right, maybe 1+1=3 and my life is still good.” The power of rational thinking vs the surge of more primal, ancient ways.

So how do I cope with this? Our thinkers seem to prefer to avoid it, or throw Hail Marys on radical life extension tech. The modern way would be therapy. The traditional way, which got my ancestors through innumerable tragedies, is the church.

But I need something—I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a cold, unfeeling world ruled by randomness. (After all, that’s not how the West was won, was it?)

How does the rat-diaspora do this? Rationally of course! With statistics. But the lower parts of our brains don’t understand statistics, so the real message is this: if you’re 64 you’ll get another 16 years according to the actuarial tables. If you’re completely healthy, run daily, have a highlighted and annotated copy of your medical records—if you’re literally doing everything right and within your power to take care of yourself—you can shade that up a couple years.

And if you're a billionaire or have a reputation for war crimes, you can bump that up to 100. Joking aside, your family tree is more predictive of how long you will live than actuarial stats. But even then, it comes down a lot to one-off factors, which can be mitigated or prevented with screening. Avoiding the big ones like heart disease or cancer and you can reasonably expect to live to 95+.

And if you're a billionaire or have a reputation for war crimes, you can bump that up to 100.

This attempt at joke is not funny.

Avoiding the big ones like heart disease or cancer and you can reasonably expect to live to 95+.

Ye, just win a genetic lottery bro. Not as unfunny as previous joke, still not rational. Tips on being rich: be born in 1st world country. It's easy, almost a billion people managed to do that, why can't you?

many people live to 95. hardly like winning a lottery. and with advances in medical technology, the odds increase. Someone who is 40 today has greater odds of living to 90 than someone who was 40 fifty years ago.

Many? Quick GPT question says 11.3% americans live up to 95. I wouldn't call this many.

your family tree is more predictive of how long you will live than actuarial stats

Not looking good for me, then.

Avoiding the big ones like heart disease or cancer and you can reasonably expect to live to 95+.

Or you do everything right and die from a mystery illness. Unlikely I guess, but I don’t see how I’ll personally ever be able to look at life the same way.

The buddhadharma is the only good solution, afaik.

But I need something—I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a cold, unfeeling world ruled by randomness. (After all, that’s not how the West was won, was it?)

Where's Tarski and Gendlin when you need them? Aight fam, spit bars:

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

So even the most healthy of us are actually living in a "cold, unfeeling universe", and while it's usually an unhelpful stance from a doctor or would be shrink, the GMC isn't looking so I'll quietly whisper skill issue, since even the "healthiest" of us live in the same reality and manage just fine. Believe it or not, nowhere in psychiatry textbooks does it state that any kind of delusion, be it intentional or otherwise, is necessary for mental health.

If I die, I die. And that really would suck. Doesn't mean I don't expect radical life extension within my current nominal life expectancy, even if superhuman AGI is a bust. That is the closest I have to an informed opinion on such a pre-paradigmatic matter. Maybe you're already 64 years old, in which case you ought to be a tad less hopeful, but not particularly so, given that we don't seem to be in the timeline where AI doesn't work. 95, like my grandfather?

Then as painful as it is to accept, he's probably going to die before technology and the medical science he pioneered can save him. That is the tragedy of a cold, uncaring universe, but it is a form of pain humans can bear, I am already bearing it, I can't say I've made my peace with it, or that it won't be some of the worst pain I can potentially ever feel when he does pass, but I'll persevere.

In contrast, my own death is at the very minimum at the exact same time, or a long time away. It is not remotely as painful to contemplate as the passage of a man who is both a better doctor and human being than I am. All I can hope for is that he thinks his life was worth it, even if it ends far too soon.

And isn't that a difference between us of degree and not kind? Believe it or not, I don't expect to outlive Heat Death, but the sensible approach to finding yourself in an indifferent and cold universe is to grab it by the Dyson Spheres and then mould it to be full of individual, happy entities that aren't so.

It may be a skill issue, but have you lost a direct family member?

Because I didn’t know I had a skill issue until it happened to me

Also an age issue, and a responsibilities issue. When you're in your 20s you feel invincible and are all "live fast die young leave a beautiful corpse." Death isn't real, it's a thing that happens to other people, not you. When the most you have to care for is a casual gf, who cares if you die? She'll move on. It's very different when you age and see your mortality appear over the horizon, or when there are people who you love deeply would be permanently, fundamentally changed or scarred by your death.

I'm sorry you don't have religion. I am religious, and more than the promise of an afterlife, the idea that life has meaning and that I have a purpose is what comforts me. It's not a perfect solution, of course, and I still feel plenty of doubt and existential dread. But it helps.

Look into Stoicism if you havent already. If I weren't a Christian, I would probably be a stoic. It's a very sensible response to life in a cruel, uncaring world.

Yes. Ones I loved to boot.

The skill issue in question is handling your own knowledge of your mortality, not that of others.

I have some bad news for you, son.

The world is cold and random. But it doesn’t have to be unfeeling. It remains possible to leave a thinking, feeling legacy that propagates your values—and values your memory—into the future.

It’s theoretically possible for an elite to outlive his body via song the history books, but for most people, I wouldn’t count on it. I’d say achieving notoriety in your field is more plausible. But the easiest way, the one that was traditional before any of this dogma of life after death, is children.

Good luck!

In my unfortunate new experience, what you say is good for coming to terms with mortality.

But acute grief is more about the imagined future you’ve lost, and the sense of unfairness and senselessness

I have a child. And am a child of the departed. It’s certainly some consolation.

But I need something—I don’t think it’s healthy to live in a cold, unfeeling world ruled by randomness. (After all, that’s not how the West was won, was it?)

It's jarring and eye-roll-worthy when someone sneaks in a grand claim in an otherwise mundane post.

Anyway, I don't experience this all that much. The times that come to mind are;

  1. The Monty Hall problem. I understand probability theory well enough to Euler myself into the "correct solution", but I still FEEL like it should be 1/2 not 2/3s. And if you completely flipped the script with an alien scenario, I might fall for it again. I'm no stranger to probability puzzles and usually solve most of them or don't fall for the obvious trap, but the lizard in my brain can't accept reality in this specific case.
  2. I have a hard time accepting that things just are (the way they are) in the sociopersonal space. In that if you do X, the signal that you do X might predict that you do Y, but, that intuition is useless. In other words, knowing aggregate trends helps little on a single data point. Predicting aggregate -> aggregate is easy. Making a prediction is hard, this is almost always because (Lewontonins fallacy, minus the fallacy).

How do I cope with it? Just ignore it lol.

The Monty Hall problem. I understand probability theory well enough to Euler myself into the "correct solution", but I still FEEL like it should be 1/2 not 2/3s. And if you completely flipped the script with an alien scenario, I might fall for it again. I'm no stranger to probability puzzles and usually solve most of them or don't fall for the obvious trap, but the lizard in my brain can't accept reality in this specific case.

Code a simulation of it, and step through the logic, it helped me.

After grokking it, my conclusion was that a lot of the explanations are backwards. After they reveal the empty slot, you can only win by changing your decision, if you got it wrong the first time. So what are the chances of getting it wrong on the first go?

I have a hard time accepting that things just are (the way they are) in the sociopersonal space. In that if you do X, the signal that you do X might predict that you do Y, but, that intuition is useless. In other words, knowing aggregate trends helps little on a single data point. Predicting aggregate -> aggregate is easy. Making a prediction is hard, this is almost always because (Lewontonins fallacy, minus the fallacy).

I have a similar - perhaps reversed - experience as this. I chalk it up to my upbringing, being consistently taught and reinforced that stereotyping someone is only one notch above imposing something like literal chattel slavery on them. As such, as Arthur Chu might say, I was trained to periodically "mind-kill" myself to never predict the behavior of someone based on other signals without some specific independent evidence. If I ran into a burly man with face tattoos in a dark alley in an area known for gang activity, it would be evil to treat him any differently than if I ran into an old lady in her 70s who has to take deep breaths every few steps; the burly man could just be a tattoo and fitness enthusiast, and the old lady could be an armed robber with a hidden gun. The relative odds of these scenarios don't matter; in fact, even considering calculating it is, again, evil.

I've been trying to learn to think differently, since I noticed that even the people who push this stuff clearly don't believe it, as shown by their revealed preference and, more recently, just explicit praise of the moral virtuousness of stereotyping in [circumstances]. It's not easy to navigate out of decades of propaganda that started since grade school, though.

The Monty Hall problem. I understand probability theory well enough to Euler myself into the "correct solution", but I still FEEL like it should be 1/2 not 2/3s. And if you completely flipped the script with an alien scenario, I might fall for it again. I'm no stranger to probability puzzles and usually solve most of them or don't fall for the obvious trap, but the lizard in my brain can't accept reality in this specific case

Doesn't the feeling go away when you realise that what you're choosing is the odds of selecting the car the first time around, not the second, since the game show master always removes a goat? The removing of a goat isn't independent of your choice of door.

Or if you expand the number of doors. If there are a million doors, you choose one and the game show master removes 999998 doors and asks if you want to choose again, do you still feel like it doesn't matter what you choose?

I was never convinced by the "expand the number of doors" scenario because it's not obvious why 999998 doors would be removed in the new scenario. It feels like another euler trick.

Yeah me neither because of how hand wavy it is. It's trying to make a point about priors but that totally misses the point! The point of the Monty hall problem is that the door Monty Hall opens is DEPENDENT on you having made the choice before. That's what makes it 2/3. If he already opened a door and you walked up to the stage and chose the door after the fact, it would be 1/2. The lesson in Monty hall is a lesson of dependence not priors.

Another way I like to view it is that Monty Hall opening the door doesn't tell us anything at all about the door we initially chose. It's the illusion of information, my chances were 1/3 when I walked up to the stage, it's still 1/3. Because the dependence flows one way. You are not actually given any information to update on, so I think the bayesian explanation is kinda shoddy on that front.

Anyone who is actually good at probability theory, feel free mansplain it to me If my intuition is wrong.

Yeah, you’re right. When you pick door 1, Monty removes it from his little pre-game winnowing of the doors; he can only open door 2 or 3 now, which collectively have a 2/3 chance of containing the prize. If he opens 3 and it contains the car, you’ve automatically lost. The chance of this is eliminated when he reveals a goat, but the collective grouping of 2 and 3 retains 2/3 odds. Now door 1 is added back to the mix, it’s smart to switch.

What is sometimes confusing is realizing that there are actually two ‘games’, each with only two doors in play, with the second dependent on the first. The odds of a door having the car in a standard two-door scenario are 50/50, but the odds of your door having it are only 1/3, because there’s a 1/3 chance that you’re only still playing because Monty excluded your (goat) door from round one. Your door being ‘safe’ from Monty’s initial opening means your odds don’t improve, while door 2’s do, provided 3 doesn’t have the car.

When you frame it in terms of dependence (on you choosing the door before or after Monty showing a door with a goat) the Monty Hall problem isn't much of a problem at all.

This is a common thing in many many stats puzzles and the overall trend of why normies are so bad at probability/stats. The most important/pivotal part is formulating the correct problem statement. And in terms of inference, that means knowing exactly what the inference tells you and what it doesn't.

The above applies to most branches of math, but probability/stats is fundamentally at a level of abstraction above most other fields of math from the ground up.

But that’s not true—you can do everything right and be perfectly healthy and suddenly die anyway, as the statistics tell us.

Well, the first thing that gets me by is that I actually find the statistics pretty comforting. For my age group, only about 2 people per 1000 die on an annual basis. If I avoid the really dumb stuff, like suicide and getting killed in an interpersonal spat, this gets even better. If I avoid being morbidly obese or severe drug addict, another point in my favor. I'll die someday, of course, but the odds are strongly in favor of it not being something I need to fuss about all that much at the moment. Some of that is denial! But the denial is aided by the statistics rather than the other way around. This is a level of randomness I can tolerate.

I suspect that my toleration of this when I get older will be built on cope about having lived a good life.

Yeah, I could tolerate it too, but can no longer deny now that it’s happened to someone I love

I believe that no matter what is real - heaven awaits us, life is hell or purgatory and we're all going to suffer here for eternity, existence is said unfeeling void and we just briefly blink into and out of life once and never again - it's the same for everyone, and no matter how it goes we at least all go down the same path together. Even the hypothetical techno-immortals who eat stars for breakfast and have consumed a billion AI-powered permutations of their favorite fetishes by lunch will eventually have to come back and reckon with the same reality, the same ending. Whether we go to God, to our Ancestors, or just into the Dirt and that Dirt into nothingness given a few more billion years, whether what we build lasts for another day or outlasts the Earth itself, we're all in this together.

So I don't feel particularly bad about having no answers or even any profound questions or a solid, tangible belief system. I'm just muddling along with everyone who ever existed.

What do you believe about consciousness?

  • If it's an illusion, death is just the illusion ending. I see little reason to believe it is an illusion though.
  • If it's an emergent property, something which atoms arranged in certain ways create, then "you" are unaffected if, for example, you are killed and a perfect copy created. In this case "you" die to the extent no other sufficiently similar human exists or will ever exist, anywhere in reality. This also implies "you" die temporarily if you get a head injury, get high, or even fall asleep. I see little reason to believe this, but if this is what you believe, I see little reason to not believe in alternate dimensions or anything similar. Maybe the Big Bounce is a thing, and after countless repetitions the atoms will align just right for "you" to appear again.
  • If souls exist, your soul is headed somewhere, and there's clearly a lot we don't understand about reality.

I think we are generally pretty overconfident about this stuff. It's much more certain that 1+1=2 than that death is the end. If death is the end, though, is coping even the right thing to do? It's horrible to imagine a conscious being just being snuffed out like that.

A way of thinking about this is that radical life extension already exists, it's called having children and being part of a tribe.

And at that point you might as well pretend you’ll live on through your amoeba cousins.

I prefer to half-seriously believe everyone goes to heaven for no reason at all.

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