That most of us struggle in a pointless daily grind, in the false belief that it gives our lives some sort of meaning. Most of us are wasting our lives doing stuff we don't really want to, instead of remembering to enjoy life. After all, we only get one shot at this.
That people should open their minds and be more accepting of new experiences that may challenge their own strongly held beliefs.
That we are much too terrified of drugs that are currently illegal, and not nearly terrified enough of drugs that are currently legal.
That most life decisions for most people are based on their social and cultural environment that force them into a predefined path. Wandering out of it comes with a price of continual self-doubt. Staying into that path is an easy way to live an ok life but it comes with the greatest price of all: a terrible feeling of regret at the end of your life.
Something I also believe is that most people will not question those life decision and ask themselves if this is really what they want.
That most ailments in the western world are ones of modernity: over-nutrition, over-medication, physical inactivity, excessive hygiene, lack of sunlight, non-ancestral diets and/or environments, environmental pollutants, etc, etc.
If something is bothering you that the doctors can't fix, it's a pretty good heuristic for plan-B.
I strongly agree with this. It irks me that doctors often prescribe drugs first without seeking to find the root cause of a problem. But I guess such is the culture these days. People want a quick fix without being told to change their lifestyles.
Most docs I know feel the same way, but when you get shaken-down for pills all-day every-day, most people are just going to give up and start passing out nexium and lipitor like it was candy on halloween.
That there is no free will. (and a few things deducted from that, like how anyone is innocent in some way and how this relates to criminal justice (protect society, resocialize, but never revenge)).
It is my experience also that things just happen without anybody being in control. Given the same circumstances, all individuals would act in exactly the same way. Of course, "the circumstances" include a lot of hard-to-describe factors, like the mental model of an individual, as it was created during their life so far.
Naturally, this point of view attracts a lot of criticism, most of all from people who think they would achieve better results in the same situation, e.g. not resorting to crime when faced with social exclusion and hardship. The assumption, in my experience, comes from lack of reflection, though. What enables one individual to perform "better" than the other? I would say, it's their mental model, created solely by their previous experiences.
The "you" that allegedly makes all those "right" decisions is merely an automaton that was programmed by past experiences. So you are performing better because you learned to perform better or, in other words, you were lucky to live in an environment that fostered those traits.
Indeed, there is no achievement and no guilt. They are both purely social constructs without any substance, and all they do is create a gap between those people who were lucky and those who were not.
Achievement and guilt help regulate those environments. A person who is successful because they live in a place that has plenty of food might work to bring food to places that don't in order to feel a sense of achievement. That would improve the environment of others. Likewise, someone destroying a place's food stores would damage that environment but guilt makes it less likely for that to happen. The exact things that cause feelings of achievement and guilt are defined by consensus (like you said, social construct). Also, if there's a genetic factor in how we come to that consensus, those genes are more likely to survive multiple iterations if the consensus results in more survivable environments, so there is substance in the sense that these rules are well tested and proven.
I wondered a lot about this in my teenage years; everything happens because of physics and chemical reactions, so why would humankind be any different? I tried to finf the answer to the question and my final conclusion was that regardless of whether this is true or not it would simply be too boring for a world to be like this.
I simply optimize for personal bliss. Luckily this includes not causing pain to others and the good feeling of doing good. Also be amazed at the complexity of these random swirls of reality and the weird dip in entropy mankind exists in.
"Don't want to be" assumes free will, which I reject.
"Can't" is still no justification for revenge. Even if we assume that the "can't" is absolute, re-socialization should be attempted for the rest of the life of the individual. See it as an analogy to medicine: we don't say, "this guy cannot be helped, so we'll just let him die."
Exactly, locking someone away might be unjust to this person, but can be necessary for the greater good of protecting the society. The conclusion should be to lock such persons away in a reasonably humane way¹ (and not to sentence him/her to death).
If there is no free will why even think about how to organize criminal justice. Surely the outcome of that is also predetermined, as it's formed by people without free will.
> If there is no free will why even think about how to organize criminal justice
What you are asking is, "if there is no free will, then why are you thinking about criminal justice out of your own free will?"
None of us is "doing" anything, it just happens.
Here is a little experiment: next time you talk to someone, try to find out what you will be saying before you actually say it. Maybe, there will be a surprise.
There is some paradox about it, but that doesn't make it untrue. I long for a society without suffering. It's probably a drive caused by evolution: protecting my kind.
That the majority of high school seniors would benefit more from trade school, apprenticeship, and small business entrepreneurship programs than four additional years of formal classroom education.
That you don't need to eat three or four meals a day. You can compress all the meals into one and still stay productive, energetic & healthy. ( Speaking from 2+ years experience of daily fasting and strength training )
This is very interesting to me. What made you adopt this habit? It does seem counterintuitive to everything I have read and heard throughout my entire life. What sort of improvements, if any, have you noticed from adopting this style of eating versus the standard 3-4 meals per day?
A tactical question: Do you load up all of your daily calories in that one meal e.g. if your usual intake is 2500 per day, do you have all of that at once or do you eat less?
For losing weight. If you're obese to begin with, this regime will give very good results at the beginning which also helps with the motivation. Note: Fasting + Strength training is superior to justing fasting. Why ? Because fasting decreases your metabolism. Strength training does the opposite.
> It does seem counterintuitive to everything I have read and heard throughout my entire life.
Yes, I'd say so.
> What sort of improvements, if any, have you noticed from adopting this style of eating versus the standard 3-4 meals per day?
1 ) Increased mental alertness - I've noticed how quickly the alertness disappears once food enters my body & digestion begins. Not sure If I should attribute this to increased insulin sensitivity or something else.
2 ) Increased productivity - It's amazing how much you can get done when you're not thinking of what & when to eat. I spend most of time writing code, learning new guitar riffs, & planning my workouts.
3 ) Prolonged workday: Related to (2). You can effectively prolong your daily work hours easily from the standard 8, up to 12 - 16 hours. This is because of (1) and (2). Heck you can also go 24 hours+.
4 ) Better quality sleep: On multi-day fasts (24+ hours), I get good quality sleep. I do believe they're of "good quality", because of an interesting effect I've noticed - you don't get the usual grogginess when you wake up. It's non-existent.
> A tactical question: Do you load up all of your daily calories in that one meal e.g. if your usual intake is 2500 per day, do you have all of that at once or do you eat less?
Yes - All calories in one meal. However, this is not optimal for muscle growth. For athletes, it'd be
ideal to spread out protein intake across two meals, at the least.
When I was younger I'd fast or eat very little for up to 4-5 days and it gave me a productivity boost.
I stopped after I took it too far(ended up shaking and nauseus after a bad combo of not completely keto + lifting weights) but have gradually stopped eating breakfasts at all and try to eat a very minimal lunch (a handful of peanuts or a slice of bread) multiple times a week.
Just skipping breakfast means I'm less tired than I used to be. If I can get around to skipping lunch (I like the break and it is social) I guess it would improve my workday even more.
My understanding is the cyclic fasting causes a fat storage response in the body to prepare for periods of low caloric intake.
Personally, my brain, emotions, attention, all shuts down when I'm hungry. I bet I could get used to it, but the transition would definitely be tough. Also from past experience, my body consumes all of my muscle fairly quickly when I don't eat at regular intervals.
Yes - strength training will take a few months to get used to. Depending on your workout's intensity and volume, you'll want to adjust your calories.
Note: intensity = how heavy you lift, volume = reps * sets
Yes, it works. Eat a salad, rice, beans, fish, and vegies once a day and you're good. I'm fasting 18hrs/day and I lose fat + gain muscles. Also, I save lots of time which I can put into work since I don't spend my time on preparing/cooking meals that much.
I may be preaching to the choir here (because this is largely a tech audience) but I don't buy into the stereotype that gamers play videogames (video games?) because of laziness or sloth or some other unfairly negative characteristic misattributed to them.
I saw a post on Reddit where a group of gamers had recreated King's Landing, the main city from Game of Thrones, in Minecraft. The entire project looked like it took years to complete. It was something of an architectural marvel and a sight to behold.
The reason I bring that up specifically was because it was not the work of a lazy and apathetic group of people. I would imagine the entire project took more hours than I spent studying for much of my undergraduate degree. Not to mention the collaboration involved. The entire project was a collective team effort towards a goal that the group deemed meaningful. I have seen multiple projects of this scale on Minecraft. If the people involved were lazy and slothful, where would they muster up the energy to work on such an endeavor? A project like this involves a certain level of planning and discipline to see to completion.
I have felt the same way about competitive games like Starcraft in that I'm amazed at how much effort people put forth to obtain proficiency and competency. There are thousands of hours of YouTube videos online dissecting every aspect of that game, not unlike the way a football quarterback might analyze game film. Again, there is nothing particularly lazy about this. I see it no differently than I would see a chess player studying old chess matches and strategies to improve their skill.
My preliminary thoughts are that video games offer a fair simulation of perfect competition in a world that is otherwise devoid of fairness. Reality is messy. Much of it, maybe most of it, depends on where you started out economically, who your parents were, and what kind of people were around you while you grew up. It's easy to fall into patterns of thought that resemble a "Why Me?" view of the world. I suspect a lot of gamers fall under this umbrella. I'm not making a moral judgement here. Instead, the way I see it is: If the real world has been disappointing to you for whatever reason, why wouldn't you seek out a more "perfect" world in a simulation? Especially when the simulation offers you what you crave in the real world: status, competency, hierarchy, friendship, community, etc. All of those can be found in video games. To me, many of them resemble a sort of perfect and fair world where one lives and dies by their own merits. I see the appeal of disappearing into one of these.
I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. I was thinking about this recently and I am still hashing out my thoughts.
One component of the 'gamers are lazy' stereotype probably comes from the fact that most of the people authoring that opinion are the gamers' parents; who'll just perceive it in the way they will. They are also the generation which like to hear their opinions reflected in prime-time news, which gladly obliges.
Gaming is ubiquitous, in another decade I imagine that attitude will be on the way out.
Those are the obvious points though, I think it's more interesting to think about how the mechanical and repetitive aspects of gaming replace a naive, deep drive for precise actions which demand focus and skill, and move chaotic or unordered things towards some goal. In the 20thC that was probably fixing cars or working in a factory or building stuff. Good ways for satisfying the drive, if you have it.
And in a nice continuation of this relationship, the more that AI replaces work, the more I think leisure, work and gaming will coincide. Many gaming environments are good examples of behavioural economics in action: incentives, rewards, how changes to game balance (even perceived changes to balance) or the price/availability of cosmetics nudge or shove player behaviour... We could stab guesses at how to implement these patterns in a way that considers them economic activity.
I don't think gaming necessarily has to be 'better' than life for it to take up a great deal of it. It just has to have the right kinds of 'APIs' to satisfy that messy, obsessive, predatory/reward-loop hunger which appears in most men and plenty of women.
My central thesis is that a couple of decades leads us basically to the Matrix (though I'm hoping for a sunnier version).
I love the example of fixing cars and building stuff. I never thought about it like that, but now that you mention it, I do think a lot of modern games are replacing the 20th century hobby of coming home and working on your car on weekends.
What you said is also what I'm suggesting: that gaming satisfies that drive in its own way. It's a simulation that can provide most of those same feelings.
I played video games (90s super nintendo) when I was a kid primarily for the music/artwork. Then the internet came along where I could enjoy the art without hitching my time to a game. With my time unencumbered, it wasn't hard to discover that reality is a better game with better music.
What makes it specifically better and why was that so easy to discover? Additionally, if it is obvious, as you say, then how do you reconcile that with the number of people who are checking out of society to disappear into video games, particularly in Japan?
I guess what I'm curious of is this: What do games offer these people that reality doesn't? I'm not talking about people who play casually here and there, but rather people who spend well over twenty hours per week playing games, sometimes longer.
Reality is better because it is all connected. A truth regarding one thing reveals more than one truth. Fiction is nice because it fires your imagination and helps you see things from a different perspective. Video games are fictions concretized into equations. Solving fantasyland physics and logistics problems by feel doesn't seem like a particularly good investment of my time, but that's just me. "Brave New World" only took an hour or so to read, but it helped me through a number of real-life problems. "Final Fantasy VI" was the fruitless expenditure of 30 hours.
I'm sure there are some professional MMORPG players out there fuming right now, thinking, "I made XXX dollars selling equipment on ebay." or "I made XXX dollars winning such and such tournament." Porn stars also make a lot of money.
If I had to make a wild guess as to why people stay on the smack into adulthood, it would be escapism. When life paints you into a corner, it is very easy to retreat into the virtual world with netflix and xbox. Urban Japan is hard mode, so probably a much higher percentage of people being painted into corners. Still probably better than netflix though. At least it's an active pursuit rather than a passive one.
You could, but then how do you explain the activity? For example, I agree it would be a lazy decision if the culprit passively consumed some sort of content. What if they are active? What if they actively collaborate with friends and strangers alike, set their own goals, and then work to meet them? Isn't that what people do in reality?
In Western society, a traditionally good life has a few components to it: friends, family, community, a sense of place, achievement. What if a video game provides this? Why would 100 hours spent towards building a building in Minecraft or learning new strategies in Starcraft be any different from spending 100 hours learning to chop wood and create a garden in your backyard? (By the way, there are popular garden simulator games too, like Stardew Valley).
Something in me tells me the two are different, but I'm grasping as to why, without placing my own sense of morality on the thing.
That quantum entanglement is limited to strong gravitational fields. Like we see the probability field because we are in Earth's gravitational field. But it doesn't span the entire universe infinitely.
Well, I think you need to find a balance. Don't blow through everything, but also enjoy life because you only live once.
I know guys who save up to the last penny to try and achieve financial freedom. It's infinitely easier (and more efficient) to try to make more money than it is to, for example, not buy the occasional starbucks coffee.
That's right. The approach that works for me is optimising top-down. Save on the big expenses (accommodation, car, groceries) which requires planning and System II thinking. Try and save on the smaller stuff but as you're fighting your impulses (under social pressure, marketing influence etc) its much harder, so go with the flow.
As an example: I had the opportunity to take over a very nice corporate car of a friend at a ridiculously low price (for a variety of reasons). Basically I managed to purchase at half the actual value of the car -- it was a few years old but looked almost new and had super low miles. It was in perfect condition.
I could've bought and sold it on the spot for close to double the price I paid. But I'll drive it for a few years and likely be able to sell it for close to the same price I originally paid for it. Others go buy a new car, take a massive depreciation hit, and in the end spend tens of thousands more.
The expensive tickets are worth focusing on. Then go drink all the coffee you want.
One can literally not overspend on food. Good food (i.e. fresh fruit, vegetables, good meat and fish, etc) are 100% worth the investment in my view. But to each their own priorities in life.
The only way to be truly happy is to be ignorant of all the ills we are inflicting on the world and each other.
Once you attain this awareness as part of growing up, the only way to drown out the awareness of this deplorable state of the human existence, is to numb the mind with drugs or to damage the brain to such a degree that it stops mattering to you.
I think there are two sides to this. Either ignore it, or embrace it and accept it as part of the human experience. If you accept that suffering is inevitable, you recognize the positives in life more readily. To me, this approach allows me to be present in life, as opposed to numb with drugs, waiting to expire.
One has a right to dislike an another person based solely on gender, race, religion or ethnicity; I can be tolerant but I won't feign acceptance or force myself to like such a person.
Why do you think most people don’t believe this? Aren’t those major points of the most popular religions? I feel (I haven’t searched for hard data) those views are shared by billions of people.
That all mental and physical reactions presented by all living things do not yield a true bearing of value. Every entity in the universe reacts with every other entity it comes accross to produce an outcome and nothing more. Being ecstatic bears no difference in value of being tortured.
There's no such thing as "value" determined by the laws of physics or floating around in the universe. Things that don't have minds don't have the concept of value. But we do. Value is created by human minds.
And if value is created by human minds, then it's definition depends on what we find valuable.
I find not being tortured pretty fucking valuable, so are many other people [citation needed]. If I place value on a thing or a state of mind or some state of the world, then it's valuable.
That people should open their minds and be more accepting of new experiences that may challenge their own strongly held beliefs.
That we are much too terrified of drugs that are currently illegal, and not nearly terrified enough of drugs that are currently legal.