If you are in the US and are actually, bona fide poor (which essentially means having no significant assets) you can have quite good health care for free.
But I do believe you realize that your fear is irrational so throwing in random rationalizations isn’t going to help you. I think you’ll need either to bite the bullet (via a supreme exertion of willpower) or game yourself somehow.
If you are in the US and are actually, bona fide poor (which essentially means having no significant assets) you can have quite good health care for free.
I have not experienced this to be true. How do I know if I’m deluding myself?
Um. Well, I’m not going to write a guide to free health care in the US, but:
Large cities have things which are usually called something like “community health centers” which have doctors and will treat you for free.
Medical colleges and teaching hospitals will typically not charge you for procedures performed by students. While it might not be the best idea for a coronary bypass, it works well for things like dental—your cavities are very carefully examined and fixed under the supervision of a professor.
Doctors cannot deny treatment for lack of funds. If you go to a hospital with some symptoms they have to do something about them before releasing you.
Hospitals are quite adept at manipulating a variety of government programs, they (not you, they) might find some insurance under which you qualify.
To illustrate, I know a girl who was in the US on a student visa (and so was neither a US citizen nor a resident alien—no rights to any governmental assistance) and pregnant. Oh, and poor, too. She had full pre-natal checkups, tests, vitamins, etc. and she gave birth in a normal American hospital under normal circumstances. It didn’t cost her a cent.
nod I’m aware of most of those processes. The problem is, I’m the sort of person that it’s very easy to convince to turn away, and I’m acutely aware that every dollar that is spent on me and not reimbursed contributes to either the poor financial health of the hospital, or the poor financial health of the government/society as a whole.
Ultimately, I need a lot of mental health assistance to get to a place where I can afford to deserve the mental health assistance that I need to get to that place, and I’m not comfortable being a leech on society.
Mr. Odialdabaoth, I hear you are an Effective Altruist utilitarian who, with one exception, attempts to maximizes the welfare of society.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: I am, and I do.
I also hear you hate ialdabaoth.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Yes. Fuck that guy.
Mr. Odialdabaoth, you may be pleased to hear that ialdabaoth is suffering from depression.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: You warm my twisted little heart.
You may also be pleased to hear that he’s reluctant to seek medical assistance using public programs because of the cost of those programs to society.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Well, damn. It pains me to say it, but ialdabaoth should take as much mental health assistance as he can.
Oh?
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Yes. Ialdabaoth is, I must admit, a talented and intelligent person. He is currently employed at a level well under his potential. If he escaped his current doom-loop, the social value of his added productivity could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ah yes, I see.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Absolutely. Now, of course, successfully treating ialdabaoth would have some regrettable side effects, such as ialdabaoth being happy. However, the benefit to society would outweigh the loss of his suffering.
Part of ialdabaoth’s brain feels that by using public resources to get mental health assistance, he will be a leech on society.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Tell him to multiply the value he might add to society if he escaped his doom-loop (>$50,000 per year if he becomes a programmer) by his career length (>20 years) by a pessimistic estimate of the chance of an intervention working (>1/10), and then tell that part of his brain to shut the fuck up.
Thank you Mr. Odialdabaoth.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Glad to help. Oh, and if you see ialdabaoth, could you be a good sport and slap him in the face for me?
Heh. Do you know I used almost that exact argument once, with one of the social workers? Although the figure I used was $80,000/year, because that’s what I used to make—and I added something about “I’ve already paid in AT LEAST grabs calculator ($80,000 x 2 x 0.35) + ($65,000 x 1.5 x 0.35) + ($50,000 x 2.5 x 0.35) + ($45,000 x 1.5 x 0.33) + ($40,000 x 1.5 x 0.30) + ($35,000 x 2 x 0.30) + ($27,000 x 2.5 x 0.28) + ($25,000 x 1.5 x 0.25) = $223,000 and some change in taxes over the past fifteen years. Are you seriously going to tell me that none of that was for social programs that I’m entitled to see benefit from?”
I was subsequently referred to security and escorted out for taking a belligerent tone.
I need a lot of mental health assistance to get to a place where I can afford to deserve the mental health assistance that I need to get to that place, and I’m not comfortable being a leech on society.
Not sure if this is at all helpful, but: Do you see the contradiction in that sentence? This is a situation that is unfixable unless you go into debt to society a bit in order to pull yourself up. As a taxpayer, I would much rather you get help, even if you don’t feel like you “deserve” it, than see you be sad forever. I don’t care if you are a leech or not; you’re a person, and therefore you being sad is a bad thing.
I really don’t see what your usefulness/uselessness to powerful people has to do with you being bad. I can’t even imagine what premises you are relying on for such a statement.
I can’t even imagine what premises you are relying on for such a statement.
It’s a modification of Hypercalvinism / Dispensationalism / Dominionism / Divine Command Theory that I was taught as a child.
Essentially, power defines morality, because “fuck you, what are you going to do about it?”. And (to quote the actual book Catch-22), “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing”.
Basically, the strong are morally justified—in a sense, morally compelled—to dominate and torment the weak, because they can. And the weak deserve every minute of it, because fuck them.
I’ve spent… roughly four to five hours a day, every day, for 35+ years, trying to update out of that belief system, and yet I fundamentally still operate under it.
[the might is right position I grew up under states:] the strong are morally justified—in a sense, morally compelled—to dominate and torment the weak, because they can. And the weak deserve every minute of it, because fuck them.
… it’s hard for me to imagine what you’ve been through. I’m sorry.
When you say that you operate under this belief system, I don’t quite believe you. You don’t seem to identify with it. Maybe you’ve updated out of it in some regards but not others? Maybe you apply it to the way you would let others treat you / how you treat yourself, but not to the way you treat others?
Also, I’m going to guess that you’re still punishing yourself for your mistakes of the day. I hope you can let them go. You’re obviously working through something painful. Have you given yourself credit for taking the bold step of making this post to try to find a way out?
As for your original question, the only approach I know of for failure, generally, is to try again the next day, possibly trying something different/smaller, possibly with help. Failure to act according to your “system 2”-intention happens to everyone, so I’d say the most important things are (1) not being to hard on yourself (2) setting things up for a new trial with a high success probability (3) recognizing small successes. E.g. set things up so you can avoid most of what your averse to, without completely avoiding all of it, and/or find ways to be less averse to it.
I hope this post isn’t too off-base. I wish you well.
you should want to be powerful yourself—so certainly go and exploit the society:)
the powerful are really not paying for it, and if they are it’s completely peanuts to them. If you are screwing up anyone by so-called leeching, it’s the middle class:) You are not bad to “them”, they don’t care about you one way or another.
I am rich and powerful (compared to you, at least), and I hereby command you to do it:)
Heh. I’m coming back to this, now that I’m in a different mindset.
you should want to be powerful yourself—so certainly go and exploit the society:)
Unfortunately, that leads to a “thrashing” unstable loop, because this:
Basically, the strong are morally justified—in a sense, morally compelled—to dominate and torment the weak, because they can. And the weak deserve every minute of it, because fuck them.
is cached shorthand for the actual system, which is “the powerful dictate morality”.
In general, “the powerful dictate morality” can be easily cached into “the strong deserve to dominate and torment the weak”, because most ways of gaining power over the weak involve dominating and tormenting them, so the people who have that mentality tend to get and keep power—hence a stable loop.
The problem is, when I find my own power rising, my external moral compass (“the powerful define morality”) notices that I’m entering that “powerful” reference class, and thus my internal moral compass (“don’t dominate others, and seek to distribute power fairly”) gains more moral weight.
As I said before, this leads to an unstable loop: while I’m powerless, my own internal moral compass doesn’t enter into the moral calculus, and therefore it is moral for me to dominate and torment others in order to gain power. But as that becomes successful, I become more powerful, and therefore my internal moral compass enters into the moral calculus—and suddenly, the actions I have taken to gain power are no longer morally justified.
Not quite. Power defines what happens in reality, aka the descriptive part. Morality, on the other hand, defines the normative part. Power often trumps morality but it does not define it.
You don’t have self-worth issues, by any chance? If they are the underlying cause you’ll have to deal with them and not with secondary symptoms.
Otherwise let me point out that early interventions are usually VASTLY cheaper than trying to fix problems which have advanced to the point where you’re delivered to the ER. Going to annual check-ups is much more efficient than heroics of a large highly-paid team of medics trying to save your ass from some late-stage nastiness.
I don’t really believe that, but let’s say you don’t. Perhaps other people deserve you happy and functional, not dead or disabled? You’re a smart guy. Get your shit fixed, everybody benefits. Do nothing, everybody loses. It’s a really simple and easy decision, but I completely understand how difficult it can feel.
Ultimately, I need a lot of mental health assistance to get to a place where I can afford to deserve the mental health assistance that I need to get to that place, and I’m not comfortable being a leech on society.
What you know influences your behaviour. Not necessarily as much as you’d like right now, but that doesn’t mean the effect is null. Given that I’d start small, like stop making claims you rationally disagree with so that you don’t reinforce your negative thinking by giving it more credence than it deserves.
hrm. Historically, when I’ve done that, I’ve got called on it, and then socially sanctioned. (I.e., “you say you think , but then I see you doing . I’m going to stop believing anything you say until you start being more honest.”)
I think I may be bogged down with too many cached constraints, but I have no idea which ones to purge, let alone how to stop following them.
Also, knowledge is a tricky thing. While I’ve always followed something like a Bayesian heuristic for knowledge when left to my own devices, it’s reasonably easy to convince me to abandon it in favor of a kind of radical skepticism against my own thoughts and qualia.
Historically, when I’ve done that, I’ve got called on it, and then socially sanctioned. (I.e., “you say you think , but then I see you doing . I’m going to stop believing anything you say until you start being more honest.”)
In person that can certainly be a problem with some emotional/irrational people but luckily we can’t read facial expressions and body language here on the internet :)
I think I may be bogged down with too many cached constraints, but I have no idea which ones to purge, let alone how to stop following them.
It’s a possibility you can’t do that alone. I also suggest some of them would simply disappear were you in a different state of mind. That is, they might not be the actual problem, but caused by it, and fixing them from the wrong end could be incredibly ineffective.
favor of a kind of radical skepticism against my own thoughts and qualia
Would I be wrong to claim the uncertainty is more general than philosophical?
Would I be wrong to claim the uncertainty is more general than philosophical?
Yes, but non-philosophical language is somewhat lacking in terms to explain it. I can spend 10 hours in separate 1-hour sessions trying to explain to a therapist that I don’t feel comfortable asserting the existence of my own subjective experience and qualia, or I can simply say “do you know what the term ‘p-zombie’ means? Do you understand me if I say ‘I can’t maintain proper perception of my own qualia if someone else tells me that I’m faking my perceptions’?”—in the latter case, replacing “qualia” with “feelings” injects a nuance that typically leads a therapist in an unfruitful direction, but explaining that to them is tedious and difficult, especially considering that they’re the expert and I’m just the (damaged and delusional) patient.
At $200/session (or even at $25/session with co-pay, if by miracle of miracles you have insurance), all that explanatory time adds up, especially when you rely on (already-beleaguered) others for every dollar you spend. And even if it was free, it’s hours and hours (and thus weeks and weeks) of tedium before we actually GET anywhere, which is exhausting and discouraging (unless, of course, I’m faking all that).
“you say you think , but then I see you doing . I’m going to stop believing anything you say until you start being more honest.
That’s remarkably harsh. People tend to be reliable or unreliable in spots. Reliability should be modeled as % reliability in whatever part of life there’s evidence for.
That’s remarkably harsh. People tend to be reliable or unreliable in spots. Reliability should be modeled as % reliability in whatever part of life there’s evidence for.
I don’t really see it as my place to judge what’s harsh and what isn’t; we work with the culture we’re given. If that kind of criticism is the norm, then who am I to say that it’s harsh?
If you are in the US and are actually, bona fide poor (which essentially means having no significant assets) you can have quite good health care for free.
But I do believe you realize that your fear is irrational so throwing in random rationalizations isn’t going to help you. I think you’ll need either to bite the bullet (via a supreme exertion of willpower) or game yourself somehow.
I have not experienced this to be true. How do I know if I’m deluding myself?
Um. Well, I’m not going to write a guide to free health care in the US, but:
Large cities have things which are usually called something like “community health centers” which have doctors and will treat you for free.
Medical colleges and teaching hospitals will typically not charge you for procedures performed by students. While it might not be the best idea for a coronary bypass, it works well for things like dental—your cavities are very carefully examined and fixed under the supervision of a professor.
Doctors cannot deny treatment for lack of funds. If you go to a hospital with some symptoms they have to do something about them before releasing you.
Hospitals are quite adept at manipulating a variety of government programs, they (not you, they) might find some insurance under which you qualify.
To illustrate, I know a girl who was in the US on a student visa (and so was neither a US citizen nor a resident alien—no rights to any governmental assistance) and pregnant. Oh, and poor, too. She had full pre-natal checkups, tests, vitamins, etc. and she gave birth in a normal American hospital under normal circumstances. It didn’t cost her a cent.
nod I’m aware of most of those processes. The problem is, I’m the sort of person that it’s very easy to convince to turn away, and I’m acutely aware that every dollar that is spent on me and not reimbursed contributes to either the poor financial health of the hospital, or the poor financial health of the government/society as a whole.
Ultimately, I need a lot of mental health assistance to get to a place where I can afford to deserve the mental health assistance that I need to get to that place, and I’m not comfortable being a leech on society.
I’d like you to meet Mr. Odialdabaoth.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Hello.
Mr. Odialdabaoth, I hear you are an Effective Altruist utilitarian who, with one exception, attempts to maximizes the welfare of society.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: I am, and I do.
I also hear you hate ialdabaoth.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Yes. Fuck that guy.
Mr. Odialdabaoth, you may be pleased to hear that ialdabaoth is suffering from depression.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: You warm my twisted little heart.
You may also be pleased to hear that he’s reluctant to seek medical assistance using public programs because of the cost of those programs to society.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Well, damn. It pains me to say it, but ialdabaoth should take as much mental health assistance as he can.
Oh?
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Yes. Ialdabaoth is, I must admit, a talented and intelligent person. He is currently employed at a level well under his potential. If he escaped his current doom-loop, the social value of his added productivity could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ah yes, I see.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Absolutely. Now, of course, successfully treating ialdabaoth would have some regrettable side effects, such as ialdabaoth being happy. However, the benefit to society would outweigh the loss of his suffering.
Part of ialdabaoth’s brain feels that by using public resources to get mental health assistance, he will be a leech on society.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Tell him to multiply the value he might add to society if he escaped his doom-loop (>$50,000 per year if he becomes a programmer) by his career length (>20 years) by a pessimistic estimate of the chance of an intervention working (>1/10), and then tell that part of his brain to shut the fuck up.
Thank you Mr. Odialdabaoth.
Mr. Odialdabaoth: Glad to help. Oh, and if you see ialdabaoth, could you be a good sport and slap him in the face for me?
Sorry, no.
Heh. Do you know I used almost that exact argument once, with one of the social workers? Although the figure I used was $80,000/year, because that’s what I used to make—and I added something about “I’ve already paid in AT LEAST grabs calculator ($80,000 x 2 x 0.35) + ($65,000 x 1.5 x 0.35) + ($50,000 x 2.5 x 0.35) + ($45,000 x 1.5 x 0.33) + ($40,000 x 1.5 x 0.30) + ($35,000 x 2 x 0.30) + ($27,000 x 2.5 x 0.28) + ($25,000 x 1.5 x 0.25) = $223,000 and some change in taxes over the past fifteen years. Are you seriously going to tell me that none of that was for social programs that I’m entitled to see benefit from?”
I was subsequently referred to security and escorted out for taking a belligerent tone.
I don’t think that’s how tax brackets work.
Not sure if this is at all helpful, but: Do you see the contradiction in that sentence? This is a situation that is unfixable unless you go into debt to society a bit in order to pull yourself up. As a taxpayer, I would much rather you get help, even if you don’t feel like you “deserve” it, than see you be sad forever. I don’t care if you are a leech or not; you’re a person, and therefore you being sad is a bad thing.
Why? Why shouldn’t bad people be sad? And why aren’t people who are useless to the powerful bad people?
(note: this is likely a rationalization of my actual fully general counterargument, which is “because fuck you.”)
I really don’t see what your usefulness/uselessness to powerful people has to do with you being bad. I can’t even imagine what premises you are relying on for such a statement.
It’s a modification of Hypercalvinism / Dispensationalism / Dominionism / Divine Command Theory that I was taught as a child.
Essentially, power defines morality, because “fuck you, what are you going to do about it?”. And (to quote the actual book Catch-22), “Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing”.
Basically, the strong are morally justified—in a sense, morally compelled—to dominate and torment the weak, because they can. And the weak deserve every minute of it, because fuck them.
I’ve spent… roughly four to five hours a day, every day, for 35+ years, trying to update out of that belief system, and yet I fundamentally still operate under it.
… it’s hard for me to imagine what you’ve been through. I’m sorry.
When you say that you operate under this belief system, I don’t quite believe you. You don’t seem to identify with it. Maybe you’ve updated out of it in some regards but not others? Maybe you apply it to the way you would let others treat you / how you treat yourself, but not to the way you treat others?
Also, I’m going to guess that you’re still punishing yourself for your mistakes of the day. I hope you can let them go. You’re obviously working through something painful. Have you given yourself credit for taking the bold step of making this post to try to find a way out?
As for your original question, the only approach I know of for failure, generally, is to try again the next day, possibly trying something different/smaller, possibly with help. Failure to act according to your “system 2”-intention happens to everyone, so I’d say the most important things are (1) not being to hard on yourself (2) setting things up for a new trial with a high success probability (3) recognizing small successes. E.g. set things up so you can avoid most of what your averse to, without completely avoiding all of it, and/or find ways to be less averse to it.
I hope this post isn’t too off-base. I wish you well.
Well then,
you should want to be powerful yourself—so certainly go and exploit the society:)
the powerful are really not paying for it, and if they are it’s completely peanuts to them. If you are screwing up anyone by so-called leeching, it’s the middle class:) You are not bad to “them”, they don’t care about you one way or another.
I am rich and powerful (compared to you, at least), and I hereby command you to do it:)
Heh. I’m coming back to this, now that I’m in a different mindset.
Unfortunately, that leads to a “thrashing” unstable loop, because this:
is cached shorthand for the actual system, which is “the powerful dictate morality”.
In general, “the powerful dictate morality” can be easily cached into “the strong deserve to dominate and torment the weak”, because most ways of gaining power over the weak involve dominating and tormenting them, so the people who have that mentality tend to get and keep power—hence a stable loop.
The problem is, when I find my own power rising, my external moral compass (“the powerful define morality”) notices that I’m entering that “powerful” reference class, and thus my internal moral compass (“don’t dominate others, and seek to distribute power fairly”) gains more moral weight.
As I said before, this leads to an unstable loop: while I’m powerless, my own internal moral compass doesn’t enter into the moral calculus, and therefore it is moral for me to dominate and torment others in order to gain power. But as that becomes successful, I become more powerful, and therefore my internal moral compass enters into the moral calculus—and suddenly, the actions I have taken to gain power are no longer morally justified.
Have you looked into the possibility that you’re letting morality be too important?
Not quite. Power defines what happens in reality, aka the descriptive part. Morality, on the other hand, defines the normative part. Power often trumps morality but it does not define it.
Certain people here sometimes seem to measure someone’s value by their income, i.e. by how much people with money are willing to pay them to do stuff.
Um… because I terminally value people being happy?
(There are sometimes situations where making some people sad makes other people more happy, but I don’t think this is one of those.)
You don’t have self-worth issues, by any chance? If they are the underlying cause you’ll have to deal with them and not with secondary symptoms.
Otherwise let me point out that early interventions are usually VASTLY cheaper than trying to fix problems which have advanced to the point where you’re delivered to the ER. Going to annual check-ups is much more efficient than heroics of a large highly-paid team of medics trying to save your ass from some late-stage nastiness.
Yes, but dealing with them requires dealing with the belief that I don’t deserve to have them dealt with.
I don’t really believe that, but let’s say you don’t. Perhaps other people deserve you happy and functional, not dead or disabled? You’re a smart guy. Get your shit fixed, everybody benefits. Do nothing, everybody loses. It’s a really simple and easy decision, but I completely understand how difficult it can feel.
Yeah, well, that is the catch-22...
You don’t really know that, do you?
In this circumstance, it doesn’t seem particularly relevant what I “know”; what matters is how I behave.
What you know influences your behaviour. Not necessarily as much as you’d like right now, but that doesn’t mean the effect is null. Given that I’d start small, like stop making claims you rationally disagree with so that you don’t reinforce your negative thinking by giving it more credence than it deserves.
hrm. Historically, when I’ve done that, I’ve got called on it, and then socially sanctioned. (I.e., “you say you think , but then I see you doing . I’m going to stop believing anything you say until you start being more honest.”)
I think I may be bogged down with too many cached constraints, but I have no idea which ones to purge, let alone how to stop following them.
Also, knowledge is a tricky thing. While I’ve always followed something like a Bayesian heuristic for knowledge when left to my own devices, it’s reasonably easy to convince me to abandon it in favor of a kind of radical skepticism against my own thoughts and qualia.
In person that can certainly be a problem with some emotional/irrational people but luckily we can’t read facial expressions and body language here on the internet :)
It’s a possibility you can’t do that alone. I also suggest some of them would simply disappear were you in a different state of mind. That is, they might not be the actual problem, but caused by it, and fixing them from the wrong end could be incredibly ineffective.
Would I be wrong to claim the uncertainty is more general than philosophical?
Yes, but non-philosophical language is somewhat lacking in terms to explain it. I can spend 10 hours in separate 1-hour sessions trying to explain to a therapist that I don’t feel comfortable asserting the existence of my own subjective experience and qualia, or I can simply say “do you know what the term ‘p-zombie’ means? Do you understand me if I say ‘I can’t maintain proper perception of my own qualia if someone else tells me that I’m faking my perceptions’?”—in the latter case, replacing “qualia” with “feelings” injects a nuance that typically leads a therapist in an unfruitful direction, but explaining that to them is tedious and difficult, especially considering that they’re the expert and I’m just the (damaged and delusional) patient.
At $200/session (or even at $25/session with co-pay, if by miracle of miracles you have insurance), all that explanatory time adds up, especially when you rely on (already-beleaguered) others for every dollar you spend. And even if it was free, it’s hours and hours (and thus weeks and weeks) of tedium before we actually GET anywhere, which is exhausting and discouraging (unless, of course, I’m faking all that).
That’s remarkably harsh. People tend to be reliable or unreliable in spots. Reliability should be modeled as % reliability in whatever part of life there’s evidence for.
I don’t really see it as my place to judge what’s harsh and what isn’t; we work with the culture we’re given. If that kind of criticism is the norm, then who am I to say that it’s harsh?
I don’t think that particular criticism is common in the culture, or at least I’ve never seen it before.
Having mediocre (or sometimes even poor depending on how you look at it) health care is better than having no health care, if you really need it.