I’m having an un-rational moment, and despite knowing that, it’s still affecting my behaviour.
Earlier today, my newsfeed included the datum discussed here, of Trump having a phone call with the President of Taiwan; and the item discussed here, about Trump talking about ‘shutting down’ the Internet. And later, while listening to my music playlist of the Merry Wives of Windsor, one of the tunes that popped up was “Green Fields of France”, one version of which can be heard here. And I started wondering whether I was prepared for politics to go in an even more negative direction than I’d thought it might back during the American elections, faster than I thought it might.
Specifically, I have the question stuck in my head: “Have I made the appropriate level of preparations, in case of significant military conflict within the year?”. There are a variety of possibilities, from America’s Congress passing laws that I find abhorrent, to China engaging in cyberwar against North American network infrastructure, to a minor US/Canadian dispute blowing up to the point Trump convinces some portion of the US military across the border to ensure the continued flow of “vital resources”, to worse.
Put another way—I’ve just finished figuring out what I would want to have done this month if, some time next year, many websites I find valuable become permanently deleted and unrecoverable (in spite of the Internet Archive’s efforts). (Part of the answer: the program wget and an archival Blu-Ray burner.)
The thing is, from inside my own head, I can’t tell whether my thoughts have been doing this particular set of planning because I’m currently in the middle of one of my bouts of depression, or if it’s actually a perfectly reasonable response to modern life and current events. So I’m looking for some external auditing, here where the sanity waterline is reasonably high:
Maybe there’s a bit of terminology confusion here; if a military conflict /doesn’t/ affect me personally, it seems unlikely to be a ‘significant’ one. (Some historical ways a military conflict could affect me personally: Victory Gardens, the Order of the White Feather, the Fenian Raids, even less oversight and accountability for civilian police whose actions would otherwise end up in the subreddit “Bad Cop, No Donut”.)
I’m thinking of scenarios such as ‘It turns out China put secret backdoors into all sorts of hardware chips, and in a fit of self-righteous pique (which they think will play well to their red-state base), the war-monger side of the American Congress doesn’t see any downsides to making a demand that everyone in the world shut down their supposedly Chinese-controlled hardware under threat that if they don’t, they’ll send the American military to shut it down’. As far as I can tell, several versions of just this one particular scenario don’t obviously break the sociological law of every political actor having to act in what they perceive to be their own self-interest.
However, I no longer trust my sense of calibration for the odds of large-scale politics, given that I was willing to go along with the predicted odds of 88% for Hillary winning the election, and didn’t update nearly as much as I should have by the time of the election itself. And said lack of calibration puts a sharp limit on how rationally I can act as I decide how much effort to put into preparing for the more unpleasant scenarios.
Stop browsing reddit for a while. Any board where attention is explicitly rewarded, whether in the form of (You)s or upboats, will almost by definition tend towards encouraging high volatility of beliefs and emotions. It sounds like you’ve been riding that wave a bit too long.
I want to provide arguments offering further justification for increasing my priority for making personal offline backup copies of various online resources (such as “it’s something I’ve been vaguely wanting to do for some time anyway, I’ve just never had any particular impetus to get more of the job done than my current mirrors”), but, from inside my head, it’s hard to tell whether these are actual reasons or mere rationalizations.
Do facts such as that I’ve had this username for 15 years, have said “it’s not just a nom-de-net, it’s a way of life”, and already have offline copies of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and several other multi-gigabyte text references, provide a reasonable amount of evidence that my possibly-irrational desired behaviour is merely a continuation of my existing trends, rather than being a step too far?
I said you sound insane because of your paranoia, not because of what you wanted to do as a result of that paranoia. Whether or not you would be creating backups in other circumstances is irrelevant, except as an indicator of how paranoid you are. I don’t think such an indicator is necessary because your first two paragraphs already demonstrate what I see as an extreme level of paranoia, and so to me it’s irrelevant whether you already have backups of various sites. It’s perfectly reasonable for you to create backups given your beliefs. Those beliefs though I consider insane. The solution then is not to stop creating backups, as that would accomplish nothing. The solution is to stop browsing sites that are specifically designed to make you insane.
Ah, but is it really paranoia if “they really are out to get you”? :)
I’ve previously demonstrated that I’m willing to make long-shot gambles on 5% odds, given that that’s roughly my estimate of cryonics working and I’ve signed up for it. So let’s try working with that number.
Out of all the possible scenarios of a Trump presidency, if you leave out 95% of the most positive options, how unpleasant is the best-remaining one? Put another way, is there at least a 5% chance of American or international politics descending to the point where my current apparent paranoia seems reasonable? And don’t forget, as you calibrate your answer, that according to FiveThirtyEight, on October 17, Hillary had been predicted to have over an 88% chance of winning, implying that many people, likely including myself, have been massively mis-calibrated about how likely unpleasant political events are.
You don’t place bets based solely on probabilities. You place bets based on probabilities, odds, timescales, investments, and alternative options. Specifically, you place bets to optimize for growth of principle with respect to time. What you’re doing is not placing a bet. If you were placing a bet and wanted feedback, it would have been appropriate to provide a lot more information, such as what you expect to gain from your bet, what you expect to lose in the negative case, what you’re hoping to optimize, what your expected costs are, and what alternatives you’re considering spending your time or money on. It’s not appropriate for you to provide any of that information because what you’re doing is not placing a bet.
What you’re doing is panicking and looking for an echo to tell you that your beliefs are sensible, that the world really is crashing, and that what you’re doing is justified. Your beliefs are not sensible, and the world isn’t really crashing. I don’t know if what you’re doing is justified, as that would require a lot more information, but honestly I think that’s irrelevant.
(A quick FYI, I’m about to try for a good night’s sleep, then compare how I was feeling when I first posted in this thread with however I feel when I wake.)
Only very mildly. The point is that you priority should be to get out of depression: in the case of a military conflict, how much helpful will be that? This is much more important for your long-term survival than a bunch of reddit branches.
If you have any clue for a method on how a person can reliably accomplish that—especially if it’s one that I haven’t tried yet—please share. With the whole world.
I trust that you won’t mind if I don’t plan on holding my breath.
I was talking about the meta-level, and your meta-level question was “Have I made the appropriate preparations?” to which I answered: no, the biggest improvement is if you prioritize depression treatment over any other.
That said, on the object level, if you have that goal, then you would try anything sensible-sounding and any combination of anything sensible until something works. But I cannot tell you what is sensible because I’m not an expert on depression.
if you have that goal, then you would try anything sensible-sounding and any combination of anything sensible until something works.
I have had that goal for some time. I have tried the sensible-sounding things, in various combinations. They didn’t work. So I’ve been shifting my focus from “trying to keep depressive bouts from happening” to “managing my life on the assumption I’m going to keep getting depressive bouts”. I’ve hit enough such management tricks that even with my bout last week interrupting, I’m about 60,000 words into writing a novel, including 1600 words yesterday; I could be doing better, sure, but I could be doing a lot /worse/, too.
As a point of interest: as of when I woke up, the votes were: LessWrong, two votes for paranoid; /r/rational, two votes for not particularly crazy.
Emotionally, I’m not feeling the particular “I’m going to hate myself in January 2018 if I haven’t mailed copies of my archival Blu-Ray discs to certain members of my extended family stretching halfway across the continent by then, and the Net gets taken down” urgency that I did when I posted, but it still seems like a good idea to nudge my plans in the direction of being able to handle that particular scenario with minimal losses of what I find valuable.
I’m having an un-rational moment, and despite knowing that, it’s still affecting my behaviour.
Earlier today, my newsfeed included the datum discussed here, of Trump having a phone call with the President of Taiwan; and the item discussed here, about Trump talking about ‘shutting down’ the Internet. And later, while listening to my music playlist of the Merry Wives of Windsor, one of the tunes that popped up was “Green Fields of France”, one version of which can be heard here. And I started wondering whether I was prepared for politics to go in an even more negative direction than I’d thought it might back during the American elections, faster than I thought it might.
Specifically, I have the question stuck in my head: “Have I made the appropriate level of preparations, in case of significant military conflict within the year?”. There are a variety of possibilities, from America’s Congress passing laws that I find abhorrent, to China engaging in cyberwar against North American network infrastructure, to a minor US/Canadian dispute blowing up to the point Trump convinces some portion of the US military across the border to ensure the continued flow of “vital resources”, to worse.
Put another way—I’ve just finished figuring out what I would want to have done this month if, some time next year, many websites I find valuable become permanently deleted and unrecoverable (in spite of the Internet Archive’s efforts). (Part of the answer: the program wget and an archival Blu-Ray burner.)
The thing is, from inside my own head, I can’t tell whether my thoughts have been doing this particular set of planning because I’m currently in the middle of one of my bouts of depression, or if it’s actually a perfectly reasonable response to modern life and current events. So I’m looking for some external auditing, here where the sanity waterline is reasonably high:
How crazy do I sound to you?
You sound paranoid. Even if there is significant military conflict, it won’t affect you personally.
Maybe there’s a bit of terminology confusion here; if a military conflict /doesn’t/ affect me personally, it seems unlikely to be a ‘significant’ one. (Some historical ways a military conflict could affect me personally: Victory Gardens, the Order of the White Feather, the Fenian Raids, even less oversight and accountability for civilian police whose actions would otherwise end up in the subreddit “Bad Cop, No Donut”.)
I’m thinking of scenarios such as ‘It turns out China put secret backdoors into all sorts of hardware chips, and in a fit of self-righteous pique (which they think will play well to their red-state base), the war-monger side of the American Congress doesn’t see any downsides to making a demand that everyone in the world shut down their supposedly Chinese-controlled hardware under threat that if they don’t, they’ll send the American military to shut it down’. As far as I can tell, several versions of just this one particular scenario don’t obviously break the sociological law of every political actor having to act in what they perceive to be their own self-interest.
However, I no longer trust my sense of calibration for the odds of large-scale politics, given that I was willing to go along with the predicted odds of 88% for Hillary winning the election, and didn’t update nearly as much as I should have by the time of the election itself. And said lack of calibration puts a sharp limit on how rationally I can act as I decide how much effort to put into preparing for the more unpleasant scenarios.
You sound insane desu.
Stop browsing reddit for a while. Any board where attention is explicitly rewarded, whether in the form of (You)s or upboats, will almost by definition tend towards encouraging high volatility of beliefs and emotions. It sounds like you’ve been riding that wave a bit too long.
Also, learn to recognize fear mongering.
I want to provide arguments offering further justification for increasing my priority for making personal offline backup copies of various online resources (such as “it’s something I’ve been vaguely wanting to do for some time anyway, I’ve just never had any particular impetus to get more of the job done than my current mirrors”), but, from inside my head, it’s hard to tell whether these are actual reasons or mere rationalizations.
Do facts such as that I’ve had this username for 15 years, have said “it’s not just a nom-de-net, it’s a way of life”, and already have offline copies of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and several other multi-gigabyte text references, provide a reasonable amount of evidence that my possibly-irrational desired behaviour is merely a continuation of my existing trends, rather than being a step too far?
I said you sound insane because of your paranoia, not because of what you wanted to do as a result of that paranoia. Whether or not you would be creating backups in other circumstances is irrelevant, except as an indicator of how paranoid you are. I don’t think such an indicator is necessary because your first two paragraphs already demonstrate what I see as an extreme level of paranoia, and so to me it’s irrelevant whether you already have backups of various sites. It’s perfectly reasonable for you to create backups given your beliefs. Those beliefs though I consider insane. The solution then is not to stop creating backups, as that would accomplish nothing. The solution is to stop browsing sites that are specifically designed to make you insane.
Ah, but is it really paranoia if “they really are out to get you”? :)
I’ve previously demonstrated that I’m willing to make long-shot gambles on 5% odds, given that that’s roughly my estimate of cryonics working and I’ve signed up for it. So let’s try working with that number.
Out of all the possible scenarios of a Trump presidency, if you leave out 95% of the most positive options, how unpleasant is the best-remaining one? Put another way, is there at least a 5% chance of American or international politics descending to the point where my current apparent paranoia seems reasonable? And don’t forget, as you calibrate your answer, that according to FiveThirtyEight, on October 17, Hillary had been predicted to have over an 88% chance of winning, implying that many people, likely including myself, have been massively mis-calibrated about how likely unpleasant political events are.
You don’t place bets based solely on probabilities. You place bets based on probabilities, odds, timescales, investments, and alternative options. Specifically, you place bets to optimize for growth of principle with respect to time. What you’re doing is not placing a bet. If you were placing a bet and wanted feedback, it would have been appropriate to provide a lot more information, such as what you expect to gain from your bet, what you expect to lose in the negative case, what you’re hoping to optimize, what your expected costs are, and what alternatives you’re considering spending your time or money on. It’s not appropriate for you to provide any of that information because what you’re doing is not placing a bet.
What you’re doing is panicking and looking for an echo to tell you that your beliefs are sensible, that the world really is crashing, and that what you’re doing is justified. Your beliefs are not sensible, and the world isn’t really crashing. I don’t know if what you’re doing is justified, as that would require a lot more information, but honestly I think that’s irrelevant.
(A quick FYI, I’m about to try for a good night’s sleep, then compare how I was feeling when I first posted in this thread with however I feel when I wake.)
Only very mildly.
The point is that you priority should be to get out of depression: in the case of a military conflict, how much helpful will be that? This is much more important for your long-term survival than a bunch of reddit branches.
If you have any clue for a method on how a person can reliably accomplish that—especially if it’s one that I haven’t tried yet—please share. With the whole world.
I trust that you won’t mind if I don’t plan on holding my breath.
I was talking about the meta-level, and your meta-level question was “Have I made the appropriate preparations?” to which I answered: no, the biggest improvement is if you prioritize depression treatment over any other.
That said, on the object level, if you have that goal, then you would try anything sensible-sounding and any combination of anything sensible until something works.
But I cannot tell you what is sensible because I’m not an expert on depression.
I have had that goal for some time. I have tried the sensible-sounding things, in various combinations. They didn’t work. So I’ve been shifting my focus from “trying to keep depressive bouts from happening” to “managing my life on the assumption I’m going to keep getting depressive bouts”. I’ve hit enough such management tricks that even with my bout last week interrupting, I’m about 60,000 words into writing a novel, including 1600 words yesterday; I could be doing better, sure, but I could be doing a lot /worse/, too.
As a point of interest: as of when I woke up, the votes were: LessWrong, two votes for paranoid; /r/rational, two votes for not particularly crazy.
Emotionally, I’m not feeling the particular “I’m going to hate myself in January 2018 if I haven’t mailed copies of my archival Blu-Ray discs to certain members of my extended family stretching halfway across the continent by then, and the Net gets taken down” urgency that I did when I posted, but it still seems like a good idea to nudge my plans in the direction of being able to handle that particular scenario with minimal losses of what I find valuable.