Sometimes I remember having had the thought “this is a dream” while dreaming, but doing that doesn’t really give me any extra “conscious” control over what happens—all it does is let me “decide” to wake up.
CronoDAS
Karma: 16,232
I have yet to be able to successfully make a Google search during a dream—what I “intend” to search for is never what appears in the box I’m trying to “type” the search query into.
Jacen Solo became an evil Sith because the people in charge of the Star Wars franchise at the time thought having the brother named Anakin Solo be the one to do it would be too ridiculous. The rest is writers trying to make the decisions of a Pointy-Haired Boss make sense.
I think I’ve probably spent the majority of my 42 years of life in a laziness death spiral. ☹️
In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).
When I do this kind of thing, it tends to be called “depressive rumination”. Rather than decide “not doing the thing sucks, therefore I should go do the thing”, some part of me assumes that “doing the thing” isn’t actually an option (because otherwise I would have done it already) and I just stay miserable. On a more general note, I also somehow managed to live for 42 years without gaining the capacity to do something at a time I don’t “feel like” doing it, even though a lot of other people tried very hard to instill that capacity in me through force and threats.
In a different context, I once gave a deliberately exaggerated example of one way my motivational system actually works in practice:
Guy with a gun: I’m going to shoot you if you haven’t changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.
Me: AAH I’M GOING TO DIE IT’S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I’M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM
Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just… change the sheets?
ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I’M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I’M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN’T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM
The other problem I have is the same one I’ve had for much of my adult life—I don’t know what to do wity my life other than live in a laziness death spiral, because a lot of the common alternatives also seem terrible and I do not know what I want.
You see, 10-year-old me was a hedonist, and probably had a relatively sophisticated philosophy of hedonism for a 10-year-old. He divided the world into “fun”, defined as “pleasurable things I do because I choose to, such as play video games”, and “work”, defined as “anything I’m being forced to do, such as schoolwork or laundry,” and his goal in life was to maximize “fun” and minimize “work”. He resented school for keeping him away from his video games and thought that having a 40-hour a week job, the way most adults did, must be an even worse fate than being a child in school, because you were still doing “work” on behalf of other people instead of doing the thing that’s the most pleasurable, and it takes up even more of your time than school does.
I still have a view of paid employment that equates it with misery and coercion. I don’t know how much I can blame my father in particular for this, and I also tried my hardest to avoid internalizing a value system that said that someone who was capable of working for money but preferred not to was a worthless person, but I also spent a long time living under clouds of sentiments like “your parents aren’t going to be around to support you forever” and “people who don’t work end up homeless and starving” and “people won’t respect you for being good at things that don’t make money.” Instead of working, I spent most of the past 20-ish years as an unpaid family caregiver for sick relatives. I didn’t have any close friends I saw in person on a regular basis, and I didn’t think Hello, my name is ----, I’m unemployed and live with my parents would actually work on a dating site profile, so I spent a lot of time lonely and feeling bad about myself.
Perhaps ironically, the thing that actually did help me—besides the antidepressant medication I’ve been on since high school—was when a woman reached out to me online after a brief encounter and ended up becoming my first girlfriend ever and, later, my wife. That was about ten years ago. I couldn’t motivate myself on my own behalf, but I could do it for her, and that was enough. Was, because she died last March and I once again am left drifting without a purpose in life. Sigh...
I have no idea!
Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
The quote is from an appendix that consists entirely of epigrams that are attributed to one of the characters in the play—it’s not actually part of the play as performed. (Shaw was tired of “smart” characters in plays that don’t actually do anything to show that they’re smart so he wrote it to justify the character’s asserted intelligence.)
(The joke here is that, given the other axioms of ZF set theory, each of these three things can be used to prove the other two—they’re either all true or all false, regardless of how plausible or implausible they might seem on their own.)
“25 Lessons from 25 Years of Marriage” by honorary rationalist Ferrett Steinmetz
If things go wrong[1] then our neural net will conclude that it has high status despite all evidence to the contrary. We have programmed schizophrenia.
No, you’ve programmed grandiose delusions—a lot more goes wrong with schizophrenia than just that.
I wrote a two paragraph argument for AI risk a while back. Does it work?
There’s an old joke...
An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and an AI researcher were asked to name the greatest invention of all time.
The engineer chose fire, which gave humanity power over matter. The physicist chose the wheel, which gave humanity the power over space. The mathematician chose the alphabet, which gave humanity power over symbols. The AI researcher chose the thermos bottle.
“Why a thermos bottle?” the others asked. “Because the thermos keeps hot liquids hot in winter and cold liquids cold in summer.”, said the AI researcher. “Yes—so what?” “Think about it.”, intoned the researcher reverently. “That little bottle—how does it know?”
Don’t forget Baumol’s cost disease: if one part of the economy gets a lot more productive per labor-hour, then wages in other parts will go up to compensate. I don’t think that the number of employees per patient in a hospital or the number of employees per student in a university is lower today than it was in the 1980s, even if hospitals and universities have improved in other ways.
In terms of food prices in particular, what I’ve heard is that prices at the grocery store and in restaurants depend much more on the cost of labor than on anything else. Grocery stores themselves operate on razor-thin margins, and changes in the price of wheat and other “raw materials” have only tiny effects on grocery store prices. Most of the actual expense of putting food on grocery store shelves comes from the cost of food processing (turning wheat into bread, cutting up dead animals into cuts of meat, etc.), which is a fairly labor-intensive industry.
I can’t speak for humanities degrees, but if you’re going to an engineering school, you’re almost certainly going to need at least some of what you learn in college in order to work as an engineer. (To paraphase a saying, half of what you learn as an engineering student might never get used in a real job, but you can’t predict which half!) Furthermore, programming is unusually easy to self-study compared to most STEM disciplines (no need to learn differential equations!), and it’s a lot easier to show you can work as a programmer by writing and demonstrating your own computer program than it is to demonstrate that you can work as an aerospace engineer by building and demonstrating your own airplane.
I imagine the same thing is true of other professional degrees: you’re not going to become a physician or nurse without first attending the appropriate institutions.
Also, if you’re like my brother and have “make a fuckton of money” as a major life goal, “be a smart person and attend a prestigious college” opens up a lot of doors to ridiculously high paying positions. He’s not “unicorn startup founder” rich, but he is a multimillionaire who has been paid more money in a single year working at a hedge fund than my father, a retired professor of electrical engineering, made in his lifetime. (I wouldn’t trade lives with him, incidentally—I don’t want to have an 80 hour work week, and video games are cheap.)
Sometimes, you might as well solve the Rubix Cube by peeling the stickers off and sticking them back on.
TvTropes calls this Cutting the Knot, after the story of Alexander and the Gordian Knot.
It’s also trivial to make a perpetual motion machine with Portal portals. Just have a portal in the floor that teleports you to the ceiling directly above it, then drop a ball into it. It’ll fall forever, accelerating until it hits terminal velocity (at which point all the gravitational potential energy goes to heating the air it falls through).
If you don’t want to just throw out conservation of energy, using a portal to “lift” things would have to take the same amount of energy as lifting it through normal space does.