Thanks ;_; Then this means I should dedicate all of my efforts to be the best engineer I can. I may only play the role of a speechless extra, but like Brad (Glee’s Pianist), I’ll still give it my all! (Also, my life has gotten ″much″ better as of late, and new opportunities for advancement both academic and social have opened up… Germany, here I come!)
Raw_Power
Karma: 1,050
No, they become “judgements”. I too wish the lnguage obeyed the rules of etymology, but life is not so easy.
It exists. My grandparents did it. Darn efficient for my younger self.
Alternately, just use a Boombox
This article made me tear up a little. It finally put in words the form of my nightmares.
It might be a good idea to find ways to make this world less of a hell...
But there is one massive oversight in that article. Fiction. Escapism. Videogames. They are getting better and better every day. More entertaining, challenging, absorbing, and gratifying. To the point that some choose to live at the margins of the social system, to be the lowest-status possible besides being an outright vagrant, because, immersed in their fiction, their social status only matters insofar as it can keep them fed and phyically able to interact with the fiction and enjoy it.
That some can be satisfied with this much may not mean they are “insane”, as many people say, disturbed and disgusted by this sheer escape of both the rules and the consequences of breaking them. Instead, it may mean that one may actually derive more happiness from regularly saving the world (which is to say, a handful of beloved characters) through fictional avatars, discussing in virtual fora, or reinventing it outright through artistic and literary creation, rather than from actually living in that world.
That’s no reason to bite them, Harry, my dear. Or to strongly react in any way. You may look down on them, especially if they are a math teacher, but then again, if they aren’t supposed to teach logarythms at the level they work in, that is entirely forgivable. A much more legitimate reason for hatred would be deliberate abusive behavior. If they are abusive AND incompetent… then, at that point, desprate times require desperate measures. It seldom happens: incompetent teachers are usually the most lenient, and they deliberately are as lenient and low-profile as possible.
Eh, how can I put this… I used to think I could make huge improvements in that sense through the invention, perfection, production, and distribution of useful machines. Hence why I decided to become an engineer rather than an MD as my parents intended: I thought I might help more people the first way rather than the second. But then I find out about the FAI, the ultimate machine, which, in sixty years or so (the time I thought it would take me to cause any actual change), would make all my efforts as a drop into into the ocean… And I’m cmpletely useless at math higher than Calcuculs II, and hate coding, so I’m also irrelevant in making the AI, so I feel like whatever I’d be doing until the Singularity would be… passing the time, basically.
Plus I thoght I’d eventually need politics, social manipulation, etc. if I wanted to neutralize those on whoe toes I would inevitably step. But the more I learn bout that stuff, the less I feel like people are worth the sacrifice, and ALSO the less worthy and capable I see myself of those tastks, since my ideals hav been tested against real-life situations, and I have failed to reach my own standards, time and again.
I mean, I know I have a very strong Neutral Good inclination, but in practice that usually translates into “fuzzy-maximizing” rather than “utility-maximizing”. I need to feel I’m useful right now, immediate gratification, otherwise… are any of you familiar with the Rage Comic meaning of “Yao Ming”? Yeah, that tends to be my reaction to stuff s simple to “rise in the morning, take a shower, go to class, take notes, work at home, do it again tomorrow”.
Oh, and the “you’re putting too muc wieght on your shoulders” argument does not work for me: if you tell me I’m getting ahead of myslef and nobody needs me and nothing really matters I’ll just go in a basement and dedicate the rest of my life to jerking off or something.
The reason I’m sharing all this here is that, from what I can tell, these traits aren’t so unique, Akrasia seems to be a very typical problem here, and (frustrated) humanism and altruism seem fairly common, so I’m guessing my case is ot so exceptional, except maybe in how dramtic I’m being about it, but I’m a Large Ham, that’s something I just can’t switch off.
Maybe it’s because I come from an Islamic culture where Teachers and Scholars are respected and esteemed as a matter of principle, and where children have been taught to be thankful for the teachers to be harsh and authoritarian, instead of allowing you to do whatever the hell you wanted at an age at which such freedom is utterly wasted due to stupidity, ignorance, AND temerity (well, actually there isn’t that much emphasis on that last part, but I can’t possily imagine why you’d hate a teacher except for the same reason you’d hate your parents: getting in the way of your fun and not leaving you the option of laziness). Anyway, in my school teachers were loved or at least respected. The people students hated the most were their classmates, but they were also those whose acceptance they craved the most, so it was more like a permanent, relatively friendly, multipolar Cold War.
I have hesitated before posting this, “is it appropriate”, “is it relevant”, I wondered. But this siteis deeply concerned with morality, and the application of rationality threin. Hence, I submit the following, knowing that I am not alone in the predicament I describe, and that people who are in my current state are among the greatest obstacles we have to overcome in our way to saving humanity from the UFAI. Here is my report:
I have been rereading this fic aas of late. I am dismayed to find out that the distance between me and Rational!Harry has grown immensely. While on one hand this has allowed me to see shades of meaning and interaction which I couldn’t see when I was utterly immersed in Harry’s perspective, including Harry’s less obvious mistakes, on the other, I find myself unable to care about him and his goals as much as he used to. Maybe I’ve been tainted by my disastrous inteactions with some charismatic but ultimately idiotic social manipulators, or maybe I’ve read too much Robert Greene and my “Humans Are Flowed” notions are sliding dangerously towards “Humans Are Bastards AND Idiots AND Hopeless”.
The reason I haven’t embraced this attitude is that I agree with Harry’s humanism on principle, I just dn’t think I could possibly be assed into the hard work and grave perils he faces. Lately all I’ve been caring about was the preservation of my own existance, wealth, mental integrity, and freedoms, specifically freedom of speech. I feel like I’ve been corrupted, and emptied. Some people I know have always been like that, and happy about it, but I’m not. But I don’t care enough to try to leave.
So, tell me, you ragtang bunch of raging humanists, where shall I find a light that will move me to stand up again, and endure the constant wear of disappointment, withouth ever letting it stop me, in my walk towards… what, exactly? Prevention of existential risk? Right now I wouldn’t care if we all died...
Yeah, but that has much more to do with their social and communication skills than with the fact that they are imparting knowledge. And, regardless of popularity as in likeableness, any teacher who demonstrates mastery of their chosen field, that is, the reliability of their word as rational evidence, will get respect from their students, whether willingly or grudgingly. I think that also counts as a form of “popularity”: your company is not sought after, but your judgement and knowledge are, and isn’t that more importaant and valuable in the end?
If we can’t be entirly honest, then what are we doing here?
Oh, “heuristics”, otherwise known as “prejudice”! The main difference in connotation being that heuristics are changed in the face of enough contrary evidence, while prejudices… aren’t.
I think anyone in the position of Robert Baratheon would have had trouble following this advice...
You mean ^ as “group intersection”, but what about the W?
It’s Continental Philosophy at its worst. I can assure you it’s exactly as messy in French.
Your phrasing is much better. But I still think the comparison is very weak, it’s like saying “natural numbers are infinite, real numbers contain natural numbers, therefore they are infinite”: it fails to convey the sheer MAGNITUDE of the situation.
Uncomfortable-truth telling yes, but they still impart massive amounts of truth, as in truth-as-empirically-valid-information.
^Wrong. Actually what we can do to rats is very limited compared to what we can do to humans. As for what we can do with humans… Together, even the sky is not the limit anymore: we pierce through it with our XXX. Also, wrong: in an absolute sense, we “can” do to humans the stuff we do on rats, but there are reasons, beyond ethics, why we don’t. It’s just. Not. Convenient.
Counterexamples: Exhibit A: The battle of Marathon. Exhibit B: Teachers.
Mencken probably meant “inconvenient” truths. If you insert this qualifier, the rest of the phrase becomes trivial.
There is a way to flawlessly lie, at least for the moment: to lie about what goes on in your minds. Specifically, lie about the motivations for past actions, especially when those motivations were nebulous in the first place and the lie is more plausible than the actual truth.