What’s the payout of this model? I’m highly skeptical of any metaphor from Ayn Rand, so drawing comparisons to her ideas doesn’t add any insight for me. If I’m just not that target audience, that’s cool.
Ustice
Karma: 196
Ooooooooh…. Antidepressants……..I take Wellbutrin.
Yeah, that could be it.
Welp, I enjoyed dreaming when I was younger. I’d rather be happy now.
All of these and more? I think it’s a trap to make absolute statements about things like altruism. I think that there are good people that give for good reasons, and good people that give for questionable reasons. Helping others seems to generally be positive, but there are limits. Some people give to manipulate others. True selfless is an impossibility, and therefore toothless boogieman.
Altruism is complicated. In order to really judge the nature of altruism, we would have to be able to attribute an outcome based on an action, in light of all alternatives. That’s currently impossible, but we can look for trends, and develop models around them.
We’d also have to truly understand the complex nature of intention, and that’s practically impossible to do for one’s self, let alone orders. Rarely is there a singular reason for anyone to do anything. Even if you go with just the most likely reason, you’re losing data.
It’s totally fine to look at it from the lenses you describe (and more!), but it’s important to remember that these lenses only show you a part of a very complicated whole. Moreover, many of the distinctions between them are disagreements of definitions.
My personal take is that altruism is generally a virtue, but not an obligation. It’s hard to know the line between helping unhealthily enabling, but it does have to be taken into consideration. It is important to remember that not all altruists are virtuous. In the absence of proof, be kind.
This assumes that I have any sort of vague impression. I really don’t. I’ve tried many times to focus on any recollection from when I’m asleep, and it’s just blank. I don’t keep a journal because a whole bunch of pages saying “nothing” isn’t useful.
When I am falling asleep, I may have a dreamlike state of imagination. Never upon waking though.
No. When I wake up I have no memory or sensation of dreaming. Just sort of a jump in time. If I were to wake up and realize I had been dreaming. I’d be pretty excited and put it in my journal.
I practiced informed consent with my son since he was a toddler. When I’d tickle him or wrestle with him I’d immediately let go when he said “stop”, often followed by “tickle me again!”
When he’s with friends and cousins, I draw a similar line. I don’t mind them wrestling provided it is
away from people who have not consented to rough play
not likely to cause a trip to the ER or serious property damage
I will usually check in if things look iffy, but he’s really good at releasing when he’s asked/told.
Man, I just wish I could remember my dreams. I miss it. I assume I do still, but when I wake, I don’t even have a hazy recollection.
I used to have vivid dreams, and even lucid dreaming when I would have a nightmare. Flying was my favorite LD activity. It was always hard though.
I was more or less going to say the same thing. No, I wouldn’t press the button except in the most extremely bad scenarios I can imagine. As for how confident I am in that, I’m pretty tempted to say certain. Whether it is due to nihilistic glee, curiosity, clumsiness, or sheer stupidity, that button is going to be pressed. Now, there are scenarios that I can imagine that delay things for a human-significant amount of time.
Factors that I can think of right now that would expand the timeline:
ease of access to a doom button
cost to access a doom button
time of access for a doom button
intentionality verification requirements to press a doom button
societal and cultural significance of the doom button
scale of knowledge of
doom buttons
how to access doom buttons
how to operate doom buttons
I do live in Florida, so my estimates may be atypical.
I would estimate that for about 100 000 people the chance of someone pressing a doom button sitting right in front of them with full instructions on any given day would be around 1:100 for odds. A roll of a d100 sounds about right there. So that’s 1.00e-8 per person, per day. Using 8 billion as the world population comparing, the magnitudes of 1.00e-8 and 8.00e9, the population is going to swamp the odds of a doom button being pressed in a short time.
If you are worried about sharing private data, you really can’t beat running it on your computer. There are open source, and open weight models that you can run right from your command line. Ollama makes it easy on a Mac. I haven’t looked enough for options for other OSs. Once you have the software, you don’t even need an internet connection.
I don’t think what you describe exists. I’m a software engineer, but not in this field, so please take that as a weak signal at best.
Just physically interact. Push each other around. You’ll be building up tiny differences, and those interactions will magnify those differences.
Also, smash the environment. I originally read you post as the room had mirrors for walls, and that’s what made me think of it.
I don’t think that your question is quite makes sense. The world is non-deterministic. There are macroscopic patterns that are generally symmetrical, but not at the deepest levels. For instance, there is the cosmic gravitational background, where space is sort of wobbling around because of the gravitational waves from other things in the universe moving about, similarly to ripples on a pond. Even if you controlled for everything in the room, you could not control for those differences. The only way for that room to be perfectly rotationally symmetrical, is if the universe is rotationally symmetrical relative to that room.THEN you can talk about quantum field theory.
You sound depressed. That emotional numbness? That sounds like anhedonia. I get that when my brain is in a depression cycle. It’s not surprising when you fall from your expectation of godhood. I know that you don’t mean that literally, but it sounds to me like you may be holding yourself up to an impossible standard, and I think that you should be kinder to yourself.
The future is unknown. What if the Singularity does turn out to be real in our lifetime, but it makes money obsolete? The whole point of the Singularity is we have no frame of reference, so singularly focusing on one particular possibility sounds suboptimal. If your prediction is off, you may over-optimize for a future that never comes.
If you have the resources, I suggest that you talk to a therapist. They can really help you sort out feelings like this. They have tools that are otherwise hard to find. They are trained in helping people overcome their biases, and find a better balance.
In any case, you aren’t alone. I have the perspective of an additional 20 years, but I have felt similar to you. Now, I’m much happier and kinder: both to myself and others. I have a job that I love, two wonderful partners, a rich social life, and a son on the verge of becoming an adult. I spend time with people that I love, invest what I can for the future, but remember that today is just as important.
It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to reach out to friends that you haven’t spoken to in a long time. It’s okay to talk to a therapist. It’s okay not to, but just remember that you can. I’m not a therapist, but if it would help, I’ll listen.
I’ve just started journaling again. I’ve done this in the past, and fell out. Recently I was looking in my notes app, and realized that because of my notes from playing D&D, my recall of events in the game were clearer than my recall of events two weeks ago.
I’m cautiously optimistic about Apple’s idea for AI, and how I could leverage that data. I don’t know if I need to simulate my past self (I think that I can do that okay), but being able to query my hand-written notes with natural language would be amazing. It can already search my notes for words, but that’s still really limited.
We aren’t there yet. Right now LLMs don’t want anything. It’s possible that will change in the future, but those would be completely different entities. Right now it’s more playing the role of someone suffering, which it gets from fiction and expectations.
Some time away from the subject of would likely be good for you. Nothing bad will happen if you take a few weeks to enjoy nature, and get your brain out of that constant stress response. You’ll think better, and feel better.
Exactly. I live in the town that hosts the University of Florida. Despite Governor DeSantis best efforts of closing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices, and all his other wasted efforts in his “war on wokism” the people that I know that work there haven’t changed their opinions, scientific and otherwise on topics that trigger the Governor.
“Woke” is just the current verbal straw-boogeyman. I’ve seen the same reactionary bullshit many times since my political awareness in the 90s. It’s just one stupid moral panic after another. From the vestiges of the Red Scare, to the Satanic Panic, plastic soda can holders, the demonization of the word Liberal, the conflation of Socialism and Communism, backlash again same-sex marriage, plastic straws, interracial marriage, gay people in bathrooms, trans people in bathrooms, trans people in sports, home-made cloth facemasks, “wokism”…
It’s all the same bullshit. It’s people getting worried about something they don’t understand, and they wind up making stories about whatever the thing is that feel salient and dangerous, and then they freak out over the latest straw-boogeyman.
Some of it is opportunistic politicians stoking fears to get votes, but I don’t think that is required. To paraphrase Agent K, a person is smart, but people are dumb panicky animals.
This is the problem of multiplying a big number with a little number. It could zoom off to infinity, stabilize at a value, or shrink to nothing.
The scenario you presented seems to contain a lot of conditional probabilities, which to me make it pretty implausible. That said I don’t want to discount the idea because of the details. I think a runaway wealth gap is not an insignificant possibility.
In situations like this, I come down on the side of being aware of the possibilities, but try to remember that it’s unlikely. Brains are going to brain, so there is no helping aliefs. All I can do is give an answering voice to anxieties when they won’t shut up.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed it’s okay to step away for a bit. I’m not worried about discussing dark topics, but the impact on your current real life, as you mentioned it’s turned your world upside down. It’s good to recharge. Maybe get out in the green. If I’m misreading this, I apologize. I’d rather err on the side of reaching out.
“Love” is just a broad category of feelings. In English, if you need to be specific, there are specifiers, but most of the time context is enough. For instance, if I say, “I love my nephew,” you’re probably not thinking that I have romantic feelings towards him, but you might think that his presence makes me happy or that I’d be willing to sacrifice more for his benefit than typical for humans in general.
Are you going to have a perfect model of my feelings? No. You can never be specific enough for that. But you’ll likely be 9⁄10 right. Usually, that’s good enough.
Woah. I am in a very similar circumstance. Back when I was in college, my ADHD and depression weren’t yet diagnosed and treated. As a result I never finished the last two semesters of a Computer Engineering degree. I never really cared about hardware, and really should have gone for Computer Science, but I bowed to family pressure.
I have been writing code since 1983 when I was six years old, in one form or another. Like you, I became a software engineer. I feel super lucky to be one of those people who turned their hobby into their job, while still enjoying it as a hobby. I’m constantly learning, and likely spend at least an hour or so every day reading about new systems and ideas.
Also like you, I have hit a point in my career where I am paid well, and can afford to pay for classes.
Also like you, I want to study mathematics. Those classes were always my favorite in school. I have been focusing on learning Category Theory for a while, and I’d really like to go deeper, but short of a graduate degree program, that is becoming more difficult.
So it’s got me thinking. I would love to get a mathematics degree, but really for pure person enrichment. I love my job, and where I work. I’m not trying to change careers. Since I already met all of the requirements for a math minor, I doubt it would be too much more to get the BS, and then I could start on a graduate program.
I used to be a math tutor in college, helping students learn up to Calculus 3 and differential equations. I’m out of practice, for sure, but I have retained a good bit of it. I expect that I might struggle a little with the first class or two that I take just because I’m out of practice. I’m already spending time watching lectures, and reading, so I am fairly certain that I can fit it into my life.
Yet, I keep coming back to the question, “Why?” I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t need the status. I have the knowledge and experience to get any job in my industry. I’m good at what I do.
I have only been seriously contemplating going back to school for the past year. So far I’m mostly balking at the return on investment, given the time investment it will take. My son is 13 years old, and so I likely have less than a decade before he is on his own, and I’ll have even more time.
I also am considering it as my retirement plan. I can’t imagine sitting idle. I need projects. Once I am retired, and no longer need to work, then I can spend that time on personal enrichment. Spending my golden years working on a PhD in mathematics, while making contributions to OSS sounds positively dreamy.
As long as my brain holds out, of course. My aunt died of Alzheimer’s, so that’s a possible future for me. I’m 46, and so far, and I feel like my brain is doing just fine. ADHD makes things complicated and chaotic at times, but in terms of intellectual adaptability and cleverness, I feel as good as I did in my 20s.
So yeah, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll wait until I can have a full AI tutor and research assistant, and just eschew university altogether. Maybe this will remain an idle fantasy. Maybe I’ll find a community of folks that are in a similar place, and we’ll explore mathematics in some non-traditional setting. I don’t know yet.
Anyway, I feel ya, bro. If you decide to do it, I’d love to hear how it’s going. Maybe it’ll give me the kick in the butt that I need.
Recognizing couple’s privilege is the one that immediately comes to mind.
I also think of how the community responded to Sex at Dawn. There was a lot of excitement around the book when it first came out, but later the criticisms became more broadly recognized, and I don’t hear many reqs for it now.
I’ve also at least locally seen changes around calling people in versus calling them out.
Unfortunately nothing with hard data.
Thanks for clarifying! Willpower is a tricky concept.
I’ve suffered from depression at times, where getting out of bed felt like a huge exertion of emotional energy. Due to my tenuous control over my focus with ADHD, I often have to repeat in my head what I’m doing so I don’t forget in the middle of it. I’ve also put in 60-hour weeks writing code, both because I’ve had serious deadlines, but also because time disappeared as I got so wrapped up in it. I’ve stayed on healthy diets for years without problem, and had times where slipped back to high sugar foods.
All of these are examples of what people refer to as willpower (or lack there-of). Most of them are from times in my life where I haven’t felt really in control. This is especially true regarding memory. It’s not uncommon for me to realize as I am putting my groceries away that I didn’t get the one item I really needed (and have to go back).
That said, I’m pretty good at grit: I’m willing to put in the work, despite hardships and obstacles. I’m also good at leading by example. I’ll fight the good fight, when needed,
All of these different features of me and my brain, are wrapped up in the concept of willpower. Each of them are a mixture of conscious and unconscious patterns of behavior (including cognitive).
It’s this distinction that makes me look askance at the concept of willpower. It’s too wrapped up in moral judgement.
I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until after my son was. I lived with a lot guilt and shame because I interpreted the things I struggled with as a moral failings, because I just lacked the willpower.
Then I saw how many people struggled with the same sorts of things I did. It was really weird learning that so many things I previously would have described as negative personality traits of mine, turned out to be what happens when someone has this quirk in their brain that me and my son have.
Now, I don’t carry that guilt. Now, I know that despite my best efforts, tools, and practices, there are things I’m just going to always struggle with that neurotypical find easy, and that’s okay. Now, I don’t see myself as having low willpower because of them. Now, I better understand the quirks of my brain, and I am better equipped to mitigate my weaknesses, and play into my strengths.
Now, I’m a lot happier and confident. I wish it hadn’t taken 40 years for me to figure things out, but I’m glad my son is free of that shame and guilt.
I feel pretty lucky: when I was a kid, I had knack for patterns and abstraction, a fascination with computers, a family that could actually afford one, and people who could help me when I was stuck, I managed to make my hobby into my profession, and still enjoy it as a hobby.
I totally agree that joy and meaning are a balm to burnout. That and vacations; take more vacations.
I guess what I’m saying is be careful to not stretch your metaphors too far, as the details are messy; however, if it helps you to remember to take care of yourself, find joy, and seek meaning, I’m all for it.