I want a vice, because I want something to look forward to. I know, I know: be in the moment and all that jazz. The moment can be just so damn boring. This observation may well be the inevitable byproduct of testing isolation’s limits. Answer: there is a limit, and I’ve found it.

Nope, I can’t be the man who runs a one-man mission to Mars or elsewhere one-man missions are required. I simply don’t have the right stuff. I now know this. But I also now question if that is really the right stuff. Congratulations that you’ve managed to survive all alone, thrive even, but can you ever thrive as grandly alone as in the company of others? I’m tending to think “no.”

Our Teetotaling Elites | The American Conservative

That may come as a nasty shock to Christ Himself, who was known to serve wine at supper, and enjoyed the odd tipple with prostitutes and tax men.

Everything Is Broken

Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

Everything Is Broken

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

Everything Is Broken

The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

 

(more…)

(Had Vincent succeeded? She felt by any rational measure she was living an extraordinary life, but on the other hand she wasn’t sure what the goal had been. later she stood alone on the terrace, filming the Mediterranean, and thought, Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. ic ould be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion.)

It wasn’t the romance of the century, but it didn’t have to be; if you genuinely enjoy someone’s company, she’d been thinking lately, if you enjoy your life with them and don’t mind sleeping with them, isn’t that enough? Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like a friendship?

Anyway, it wasn’t just that. I was having one of those moments, where you look at your life and think, Is this really it? I thought there’d be more.

What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money. If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your life.

(more…)

then it seems foolish to suggest that the solution rests in expanding the bad practice and objectifying men. Maybe it can be argued that by subjecting others to suffering, they will be motivated to end the suffering, and thus this bad practice expansion is simply one step back, two steps forward. And I can appreciate that when you yourself have been subjected to a bad practice, you may just want to see the world burn. Still, the loss of moral legitimacy – calling something bad and then proceeding to cheer for more of it – is an untenable price: Americans are a forgiving bunch, but not when it comes to hypocrites.

Just because something is optimal or true or right, doesn’t mean that it always yields unequivocally great outcomes. The non-great outcome doesn’t make that something any less optimal or true or right, but does decrease the likelihood that the experiencer of said outcome will strongly adopt that something.

Take something like telling the truth. Everyone basically agrees truth-telling is a good thing, and yet many people don’t practice it. Why? Explanations abound, of course, and they are usually laced with castigation. These judgements are extra juicy for the truth adherents who casually inflate their egos all while failing to grasp that what may be obvious and easy to them is not for others, EVEN if those others echo the same refrain about truth’s goodness.

Let’s say that a behavior yields four scores (-10 to 10): short-term individual flourishing, long-term individual flourishing, short-term societal benefit, and long-term societal benefit. When we find a behavior that, at minimum, scores positively in the two long-term categories, it gets encoded into society’s standards of things a good person does. Stuff in this standard often appear in religions, philosophies, advice parents give to kids, and phrases uttered mindlessly in 2AM discussions. What this wholesale adoption doesn’t do is erase the importance of personal experience, experiences that may well score negatively in categories that usually, on average and among a very large sample size, score positively.

I shall now default to this divergence when I find someone not doing things a good person does. Like, I can shout from the mountains that telling the truth is the only way to be and I can, in fact, be right, but I must appreciate that part of the reason I’m so convinced of my rightness is that my history is littered with broadly positive scores. What if upon revealing my biggest secret I was kicked out of the house? What if I had to weigh being loved against telling the truth? What if I had experience piled upon experience that scored deeply negative numbers? I certainly wouldn’t be shouting from the mountains.

Movies

• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Tenet
• Band Aid
• She’s in Portland

Books

• Humans by Brandon Stanton
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• High Output Management by Andrew Grove
• Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
• Blood Work by Michael Connelly
• Into the Magic Shop by James Doty

(more…)

Books

(more…)

When thrust into a conversation with someone who sees reality in a different way, “progress” or, rather, not-ending-up-hating-this-person can feel impossible. If basic facts can’t even be agreed upon, how can anything positive occur? What this question incorrectly implies, though, is that no basic facts of agreement exist when they do. Or at least agreement on something should exist if you are the open-minded, just calling balls and strikes person you surely claim to be.

First, step back from the toxic issue (TI) and pivot to a place of shared condemnation. How to find such a place? Well, apprehend the reasoning error your counterpart is making re: TI. A quite common one is making an unfalsifiable claim¹ or making a claim that seems falsifiable only to perpetually change the falsifying metric whenever the thesis appears falsified,² but any error will do. It’s important to appreciate that your counterpart almost certainly agrees that reasoning errors are, in fact, errors, but that his own biases will prevent him from easily witnessing his mistake re: TI.

(more…)

Censorship concerns aside, tech companies labeling/blocking/slowing “misinformation” seems almost certainly to be ineffective in the same way parental advisory stickers are ineffective: by attaching such a label, the people you most hoped to “save” will be, counterproductively, MORE attracted to the content than they otherwise would be.

You so badly want to help. Plus, you have very real knowledge that can assist those you care about. But, you know that advice is so rarely followed. What to do? Suggest measurement.

Consider the Fitbit craze. Everyone, from the most obese down to those possessing visible ribcages, knows that walking is healthy. Yet, almost nobody walked enough in a given day. Action, not information, was the issue.³ Then these same allegedly unmotivated, uncompetitive, and lazy folks were give a simple step counter. No advice. No instructions. And BOOM! neighborhoods were suddenly overrun with walkers striving to reach the arbitrary figure of 10,000 steps. Better still, these walkers were now truly open to receive advice since health tips no longer carried the burden of something to put off and feel guilty about, but were instead genuine methods to be added to the self-started and already underway lifestyle transformation.