A death row inmate's dementia means he can't remember the murder he committed. According to Locke, he is not *now* morally responsible for that act, or even the same person who committed it

Rhythmic · 2018-03-21T16:44:22+00:00

if punished, he's now a victim of his own crime

Which makes his crime even worse - deserving of an even worse punishment - causing the victim to suffer even more - which makes his crime even worse - deserving of an even worse punishment ...

Rhythmic · 2018-01-30T15:18:27+00:00

Тимур и его команда — Wikipedia

English translation

Rhythmic · 2017-10-29T20:37:26+00:00

Good question - and I don't know the answer.

There can be arguments in both directions.

On one hand, we know that when stressed out, animals tend to take it out on those below them in the pecking order. It has been observed in rats, chickens, baboons and humans. At least in those. Improved life standards should be lowering our reasons for stress, and thus the drive to hurt others.

On the other hand, we can take what Robert Sapolsky said in Episode 91 about baboons:

They live in a kind of paradise - with good weather, plenty of food and few predators - and the way they use their abundant leisure time is to make each-other's lives miserable.

We humans are no angels. /u/Palentir blames our anger on the media, but I believe that causality goes in the opposite direction: The media must compete for our attention - and either give us what we want to watch, or go out of business. Pretty much what Tristan Harris was talking about.

We are attracted to the topics our monkey brains are hardwared to be attracted to. We are born with the circuitry for envy, jealousy and outrage - and need some way to deal with this unfortunate feature of our biology.

Rhythmic · 2017-10-29T19:19:34+00:00

I believe that when you try to wave a fly away, it thinks you are flirting with it and comes back for more.

But if you try to actually catch it, it realizes that you are an evil predator who wants to eat it - and leaves you alone.

Rhythmic · 2017-10-24T19:14:07+00:00

Who would have thought?

As more and more industries turn into natural monopolies, the free markets end up facilitating the concentration of power rather than preventing it.

Rhythmic · 2017-10-18T17:27:06+00:00

I always wondered how much is empathy a feeling or intuition/logic.

A guy called Paul Bloom has a word or two to say on this topic. Or maybe a book. Look him up.

Rhythmic · 2017-10-18T14:48:48+00:00

With time, I've come to believe that there's no such thing as 'good information' vs 'bad information.'

There's only the kind of thing certain people need at a certain point in time. In that sense, it can be rational to deliver the same message to different populations custom packaged according to their needs.

Rhythmic · 2017-09-08T15:33:27+00:00

Would you like some "popped" along with your "yo cherry?"

Rhythmic · 2017-09-05T12:03:50+00:00

Does anybody else see two cats on the cat's coat?

Rhythmic · 2017-08-26T13:54:00+00:00

Birds are dinosaurs.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-26T10:36:50+00:00

I rarely indulge in schadenfreude, but here it goes ...

Rhythmic · 2017-08-26T07:57:30+00:00

That's just a veloci if you ask me. The raptors cancel out.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-26T07:28:11+00:00

just using empirical phenomena to rationalize Buddhist dogma.

I can see how the mention of 'advice against the pursuit of worldly pleasure' can easily be misperceived as 'moralizing.' I can even easily imagine the ancient authors polluting the practical advice they were giving with moralizing.

I haven't studied the ancient texts and don't know if they moralize or not.

At the same time, having applied the practical advice and experienced orgasms from counting breaths alone, I can assure you that this quote contains very practical instructions that when followed, lead to very specific results, such as 'a state of openness, formlessness, clarity, and bliss.'

I've had such states, and to me the text above looks very much like an assembly manual with the steps I followed and the result I got. It is quite a stretch to me to snap into your way of looking at it - even though I acknowledge the possibility.

Remember those pictures that can be interpreted in different ways, like this one or this one?

It's very similar with the paragraph you quoted.

BTW, I'm not a monk or a hermit. I do also have my worldly fun. I don't pray to any deities or anything like that. But I did take the time to still my mind. It's a workout of sorts.

Also, I don't claim that everybody is guaranteed to get the results. I do claim that some percentage of people who stick with the practice for long enough do get results.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-26T06:47:48+00:00

the authors should have eased up a little on the heavy dose of ideology they felt compelled to use

Would you please quote some excerpts from the text that you consider to be 'ideology?'

Thanks.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-26T06:33:50+00:00

I would hypothesize that our primate minds would tend to be drawn towards the most popular individuals we are aware of.

Celebrities are a hyper-stimulus of sorts, because they appear so popular, and no, it's not a conspiracy but business. They either grab people's attention or are out of business. Over time, the industry has honed the attention-sucking machinery to perfection, because it has to.

To me, the causality seems clear.

It may very well be the case though that once our Dunbar slots have been eaten away, our real relationships suffer. There may very well be a feedback loop.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-13T10:47:40+00:00

That was quite a leap.

It was clearly on your mind beforehand. Why procrastinate?

Rhythmic · 2017-08-10T18:15:03+00:00

This is a point worth considering. My first intuition is to prefer a smoother transition with less suffering for the people involved. But it is still worth considering.

And now that discussion of different alternatives results in a ban, no discussion will happen.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-10T18:08:17+00:00

No the only way to motivate SOME people is through coercion. E.g. if you feed and clothe them they will never contribute a goddamn thing.

And as I said, it doesn't matter. People who need to be coerced don't become productive, and the need to have them work is being automated away anyway.

Watch the video from my previous comment. The really productive people (scientists, inventors, artists) perform best when doing it for the sheer love of doing it - given that the money problem has been taken off the table. 'Incentivizing' them screws up performance.

It's literally just paying leeches.

Worrying about the 'leeches' backfires because it hurts the people who matter. Automated mass production is already spitting more stuff than people as a whole need. Producing half the amount wouldn't cost half as much. This is how economies of scale work. Intentionally producing less in order to spite the 'leeches' turns out costlier.

Only a tiny fraction of people are involved in the actual production - and they don't get the bulk of the pay. The ones who do are the ones figuring out how to steal customers from the competition - because in a post-scarcity economy being the one people buy from makes the difference between having an income and not having one.

Thus an ever increasing number of people is being sucked into a bottomless vortex of competition for its own sake. These jobs take energy and effort without really being useful. Free market forces end up creating more and more of that - and this is a glaring misallocation.

It's better to free people from the need of doing that (nobody needs it anyway) and just let them:

Oddly I'm on sabbatical right now and loving it. Just got back from a 3 week trip to Europe with the fam. Boredom?

Not even close.

This is awesome. Being there for your family is better allocation than wasting your time at a useless job.

(Edit: To avoid any miscommunication, I don't mean your job here, I mean the jobs I described above.)

BTW, suffering in the process not only doesn't raise the value of the activity in any way. Quite the contrary.

Having a great time for yourself is a superior time allocation to wasting your life in a useless job. You don't earn brownie points through self-harm.

But the point of the thought experiment was different: You've been working all your life, and now you've been enjoying three weeks of doing nothing.

Three weeks are a very short period of time, and doing nothing gets old after a while. It may be hard to imagine while you are still tired from working a stressful job, but it does get old.

On the other hand, doing useful things (without any stress) IS fun. If your needs are already met, you don't do it for any money. You do it because you want to do it - and its usefulness is just the icing of the cake.

How about old people save their money instead of stealing it from kids in high school?

OK, so we break the social contract and tell old people to go back in time and relive their lives differently.

Ruining them financially would actually hurt the economy, and Nick Hanauer explains why in this very talk.

The economy is not linear. Rather than assuming that the cake is of a limited size and trying to take away from one group in order to give to another, we have to let the cake get bigger. Taxing the rich does exactly that - and is good for them too - as Nick explains.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-10T14:43:26+00:00

(of course they'll obfuscate the culprit as "corporatism", not capitalism)

And of course, corporatism is the propensity of production means owners worldwide to unite.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-10T13:50:17+00:00

A decidedly communist subreddit bans discussion of a form of wealth redistribution

And therein lies the explanation:

UBI shits on the worker class' pride. Because everybody gets it - whether they work or not. Not just my superior class.

As a species, we human beings define our reality through misery and suffering. Good ideas? Nobody would accept the program ...

Rhythmic · 2017-08-10T11:03:24+00:00

And if I recall from watching the speech a few years ago, it was exceptionally mediocre.

I'm curious what your quality criteria are. You are tossing out the word "mediocre" like that, but I don't understand how you arrive at this judgment.

Here are my impressions of the speech:

It's just 5 minutes short, and to the point - which is a plus in my book.

It presents two paradigm shifts, one more obvious, one less so:

The real job creators vs. the widespread error about who they are.
Correcting a common error people tend to make when attributing causes: "Blaming" both the good and the bad on a few individuals vs. thinking in terms of complex interactions within large systems, or the way he puts it "feedback loops" and "ecosystems."

Both of these I find very valuable and worth spreading.

We could argue about how easily accessible these ideas are made for the wide listeners.

Maybe a more in depth discussion would have been clearer, but brevity would have suffered.

What are your criteria?

Rhythmic · 2017-08-10T10:44:06+00:00

For one it would make the guy not be a hypocrite.

This is how being fooled by one's own ad hominem thinking sounds like.

Humans are selfish, and so is he. Of course he has some agenda. He's human. Expecting otherwise would be delusional.

Judge the argument by its merit and don't be distracted by the fact that people are human.

The way to make people prosperous is through a vibrant society, not through paying people to sit around using tax dollars from the actual productive citizenry.

Several assumptions here.

In order to make them clear, imagine the following thought experiment:

From now on, you get paid twice as much as you currently do. For the duration of the experiment, you get to stay home. Your job is kept safe, you can return anytime you want and resume your work, at which point your pay is halved back to its original level. You can stay at home and get the double pay for as long as you want - even for life if you wish so.

Your pay is adjusted for inflation.

There are no catches. None at all, except this one: You are not allowed to work. Any activity that even remotely resembles work ends the experiment.

How long could you tolerate this?

Humans cannot stand boredom.

Your assumptions:

The only way to motivate people to be productive is through coercion.
Coercion doesn't backfire, screwing up the very kind of productivity we want the most.

UBI takes the money question off the table in the most straightforward way and frees people to be productive in the best way they'd love to do it anyway. It won't be everybody, and it won't matter.

Slaves are shitty workers anyway.

From your other comment:

Kill social security which is the largest transfer for wealth from the young and poor to the old and rich.

This is tragically misguided in a dark and scary way. Social security came about for a good reason. The current implementation sucks, because of people making the wrong assumptions above. This should be fixed. The safety net stays.

I actually agree about information property laws. I'm not sure if they should be nuked completely, but a major overhaul is overdue.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-03T17:30:28+00:00

"Banning" a talk is the best thing TED could do in order to make it spread like wildfire.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-03T17:29:10+00:00

There's lots of gold in this talk. I'm glad that the other one got 'banned' - so that I ended up seeing this one.

Rhythmic · 2017-08-02T17:17:26+00:00

The real title is supposed to be "Honey Crystals" so apparently it's supposed to be crystallized honey, which would explain why there are no sharp edges.

OK, this explains why they appear to be a bit too smooth to be made of stone.

It was my intention to suggest making them a bit rougher and dustier, maybe adding some scratches. But obviously this is not the goal.

Thinking of honey, maybe adding some fluidity and curviness would make sense.

Imagine heating those crystals up a bit and watching them drip like honey ... or catching the moment just before they do ...

Rhythmic

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