That people should open their minds and be more accepting of new experiences that may challenge their own strongly held beliefs.
That we are much too terrified of drugs that are currently illegal, and not nearly terrified enough of drugs that are currently legal.
Something I also believe is that most people will not question those life decision and ask themselves if this is really what they want.
If something is bothering you that the doctors can't fix, it's a pretty good heuristic for plan-B.
That most technology has little or no real value.
That web development sucks.
"Can't" is still no justification for revenge. Even if we assume that the "can't" is absolute, re-socialization should be attempted for the rest of the life of the individual. See it as an analogy to medicine: we don't say, "this guy cannot be helped, so we'll just let him die."
¹ something in this direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison
It is my experience also that things just happen without anybody being in control. Given the same circumstances, all individuals would act in exactly the same way. Of course, "the circumstances" include a lot of hard-to-describe factors, like the mental model of an individual, as it was created during their life so far.
Naturally, this point of view attracts a lot of criticism, most of all from people who think they would achieve better results in the same situation, e.g. not resorting to crime when faced with social exclusion and hardship. The assumption, in my experience, comes from lack of reflection, though. What enables one individual to perform "better" than the other? I would say, it's their mental model, created solely by their previous experiences.
The "you" that allegedly makes all those "right" decisions is merely an automaton that was programmed by past experiences. So you are performing better because you learned to perform better or, in other words, you were lucky to live in an environment that fostered those traits.
Indeed, there is no achievement and no guilt. They are both purely social constructs without any substance, and all they do is create a gap between those people who were lucky and those who were not.
What you are asking is, "if there is no free will, then why are you thinking about criminal justice out of your own free will?"
None of us is "doing" anything, it just happens.
Here is a little experiment: next time you talk to someone, try to find out what you will be saying before you actually say it. Maybe, there will be a surprise.
The only way people make me dislike them immediately is when they start showing arrogant and elitist behaviour towards blue-collar workers.
One hundred something democratic sovereign states and not a single one implemented this yet.
A tactical question: Do you load up all of your daily calories in that one meal e.g. if your usual intake is 2500 per day, do you have all of that at once or do you eat less?
For losing weight. If you're obese to begin with, this regime will give very good results at the beginning which also helps with the motivation. Note: Fasting + Strength training is superior to justing fasting. Why ? Because fasting decreases your metabolism. Strength training does the opposite.
> It does seem counterintuitive to everything I have read and heard throughout my entire life.
Yes, I'd say so.
> What sort of improvements, if any, have you noticed from adopting this style of eating versus the standard 3-4 meals per day?
1 ) Increased mental alertness - I've noticed how quickly the alertness disappears once food enters my body & digestion begins. Not sure If I should attribute this to increased insulin sensitivity or something else.
2 ) Increased productivity - It's amazing how much you can get done when you're not thinking of what & when to eat. I spend most of time writing code, learning new guitar riffs, & planning my workouts.
3 ) Prolonged workday: Related to (2). You can effectively prolong your daily work hours easily from the standard 8, up to 12 - 16 hours. This is because of (1) and (2). Heck you can also go 24 hours+.
4 ) Better quality sleep: On multi-day fasts (24+ hours), I get good quality sleep. I do believe they're of "good quality", because of an interesting effect I've noticed - you don't get the usual grogginess when you wake up. It's non-existent.
> A tactical question: Do you load up all of your daily calories in that one meal e.g. if your usual intake is 2500 per day, do you have all of that at once or do you eat less?
Yes - All calories in one meal. However, this is not optimal for muscle growth. For athletes, it'd be ideal to spread out protein intake across two meals, at the least.
When I was younger I'd fast or eat very little for up to 4-5 days and it gave me a productivity boost.
I stopped after I took it too far(ended up shaking and nauseus after a bad combo of not completely keto + lifting weights) but have gradually stopped eating breakfasts at all and try to eat a very minimal lunch (a handful of peanuts or a slice of bread) multiple times a week.
Just skipping breakfast means I'm less tired than I used to be. If I can get around to skipping lunch (I like the break and it is social) I guess it would improve my workday even more.
does strength training take aome getting use to while fasting? what have you found to work for you?
Intermittent fasting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_KS3RQbB5g
You just have to eat the right type of food, beans, yogurt...
I am actually fasting right now, sorry for -accidentally- being rude
Personally, my brain, emotions, attention, all shuts down when I'm hungry. I bet I could get used to it, but the transition would definitely be tough. Also from past experience, my body consumes all of my muscle fairly quickly when I don't eat at regular intervals.
All in all, just do what feels right for you.
I saw a post on Reddit where a group of gamers had recreated King's Landing, the main city from Game of Thrones, in Minecraft. The entire project looked like it took years to complete. It was something of an architectural marvel and a sight to behold.
The reason I bring that up specifically was because it was not the work of a lazy and apathetic group of people. I would imagine the entire project took more hours than I spent studying for much of my undergraduate degree. Not to mention the collaboration involved. The entire project was a collective team effort towards a goal that the group deemed meaningful. I have seen multiple projects of this scale on Minecraft. If the people involved were lazy and slothful, where would they muster up the energy to work on such an endeavor? A project like this involves a certain level of planning and discipline to see to completion.
I have felt the same way about competitive games like Starcraft in that I'm amazed at how much effort people put forth to obtain proficiency and competency. There are thousands of hours of YouTube videos online dissecting every aspect of that game, not unlike the way a football quarterback might analyze game film. Again, there is nothing particularly lazy about this. I see it no differently than I would see a chess player studying old chess matches and strategies to improve their skill.
My preliminary thoughts are that video games offer a fair simulation of perfect competition in a world that is otherwise devoid of fairness. Reality is messy. Much of it, maybe most of it, depends on where you started out economically, who your parents were, and what kind of people were around you while you grew up. It's easy to fall into patterns of thought that resemble a "Why Me?" view of the world. I suspect a lot of gamers fall under this umbrella. I'm not making a moral judgement here. Instead, the way I see it is: If the real world has been disappointing to you for whatever reason, why wouldn't you seek out a more "perfect" world in a simulation? Especially when the simulation offers you what you crave in the real world: status, competency, hierarchy, friendship, community, etc. All of those can be found in video games. To me, many of them resemble a sort of perfect and fair world where one lives and dies by their own merits. I see the appeal of disappearing into one of these.
I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. I was thinking about this recently and I am still hashing out my thoughts.
I played video games (90s super nintendo) when I was a kid primarily for the music/artwork. Then the internet came along where I could enjoy the art without hitching my time to a game. With my time unencumbered, it wasn't hard to discover that reality is a better game with better music.
I guess what I'm curious of is this: What do games offer these people that reality doesn't? I'm not talking about people who play casually here and there, but rather people who spend well over twenty hours per week playing games, sometimes longer.
I'm sure there are some professional MMORPG players out there fuming right now, thinking, "I made XXX dollars selling equipment on ebay." or "I made XXX dollars winning such and such tournament." Porn stars also make a lot of money.
If I had to make a wild guess as to why people stay on the smack into adulthood, it would be escapism. When life paints you into a corner, it is very easy to retreat into the virtual world with netflix and xbox. Urban Japan is hard mode, so probably a much higher percentage of people being painted into corners. Still probably better than netflix though. At least it's an active pursuit rather than a passive one.
Gaming is ubiquitous, in another decade I imagine that attitude will be on the way out.
Those are the obvious points though, I think it's more interesting to think about how the mechanical and repetitive aspects of gaming replace a naive, deep drive for precise actions which demand focus and skill, and move chaotic or unordered things towards some goal. In the 20thC that was probably fixing cars or working in a factory or building stuff. Good ways for satisfying the drive, if you have it.
And in a nice continuation of this relationship, the more that AI replaces work, the more I think leisure, work and gaming will coincide. Many gaming environments are good examples of behavioural economics in action: incentives, rewards, how changes to game balance (even perceived changes to balance) or the price/availability of cosmetics nudge or shove player behaviour... We could stab guesses at how to implement these patterns in a way that considers them economic activity.
I don't think gaming necessarily has to be 'better' than life for it to take up a great deal of it. It just has to have the right kinds of 'APIs' to satisfy that messy, obsessive, predatory/reward-loop hunger which appears in most men and plenty of women.
My central thesis is that a couple of decades leads us basically to the Matrix (though I'm hoping for a sunnier version).
What you said is also what I'm suggesting: that gaming satisfies that drive in its own way. It's a simulation that can provide most of those same feelings.
You could call this a lazy decision.
In Western society, a traditionally good life has a few components to it: friends, family, community, a sense of place, achievement. What if a video game provides this? Why would 100 hours spent towards building a building in Minecraft or learning new strategies in Starcraft be any different from spending 100 hours learning to chop wood and create a garden in your backyard? (By the way, there are popular garden simulator games too, like Stardew Valley).
Something in me tells me the two are different, but I'm grasping as to why, without placing my own sense of morality on the thing.
If you're making $25k a year it will be a lot harder and take much much longer to retire than for someone making $150k a year.
I know guys who save up to the last penny to try and achieve financial freedom. It's infinitely easier (and more efficient) to try to make more money than it is to, for example, not buy the occasional starbucks coffee.
As an example: I had the opportunity to take over a very nice corporate car of a friend at a ridiculously low price (for a variety of reasons). Basically I managed to purchase at half the actual value of the car -- it was a few years old but looked almost new and had super low miles. It was in perfect condition.
I could've bought and sold it on the spot for close to double the price I paid. But I'll drive it for a few years and likely be able to sell it for close to the same price I originally paid for it. Others go buy a new car, take a massive depreciation hit, and in the end spend tens of thousands more.
The expensive tickets are worth focusing on. Then go drink all the coffee you want.
On the other hand if you are already progressing through a career I suspect it's easier to trim spending than work further up the ladder.
The Starbucks thing is a red herring, most people overspend on cars, housing and food.
populations that are decimated lose massive amounts of knowledge and only increase in numbers increases the complexity of the technology.
in a lot of ways we act like cells in the human body. nothing tells them to be what they are, they find an opening and fill the role required of them.
this doesn't mean we are going anywhere specific, but it does mean that as we work together our collect potential grows.
Once you attain this awareness as part of growing up, the only way to drown out the awareness of this deplorable state of the human existence, is to numb the mind with drugs or to damage the brain to such a degree that it stops mattering to you.
2) There is life after death to transit and prepare before your next reincarnation
There's no such thing as "value" determined by the laws of physics or floating around in the universe. Things that don't have minds don't have the concept of value. But we do. Value is created by human minds.
And if value is created by human minds, then it's definition depends on what we find valuable.
I find not being tortured pretty fucking valuable, so are many other people [citation needed]. If I place value on a thing or a state of mind or some state of the world, then it's valuable.