chronofar

> The problem is opioids and other hard drugs aren't regulated, they are just made legal.

So let's regulate them! (though as someone else pointed out they are indeed currently regulated, just not well)

> Human thought when addicted to hard drugs is not logical. Giving people the freedom to consume them has the effect of allowing them to forfeit their freedom from choice when they become addicted. Making them even more widely available will just cause more to become ensnared in their web.

I frankly find it bizarre when people venture down this train of thought. Should we eliminate all potential sources of illogical behavior? You mentioned sex, should we regulate that? Sugar? Groups (which inspire groupthink)? What even is the threshold for you for "logical?"

If we assume consenting adults are capable of making decisions and we value their freedom in doing so, drug prohibition is directly counter to that value.

Now if you truly want to venture down the road of restricting freedom to what is "logical" or some such thing, that actually is a road I think you could reasonably trod down (it's not a popular argument and I think it's pretty hard to make work but I can see a possible world with very little individual freedom but high degrees of flourishing, the problem is it's much more likely when you remove freedom flourishing also suffers b/c the possibilities narrow towards the needs of whomever still holds freedom, ie those in power), but I doubt that actually is where you were headed, drugs just tends to get this kind of double speak for historical reasons.

> Not sure what the answer is but just waving a wand and making hard drugs legal is not it.

Make them actually legal (and thus more safe), tax them heavily, use a portion of said taxation to educate properly and then support and rehabilitate those who need it. Don't allow unsafe activities in public places that cause an unsafe environment.

This really isn't that complicated, we've just been under the spell of prohibition for so long waking up can be a bit disorienting.

> This part is always lost on the "legalize everything" crowd.

These types of generalizations are usually built of straw and mud, but I'll go ahead and respond as someone in said crowd with a "no it's not." There's an implicit assumption here that increased usage is worse than the effects of prohibition, but that's at minimum highly debatable. I tend to think increased usage of a regulated and taxable substance by a well educated and supported populous is significantly preferable to prohibition and scare tactics, to say nothing of the wide swath of wide reaching knock on effects the latter has like powerful cartels/gangs, militarized police actions in response, people being groomed as convicts for their use, etc.

I'm not at all inclined to sweep the dangers of hard drugs under the rug, I'm all for looking at their effects and impacts head on, and indeed I think the legalization route is the best route to do so. I think individuals should be given sole stewardship of their own conscious experience, by endogenous or exogenous means, and society's best chance of maximizing those individual choices is through well thought education, regulation, and support (which is likely to all be cheaper and more tractable than prohibition is).

> Maybe I was not explaining it clearly enough, but I agreed with this. Similarly to what you said here, I said in the original post that to survive and to reproduce is more of a tautology than a purpose. What I meant is that if there must be a purpose of life, survival would be the closest thing to it, but in some strict senses of "purpose", it is not a purpose.

Ah, well apologies I spent several replies only to be redundant :-).

> I wonder if you agree that there's an objective morality.

I don't think there is an intrinsic value function we can perceive/verify writ into the universe. There could be one or many, but I don't think we're presently in a position to assert what it is with any degree of confidence beyond wild speculation. This doesn't leave us with pure subjectivity/relativism, I think it just means we need to use a priori means to arrive at value functions. And once you do reason yourself to a value function or combination of value functions there are objective (though often quite difficult to analyze) answers to its optimization.

So I don't think there can be pure objectivity in value assignment, however once you bootstrap into value propositions, which could be so universally recognized so as to be very difficult to argue against (the reduction of suffering for instance), there are objective answers to optimizing for those values.

> Or, to put it into a question, how do you think humans, almost universally, can distinguish good from bad?

Without rigor I think most people instinctively tend to distinguish good from bad (insofar as those words have real meaning) by way of empathy, by the recognition of one's own internal desires and suffering and joy and recognizing the same states in others. The golden rule if you will, it's about as inherent a moral compass as I can think of.

And this indeed could be traced back to evolutionary origins and our sociability as a species. It's also quite fallible, and at scale you can see it break down again and again (empathy is a face to face sort of mechanism and tends to struggle to maintain its hold at a distance over space and time and in large numbers we find ourselves congregating and competing in, and as already noted good/bad are pretty poor substitutes for the complicated situations we find ourselves in at scale, and our evolutionary toolset is rather lacking in getting us to pay attention to the nuance and working through optimization deliberately), thus I think one could give pretty good reasons why this should not be an overriding guiding value function but rather a sort of starter's pack.

> First of all, thanks for the compelling discussion so far.

Likewise thank you for the compelling discussion and clarifications.

> To be clear, I don't hold any strong position. All my previous comments are based on the assumption that the three premises I wrote in the very beginning of the first post are true, but I'm not arguing that those premises are true. I was just elaborating the implications if they were true: 1) To survive and to reproduce would be the closest thing to the ultimate purpose of life. 2) What traits we consider "good" or "bad" would actually be just what traits are beneficial for survival or not.

I think you need a few extra steps to get you from those premises to these conclusions. In fact, I'd suggest you may not even really be able to get from those premises to those conclusions, in particular I think you'd need to invoke "designers" (or "higher beings") imbuing purpose into the functional specifics of evolution to arrive there (thus contradicting one of those premises).

The premises as stated don't tell you much in the way of ascribing "purpose" to life, only how the mechanisms behind how it propagates and changes over time, just as Maxwell's equations do not define some "purpose" to electromagnetism but rather describe its evolution across time. And further the emergent systems that arise from these underlying processes, of primary importance for our conversation here consciousness and emergent from that society and civilization, need not owe all their properties to the mechanisms of the underlying systems (indeed this is what we often mean by emergence).

So ultimately I think that not only is survival not the "ultimate purpose," I think it's difficult to argue there is any intrinsic purpose there at all.

I disagree that maximizing the chance for survival is the only ultimate objective function, or that it's somehow the only one that can escape "why is this desirable?" questioning, or that it is even coherent as an objective function in the long run (I see no reason to think the we'll run into technological limits that prevent us from deviating from natural evolution in the future for much, if perhaps not most of life).

Evolutionary mechanisms do not bestow some "ultimate" or unquestionable truth/goal of which all others are subservient or branched from, it is merely an explanatory framework for biological continuation we've observed in the world, and like other similar explanatory frameworks we generally would do well to avoid attributing "purpose" where all we can see (if we can even see that) is "is." It certainly is likely an attributable factor for much of what we value as we are products of said process, but we do not owe it primacy any more than a computer off the assembly line owes the assembly line its purpose.

To be honest I'm now a bit confused on your position, as you explicitly brought up points in your previous post that elucidated some of the cracks in attempting to treat survival as the "one true goal":

> But when you think about it, there are "good" things that aren't advantageous (or even are harmful) to survival, and there are things advantageous to survival that are considered "bad" by most people. Many examples would be highly controversial, so I'd pick a less controversial example, but probably not the best one: eugenics.

And I could posit other thought experiments or examples or such, but perhaps first I should ask how this line of questioning doesn't lead you away from survival as the ultimate objective function.

> So, how exactly do we know which is good, which is bad? Is there even an objective good or bad without invoking the idea that some higher beings say so?

I’m not sure how “higher beings say so” gets you to objectivity, especially when the very nature of our understanding of any such being would be anything but objective.

Mostly what you’ve touched on there is that “good” and “bad” are rather inadequate descriptors of any sort of well reasoned and thorough analysis of many subjects. There can be multiple competing objective functions and incentives to analyze in complex systems, and simply labeling such things with any sort of dichotomy is liable to leave you wanting.

This does not mean the answers lack objectivity, or value propositions that can be meaningfully evaluated, it simply means the objective evaluations are considerably more complex and nuanced than many are willing try and assess, and this poled subjectivity serves as a somewhat lazy proxy for performing a better evaluation. Sometimes this is necessary given our limited capacities in day to day life, but it does not inherently speak to limitations of objectivity or evaluation of morality or philosophy.

Depends on what your purpose is. Of course text message isn't equivalent to a face to face meeting, nor is a face to face meeting over zoom the same as a face to face in person.

If the goal of the communication is specific (need requirement X by Y time), text is actually quite probably better (can take time to be concise and clear, use tools catered to the specifics, remove various other subtleties of face to face meetings). If you want to get to know someone or have low specificity communication needs, clearly an in person rendezvous is best.

> Can you be more specific? "Public channels for team comms" -> they explicitly addressed that ("frustrated grumbling").

"Frustrated grumbling" goes to the tight feedback loops, make sure juniors aren't on their own island for too long without a checkin of some sort (if you want to manage things that way, I could also argue for letting juniors flail a bit in some cases but the person I replied to obviously prefers a more micro approach). Public channels were related to the desire to know what others were working on.

Further specifics depend on the dynamics of the team, but the point in there are various relatively easy ways to systematize remote work efficiently.

> Remote forces us to change the way we have been operating for decades. Why should we?

Why should people be forced to continue operating in ways they find suboptimal for a myriad of reasons (commute, distractions, tethering living location/family/friends to job, etc) just because some are unwilling to adapt even though solutions are readily available? The historical status quo is not often a great place to look for arguments for how things should be.

> I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.

There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc). You may simply have a preference for being around people and using the methodologies you listed here, which is fine enough, but remote doesn’t fundamentally block any of the outcomes you mentioned.

You can avoid quite a bit of OOP with Kotlin if you like, and with Arrow make some really nice functional code. Imo it offers a great balance of imperative vs functional, providing powerful tools for whatever style suits the project best.

> The science can speak for itself.

Well you’d think so, but here we are with different views about what is a reasonable position on what it says.

You’re continuing to straw man things here, we may just be at an impasse.

> Science isn't the reason people don't trust this specific vaccine, because science doesn't support that fear.

Skepticism of mandates is fully supported by the science.

> It's a good thing that isn't the argument I made, then.

Well it could perhaps be accused of being a reductive summary, but surely you see how it could have come off like that?

> The vaccine was tested. It's safe. No, that doesn't mean there isn't risk, there is always risk, but risk doesn't mean it could be poison for all anyone knows.

There is a vast bit of difference between no risk and poison for all anyone knows. Safe (as in unlikely to kill you or cause you lasting harm in the short term)? Yes, that’s evident. Worth the risk over the disease for those not at risk? By my reading of the data that’s far from clear. And again comparing 50 years to a few months of data.. I just don’t see how you can’t see the difference.

Again, your position doesn’t resemble anything scientific.

“If you don’t believe what I believe, you listened to cranks” isn’t a terribly compelling argument.

They went through the same process yes. That does not make taking a brand new COVID vaccine in the height of a hyper-politicized pandemic the same as taking the for example MMR vaccine that has been used for decades. There are all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of the former more than the latter that need not be driven by crankery, and you’re only undermining your presumed desire to appear on the side of science by suggesting otherwise.

> I personally get really anxious when I'm "wasting" time

One could argue that this is the problem. Not that you spend your time doing activities others wouldn't consider leisurely, but that you feel compelled to because otherwise you become "really anxious." Some anxiety can be a propulsion, but too much can be a pathology. I'm certainly not fit to evaluate your own, but by your own words I'd suggest it's possibly worth further reflection.

Check out Four Thousand Weeks for some recent musings on why that anxiety may be best ignored rather than heeded: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-w...

Whether that’s true or false changes virtually nothing about this article or our understanding of anything in the universe.

Only if you presume systems that display one must display the other, which I think is far from a given in systems that aren't comprised of neurons, or in other words systems that don't look/work like us (which is the only pathway we have to believing the two are linked in any way).

You’re throwing a lot of assumptions in there that I would be quite careful about holding “firmly.” I’m not convinced we have any idea whether long term memory is required for sentience, I’d suspect not (are amnesiacs not sentient?), nor that we can reliably infer sentience from behavior (again Chinese Room experiment). It’s possible, but this is too nascent to hold such opinions firmly.

> everyone arguing about brains and the universe is trying to justify something like the Consequence Argument

That hasn't been my experience at all, usually I see claims about the brains and universe being made from epistemic grounds, and indeed they are valuable in of themselves even if purely academic. The nature of our reality is worth discovering on its own merit, rather than just discarding in favor of saying that's not what we're really talking about (when indeed some of us are talking about that!).

All the more reason to be clear about context.

> It matters quite a bit I think, because otherwise it's an impediment to communication.

It sounds like we agree on the problem but disagree on the solution. I would argue most of the impediment to communication on this subject is exactly because people are trying much too hard to brand a certain conceptualization "free will" and trying to delineate different contexts and scenarios far too little. It's absolutely worthwhile to clarify what context one is referring to when using the term. It's absolutely a waste of time to try and assert this context is the only correct context to do so.

This seems to me like more of the same talking past this subject is rife with. I didn't purport to frame any such definition as "first," the context of my reply was referring specifically to a Dennett rebuttal to a Harris essay, which is by definition not first.

To me the semantics of what one wants to call free will really don't matter and aren't worth much discussion, yet they seem to be primarily what gets discussed. What matters is clarity and context (context being do you want to talk about how minds and the universe works or do you want to talk about moral or societal responsibility), and trying discuss which one ought to be called free will seems to me to be yak shaving.

I'd agree the debate is actually fairly largely settled for now, as I pointed out in my bullets in the previous reply. There is still much to figure out about neurology and the origin of thought, and about societal cohesion, but the fundamentals there seem pretty solid for as long as we're mostly human. I add that last caveat because I think these concerns actually do start to merge once a mind is capable of fully experiencing and conceptually recognizing causal lines (physical, chemical, or otherwise), which certainly seems to be not in the cards for us biologically and may even be theoretically impossible, but I wouldn't rule out just yet. In such a world with such minds things would look quite a bit different, and there would be much less daylight between every day morality and mechanistic functions underlying the minds a play.

> Deciding that one's life is all about luck is a miserable way to live. It means one has no agency, no choice, no way to make one's life better. Because it's all luck, that means there is no point in trying. The outcome of this is self-fulfilling - misery.

It likewise can be a recipe for misery to ignore the role of luck in your own life and the lives of others. It's not only inaccurate (sub luck out for the mechanisms by which the world turns), it attributes an unreasonable level of burden of consequence on the decision maker, one they can never hope to live up to and one no one around them will ever live up to.

Of course as with many things the most reasonable course of action is something in between. To both acknowledge the ways in which we understand the world works and how much of that is outside your control, and then take very real ownership of the things that are in your control (namely your actions), and take special care to note how taking control of the things you can over time ends up compounding in unforeseen ways such that you end up "luckier" (the meeting of hard work and opportunity and all that).

If anything this just seems to once again show that any extreme along nearly any axis is not only inaccurate but detrimental to mental health. Nuance and acknowledgement of opposing ideals, and realizing they're compatible and not actually opposing at all, is where one finds truth and solace.

They didn't make an excuse for lack of impulse control at all, they simply claimed responsibility for the action while not taking responsibility for the thought, which is a perfectly reasonable, rational, and adaptive perspective.

> So what? The fact is that the "free will" you appear to want to talk about does not and cannot exist, whereas the "free will" Dennett is talking about does exist and has important real-world consequences. So, to be blunt, why should I care about your preferred definition? What's the point of going on and on about something that doesn't and can't exist? Who cares?

Because it's a poor rhetorical tactic, one used quite often in this and other topics, that confuses the subject rather than adding clarity and mutual understanding. Redefining the subject of a debate in the middle of such a debate is a recipe for talking past one another (which these two have done at length multiple times and never seem to quite understand how much they're talking past one another, or at least never acknowledge it so as to "win" more) rather than coming to a better understanding. Neither one can be wrong or right because neither really acknowledges the other, they're just sort of talking about related (but different) subjects at the same time using the same term in different ways, to the consternation of passer bys who end up joining one camp or the other not realizing they can easily be in both.

> Telling people that they don't have free will, in real terms, amounts to telling them to suck it up while the evil, predatory people in the world, who know perfectly well that they do have free will and have no compunction about exercising it at others' expense, take all their goodies, instead of choosing to fight back.

That's not what it tells them at all, and indeed this is a common point of confusion that could be alleviated without all the talking past one another. A better synthesis would be:

- Acknowledge one does not directly author one's own thoughts (either by way of the vast literature of neuroscience or simply closely observing the nature of thought)

- Acknowledge the vast role of forces outside our direct individual control in our understanding of ourselves and others

- Acknowledge our ignorance of full causation of any given thought or action and the scoping differences of emergent systems

- Acknowledge regardless of the first two and because of the third at an individual and societal level there is very real meaning to responsibility and attribution of action to a locus of control (be that individual or grouping of individuals)

Compatibilism (of which Dennett is a proponent) more or less just says the 4th is actually compatible with the 1st. And that's completely reasonable, but we'd save a lot of time in these debates by taking great pains to acknowledge the difference in scope and context as opposed to arguing which one we want to call "free will."

This is the most common advice around these parts, but it seems woefully misguided to me.

The “only good answer” if there is just the one is that you should use whatever fits the requirements. If those requirements involve you getting to market as fast as possible in a highly generic domain (ie building a standard website) where the tools you know work just as well as others and you’re not worried about various other factors then sure, go with what you know and can churn out the fastest.

But though many projects may fit this mold they are by no means universal requirements, and your requirements may very well dictate the best path is for you learn new tech (for instance if you usually do .NET stuff but are building a a ML service on a device or something). Sometimes there are better ways to accomplish things than what you already know and you’ll indeed be better served by learning them. If you’re just a hammer looking at everything as a nail because you can bang on it the fastest you’ll stub your (and probably others’) thumbs one way or the other.

Not to mention learning new tech is often its own reward regardless of the much less certain fate of a given MVP. At the very least you'll have another tool in the toolkit to assess future project requirements, rather than blindly attacking everything w/ a hammer.

Aside from the newly introduced Fleet the other commenter pointed out, Jetbrains' IDEA Ultimate can include all the functionality of all the individual niche products (via plugins), so you could just use a single Jetbrains IDE for most any language/flow you choose. I personally kind of like to keep them separate so I can keep different envs configured the way I most often use them, but you could just use the single IDE for all.

Do you have some models you're looking at that cause you to believe with such certainty that this is what the future holds? I have not seen, nor can I even really fathom, a scenario in which declining birth rates leads in of itself to extinction (unless the birth rates drop to basically zero for some reason), but certainly this could be due to a failure of imagination. A declining population would certainly look different, but I don't see it causing the end of civilization, much less the species.

Hasn’t it? There is considerably more infrastructure for the elderly today than a couple of generations ago. Communities where folks can maintain a bit of independence with caregivers and peers in the neighborhood seems like a nearly ideal way to age to me.

But of course not everyone lives like this and many have a horrible quality of life at the end so there is room to improve. One improvement is cultural I think: we shouldn’t be hanging on to every last strand of life possible, and should make it easy for those with little prognosis for quality of life to die gracefully in a way of their choosing.

In any case certainly more adaptation is needed, but I see signs of the development.

> The sleepless nights and diaper changes are a mere blip on the scale of a lifetime with kids. You deal with it, then the kids grow up quicker than you think. Don't let the idea of the first few months/years define your entire decision for how you want to structure your family for the rest of your life.

This is just a common feature of our perception of time not constrained to child rearing. Past years seem to have gone by quickly while the present moment seems to have an eternity in front it. It's also a common feature of our perception to rationalize past decisions as foundation of the current moment ("wouldn't trade it for the world") without really understanding the counterfactuals (are you sure you wouldn't?).

Anyway I agree one should generally not let the experience of a few years of hardship detract from a life direction they may find fulfilling, but one should also not take the present for granted or be readily willing to subscribe to a miserable present in hopes that it blossoms into a worthwhile future. We're too bad at predicting the future to make those trades reliably well (though the aforementioned bias will (mis)lead us into thinking we're quite good at it).

> You actually like hanging out with your own kids. I talk to a lot of people who are anchored to some negative experience they had 10 years ago babysitting for someone else's kids, as if that was representative of parenting life. It's not at all. At the end of the day, I actually rush to finish up my work so I can have more kid time. It's fun.

You shouldn't be so ready to extrapolate your experience to the hypothetical future experience of others who are already skeptical. Your 10 year ago babysitting example sounds like a strawman anecdote. I know plenty of people who simply don't enjoy the company of children, their own included. There is of course a biological propensity to have an outsized affection and enjoyment of one's own children, but that is not universally applied to everyone, and not everyone finds endless joy in experiencing the world through the eyes of a child or playing the role of caregiver. Some certainly do and that's great, but it's not a universal truth.

Again, this is a very fixable problem, and society will be the better for it by learning to adapt better rather than just throwing more kids at the problem. Kids do not owe their parents anything, including geriatric care.