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pogimabus

192 karma · joined September 18, 2015

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pogimabus··on Two philosophers found purpose in the world of work
The more I think about this poison thing the less sense it makes, if you tell someone not to eat poison because it will hurt them you either need to tell them what things are poison or you really aren't telling them anything except that you don't want them to hurt themselves (whatever hurting yourself means) and that there are things out there that will hurt you that you call poison.
pogimabus··on Two philosophers found purpose in the world of work
> you're confusing principle with quantitative absolute

I really don't think I am, I'm trying to tell you that you keep referencing subjective values as if they can be assessed objectively. An example from the comment above is the following subjective value implied as an objective value: a long life is a better life than a not long life. I know it may sound preposterous but for every scenario we could imagine there is always a way to look at an action as a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective, even chugging rat poison. Perhaps the results of my death from poisoning is that someone else is able to survive due to the whatever circumstances surround the scenario; in this case I may be balancing the value of my own continued existence against that of someone else's and you want to tell me you there's a framework that is somehow going to guide me into making an objectively correct choice about who lives and dies?

> Objectivism deductively and inductively proves that certain actions are an objective good for the soul as a condition of being human

I disagree with this wholeheartedly.

I have seen zero proof of this and I really don't think it can be proved because the objective universe does not track goodness in any way, it is a concept defined entirely within our minds and does not have an objective physical reference we can test or compare against.

pogimabus··on Two philosophers found purpose in the world of work
The problem is that someone is trying to claim they know what benefits my existence. I don't have confidence that I know exactly what benefits my existence so the fact that someone else thinks they know that as well as or better than I do is preposterous because we never agreed on what benefitting my existence even is.
pogimabus··on Two philosophers found purpose in the world of work
> objective requirements of how individual maximally live.

What is it "to live"? Even more of a mystery is what is it to "maximally live"? You are reducing all of life to a single dimension that you haven't even defined. There may be an objective minimum amount of calories that are necessary to stay alive/awake but I don't think that raw survival is super relevant here; what value is there in intaking a single one beyond that? The things that make us happy at one point in our lives aren't necessarily always going to make us happy, in fact our ideas of what it is to be happy can easily fluctuate throughout our lives, and definitely do fluctuate from person to person. There's very little in this world that is as cut and dry as you seem to imply.

pogimabus··on Two philosophers found purpose in the world of work
Not sure how you can define productive action other than to say it's action that moves the universe towards a state that is desired. Desire arises from our values and a moral action is one that aligns with our values. Given this, I don't see there being any arguing against productive action being the morally correct action, I just think many people don't understand an assessment regarding whether or not any action is productive is inherently completely subjective.
pogimabus··on Ask HN: How come HN folks are so well-versed in social sciences and humanities?
Be careful how much credit you give them, I find they often speak with great confidence about things they clearly know nothing about.
pogimabus··on 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018)
Becoming multiplanetary IS handling it, just not in a necessarily "ideal" way. The problem is that we don't want to have the reset button hit and have every human in existence set back to the stone age technologically; having multiple self sustaining human societies on multiple planets mitigates that risk in a major way since the likelihood of a disaster being so large that it resets technology on both/all planets is much smaller than the likelihood of having a disaster that does it for just one of them.
pogimabus··on Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
Somebody should tell this guy lol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19895407
pogimabus··on Testosterone Treatment and Alleviation of Depressive Symptoms in Men
You are struggling with this because believing there is no difference between the mental characteristics of men and women on average is to be in denial of reality.

I think maybe this is a hard pill to swallow for many people because we have proven over and over that we can't trust each other to both know this AND still treat everyone, regardless of how we may be able to classify them, as an individual and to judge each individual by their own actions, desires, and capabilities rather than by the average characteristics of whatever bucket we happen to be considering them to be in at the time.

pogimabus··on Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures
As a musician, the reactions to almost every post on hacker news involving music ends up both cracking me up and serving as a healthy reminder of the arrogance and hubris around here. In all my time I've never met another musician/composer who tried to convince me that there is some kind of fundamental rythmic difference between 2/3 and 6/8 time, yet here we have scores of people who are fighting for the idea as if it were part of their identity or something... At least it's a healthy reminder that the eloquence and apparent confidence with which a statement is delivered really isn't indicative of it's truthfulness at all haha...
pogimabus··on Impossible color
Interesting! Although I don't think this means I'm completely wrong, just that there are "true/full violet" values that we can't see that would make the semi-circle that is visible light into a full circle if we could see a full "octave"; instead we are limited to seeing just violets that are mixes of other colors.
pogimabus··on Impossible color
My completely made up intuitive understanding of it is that it's the same as musical pitches; there are many versions of each named pitch e.g A through G that are each an "octave" away from each other. The difference between "Middle C" and the one above it is that the frequency of the higher version is exactly double that of the lower. As a listener the two notes sound extremely similar, the higher one just feels more "energetic" or something. I imagine colors would be the same if our eyes could see more than one "octave" but we are only sensitive to approximately one "octave" of light, ~ 480Thz-750Thz.

Given that, violet appears to be between red and blue in the same way the pitch of G appears to be between the pitches F and A.

pogimabus··on We're officially launching UBI
I'm getting really tired of seeing this argument at the top of every single thread about a UBI experiment, as if:

1. There are no other concerns that we can gather info about besides "UBI might cause so much inflation that it cancels itself out" and

2. Nothing can be learned from these experiments unless they prove that the concern in #1 is unfounded.

This is just obstructionism. Using less than 100% accurate simulations to attempt to predict the outcome of implementing actions and to inform our choices has been common practice since the dawn of civilization, there's no reason that the tool is suddenly completely useless in this particular situation. This isn't a "hard science". We have massive problems with poverty and economic inequality in our society and statements like these only serve to stop the conversation that potentially leads to solving them. Why do people seem so stubbornly against seeing if a UBI works?

pogimabus··on How David Hume Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis
> "When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything.

It's funny that you quoted this line because I think it reveals a particular ignorance that the author has, namely a misunderstanding of depression due to her particular experience with it. A more truthful version, in my view, would be the following:

When you’re not depressed, you want things: work, love, children. When you have mild depression, you want to want things. When you’re deeply depressed, you no longer want anything.

Age really doesn't have anything to do with it.