ribbonfarm: A Brief History of Existential Terror

9eB1

Many choices are binary: you either do crime or you don't; you either use drugs or you don't; you are either an employee or an entrepreneur; you are either a citizen of country X or country Y.

I disagree, both in general and specifically. All your examples are actually not binary:

Alice torrented a recent movie. Does she do crime?
Bob was in Amsterdam for a couple of days and ate a hash brownie. Does he use drugs?
Charlie is a freelancer consultant on a long contract. Is he an employee or an entrepreneur?
Dave is a citizen of US, Canada, and Israel. Which single country is he the citizen of?

seem to be few options to go 10% crazy

I don't see this as true. Extreme sports, backpacking in Guatemala, Burning Man, weird hobbies, etc. etc.

What you may be pointing in the direction of is that if you are enmeshed in a web of routines and responsibilities -- a wife, a kid, a mortgage, a stable social circle, etc. -- breaking out from it is difficult to do partially. You either need to slowly and carefully ("safely") rearrange that web, or you need to do a Gauguin and set off for Caribbean or Pacific islands.

Congratulations on defeating my argument using mostly non-central examples.

(By the way, you can also get 90% of the university diploma, if you just get the diploma, and then tear off 10% of it; or copy it on a printer that uses less saturated ink.)

09eB19y

The non-binariness of things seems to me to be a fundamental tenet of the post-rationality thing (ribbonfarm is part of post-rationality). In particular, Chapman writes extensively on the idea that all categories are nebulous and structured. I also think there are options to control your risk factor, depending on the field. You can found a startup, you can be the first startup employee, you can join an established startup, you can join a publicly traded corporation, you can get a job in the permanent bureaucracy. Almost every spot on the work risk-stability spectrum is available. Perhaps the real question is why some particular fields or endeavors lend themselves to seemingly continuous risk functions. All of Viliam's categories are purely social structures, where other people are categorizing you. So perhaps it's not about the risk inherent in an activity but being labeled that fits his intuition. People might label you a drug user if you smoke marijuana in their map, but in the territory the continuum of "having used marijuana once" to "uses heroin daily" is not only continuous but many-dimensioned.

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