As a resident of EU, I consider it net positive — it recreates in a miniature the pre-visa world of 19th century, giving me an opportunity to pick a country with internal policy, tax policy, culture, cuisine etc I like with a minimum of hassle: no residence permits, no tying residence to a place of work, no waiting in visa queue for years to be rejected by a bureaucrat, mostly single-currency, integrated payments network, cross-country banking, equal access to local education etc.

And I'm not even a citizen of a full EU state, I'm a citizen of EEA country.

OTOH, all this convenience comes from a handful of EU directives, the rest I could easily live without.

I'm not sure how the presence of such places argues for or against equating bluntness with directness.

Is equating bluntess and directness warranted? Bluntness seems to be a quality direct questions or statements may or may not have: one might directly but politely ask for something.

If they are not the same, then the "count the echoes" no longer applies: ask culture does not preclude any amount of echo tracking.

The lack of pushback is not an inherent quality of models, but the lack of priming. With the system prompt I use, Gemini 2.5 Pro gives me the following answer to the first example:

The initial formulation's strength lies in its recognition of the real, homogenizing pressures exerted by large-scale social systems. These pressures are not imaginary.

However, the model's critical failure is its attribution of these pressures to intentional, malicious design and its adoption as the sole explanatory framework. This creates a brittle, disempowering, and non-falsifiable worldview.

A more robust synthesis would be to hold two ideas in tension:

1. External systems exert real pressures that can stifle individuality and cause genuine distress.
2. Our internal interpretation of these pressures is governed by cognitive frameworks that can either empower us to navigate them strategically or trap us in narratives of persecution and paralysis.

The key operational question shifts from "How is the system designed to suppress me?" to "Given the observable, indifferent pressures of the system, what internal models and external strategies will be most effective for navigating it to achieve my objectives?"

One more cheat code that works for me: when I've got a pile of necessary but boring work that does not require real focus, just willpower to plow through it, I bath it and tackle it when I'm tired. At this point my mind stops nagging me with "there are better ways to spend your time". As a side effect, this frees up my high-energy hours to do something more productive.

Indeed, the example of envy seems very strained: I put pictures on the walls not because I envy my neighbours who have pictures on the walls, or select a tastier kind of tea not because I feel jealous about people who drink it.

I have immediately thought about a description of non-human intelligence in "Blindsight".

Also here's some interesting parallels and contrasts between our AI systems and Rorschach, as elicited by ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/share/67f0e022-0034-800b-81eb-610e1ac6f5e3 (see the third question onwargs).

The demand for products (and indirectly for labor to produce these products) will fall too, won't it?

To HJPEV.

This link is broken too.

Archive.org copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20131005121009/http://dorianinnes.com/how-to-be-happy-in-1-step/