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I think money is relatively neat value-holder here, because we can map people, and their options on it.
I don't intuitively know how much money 1 mln USD is, but I know a guy who is a millionaire, and more or less know what he is capable of buying for himself or spending on charity.
I don't intuitively grasp how much 1 billion USD is, but we have examples of billionaires and their actions to guesstimate what that means.
Similarly, I never lost a finger, but can practice using one hand, of just a few fingers of one hand to do everyday tasks, and see how much worse it is. I know several people with 1-2 fingers missing, and they do not seem particularly inconvenienced, some even play guitar! I know a guy with just one hand (which I think is much worse than just missing all fingers on one hand) and he is limited in some things but does fine. So it seems even missing half of your fingers is not that bad if you have a decent middle class career and wealth, and would probably be less of a problem for a millionaire.
Even based on that imprecise financial intuition, I can guess it would not be worth it to sacrifice fingers for 1 mln (because its not that much money in the end), worth it for 10 mln (because it would set you for life), and if Im going for 1 billion I might just go all the way to 10s of trillions.
1One thing to consider is that we have more female ancestors than male ones, because males are far more likely to fail to breed, while also having the option to be much more successful breeders.
And historically, men were far more likely to be farmers (in a literal sense, farming plants being their main occupation, lifestyle and a source of calories) than women.
Or to put it differently: between about 12000 BC, and about 1800 AD, there majority of women were WIVES of farmers, but not farmers themselves (due to division of labor, the vast majority of women did jobs related to the production of cloth and non-farmign products, while men did the farming), while at the same time, there was a big % of men who were farmers (often unfree to some degree) who died childless.
Moreover, farmers usually stayed on the same land for a long time, intermarrying with their neighbors, thus particularly virile farmers eventually became ancestors to a lot of their neighborhood, while unsuccessful, poor, or unfree farmers had few or no children.
Women, moreso than men, would marry-out and leave their ancestral household, thus spreading their genes.
So we might end up with a calculation where you have a lot of Spinner and Weaver ancestors, but fewer Farmer ancestors.
honestly, the best solution to laziness spirals that I learned form personal experience, is to externalize the choice, so it is not dependent on willpower. Most of such tricks are almost trivial:
- can't get out of bed in the morning? Make the alarm clock louder, but also much further away, so that you HAVE TO get up to turn it off.
- procrastinate on the phone/computer instead of working? Block every website and program that could possibly lure away your focus
- can't make yourself walk/jog anywhere, and instead drive everywhere? put your car keys inside your running shoes
- can't get yourself to work-out? Put your favorite time-waster (like say, the controller of your gaming device) under the gym bag or your weights.
- create false deadlines on projects by telling someone it will be done much earlier than it needs to, and have them hold you accountable.
- If you bring lunch/snacks to work, have a colleague keep them for you, and not give them back until you completed the chosen task, and can prove it (ex: no lunch unless you send 40 emails)
- at home, pile dirty laundry on your favorite chair, or the favorite place on the couch. It will prevent you from sitting down, and encourage being more tidy. (IMHO, the couch is one of the worst humanity's inventions )
A lot of anti-laziness schemes depending on trying to change your willpower, values, or decision-making systems, but often the easiest and most dependable solution is to remove the choice altogether, by pitting our avoidance of inconvenience against our laziness.
Dominance underlies the things that can be done most efficiently with dominance. The moment dominance is no longer the most efficient force, it collapses, because in the vast majority of cases, dominating others takes a lot of time, energy and effort. This is actually how and why slavery (pretty much the most powerful example of dominance) was abolished: it started to make less economic sense than Bargaining (paid employment of freemen) and just Getting Things Done (through better tools and ultimately machines), so even its most ardent supporters became dispirited.
1A related thought: an intelligence can only work on the information that it has, regardless of its veracity, and it can only work on information that actually exists.
My hunch is that the plan of "AI boostraps itself to superintelligence, then superpower, then wipes out humanity" relies on it having access to information that is too well hidden to divine through sheer calculation and infogathering, regardless of its intelligence (ex: the location of all the military bunkers, and nuclear submarines humanity has), or simply does not exist (ex: future Human strategic choices based on coin-flips).
Most AI Apocalypse scenarios depend not only on the AI being superhumanly smart, but being inexplicably Omniscient about things that nobody could be plausibly Omniscient about.
this might not actually be always beneficial. Lucid dreaming also means you remember much more from the dreams, which can extend the lifespan of your recurring nightmares. Not to mention, if you dream lucidly, your consciousness is not resting, and intrusive thoughts will pile up.
My hypothesis is that a lot of things that seem impossible or very hard in a dream, are simply too boring to focus on. Its totally possible to consciously dream up a page of text, but who would really want to waste precious dreamtime to type?
I have a suspicion that "flying dreams" have more to do with the state of your physical body than just your mind. I noticed I only dream of flight (or rather, levitation) if my muscles are very relaxed, like after a good massage, long hot bath, or good stretching. If im physically tense, either from effort or from stress, then I either cannot fly in a dream at all, or I keep losing the ability and falling, often with enough distress to wake myself up.
In my experience, conscious Daydreaming can achieve the same results but more consistently. But then again, my imagination is extremely visual, I tend to "think in VR movies", so Lucid Daydreaming comes easier than Lucid Dreaming, and is far more controllable.
Cast Away (2000) is a great study of an (otherwise average) man using the absolute height of his rationality to survive on a deserted island. Unlike the Martian, or many similar examples, the protagonist of Cast Away is NOT a scientist, nor a person with he kind of education and training to focus their rationality (well, he seems to be a logistics manager so his mental skills must be at least weakly adjacent to optimization, but not much). His survival depends not on some pre-thought mental models, but on applying raw, simple clear thinking to entirely unfamiliar problems.
The movie shows the processes of his survival struggles in loving detail, including his failures, insights and progress.
Importantly, it also shows what happens when a person who had spent years fighting for survival by using their intelligence to solve purely technical problems is at a loss when trying to apply the same kind of rational reasoning to human affairs, which are rife with compounded irrationality (a problem a lot of Rationalists can empathize with).