But consider: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y
„We found that participants with higher intelligence were only quicker when responding to simple questions, while they took more time to solve hard questions.“
I was writing a lengthy answer about how I struggled with similar questions before actually becoming a father and how they all became relativized, but then it seemed a better idea to just give a little piece of advice: If you have a partner that seems adequate to you, go for it, you‘re probably already overqualified. Your words already speak of the love you will able to lavish on a child, and that is the most important thing to give. The rest is, as always, a matter of adaptation of strategy and tactics to circumstances that are beyond our control.
This is what I needed to hear. Thank you.
Edit: I‘m not sure anymore. It gives me aches to even think about what might be worth preserving and what possibly isn‘t anymore.
Warning: potentially hazardous line of thought.
It‘s too late now for my father, but I have thought about consequences for the rest of my family that is willing to take the chance. My plan is now, in the case of onset of any type of dementia, to opt in for assisted suicide before too much damage will have occured. Careful planning should allow for near-optimal preservation, to the extent possible when and if this rather radical step becomes necessary. What could I possibly lose? Some years of cognitive and physical decline where any joy would be overshadowed by the losses.
And yes, the possibility you mentioned indeed provides at least a little comfort.
If I am still around then, I‘d be happy to lend you a hand turning over stones, no matter how long it takes.
Lyrics that came to my mind (from Bruderschaft - Forever):
I will walk this ground forever and stand guard against your name. I will give all I can offer, I will shoulder all the blame. I am sentry to you now, all your hopes and all your dreams. I will hold you to the light, that’s what forever means.
I‘ve just read „Think Again“ from Adam Grant. If vaccine whisperers succeed in convincing lots of anti-vaxxers to eventually protect their children, their approach may generalize. Even more impressive is the case of Daryl Davis, an Afro-American musician, talking hundreds of KKK members out of their white supremacist worldview.
I am very afraid that the best even a superintelligent AI can come up with would be uncanny puppet versions of the people we cherished or rather completely new people with just some similiarities, more akin to clone siblings than to the original individuals. What I actually want is what was left over of his connectome, and that is, for all I know, gone forever. Unless some AI can extract it from thermodynamical noise - which does not seem all that likely to me.
I cannot see how your last sentence holds. My subjective experience of time was, up to now, everything from the usual feeling of continuous time and total disarray during psychosis up to a feeling of complete timeless eternity during transcendental meditation. Instead if knowing how time feels like - I have had my share - I would like to understand how consciousness relates to time in the light of physics. Subjective experience can be deceiving in infinitely many ways, but there must be (at least I hope so) some objective underlying physical foundation for it. At least my inclination towards realism tells me that.
I wish I could pick up all your lines of thought, as I find most of them really interesting. Our energy levels seem to be very different at the moment, though - I am just recovering from mild depression and my thoughts are neither very associative nor creative right now, much less clear and coherent. I just cannot keep up with your stimulant-infused input right now.
Nevertheless, here is what I mean talking about a local optimum. I am trying to put appropriate energy into different aspects of my life, namely: Taking care of my family, doing a good job at wo...
Rather than telling me something completely new, you are actually condensing many of the things I already know in a very helpful way. I appreciate that. Instead of echoing your key points, I would rather point out where I really seem to struggle:
I my native language, which happens to be German, somewhere in the middle between the concepts of intelligence and wisdom, we have the idea of „Klugheit“. Klugheit is less about the theory of solving problems or knowing about what is the right thing to do in a given moment and in life, but all about putting it into...
This conversation increasingly develops characteristics of group therapy, but so be it.
Regarding values: Yes, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding along with the experience and creation of meaning are among what I perceive as my core values. My understanding of power has a big intersection with positive freedom and because of that, I seek more power and influence mostly as means to act upon my values. So far, so good.
Now that I have thought enough about the last few weeks and my thoughts and actions, I think I have figured out what actually bothers ...
I think I‘ve read something about the value of seemingly procrastinating behaviour a while ago. Right now, I have plenty of work to do, yet I am reading your reply and answering. Is this lost time or procrastination as commonly understood? I don‘t think so. It seems like meaningful exchange to me. And maybe updating my own self-model with the help of others is exactly what I really need right now to do better work later.
As for the feeling that something is going wrong with me: Increased awareness of the downward spiral does not easily translate into being able to stop or transform the process. It‘s part of my daily struggles.
Well, maybe my underlying motivation for this question was the wish for some shortcut to overcome what I perceive as personal deficiencies. Throughout my life, I‘ve hardly had to work as hard as most people around me to complete mental tasks, and that has led me to live a rather decent life by now. And I‘m still making progress in terms of achievements that secure my material situation.
But being completely honest, I feel lazy and having fallen behind what I could be. The things I value most are intelligence, knowledge and understanding, and I just know a s...
Thinking about the responses, I have to come to the conclusion that this is a rather bad idea. The positive symptoms which I remember very intensely just don‘t make up for the decline in critical reflection of what one is actually doing, thinking and feeling. I had suppressed that to some extent, but it is clearly a major part of what I went through. Thanks for pointing out this aspect. Personally, I will probably try to work on healthy habits, routines and stay on my medication (what I would have done anyway).
I prefer to not examine this issue in a frame of pathologies. In the individual case, concrete symptoms and behaviours of course depend on the unique personality of the affected individual. Yet, when you know a person good enough, it is not that hard to recognize the changes taking place under hypomania, and from what I can tell they seem to generalize well. It is exactly not the possible impairments that interest me, but what I subjectively experienced as an improvement to my default condition.
I should have added that I have tried several proposed methods...
Despite a little tear on the ego, it has some advantages not to be the smartest in the room. Having read here on LW a couple of years ago and now bit by bit picking up some of the stuff that happened back then and in the meantime, the dominant feeling for me isn‘t envy of the capability of others, but relief that there are enough minds in the world entertaining thoughts that at least partially reflect my own shallow ones on topics that I deem important, but have no one to talk about.
Unless it involves some mathematics that I am not accustomed to, it feels ...
Long story short, my doc and me tried methylphenidate despite my bipolar disorder. I can‘t remember ever having had such an inner calm and structured motivation. I seem to be in some weird niche of the ADHD space. Let‘s see how this proceeds, I am fairly optimistic that I am able to perform better according to my self-expectations now.