All of senguidev's Comments + Replies

You feel your limbs weird, and what? What implication are you trying to point to? How should your experience or insight contribute to rationality and moral philosophy?

The reasoning is quite basic actually.

  1. You believe, for decades, that X happening would make absolutely no rational sense.
  2. X happens.
  3. You are shocked. You realize your rationality was lacking.
  4. You didn't thought your rationality could be lacking in this way.
  5. This meta-fact is important for rationality.

Yes, we have inherent biases but [...] they are not resolved by merely being aware of them

Except ... (read more)

I wish too. This is an extraordinary bold claim though. There's no logical reasoning from "here a few, sparse, mostly theoretical ideas" to "so this is how this immensely complex systems involving billions of humans and organisations with agency we have no idea how to model should behave if we changed some major factor by a few orders of magnitude". 

You can only make the jump with vibes or politics. And fine, since we have no idea, I'd rather make an optimistic jump too! I hope you manage to distill some nuanced faith in the future, sincere thanks for trying!

The arguments are interesting and not so usual, so always interesting to nourish reflexion, thanks (I was personally familiar with them).

A world with a large and growing population is a dynamic world that can create and sustain progress.

The right conclusion though is "this is a very complicated subject, we have no idea if it's better or worse to have more or less people".

7jasoncrawford
I don't think that's right. The world now is much better than the world when it was smaller, and I think that is closely related to population growth. So I think it is actually possible to conclude that more people are better.
Answer by senguidev3619

Hi concerned_dad,

I'm not a parent and have no knowledge or experience with drugs. I don't think I qualify to directly answer your sensitive request. So I won't, except by upvoting Ruby's answer that sound pretty helpful.

However I would really like to salute your tone and overall approach. It sounds very caring and pretty open-minded. The good kind of caring, not ferociously over-protecting. Sure, you worry - who wouldn't in this situation? People can be quick to lecture, judge, point out flaws and be a little too harsh on the internet (even well-meaning). ... (read more)

I know very few sons who would respectfully and openly converse with their parents about topics like this with the aim of getting an outside viewpoint, and I believe lesswrong contributed to this conscientiousness, so thanks to everyone here who models that!

Thanks for sharing this !

Obviously you've put a lot of thinking and experimenting in it, congrats. Maybe so much so that (as you imagined) it's a bit difficult, for me at least, to discuss the details of this method...
However, from the general tone and exploration, I believe you'd really appreciate reading more about CBT.  The version you've been told sounds immensely reductive and misses the point.
A variant of CBT that I've found more approachable to begin with was ACT.  There are accessible books for general audience such as The Happiness Trap ... (read more)

If you want to go further, "Reinventing Organizations" by Frederic Laloux is basically a book on "creating full alternative stacks".

He tried to compile examples of organizations working with this mindset. He tries to build intuition on why these are successful and how to reproduce their success. It goes into practical details of internal processes / tools adapted to this new way of working.

My take is that it's hard. But probably worth trying because there isn't any better alternatives.

If you're seriously interested in finding a way out of bad equilibria, this book surprisingly clarifies a lot of unsuspected options. I highly recommend it. 

This paper felt significant and promising, but 8 years later, there seem to be no real follow-up. Do we know why? Am I missing something?