All of a363's Comments + Replies

an excerpt From Neal Asher's "The Gabble: And Other Stories":

"‘Same arguments apply,’ he replies, and of course they do. ‘God?’ I ask. He laughs in my face then says, ‘I try to understand it. I don’t try to cram it in to fit my understanding.’ He definitely has the essence of it there."

I also sweat a lot and the best way I've found of dealing with the discomfort is a merino wool baselayer. And not just for sports: I will probably never buy another pair of cotton boxers or socks.

Cotton gets wet, then cold and clingy, which can exacerbate blisters (socks). All sorts of high-tech synthetics start to stink real fast (I don't have much experience with silver-treated fabrics though). Wool wicks very well, will not stink even after a week of wear, it retains 50% heat insulation and does not cling against the body even if it is saturated with s... (read more)

0Alicorn
Wool is itchy. And my dislike of sweat has little if anything to do with what I'm wearing when it happens.

What about "war is OK for me"?

It really gets to me that when a bunch of people gather together under some banner then it suddenly becomes moral for them to do lots of things that would never be allowed if they were acting independently: the difference between war and murder...

The only morality I want is the kind where people stop doing terrible things and then saying "they were following orders". Personal responsibility is the ONLY kind of responsibility.

Your brain, like mine, might have trouble handling social interaction by default, but if you devote sufficient attention, you may well make progress, perhaps even significant progress. In my experience, many nerdy people who claim to have trouble understanding people don't direct anywhere near as much cognition towards social interaction as they do towards the things they are good at

The last part is certainly true but I'm not sure I don't enjoy socializing by default: when I was a kid I never lacked for friends and was pretty open and curious about them... (read more)

I hope it's true in the sense that I won't one day start thinking that I somehow understand ("grok") humanity and know what it means to be human (or just a sentient being) in a general sense.

In the specific sense, individual people are not that mysterious in their behaviour most of the time. But their motivations can be hard to understand from their own point of view. I guess it's mostly because I can't be bothered to find out...

7HughRistik
I used to have trouble understanding humans, but then I devoted a hobby-slot worth of effort to the problem, and it went away. Your brain, like mine, might have trouble handling social interaction by default, but if you devote sufficient attention, you may well make progress, perhaps even significant progress. In my experience, many nerdy people who claim to have trouble understanding people don't direct anywhere near as much cognition towards social interaction as they do towards the things they are good at. Don't just try to understand someone's motivations when you run into some sort of difficulty or challenge with them. Try to understand every single person you meet and try to see the world through their eyes. You need to accrue enough data that you can start seeing patterns. Over time, you may be able to evaluate people faster and faster until eventually you will just get an intuition or a feeling about them. In the Star Wars novels, Grand Admiral Thrawn studied the art of species he fought to understand their psychology better for his military strategy. Listen to popular music and watch popular TV shows and movies. These media appeal to human beings with modal cognitive architecture. With enough exposure, these media might resonate with you. You may be able to cognitively reverse engineer people's mental architecture. Media has a message, and people consume media because that message appeals to their motivations and emotions. Why is this? You get a certain emotion when you listen to a song (if it's a popular song, you probably don't like it, I would guess based on what you've revealed so far). Do other people like experiencing that emotion? If so, why? Or are other people getting a different message from the song? If so, what sort of mind and motivational/emotional structure might they have such that the emotional and conceptual message of the song appeals to them? Make hypotheses about people, and try to test them. For example, make a guess about someone
2loqi
I suspect that when examined closely enough, your motivations are also likely to be hard to understand from your point of view.

I've always been interested in how stuff works and I've taken apart or built from scratch a lot of the stuff I've owned. I've built stuff as small as a molecule or as big as a hangglider without even considering asking for expert help - it's just so easy and enjoyable, I can think things through, do research and come to understand something new...

But I've never been interested in how people work. It seems to me it's impossible to understand things that are outside my experience and there's a lot I can never experience for myself, to understand. I've never ... (read more)

5Cayenne
You learned by taking apart and building things from scratch... maybe you just haven't taken apart and built from scratch enough people? (Sorry, it was the first thing that popped into my head when I read that.) Edit - please disregard this post
5nerzhin
This might be your point, but the above statement is probably not true. Not to say it's easy to begin learning to solve people, or even that it's worth it. But it's probably possible.

That is indeed true, but only because people have the ability to whip themselves into a >very sincere feeling of offense given the incentive to do so. Although sincere, these >feelings will usually subside if they realize that nothing's to be gained.

I'm reminded of how small children might start crying when they trip and fall and skuff their knee, but will only keep on (and/or escalate) crying if someone is nearby to pay attention...

My current guess is that it's because of the increasing institutionalization of society, >which is caused by economic growth. When your tribe is made up of a hundred >people, you can model each person in high detail when you interact with them - >taking into account their personality, their strengths and weaknesses, their past >interactions with you, and so on. However, in a corporation with a hundred thousand >people, the CEO doesn't have time to construct complex models of each worker, >and yet he must ensure that all the workers coope

... (read more)

Right. Or from another angle: people who do not have dogs are considered pariahs, so the dogless are getting a nocebo all the time. So when they take the placebo (dog) their increase in well being would mostly be through the elimination of the nocebo effect.

"Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest (The end for others sought) Watch sloth and heathen folly Bring all your hope to nought." -Rudyard Kipling

4benelliott
How is this related to rationality?

It seems the statement "I am happy" can mean one is experiencing an fleeting positive reaction to external reality or it can describe the speaker as someone who does a lot of BEING happy, who is mindful of the way the impact of positive and negative stimuli on their consciousness is integrated into their perception of the world and tries to steer the process in a way that shifts the baseline of their perceived happiness higher. One could just decide to be happy all the time and through practice achieve this, but the rationalizations required to s... (read more)

1murat
So what happened after that? Did your technique stop working?

Can't help but twist that into "To educate a society in morals and not in mind is to educate a menace to humanity..."

0Document
To educate a man in "morals" and not in morals etcetera etcetera. Edit: alternatively: something something wild and wasted virtues.