All of fitw's Comments + Replies

Apologies if I am being stupid (or if others have asked this question), but I have some basic confusion:

<i>At least 90% of my suffering disappeared in an instant, never to return. I had hit Stream Entry, the first major checkpoint on the road to Enlightenment...For my entire life, much of my behavior had been driven by desire. I didn't have desire anymore, but</i>

and after this you say you had to go to a mental ward because you started identifying more stuff as suffering. Am I reading it correctly that stream entry supposedly made your life imm... (read more)

Good point. I didn't know these examples, so my comment is at least partially wrong. I am puzzled about Brahmi numerals: that is supposedly Ashokan Brahmi, but India did not have numerals at the time of Ashoka.

AFAIK, Indians used the little endian notation. Arabs reversed it since they were writing from left to right, but the Europeans did not reverse what the Arabs did. Today of course Indians follow the west in using big endian, but the little endian practice reflects in, for instance, the ka-ṭa-pa-yā-di  system used in Indian musicology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katapayadi_system ).

Would love more commentary on how you seem to go from cooperation to altered state of consciousness, specifically, from (i) below to (ii) below:

(i) Your comment <blockquote>I live in a local pocket of the universe where even my interactions with complete strangers – such as the salespeople at stores – tend to be friendly and warm in tone, or at least politely neutral.</blockquote> This, I can and do believe, is a natural denouement of cooperation.

(ii) That bit about altered states of consciousness ("pure love"?). It is not clear to me that this... (read more)

I don't have any answer, but I have similar-seeming problems (or so I believe). One thing I would like to understand better is whether the problem of "attention span" is really an umbrella term for many different kinds of problems, and understand it in a Kaj Sotala-kind of framework of internal systems. For instance, one can have an attention span problem while reading, because of any of the following reasons (sorry for the long list; please let me know if I am spamming):

1(a) Reading involves effort, which an internal subsystem doesn't want to expend.

1(b) ... (read more)

While I understand that many would find this post irrelevant and distractionary to lesswrong, I can't make sense of a comment like "I did not even want to know the information contained in the title of this post (about which candidate is entering the upcoming national election in the US), and am irritated that I learned it on LessWrong. So I have downvoted."

There is a view that "syncretism" used to be the "default" religious response and natural human tendency (well, why not maximize your portfolio and hedge your bets?), but that a minority of religions that explicitly defined themselves in opposition to other religions had huge evolutionary success, and some of them have shaped modernity.

Sorry I don't have anything useful to comment, but just wanted to thank you profusely for this post. I relate pretty strongly to these very problems, especially the uncertainty of usefulness (often the certainty of uselessness) and the opportunity cost considerations. I don't know any good article where someone talks about handling this issue.