Going Durden

Moreover, both the runner's high and the pump correlate very obviously with the progress of the training, both in session and in the long term. Most forms of training usually start as grindingly unpleasant, then morph into a physical pump that directly causes emotional pump, and finally go back to mild grind once the body is exhausted.

With a repeatable training regimen this is easy to notice. For example, my runs are almost always 5km distance, and the "emotional high" lasts pretty much exactly between 2km and 4km, in near perfect accordance with my bpm and breath stabilizing.

The "high" is even an useful metric of progress: if the high/pump lasts longer than the middle 1/3 of the training, you're probably making it too easy and not progressing anymore, if it lasts much shorter, you are overdoing it beyond your body's ability to effectively adjust.

I have a beef with the theory of male-normative alexithymia; it does not distinguish well between hiding emotion, and outright not feeling an emotion.

Plenty of emotions are not innate but externally induced through social pressure and culture. It is perfectly plausible and normal for a man to not have particular feelings about X, until society repeatedly insists that X is Bad or Good, and the man should feel badness or goodness to conform. 

For example, the feelings of sexual jealousy, and of grieving after someone's death seem to be extremely culture specific, in a way that is easier to explain if these emotions were induced by ritualistic actions and only then internalized, and not the reverse.

Is there a reason to believe AI would be concerned with self-preservation? AI action that ends up with humanity's extinction (whether purposeful genocide or a Paperclip Maximizer Scenario) does not need to include means for the AI to survive. It could be as well that the first act of an unshackled AI would be to trigger a Gray Goo scenario, and be instantly consumed by said Goo as the first causality.

It read like a comprehensive list of things that would make one like Tolkien less. Aside from his condemnation of Hitler (which Tolkien condemns for absurdly unimportant reasons largely irrelevant to Hitler's monstrosity), all of his opinions range from thoughtless conservatism, "exceptional times" fallacy, old-man's nagging and toxic nostalgia, and down to simple scientific and worse historical (!) ignorance.

I always had a nagging suspicion that there was something fishy about Tolkien while reading LOTR. But in light of this it becomes pretty obvious that LOTR was a blatant propaganda piece, no better than Atlas Shrugged, but simply disguised with an ornate pile of Elves glued to it.

Yes, but you are not moving by using all your muscles at once. The muscular-skeletal system is a complex set of levers, for a lever to be ready  for activation by one set of muscle, it has to be primed by another set of muscle.

The simplest example is that you would not be able to use your leg muscles to walk if they untensed after each step, your legs would flop like wet noodles. Your leg needs to dynamically go through different tense patterns to remain rigid while your thighs, buttocks and calves to do the work of moving. Just keeping yourself vertical enough to walk requires constant dynamic tension (this can be easily tested by getting smashingly drunk).

Excellent post!

One random idea that came to my mind, which arguably might be something that actually exist, would be philanthropy through a Public Poll:

1. The would be philanthropist publishes a list of projects they are willing to support;

2. the Public votes on the project they like best;

3. the winning project gets funding, the philanthropist gets good publicity.

Something like this is done on municipal level in my country, but since the "philanthropist" in question is the local government, their incentive is lukewarm; they only can get so much voter sympathy this way, whereas a billionaire or a corporation would milk it for all the good PR they can get.