mosasaur

It is very likely you did not need glasses. But now that your eyes are used to them you probably need them. What was happening was your eyes adjusted to your way of life. If you would have reacted better to the signal your eyes were giving you, you would have started to focus more on things in the distance and then switch to things closer by, retraining your eyes. My eyes are not accommodating very well either, but one eye is in far mode and the other in near more, so I can see reasonably well at all distances. It is no surprise that for both eyes the optimal distance is... (read more)

"What does you gut instinct say about a lawyer who is paid an average of a quarter of a million dollars for a year's work in which e puts an average of 2 innocent people in jail for six years each and donates on average 2% of er income (5000 dollars) to buying mosquito nets for third world children, saving on average 10 lives?"

You are forgetting the lawyer works to uphold the status quo. If that status quo ("the system") also makes arms dealers reach and invades third world countries or does other despicable things, the net effect of the lawyers actions can still be negative. Think about it as different math... (read more)

"I might be missing something, but this (and the rest of your post) reads basically like Marxist propaganda."

Thank you. Marx was a very intelligent person who unraveled much of the inner workings of capitalism. His error was -- I think -- that there is something like a collective will of the people (a CEV, maybe) and that there is an effective way of measuring and implementing it. We all know how badly it turned out. But maybe the idea of harnessing collective greed is even worse because it seems flawed already from the beginning.

"Just about the only way to make a lot of money is to do something that other people want... (read more)

"Wouldn't that depend on how much harm the lawyer might do by remaining at the high-powered law firm?"

Yes. This logical error is present in all the charity related articles. By the time you own the money it is too late. You have helped a corrupt system to become even more corrupt. No amount of money donated to charity -- not even a multiple of the money you earned -- can right that wrong. Not even with maximally effective charity.

If the leaders are wrong and can't be deposed it doesn't help to try and save their victims, because as soon as you help them, whatever they gain is taken from them and... (read more)

You'd like to hear more? According to all the down votes there aren't many like you.

Unfortunately you won't like what I have to say either, I think. I hate your life tracking idea. Too many attempts to maintain my weight by calorie counting and weighing my food. Even when I was successful it destroyed my motivation and killed my intelligence. I believe many overweight people are really eating and eating because there are not enough vitamins and other nutrients in their food, especially vitamin D.

I also hate the fact that I up voted the GP when his "save the world" idea, using money and mathematics is total crap. As... (read 386 more words →)

Good point Somehow I've always been attracted to taking the road less taken. Maybe there is a group level reason for that, it would be nice if it turns out my actions are not entirely egoistic. I don't make much of a distinction between processes inside humans and processes between humans. For me, pjeby's akrasia theory about conflicting motor programs can be explained in a similar way as you are doing now for scientific progress that uses differences between scientific theories as a way to generate enough diversity for an optimization process to work with. In that light I am a bit skeptical about the negative attitude about akrasia I often... (read more)