No, The Sort is succeeding in Europe, it's just that Europe is on the low end of The Sort in most cases, and most of the Sorted are getting relocated to other places that offer better pay and amenities.

This happens because most of Europe has made it illegal to be upper middle class thanks to an aggressive tax regime. The upper middle class can only exist where marginal labor can generate enough income to push them into the bottom rungs up the upper class.

I think The Sort is something different but related.

When I think of the rat race, I think of how people feel disconnected from the value of their labor. They feel like their work has no meaning because they are removed from the real impact by several layers. They feel like all they do is push paper (or now, send emails) and never see how their work connects to the real world.

The rat race is perhaps a byproduct of the processes that create The Sort, but we could have a rat race without The Sort (I think it'd be fair to say Japan has this even when it was insulated from The Sort).

The fourth color opsin for these animals lies in the ultraviolet.

Hmm, but my understanding is that humans who are natural tetrachromats see more colors in the yellow-red part of the spectrum. And humans already can see UV light a little, but the thing that stops this from being visible is actually the lens, which blocks UV light normally to protect our eyes. So what I know suggests that even if we could change our cones we'd still fail to see UV light.

Not to be rude, but I'm confused why this is labeled "Practical" and landed on the Frontpage. This reads like a personal blog to me, which I don't mind, but isn't what I expected based on the labels.

Like yes I can read into this post as being something more than just a slice of life story about the author, but this is roughly true of literally any slice of life post.

Not "ego-less" but "viscerally knowing my ego isn't in charge of what it thinks it's in charge of". I'm also not confident that this was the same thing as stream-entry/enlightened/etc.

For what it's worth, as I model the path, I'd guess that this was stream entry. That is, you had insight into the non-separateness of self for the first time. It's expected that it doesn't stick, as only rarely does that happen (very, very few people seem to experience sudden, persistent awakening), but it gave you a taste of it, and with dedicated practice it can become persistent, but it general requires having a string of insights over months and years that resolve various confusions that stand in the way of persistence.

I constantly find myself needing to give opposing advice because I'll read something and feel like it leaves out the other side. So, someone says meditation is great, I'm like, woah, there are risks. Someone says meditation sucks or not worth doing, and I extoll its virtues.

Apparently I'm forever cursed to push people back towards the middle way. 😜

On one hand, at every individual step, these things made sense and (I have to admit) they worked, in that they pushed us over some difficult hurdles and actually got us to accomplish what seems to me like it was some useful stuff. But on the other hand, ingredients like these are what the Stockholm Syndrome is made of, and I saw that taking hold in myself and those around me.

In some Buddhist lineages, like Zen, the relationship between student and teacher is meant to be like that between child and parent. However, this is a relationship that normally develops over months and years, and at first you're treated more like a lost child who's a guest that might end up staying and getting adopted or might wander on. Many teachers won't let new students attend sesshins (retreats) both because their practice might not be strong enough to handle it and because the relationship between teacher and student is not yet firmly established.

Personally, I think Zen's cautious approach is better than throwing people into the deep end. Best I can tell, the risk of psychosis is much higher with Goenka style retreats, although I don't have hard numbers, only anecdotal evidence and theory that suggests it should be more common.

I’ve come to the conclusion that none of this would truly help me, and that, one way or another, I’m going to die anyway. What difference does it make whether I die in 60 years or in 10,000? In the end, I’ll still be dead.

The difference is 9,940 years of living! Who knows what you might get up to.

Perhaps it's a difference of opinion, but the value of life is in the living of it, not in how it ends.

The problems with local positivism seem to me... kinda important philosophically, but less so in practice.

Yes, most of the time they don't matter, but then sometimes they do! I think in particular the wrongness of logical positivism matters a lot if you're trying to solve a problem like proving that an AI is aligned with human flourishing because there's a specific, technical answer you want to guarantee but it requires formalizing a lot of concepts that normally squeak by because all the formal work is being done by humans who share assumptions. But when you need the AI to share those assumptions, things get dicier.