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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 51m \ parent \ on: Stacker Saloon
Ah. You might have guessed that I'm prone to guilt, but in this case I'm not, bc anyone who resonated with that post has something in their heart that they need to attend to.
I wish you success on your quest. Hope to keep seeing you around.
Two giant text files in org mode -- one for transient daily thoughts, one as a permanent store of concepts of lasting importance. Have some other auxilliary stuff, but they pale in comparison and account for 5% of my mental cycles, or less.
20 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 13 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
It sounds awesome! I bet whoever does something like that would walk away with some crazy perspective in all kinds of ways.
120 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Why did the non-economic arguments not make sense to you?
I expressed it badly: I've seen economic arguments that it's hard to get started on a family by most of the standard definitions (have a house, some economic security) and how that would cause perverse effects is easy enough to understand. The other class of arguments tend to range over much larger territory, and I didn't know which things you were talking about, but now I do thanks to your elaborated answer.
It makes it really frustrating to find someone who doesn’t think you’re a bad person because of X, as if only X matters.
I wish I was still in the game because I'm v curious about this. It seems like everybody is feeling this same thing, no? Nobody likes what it's doing to them. Which seems like something you could unite over. Like, if your profile called it out. "I'm looking to connect w/ someone and not get lost in these stupid labels and tribalisms and all that." But maybe that's naiive.
I can say, not from online dating but from life, even from SN, which is kind of a hostile environment for this kind of thing, which makes it a good example: putting yourself out there, earnestly, makes you a target for stupid bullshit, but there's always people who are hungry for real interaction, and they respond. It's always happened, to such a degree that it seems corny: put yourself out there, be real, have positive regard for people by default, and people matching that description turn up in all sorts of places.
Again, not denying your own experience. Dating is its own weird game. I wish I could play still, just to see what it's like now. Although from what you're reporting, maybe it would erode one of my handful of comforting beliefs about the world :(
20 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Being expensive isn't the same thing as purchasing a child, obviously.
The distinction isn't as obvious to me -- or to most people, apparently -- as it is to you. Which is not itself a problem.
The problem would be if you think you've performed some devastating praxeological smackdown, which you have not. However, it wouldn't be my problem, so I'm content to let it alone.
We should pay close attention to this because if we think they're fighting Bitcoin now... we're delusional.
It would be nice if more people understood this.
20 sats \ 9 replies \ @elvismercury OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
yes, he thinks his generation is mostly fucked (ha!) when it comes to dating.
Why? "Dating" is overbroad, so maybe that's what I'm confused about. Do you mean:
- getting married
- having a family
- being in a stable long-term relationship
- something else
I've read some Gen-Z stuff on the topic but it's never made a ton of sense to me, since the arguments have generally been non-economic ones, so I'd be interested in your perspective.
40 sats \ 7 replies \ @elvismercury OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process
Have you been through an adoptive process? It's quite expensive. Significant amounts of money change hands before a baby ends up as the legal child of the adoptive parents. You don't have to like surrogacy, but the arguments you're making seem pretty tenuous to me.
I'm curious if you have similar feelings about broad swathes of the economy where people in dire circumstances take shitty jobs that nobody in less dire circumstances would ever take. For instance, there's quite the cottage industry in third-world countries paying people to adjudicate terrible videos of animals being tortured for fun, and the like. The psychological costs of this job are substantial, but presumably people in those circumstances think it's less bad than the alternative. Is this fine, or not fine?
20 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
If we agree to leave it up to the individual to judge the rightness/wrongness (or wrongness/more wrongness, as you seem to suggest) of their actions, then shouldn't we also establish what measuring stick they need to use?
It depends on what the exercise is for. One could impose some set of moral axioms and reason forward from it, and say "this is how it should work" and make a rule set for how we should punish this or that. But others aren't likely to be bound by my logic, so I can't get very excited about the exercise.
You can get pretty far with some pretty basic stuff, though -- the golden rule is pretty good. It's relative, but it seems a stretch, in any era, to argue that people really don't see the problem with raping and murdering women in Juarez, or lynching negroes for moving into the wrong neighborhood. One can make the argument ("I'd expect the same if I moved into their place where I wasn't wanted") but I don't believe it.
40 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.
The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.
I do wonder if most people go around, as I do, knowing they're doing terrible things, and do them anyway, because they can, because it's normal and nobody's stopping them, and they get by through a willful act of looking-away.
Or whether the wrongness doesn't even occur to them, and so there's nothing to look away from.
And I don't know which I think is worse.
69 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Basically, I don't think being so obsessed with things I have no control over and that evoke overwhelmingly negative feelings is very additive to my life.
Can relate. It's the curse of the curious person, to have to resist the temptation to indulge in things that are undeniably important but unproductive in any good sense.
140 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Bryan Caplan occasionally does posts where he makes a big list of things that seemed abhorrent and hideously unnatural over the years, that now we don't think twice about. This seems like that, to me.
The bigger class of concerning things, imo, are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.
69 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Interesting! Do you have an answer to that question (e.g., an aspirational answer) that was inconsistent w/ the listening habit, or did you unsubscribe bc the implicit answer was one you didn't like?
80 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Agreed with all of this. I would only add: young women seem to have their own flavor, it's just pointed in a slightly different direction. Freya India writes persuasively on this topic.
142 sats \ 19 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
I'm sympathetic to both of your points:
- every generation thinks the next is utterly ruined
- right now feels (to me) acutely bad
... but then I think that maybe, wrt #2, I am exquisitely sensitive to certain flavors of ruin, and see it clearly, and see that it's worse than ever. But then I think that every generation may have had their own particularly fine-tuned feature detectors.
For instance, there are people alive now for whom the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times; that worry seems absurd to me, but I have an entirely different mental ecology as a function of my path and era.
It's a foreignness that's hard to simulate, I think.
21 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Same. Since I've been on "sabbatical" for 7 weeks I've started reading fiction (in book form) voraciously again, and it's like waking up to myself. Oh yeah, I remember when the inside of my head felt like this, it's nice.
I never want to go back. In fact, I want to keep pushing forward, whatever that means.
20 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Rats that built their own lab.
102 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
Thank you for appreciating my craft.