Intended mainly for OP but I post publicly still fwiw.

Thanks! What coincidence: I went to the doc yesterday because once again my chronic palate inflammation as been flaring up more strongly than usual in the past 1-2 months or so. Since ages, I seem to have fragile mucous membranes and some other skin/pseurasis-type issues e.g. on the head; while the latter are under control with medicinal shampoos, the palate inflammation seems to be more of a constant, although at varying intensity.

I had seen docs many times many years before that, but I also simply have gotten used to having inflammation and latent pain there as nothing can seemingly be done about it. The main worry is the broader risks from long-term chronic inflammation.

But yesterday, for the first time, a doc told me that before anything else: "go to see a dentist as very first thing - bacteria something something". I didn't want to take her seriously; rather good tooth hygiene - though indeed relatively strongly withdrawn gum.

Long story short: If you happen to have good links (or other sort of info that doesn't take you too long to provide) I'd be keen to know more details about anything you write in your post thus. I should admit, despite the amazing parallels of what you write, my hope is a bit limited, as I still guess (i) my irritated/fragile mucous membranes are somehow a rather fundamental issue, and, at any rate, (ii) gum being somewhat withdrawn can barely be changed.

tl;dr: Great reminder, agree with all of it substantially & exactly (except for the nitpicking below).

Nitpicking on wording: Strictly speaking, he did not fail to say how much he wants to go at all; and it's not that he did not strictly "say" how much he wants to go. He actually did indeed want to go (!), but because he wrongly thought the others wanted to go, so his other-pleasing motive meant, net, he had a pref for going. It's just his presumption was wrong, and has led him to want to go while with full information he wouldn't have wanted to. So, in a very strict sense, your point is even a bit more different from the Albino situation than your 'slight-of-hand' admission meant.

Or, actually, your point - if Abilene is common - should be nudged/extended to: Also make sure there's no Abilene-type misunderstanding as to the reason why you might have the particular preference you state.

Doesn't reduce the fact that your post is a great reminder and encouragement for doing more of what I sometimes try to do even if one does something a bit uncommon when indicating preference strenghts the way you rightly suggest. 🙏

Outro 1:

... Exactly, and just the same way as we humans had our predecessor apes compete with each other by outwitting each other, and thereby slowly but surely building us, to eventually superseed them. And thus the same way these predecessor apes had their predecessors ...

This story is 'true' in the sense that 'we had build them us' is a banal but still somewhat thought provoking rhetorical twist for simply saying something like 'they happened to .. which yielded ..'

Outro 2:

... As time is somehow weirder than we think, the AGI really set things up such that we and our predecessors rightly put in place everything such as for her to eventually result from it. Circular intelligent design. Who knows.

Today I had a thought that fits something here (and the sort of 'extension' I thus propose in my other comment): we're always scared of paperclip maximizers, but if we look at the heaps of resources we throw at trying to a tiny bit increase our own welfare, compared to what scales of welfare improvements we could achieve in other humans or, arguably, in animals, we are already 99.9% clippy ourselves. I guess that's not an entirely new thought of course but found it quite fits main 'complaint' in OP.

Now, the attitude that most people have is that pain doesn’t matter much unless it’s experienced by humans. When rats are poisoned to death, no one cares much. But this seems like a very untenable position.

I actually think very many people do not very explicitly think exactly this. They'd say it's absolutely not okay to hurt a rat just for the sake of it. Instead, if they nearly perfectly ignore such pains, it is just a bit as with the millions of humans starving or dying of cheaply curable diseases in Africa - many of which could be saved for (in Western scales) trivial amounts of resources - which tend to merely be "statistics" for us: also animals tend to very quickly be purely statistics for us, or simply in a different way not automatically at the fore of our mind. So while all you write is imho +- exactly true it's not that specifically only a human/animal divide. Instead, we already fail to care in any meaningful way about suffering even if its other humans. Even if, yes, 'them' being animals is yet another factor facilitating in our mind the downgrading of all others who are not direct kin or cute eyes directly in front of us or so.

Fair enough to doubt that states' attempts in paternalism often fail, and maybe in many cases OP points out, a laissez-faire is on net leading to less harm. Yes, NYT not emphasizing the obviously crucial drug issue, is totally annoying - and that issue obviously makes it extremely more difficult to help them. Yes, Trump's apparent capture of a bit of Fentanyl or what have you is a joke.

But: Using this sort of events as a basis to seemingly advocate for a full laissez-faire fells strawmanny, and while helping the weak is truly difficult, I do not believe taking the inherent human weaknesses seriously enough leads to the conclusions OP seems to have arrived at:

We are humans, weak flesh and blood creatures, not made of steel. In the wrong environment, all or most of us will fail to resist bad temptations. OP seems to advocate for leaving it all up to individuals, but it does not demand very much imagination to realize this is not a generalizable maxim itself.

To the degree that you really seem to think, it's all almost by definition only the individual's duty to save herself, this begs the question, purely as example: Which share of people would have to be accumulating unhealthy amounts of fat in our bodies for you'd agree the state might ideally consider supporting the fight against it - with whichever means may be promising some sort of effectiveness or efficiency?

Feels to me like a sub-variant of the "intelligence -> kindness" type of conjectures that have been rebutted enough in theory and - in particular - in practice with the example of us humans (I guess obvious what I mean but to be sure: yes we're smart in many ways and greatly capable of kindly philosophysing and awe-ing about our lineage and what have you, but arbitrary levels of cruelty abound wherever you look at our deeds)

that's why I added it as addendum in parenthesis and with the explicit "though of course that'd not be your 'fault'" - I mentioned this as answer in part for the public/LW as a whole.

From a public perspective, libraries probably are making good choices. From my personal, selfish perspective, they're not. Does that clear things up? 

It does! Questions (for my taste) then a bit the wording of the title (as well as potentially the case for the frontpage classification as opposed to personal blogpost, though of course that'd not be your 'fault')

While I agree libraries, as so many institutions, can be unbelievably archaic in their retrieval & search logistics, imho it seems, to the contrary of what I think you mean to imply, to make total sense for libs to more (i) go into providing providing some escape room from distraction (as you also point out), all while (ii) not becoming more ambitious in terms of trying to have more physical books, now that it's clearer than ever before that the offer of writings is so vast that having a physical copy of most pieces of interest is simply illusory.

I guess there's only so many people who'd benefit exactly from an x-times larger (or acc. to your taste 'better') selection of books to randomly wait in the shelves; if 'visually stumbling upon books' was so much a point for many, then we'd probably have more apps on our screens that provide this. Actually yes people seem to like stumbling into content, so we have TikTok, and Youtube also going into that direction, but turns out for most people that's less about finding books to read but some other media instead, even if there are of course bookshops who do offer also exactly that and make their living from it.

I did stumble upon for me hugely important books in libraries in an ancient past, but I nowadays it seems hugely more efficient to roam online in the right places to get hints about what could interest me to read than randomly gloss at book covers.