I have a very simple rule of thumb for evaluating the value of products and services: Agency, Resource, Status, and Experience. It reminds me that in everything I buy commercially, I'm paying for ARSE:
I was thinking about the various services and ministries provided by my small-city church, and to reconstruct its social impact, you'd have to have at least these things:
I'm trying a live experiment: I'm going to see if I can match your erisology one-to-one as antagonists to the Elements of Harmony from My Little Pony:
Interesting! They match up surprisingly well, and you've somehow also matched the order of 3 out of 5 of the corresponding "seeds of discord" from 1 Peter 2:1, CSB: "Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander." If my pronouncement of success seems self-serving and opaque, I'll ela...
I posit four basic categories of value: resources, experiences, esteem, and agency. You've listed a group of esteem games.
In the first example, let's assume your spouse likes the other restaurant significantly better than the one you both like. You deny yourself a specific potential positive experience by using your agency to grant her a more positive experience, and in doing so, you obtain the esteem of the sacrificial as well as the esteem of the generous in your spouse's eyes.
If it's a healthy relationship, that esteem is a side benefit which gets folde...
I define SL4 in terms of a description I heard once of a summary of Baudrillard's work: a simulacrum is when a simulation breaks off and becomes its own thing, but still connected to the original. And whether or not that's how Baudrillard thought of SL4, it's a useful concept on its own. (My simulacrum of "simulacrum" as it were.)
For example, a smartphone is a miniature computer and video game console that also has telephone capabilities; it's a simulacrum of Bell's talk-over-telegraph-wires device.
The iPod Video is an almost identical piece of hardware an...
In the late 00's, I was made aware of the Hero's Journey memeplex, the sequence of all Western stories, based on Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. At some point after that, I recognized that it's the same set of instincts as the Stages of Grief -- or rather, the stages of grief, when experienced as a Hero's Journey, lead to the successful end of a particular grieving.
The first stage of grief is denial, and the first step of the hero's journey is life in the "doomed village": things look normal and sound normal, but something's profoundly wrong in the ...
The map is to the territory as the corporate media complex is to the Truth.
Why should I believe a level 4 simulacrum of the election results when all the superweapons are both at stake and in play?
Let's get our ontology correct. She used philosophical tools to approach philosophical problems, and wrote essays on the results in philosophical terminology. That makes her a philosopher. If her results were incorrect, at worst she's an incorrect philosopher like so many others throughout history who moved philosophy into "less wrong" territory.
The same is true of Buddhism, and Christianity too: in addition to being religions, they're philosophies, making ontological and ethical statements and explaining how those were reached. And atheism, while a philos...
Agreed on tech change. We now expect a new generation of video game consoles every five years, a new version of Microsoft Office every three (but did NOT expect the name change to "Microsoft 365," an increasingly ominous claim of ubiquity), and new phones every other year.
The only real technological surprise I've had in a good long while was yesterday when I suddenly realized Notepad.exe now has a "New Window" menu option, which simply spawns another instance of Notepad. To me, this is cause for celebration, and I find myself wondering why there wasn't more fanfare for this superb productivity hack.
Yes, and still a young-Earth creationist too. On here I'd probably clarify my concept of omnipotency as "axiomatic ultra-ability", more similar to a programmer of a simulation than a lightning-tosser in a cloud-chariot in the sky.
As a geek-for-life and dedicated devourer of SF, I compare and contrast the details of what I believe with all the god-fictions out there, from Aslan and Eru Ilúvatar to Star Trek's Q and The Prophets, to the God and Satan of Heinlein's Job, to the Anu/Padomay duality at the core of Elder Scrolls lore...
The COVID Procrastathon claims another good mind.
I had to push through something similar in July. What finally broke my dam of pent-up work was one sudden realization regarding an incident I've long suspected was behind my procrastination:
The very first time I procrastinated hard, and lost something because of it, was the first time my parents said they'd take away something if my homework wasn't complete. I panicked and was in tears for two hours, pleading, but they were steadfast in their abandonment of me to my dark fate. I asked my mom t...
It makes me think a republic is the best form of governance possible among humans, as long as the real smarties are running the show and they have good priors. Real smarties with bad priors may be worse than average successful achievers with good priors.
I remember the late 90's, when I first gained access to the Internet. Here were my people, people who enjoy thinking, minds communicating at a bare-metal level about interesting and smart things.
It was around that time I ran across the concept of a "free-thinker" and started mulling over that label in my mind. It sounded like a compliment, something I'd like if people started calling me that. After all, I don't think the way other people do (thanks, autism!), and I had always felt like a mind trapped in a body. But the first time I...
My own experience with my mental mountains has led me to what I call the "One, Two, Many" model of emotion formation and annihilation.
1: There is an initial event which causes a sensory memory of the experience to get stuck in my mind, usually a visual/tactile memory with an associated specific type of feeling bad, or more rarely, feeling good.
2: There is a reinforcing event, which has a specific similar characteristic that makes my mind go, "these are the same type of thing," like having a hard time remembering the names of both Al Pac...
Stability's value is as a loss-prevention or expense-prevention resource: a status of being predictable or being resistant to immediate entropy in some way. It's such a broadly applicable concept that its benefits are practically ubiquitous, and it adds all the types of value to various circumstances.
Stability of a situation, as in the expectation of not having to anticipate much change, allows you to conserve resources you might otherwise need to devote toward anticipation of contingencies; you can also thus experience the opposite of anxiety.
A ...
I've been working on something similar myself. I've identified four qualitatively different categories of "things of value" that we humans seem geared toward:
In the scrapped early version of the script, the world is a much darker place. Carnivores are made to wear taser collars that activate when their emotions (measured by physiological stress) reach a point that the collar believes the carnivore is attacking someone, or about to.
The beast at the top of the scheme we see in the movie is power-mad with a Napoleon Complex, tired of being put down and put upon. But it's too well done, too well-funded, to be just a rogue politician. No, this has money behind it. And I have no doubt that were this fiend's plot to have reached its conclusion, there would surprisingly quickly have been a taser collar around the neck of every carnivore in the city.
What we know so far is that there tends to be vascular damage: the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels are the cells most affected. The longer a person has it, the worse the damage will be. In this case, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
The lungs have a huge network of very fine blood vessels which are particularly vulnerable. Obesity and diabetes negatively impact the circulatory system. Some cancers have ACE2 expression which results in higher risk. Thinking of COVID-19 as a circulatory disease is a better model than thinking of it as a...
According to right-wing media I listened to with half-an-ear and thus cannot repeat their methodology, "they" changed the definition of "case" to include something related to contact tracing.
Man, it's hard to filter out noise in this environment. The Lancet has a paper from April on how China redefined cases to account for asymptomatics and contact tracing, and saw a huge jump in cases. But if the definition of "case" changes and there's a jump in the number of "cases," it probably means nobody's reint...
Which, indeed, is why I categorized "certification" as Status or marketing: the product gains standing in the eyes of whoever believes the certification has merit, but gains negative status with whoever distrusts the certifier.