Perhaps hobbies/careers that involve crafting a physical object have some built-in psychological advantage in generating feelings of fulfillment compared to other hobbies/careers?
Do you view moral agency as something binary, or do you think entities can exist on a continuous spectrum of how agentic they are? From this post and the preceding one, I’m not sure whether you have any category for “more agentic than a cat but less agentic than myself”.
I’m not sure “proximity” is the best word to describe the Good Samaritan’s message. I think “ability to help” would more centrally describe what it’s getting at, though of course prior to the creation of modern telecommunications, globalized financial systems, etc. “proximity” and “ability to help” were very strongly correlated.
I think for many philosophers, the claim “abstract objects are real” doesn’t depend on the use of mathematics to model physical reality. I think considering pure math is more illustrative of this point of view.
Andrew Wiles once described the experience of doing math research as:
“Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room...”
Since this is also what it feels like to study an unfamiliar part of physical reality, it’s intuitive to think that the mathematics you’re studying constitutes some reality that exists independently of human minds. Whether this intuition is actually correct is a rather different question…
farming and science and computers and rocket ships and everything else, none of which has any straightforward connection to tasks on the African savannah.
Farming does have a straightforward connection to techniques used by hunter-gatherers to gather plants more effectively. From page 66 of "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" by James C. Scott:
... hunters and gatherers, as we have seen, have long been sculpting the landscape: encouraging plants that will bear food and raw materials later, burning to create fodder and attract game, weeding natural stands of desirable grains and tubers. Except for the act of harrowing and sowing, they perform all the other operations for wild stands of cereals that farmers do for their crops.
I don't think "inject as much heroin as possible" is an accurate description of the value function of heroin addicts. I think opioid addicts are often just acting based off of the value function "I want to feel generally good emotionally and physically, and don't want to feel really unwell". But once you're addicted to opioids the only way to achieve this value in the short term is to take more opioids.
My thinking on this is influenced by the recent Kurzgesagt video about fentanyl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6KnVTYtSc0.
If you were to start yearning for children, you would either (a) be able to resist the yearning, or (b) be unable to resist the yearning and choose to have kids. In case (a), resisting might be emotionally unpleasant, but I don't think it's worth being "terrified of". In case (b), you might be misunderstanding your terminal goals, or else the approximation that all of the squishy stuff that comprises your brain can be modeled as a rational agent pursuing some set of terminal goals breaks down.
In what sense does the Society of Friends require more commitment than Unitarian Universalist or humanist churches do?
Neat!
In the linked example, I don’t think “expert consensus” and “groupthink” are two ways to describe the same underlying reality with different emotional valences. Groupthink describes a particular sociological model of how a consensus was reached.
Which airlines make you pay when they force you to check your bag due to running out of overhead bin space? I frequently have to check my bag intended for the overhead bin due to being among the last to board, and I’ve never been charged a fee for this.