There is a very good article pinned to the start of Less Wrong at the time I am writing this, where the author starts by pointing out that human beings ‘run on corrupted hardware.’
This is a tech analogy, which might be meant to point at that homo sapiens have not evolved to live in the environment that they currently inhabit, with many first and second-order problems derived. On that level, the analogy is solid. But it is part of a deeper struggle, the problem of language, when married to the perils of modernity.
Let us give this some context. A computer/smartphone/any digital device/program has both hardware, which encompass broadly its mechanical components, and... (read 186 more words →)
I would base the justification of my response in regards to the validity of your argument on these terms:
1. In your opening statement, you admit to a false premise in order to grow the size of your audience.
2. In the body of your statement, you make many claims such as ‘some people’ and ‘more people ’, without any concrete example to cite- exactly how many people can or would benefit from doing more?
3. Your argument towards increasing ‘agency’ in others is thinly defined, without clearly stating whether or not this increased agency would also lead to increased happiness or production for the individual or society at large.
4. Your closing statement is an appeal towards personal emotions, and does not contain anything of substance.
5. Finally, your response to critical commentary contains most of these errors as well.
With all this in mind, I cannot personally agree with your argument that human beings should do more instead of less.
This seems like an awful way to read. Do you go to art museums to train your eyeballs? Do you flavor your meals so that your tongue will know the difference between spices? Why does your reading need any purpose, at all? What is the purpose of breath?
I think this is bad advice. Further, I think that the worldview the author espouses is inherently false, and that she acknowledges this in the opening statement, which is about as good an example of Satre’s “bad faith” as I can think of, on the internet.
A thought exercise, taken from a recent podcast- a guru tells her followers to ‘do something’. The followers, in their existential modernist angst, agree to do the something that the guru says to do. In doing ‘the something’ the followers pay tens of thousands of dollars to the guru, and some of them die in a trust-fall mishap. Question- who are the lives of these followers made... (read more)
It seems likely to me that when a person is saying 'can you keep a secret', to some level they are saying 'here is a piece of gossip'. Gossip seems to be one of the backbones of any society, enforcing social norms, and possibly disciplining otherwise impervious leaders/rulers who violate those norms. The 'secret' then is really, 'please keep it secret that I told you this from anyone who might punish me, or use this against me in any way.'
If you have a true secret that must be shared, a real threat of repercussions (violence) is all that may enforce this. Or not.
I’m very interested in your perspective. Mostly, because I find it so alien from my own. A little background- I work in law enforcement, and before that served in the American military. In these backgrounds I have come to see human suffering as the norm, and not a problem to be fixed. If I were to make a big-picture worldview of things, I would say that the ‘natural’ state of the universe is randomness and chaos. Human beings are a thing that make shaky structures-sometimes literally, but most often some sort of society that breeds more citizens then it can either feed or make use of. A very few of these shaky... (read more)
This is exactly the sort of high quality article for which I am here. Please promptly write an article on pastry alternatives, so that I might increase my knowledge of strange foods.