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There's a particular kind of romantic partnership, with a certain sort of person, that I've wanted since I became a self-aware, directed agent at around age 15.

 Empirically, this kind of relationship has been hard to achieve. It hasn't worked out yet, at least.

And this sometimes leaves me wondering if my standards are unreasonable.
In years past that desire was often very alive.

These days, I'm rarely directly or viscerally in contact with it.
I sometimes contemplate aiming for some other kind of romantic and/or sexual relationship instead. In part because I might be more effective if I...I don't know, got laid more? But that's not really the thing. More like, if I had someone around whom I could regularly relax.
But mostly, I don't pursue those alternative relationship-setups out of a sense of something like loyalty to myself + a vague sense of wrongness and/or sadness about it. It often feels like giving up or giving in.

[I might elaborate on the wrongness sometime.]
(That said, it varies. I have felt more inclination toward dating people, in the sense of going out on dates with people with whom I am almost certainly not going to partner with, this year, compared to most years.

All of this is still reasonably fluid.)
But then, periodically, for some reason or another, I'll reconnect with the thing that I'm wanting in a visceral way.
And then I'll have a moment of "Ohhh...Yeah, THAT thing. THAT's what I care about. I want THAT." I feel the aliveness and open goodness that motivated my younger self.

All the other "options" pale markedly in comparison. It becomes obvious that they're not what I want.
Furthermore, when I am in touch with this desire, I feel slightly baffled that this seems so hard, and that it hasn't panned out yet.

It seems so...obvious, or in some sense, ordinary. It feels like it should be...well, not easy, but not crazily hard.
It seems like, there ought to be lots of people who want what I want. Not even close to the majority of people. But lots.

And then I feel confused that I've been going around in the world for more than a decade and I've had so few hits. It's not clear if I've ever gotten close.
I feel sort of like the world is trying to gaslight me into thinking the sort of partnership that I want is a pipe-dream.
And then I have moments when I "wake up", and I re-realize, that

No, it's the world that's crazy, the thing that I want is obviously Good and obviously worth guarding.
There is goodness and beauty that is worthy of love and committed-service.

The thing that I'm longing for is real. I'm not just hallucinating.

There's something that my love is FOR.
And, OBVIOUSLY, don't ape love of things that aren't worthy of it, for the sake of convenience.

I SHOULDN'T follow false gods because maybe they're the only ones there are. There's something that's not false.
And then I'll loose touch with it again.

And I'll stubbornly persist in half-heartedly seeking the thing, without really feeling why, mostly on the basis of a trust that the other time-slices of me are on to something real.
. . .
But this still leaves me with a hard problem of figuring out how to make it work out. How do I find and make the thing that I'm wanting?

What should I do? What should I try?
And additionally, what sort of "stance" should I have towards this?

Maybe I should maintain resolve and never give up until I find a way.

Maybe I should be "optimistic." Trust that it will work out, and doors will open.
But hope is painful. So, Maybe I should mostly live in the world where it doesn't work out, but continue to take steps anyway?

Maybe I need to be coming from a place of Surrender. (That IS what the trope book says.)
And all this also (maybe) leaves me with the problem of how to have meaningful companionship in the meantime.
(Or possibly "have meaningful companionship ever", depending on when the world ends. All of this has a somewhat different tenor when I consider that this might be my last decade on earth, and I ask, given that, how I want to spend it.)
These days, the main constraint on who I'm willing to date is "Do they have the necessary virtue and internal 'infrastructure', such that they can hold up their end of the connection, so that we can be fully honest with each other?"
(Because, in general, I'm not willing to warp my perceptions by pretending to believe things that I don't as a way to avoid tripping on the insecurities of people who are closest to me.)
But more specifically, I need to be transparent about this particular thing, because I'm not willing to loose track of the-thing-that-I-want by engaging in some other mode.

Which can be brutal, and is off the table if the person can't own their end of the connection.
I think that as long as we have full honesty, I can manage to have romantic or romantic-ish relationships, without loosing track of myself.
But it isn't like I have figured out how to navigate all this in way that works, yet.

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Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
I was reading something that suggested that trauma "tries" to spread itself. ie that the reason why intergenerational trauma is a thing is that the traumatized part in a parent will take action to recreate that trauma in the child.

This model puts the emphasis on the the parent's side: the trauma is actively "trying" to spread.

This is in contrast to my previous (hypothetical) model for IGT, which puts the emphasis on the child's side: kids are sponges that are absorbing huge amounts of info, including via very subtle channels. So they learn the unconscious reactions of the people around them.

(I say "hypothetical", because all while this sort of thing is in my hypothesis space, I haven't seen clear enough evidence that intergenerational trauma is a meaningful category that I solidly believe it is real.

More like, "here's a story for how this could work.")

On first glance, I was skeptical of this "active trauma" story.

Why on earth would trauma be agenty, in that way? It sounds like too much to swallow.
CULTURE
Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
@JeffLadish I think because the reward structure of being a bio-ethicist rewards saying level-headed sounding, cautious-sounding, conventional wisdom?

Though I'm not sure why that is.

I guess if you want to radically improve the world, you mostly don't go into a field that is about opining on other people's work, you go into something like Engineering and do the work?

I note that Nick Bostrom is what a Bioethicist should be: he thinks hard about tradeoffs and risks, and crystalizes concepts like the Unilateralist's curse and black ball technologies.

But this is starting from a place of "The world could be vastly better. How do we get there?"

I don't know why bioethics doesn't look more like a field of (less smart) Bostroms.

I guess because everyone's disgust reactions are triggered by the actually good proposals, and in order to make those proposals the consensus of the field a lot of people have to bite the bullet and stick their neck out saying "I know this sounds crazy / absurd / vaguely evil...
SOCIETY
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Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
CritRats!

I think AI risk is a real existential concern, and I claim that the CritRat counterarguments that I've heard so far (keywords: universality, person, moral knowledge, education, etc.) don't hold up.

Anyone want to hash this out with


For instance, while I heartily agree with lots of what is said in this video, I don't think that the conclusion about how to prevent (the bad kind of) human extinction, with regard to AGI, follows.

There are a number of reasons to think that AGI will be more dangerous than most people are, despite both people and AGIs being qualitatively the same sort of thing (explanatory knowledge-creating entities).

And, I maintain, that because of practical/quantitative (not fundamental/qualitative) differences, the development of AGI / TAI is very likely to destroy the world, by default.

(I'm not clear on exactly how much disagreement there is. In the video above, Deutsch says "Building an AGI with perverse emotions that lead it to immoral actions would be a crime."
SOCIETY
Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
My catch all thread for this discussion of AI risk in relation to Critical Rationalism, to summarize what's happened so far and how to go forward, from here.

I started by simply stating that I thought that the arguments that I had heard so far don't hold up, and seeing if anyone was interested in going into it in depth with


So far, a few people have engaged pretty extensively with me, for instance, scheduling video calls to talk about some of the stuff, or long private chats.

(Links to some of those that are public at the bottom of the thread.)

But in addition to that, there has been a much more sprawling conversation happening on twitter, involving a much larger number of people.

Having talked to a number of people, I then offered a paraphrase of the basic counter that I was hearing from people of the Crit Rat persuasion.
POLITICS
Eli Tyre
Eli Tyre
@EpistemicHope
I know some people who seem (to me) more concerned with receiving VALIDATION for their mental health issues than solving them.

They seem to care most about other people BELIEVING their problems are real.

I'm curious about this.

Like, it's more important to them that people know how debilitating their anxiety is, than to overcome the anxiety.

Or it's important to them that others believe that they're actually depressed, not "just sad."

Or they want people buy into the narrative that they've been traumatized, and might be something like offended if someone minimizes that.

What do we make of this?

1. One possibility is that if solving the problems seems hopeless or even just really hard, you need external support to be able to cope.

If no one cuts you slack because of your mental health stuff, maybe you're in a really bad place, so you need people to believe you.
HEALTH

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a kind of general history, a plot. In this sense continuing in Riddlersworld goes through an approach of minimums, taking riddlers as what gives an outline of some of the events that could happen at an always unknown date. 2/*

Sure, riddlers intend to convey the idea that they do know the dates, or at least the year, but they don’t know them. 3/*


Take 2020 as an example. At this point of the year you can make so many ad hoc statements as you like, but guys, 2020 clearly meant year 2020. 2020 was the year of the visible "outcomes". 4/*


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@jaredcrubin
Excited we finally have a draft of this paper, which attempts to provide a 'unifying theory' of the long economic divergence between the Middle East & Western Europe

As we see it, there are 3 recent theories that hit on important aspects of the divergence...

1/


One set of theories focus on the legitimating power of Islam (Rubin, @prof_ahmetkuru, Platteau). This gave religious clerics greater power, which pulled political resources away form those encouraging economic development

But these theories leave some questions unanswered...
2/

Religious legitimacy is only effective if people
care what religious authorities dictate. Given the economic consequences, why do people remain religious, and thereby render religious legitimacy effective? Is religiosity a cause or a consequence of institutional arrangements?

3/

Another set of theories focus on the religious proscriptions of Islam, particular those associated with Islamic law (@timurkuran). These laws were appropriate for the setting they formed but had unforeseeable consequences and failed to change as economic circumstances changed

4/

There are unaddressed questions here, too

Muslim rulers must have understood that Islamic law carried proscriptions that hampered economic development. Why, then, did they continue to use Islamic institutions (like courts) that promoted inefficiencies?

5/
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J. Davila-Ashcraft
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@revjackashcraft
Thread: One of the things demons and fallen spirit beings want to do is replicate their torment in your marriage and family. Part of that strategy is to encourage us to treat each other with the same savagery they treat each other, since they have no capacity for love or...

compassion, even for their fellow fallen spirit beings. Even when a demon helps another demon it is only in self interest, never loyalty or love. This is what they hope to do in your family and marriage. Marriage is the foundation of culture. If you can destroy marriage, you can

destroy culture. If they can destroy the relationship between husband and wife, they can destroy the spiritual formation of the children. Demons are keenly aware of the social structure put in place by God and where to launch their attacks against it.

Marriage is properly defined as a solemn contract in which a man and a woman confer bodily rights, among other things, for the sake of procreation. This is strictly a formal theological definition of marriage. Marriage is solemn because it is formalized in public, and witnessed..

by a minister of the church. It is a contract because there is a conferral of bodily and other rights. Now some might ask, isn't marriage a covenant? Yes and no, depending on how you define the word. If we define a covenant as a solemn contract, then yes. In any valid contract,..
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On December 25 Mr Pool retweeted August 16 message about the Phoenix and that the worst was still on the horizon to come. 1/*


Maybe now we can assume that November 3 message meant "FUD" nor "FUN". Putting the word in capital letters seems to indicate the aspect the word fud has in our space, FUD. 2/*


Brad started it on December 22 (1/3 posts (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 3/*


And immediately the SEC followed dropping the bomb (1.3 billions (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 4/*


FUD materializes, Bitstamp is one of the first that haltes XRP trading and so on. 5/*
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