club_tropical

I didn't know you could do rain dances in Antarctica.

This is criminally underinvested.

Yes, this is what the quitting is about. There would be no reason to quit if someone more valuable than you also earns more; that just makes sense.

Malmo is barely Sweden, anyway :P

I have mentioned before - I hate Goodhart's law. It makes no sense. There is no example that is a good measure but a bad target.

The canonical example I have heard is hospital emergency rooms that started to be measured by wait times, so they refused to admit patients until staff was ready to receive them, literally having ambulances circling around the block. This was supposed to be a "good measure turned into bad target" situation, but of course it makes no sense. What really changed was the locus of evaluation from the patient that evaluates his end-to-end emergency care experience on many criteria, including, but not limited to, emergency room wait times, to a bureaucrat who just evaluates the hospital myopically on 1 metric.

It is always the myopia of singling out this measure/target that is bad, throwing off all other tradeoffs and considerations, not the actual desire to improve the measure/target.

I am toying with the idea of going to grad school, especially law, but with zero careerist ambitions, so nothing can be lorded over me.

China?

I feel like maybe there are a few other reasons why it was a traumatic experience.

1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention, obviously.

2) I disagree on 2 counts.

a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness and we cannot extrapolate our behavior under volatility to conditions of certainty. The closest we come to it are the most meaningless actions (like me reaching for a water bottle, "knowing" that I will touch it and lift it up), but no meaningfully large action, and certainly not a single one that involves other conscious beings is ever experienced as certain.

b) Humans are not fundamentally probability-modeling animals. When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action. It is a complete category error to model human actions as such. Probability estimates have their (limited) place in (rare) human decisions, but even then it is not an exact fit.

This whole crystal-ball exercise is at best a lazy attempt by Lee, because it is easy and convenient to talk about the robo-human caricatures of his imagination. He is basically shaking his fist ADMONISHING YOU to behave more like the simplified easily-quantified caricatures so he can study you easier get his MacArthur Genius Grant goddammit.

Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS:

1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gaslighting as a mom saying “why your hands don’t want to clean your room”.

2) Crystal ball, aka “if you knew you wouldn’t get caught” or “if you knew a child would get harmed”. These are always bad faith, 100% or the time, no exceptions. Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this. NO GOD, of ANY faith, has ever made guarantees like this. The only thing this trickery is meant to serve is for the labcoat-flasher to control the imaginary future via the imaginary crystal ball and PROSECUTE YOU NOW for transgressions in his imagination. This is the girlfriend mad you for cheating on her in her dream and demanding you grovel at her feet for an apology.

3) This one is harder, because it sounds good, but it is worth making explicit because it is used against you as a form of control: human egalitarianism. See, nobody actually believes this, not in the here and now among the living 7 billion humans let alone all the imaginary descendents for centuries to come. A true and complete belief in this would make you a LITERAL SLAVE, spending every second and every disposable income on sponsoring the mass of humanity unrelated to you. The labcoat-flasher himself doesn’t believe this either, but he hopes you won’t focus on him - no, he will start with your well-meaning and generous (if ultimately strictly-speaking untrue) belief that all humans should be equal and will take your benevolence, stretch it “to its logical conclusion” far beyond it was ever meant to go, wrap it up around your throat and CHOKE you with it. This is the girlfriend demanding you take a second job to buy her the $100,000 crocodile skin Hermes Birkin purse she wants because that is her love language and you said you cared about her- or do you not love her?

Mendacious to its core, this kind of manipulative gaslighting rhetoric they boldly call “research” is the parochial pastime of labcoat-flashers like this Sangil “Arthur” Lee. It is a step in their vain chase for tenure or funding or some Young Researcher Award (TM). It never did and it never will have anything to do with reality or truth or any honest pursuit of such.

> The important thing is that I wouldn't attach a negative value-judgment to complexity, like saying complexity is always evil or bad or serves nefarious purposes.

I would and I do.

> It is precisely the unwillingness to engage with complexity that perpetuates it.

No. It is the chimpout, the excessive disproportionate and cruel response of labyrinth-makers against those who dare to cut to the heart of the maze, that perpetuates the artificial complexity through intimidation.

They would LOVE for you to “engage with complexity” - that means walking into the labyrinth of their construction, a turf they fully control. Nothing gives them more joy than seeing you squirm around the maze, wasting away trying to “understand” Modern Monetary Theory or why The Court upheld starre decisis here but created a new precedent there, like these things are emergent properties of nature like butterfly wings.

> The world is made up of phenomena that mostly are pretty complex

The word “made up” is doing a lot of work there. Do you mean like a butterfly wing makes up the world around you or central banking?

One of these is not so much “complex” as it is mysterious, alluring, captivating, and we have no explanation for it, complex or otherwise.

The other is exactly like the giant labyrinth constructed around a lie. Complex for its own protection - synthethic complexity that you can skip if you know the shortcut to the heart of the maze.

Not speaking for OG, but: associated with his real name, while (as a PhD in econ) deeply dependent on reputation-contingent job prospects.

People can have careers ruined by a tweet; self-published article under your own name is in no way free from constraints.

And you should. If the opposite could not have been published, or would have had enormous donwsides, you should discount its objectivity, same like if I pull out a knife and demand your wallet, one should discount your voluntariness.

Longest few days of your life, I bet.