dontbeevil1992

that's awesome. I think CBT is really reductive. Quite pessimistic, as well - CBT seems to hold little hope of actually healing many issues, but only aims for symptom management. I think that's because it's not a very good therapy for many (most?) situations so it has to rationalize it by saying true healing is impossible.

IFS is amazing.

in gestalt therapy this is called being at an impasse - you are in touch with yourself enough to know that you're not happy, but not yet sure how to change your life to be happy. long term I do believe it is better to be in touch with yourself even though there may be periods of discomfort or confusion. it's better to do that than to be humming along feeding your trauma until you reach the age of 50, have a mid-life crisis and realize you've wasted so much time not in touch with yourself.

very cool! some similar themes to LotR. Did you intentionally make the crows names use mainly phonemes from the word "crow"? That's a cool technique

I'll say it again: I'm not saying that we can use past lack of nuclear war to predict future lack of nuclear war. All I'm saying is that each year's probability is not independent, meaning the model of a probability of no nuclear war which geometrically goes to 0 is not accurate.

I might not have said this clearly enough - I'm not saying that conditioning on "did we have a nuclear war" will change the probability to be less. I'm saying that the event "did we have a nuclear war in year n" is not independent from "did we have a nuclear war in year n+1" "n+2", ... because there are shared factors influencing them. Therefore the model of independent probabilities multiplying year over year and seeming to imply that nuclear war is inevitable because (1-p)^n goes to 0 as n grows doesn't make sense mathematically speaking.

Another issue with this logic is that the probabilities are not independent.

Saying that you have probability x of nuclear war every year and so probability (1-x)^n of no nuclear war in n years assumes independence. In fact, if you don't have nuclear war on year 1, I would assume that the reasons for that lead to inferences and correlations that would affect the probability of nuclear war on year 2, possibly making it lower.

surely there's some middle ground between infinity and a paltry $3500. in our legal system there are concepts like damages, emotional damages, pain and suffering. it's not just about how much wages you missed out on. or does all that just go out the window because these are members of society who aren't paid a lot for their labor?

seems like a good place to put this quote: "Justice is what love looks like in public." If this conservative economist wants to spread love, he can start by supporting economic policies that prevent the 1% from exploiting everyone else

Agreed, life is not always zero-sum, and higher taxes don't always translate to better services.

Let's look at an example of where life is zero-sum, which also happens to be an important battleground that leads to more macro effects: wage negotiations. Clearly it's zero-sum: the firm produces some wealth, and many dollars that aren't paid to wages end up paid to someone with more power in the firm, such as an owner, major shareholder, or executive.

Now, when it comes to negotiating wages, in an oversaturated labor market, workers without a union are in a terrible bargaining position, as they basically have the choice: work or die. This leads to what we see today: horrible exploitation of the people with the least power in society. Lawmakers have, over the years, stripped unions of relative power. This is one of the choices I mentioned, where one group is immiserated precisely in order to let another group hoard more and more money. Now, sure, unions have downsides, and they can be corrupt, but on the whole, US wages have stagnated while production has increased since the 70s, when the US began its forceful destruction of labor power.

The only argument you can make in response is that the system as a whole has to be this way, or else, for example, talented executives won't step up to difficult tasks and things won't get done. I'm sure that, in some cases, this is true, but it's a trade-off, like most other things in economics, and the absolutist way that many people hold this, so that a lot of exploitation is justified to retain this, is murderously excessive, and not based on empirical evidence.

People should stop complaining that they don't have healthcare because they have iPhones and vaccines and don't literally live in the mud? Maybe that would hold water if there were literally no other option, and if the distribution of wealth and misery were an unchangeable force of nature. But the reality is, people don't have healthcare BECAUSE some people don't want to pay more taxes, and want poor people to stay in a desperate bargaining position so they can be exploited. Some people have less BECAUSE other people have more, and for no good reason besides the fact that our society supports the haves in exploiting the have-nots. It is a choice that our society works this way, and there is another way for things to work, and we must make that choice to change.

this is a really cool idea, and well-executed! only thing Id say is the glyphs end up very bulky, it would be cumbersome to write and readd

I don't see this as a counterargument for two reasons.

First, how do the actions of other countries have bearing on what is true about the history of our country?

Second, I don't know the details, but seems to me that powerful people in other countries could, just like the U.S., be reaping political and financial benefits from criminalizing drugs.