folksinger

Thank you for such a charitable interpretation. This is basically what I was trying to get across.

Depression is a son of a bitch that I have also known at times and it really is as hard and as easy as just doing anything at all.

What your life is missing is meaning. Meaning is action. If a word means anything at all it is because it is in reference to some kind of actual experience.

Blogs, books, and media of all kind are basically meaningless. Vanity of vanities and all that jazz.

You need to experience life. You need to find meaning through action. You need to become a poet by becoming the poem.

Help your neighbor with his hobbies. Cook dinner for your family. Sing a song for a friend. Do something, anything, for someone else.

Realize the inaction and the meaningless nature of sitting in one place and searching for answers on screen or in print.

If you must read, read all text as a poem, or at least read poetry itself!

The darkness that you see is just a fiction. How could it be anything else? The magic spells are just words on a page. Belief is what makes them seem real.

Go outside. Go for a walk. There is no darkness. It is boring and peaceful and that should put your mind to rest.

Bouncers are fooled by people wearing paper masks of the people depicted on a photo ID?

When bouncers let people enter a bar with a photo ID that does not match the person in question they are not failing to identify a human. They are failing to give enough of a shit to carefully examine the picture in question.

Do you think you could fool a human intelligence with some paper printouts taped to your face?

Once you become aware of how many people on HN are part of that LessWrong AI immortality cult it becomes pretty obvious why they are so defensive.

Trust? This word depends on context. Do you trust your spouse? Do your trust your waiter? Do you trust the news? Do you trust that the sun will come up?

I will grant that both Bitcoin and dollars depend on trust. But both are grounded as well. Bitcoin to physical computing devices and dollars to real estate.

That is, Bitcoin is as real as all of the SHA-256 calculations per second across the network and dollars are as real as the mortgages per square mile across the nation.

This is exactly the kind of comment that confirms my hypothesis of the anti-philosophical spectrum.

At least we can both agree that we are talking about how we interpret and react to hypothetical utterances on the internet.

Think of a triangle. At one point is "philosopher", at another "asshole", and the third "idiot".

Consider the edge between "philosopher" and "idiot" to be "innocent love". Consider the edge between "philosopher" and "asshole" to be "pure knowledge".

The total idiot has all the love and none of the knowledge. The total asshole has all of the knowledge and none of the love. The total philosopher has all the love and all of the knowledge.

Anti-philosophers fall somewhere along the "asshole-idiot" spectrum. Stock brokers, tech bloggers, newscasters, Hollywood actors. You get the drift.

Those tradeoffs are as chilling as a nationalized postal service.

The "chilling consequences" that you are imagining are as speculative as any other work of science-fiction that you've read online.

Ask yourself: where did you get the idea that creating new public institutions would have "chilling consequences"? Did you personally experience this in reality or did you read about it somewhere?

What are the chilling experiences that you've had with public roads, the postal service, or the hall of records that holds the deed to the private property you live on? Do these negative experiences align with the "chilling consequences" that you imagine with a public social media?

We make natural monopolies into public institutions. Roads, sidewalks, parks, copyright registrars, postal services, land surveyors, courts, law enforcement, etc, etc.

And then we take an active role in their management.

Notice the difference between the physical activity of helping to maintain these institutions and the physical activity of sitting at your keyboard and typing into an HTML form and hitting the submit button.

Look at what is actually occurring and not just at what is described in what you are reading.

This is the solipsistic perspective of someone floating in the ocean, looking in only one direction and sure they are alone, sure they are surrounded by nothing but an endless expanse, completely unaware that they are just a few hundred feet from the shoreline that lies behind them.

The answer is not different, it is the same for EVERYONE! Turn around and swim back to land!

> Without any examples for or to the contrary, I'm not convinced this is true.

There are two volumes of Songwriters on Songwriting and I guess I could introduce you to all my songwriting buddies if you're so inclined.