Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
I think that you will find that the very concept of "meaning of life" is meaningless. There is no concrete, real-world thing that it refers to. However, some people do attain a certain bodily and mental state where they feel they are missing something, they feel like life is incomplete. This sometimes manifests itself as a nihilistic worldview (among other effects). It is also almost always accompanied by a feeling of disconnection from others, from society.

Now, for someone who is not in this particular bodily (and mental) state, life itself is a joy. The concept of meaning of life doesn't even come into question, because if you love waking up in the morning, love the work you're doing, the people you interact with and society and the world itself, you don't feel like you're lacking anything. There is no need for further meaning.

Also, this state, like all other bodily functions, is not a discrete, binary switch, but a continuous biological mechanism that takes a spectrum of values. It can be measured by simple tools such as the activation of the vagus nerve, brain activation pattern revealed on an EEG and so forth.

As for how to change this bodily function, unfortunately that is still a bit of a mystery. Some find that seeing a therapist helps, changing of your personal circumstances often helps as well. There are other promising mechanisms such as neurofeedback, but none of them have a perfect track record.

Comment · 5 years ago
How would that fix the actual problem? And how do you judge what is a worthy discovery and what isn't?

As parent said, UBI would probably fix the incentive scheme, your solution wouldn't. You need to decouple the reward from the result so that research is done out of sheer curiosity and love of science.

Comment · 5 years ago
Top half of the main page, top half of the ask page, usually only comments (not visiting the pages themselves unless it is something very interesting to me).

3-5 times a day. On average, I open 10 discussion pages a day, and visit around 3 links.

Comment · 5 years ago
What do you mean by writing as a business? Copywriting? Writing fiction? Books? Web publishing? To me, the term writing is vague.
Comment · 5 years ago
> It's stretching the Big Oh notation but it isn't terrible

I'd say it is terrible. O(10) is O(1), and it doesn't make a lot of sense in this context (measure of growth to represent a scalar).

Comment · 6 years ago
I guess this is a case of arguing by definition. Depression is an illness in as much sleepiness is an illness.
Comment · 6 years ago
What's the point of this? Yes, I am severely depressed among other issues I am facing. I haven't had a job in 3 years, after burning out and started having panic attacks. The finances are so stressful that are making me just numb. I can't make any decision, the executive part of my brain appears to have shut off.

Also, depression is not an illness. It's a defensive mechanism, just a symptom of a certain body state. It's a completely natural response.

Comment · 6 years ago
But I assume the SoC or the processor itself does have PCIe expansion ports, right? Internal GPUs should in theory work should the part be sold by itself.
Comment · 6 years ago
This shifts the labour market, making a lot more jobs available and making it much easier to get a job for new people or the jobless. I don't think it would work well though. Ideas such as job guarantees for everyone often come up in UBI conversation so this is a related concept.

I think UBI is a much better idea.

Comment · 6 years ago
I got the tarball from the official site, using Internet Archive.
Comment · 6 years ago
I see this kind of answer frequently. In many places and situations, people are not so fortunate as to have a choice between healthy and non-healthy workplaces.

"If they reject you for that, you don't want to work there in the first place". Except if the alternatives are no job at all, or a minimum wage workplace with significantly worse conditions. That kind of answer assumes a certain privileged position.

Comment · 6 years ago
Unfortunately not in a position to help with advice. But I too am in a position that I'm struggling to escape from, and a steady income would be very helpful. Would you mind sharing how you created that income stream (of course, I'm not asking for specifics, just what general field, how long it took to create it, how many failed attempts were there before it etc).

As for getting out of your geographical area, money is usually very helpful. Many countries offer investor visas for instance.

Comment · 6 years ago
> The vast majority of people are greedy, uneducated and selfish.

That's a naive view of human personality. The reality is that all people are "greedy" and "selfish" in that they consciously or subconsciously pursue their own interest. (Some people do suffer from various degrees of developmental trauma that affects their ability to do that easily, but the part of the brain that is responsible for that still exists. "psychologists" sometimes refer to this as inability to perceive borders, perception of self etc).

Now, the set of people that you are referring to by exclusion, i.e. those that are not "greedy, uneducated and selfish" simply find themselves in a priviledged position and signal virtue by painting themselves as climate conscious individuals. Of course, the brain hides most of the real motivation behind this reasoning.

Are there also people who want to see the world burn? Absolutely. Again trauma does that to people. But most mentally "healthy" people don't want the planet to become uninhabitable for human life.

This is all coming from someone who was at one point in life deeply affected by intense destruction of natural ecosystems around, intense logging, illegal deforestation. I was an avid cyclist and used to love nature and was seeing the destruction on my rides. But you learn to accept that, this is the way of life.

===============

Now, to answer to original question. What must happen for humanity to coordinate on solving this problem? I don't expect humanity to be able to do it. But I think what would need to happen as a stepping stone, is to end most of the conflict in the world right now. This is of course impossible to do in one generation. When you stop seeing the world in "us vs them" and the vast majority of people emphatize with everyone else and other life forms, i think coordination is possible. I doubt humanity will reach that point though.

Comment · 6 years ago
> somewhat technically literate

But doesn't know what IRC or freenode is, as illustrated by a comment in that thread.

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