w_complicated

Thank you for the extended reply, I found it really interesting. There's a couple of things I disagree with:

- you seem to say that the only reason for politics (and generally speaking disagreements, wars, etc.) is genuine difference in beliefs (ground truths), which come deeply from the heart and as such are not subject to intellect or logic. In my observation, these beliefs are not all similar in nature. Some are truly foundational like "I like people" / "I'm indifferent whether people exist or are happy", however there are plenty of higher-level thoughts, to give an example from the other extreme on that axis: "I like party X" / "I think party X are all thieves", which are very often described also as beliefs, but in fact, they can be subject to division into smaller components using pure logical process, until eventually you reach the much more foundational level of beliefs. What I've observed is that people are unaware of the fact that their beliefs can be analysed this way and instead just fallback to "we just disagree on beliefs, we will never agree". This is a useful method of manipulating people, to divide them into groups which believe that are opponents, while in reality they needn't be.

- you say that no better tool (to close that gap of understanding high-level problems) has been created and seem to imply that this means that it cannot ever be in the future. Even if it could, perhaps that would be a product of some reputable scientific society or a big corporation, and not a modest group of editors of a philosophical website. If you go to the extreme and expect anyone to deliver an ideal tool, then you're right that it may never come to exist. But what I believe everyone can do is try to make an ever so slightly better tool than the one we have right now. That's what we're trying to do and that's what I'm certain you could do too, we don't aspire to be superheroes.

(Sorry for such a delayed response, a random life event cut in)

That's really interesting. As one of the co-authors I agree with your approach, but I also thought that so does the article. We put emphasis on following truth (as opposed to falling into nice illusions), being authentic, following your life mission (that's how I understand the "He who has a why to live for" part of your quote), and not escaping from sadness or problems. Even the heavily criticised inverted quotes mentioned "Happiness sometimes is being pained in body and troubled in mind". How come did you come to the conclusion that the article suggest avoiding pain and going for simple pleasures, easing up on the life's purpose? (Sorry for such a delayed response, a random life event cut in)

Sorry about that, there is no excuse, we only need a bit more time to make it properly static. In the meantime I'm happy to PM you the text if you're interested.

Thanks! I actually hear similar feedback regularly. Maybe it's about time I should take it more seriously. But I can't agree with the statement that the cannon already exists. The idea behind the site is not to reinvent all knowledge, but to assemble some of it into solving everyday problems. I can relatively easily find answers to some low-level questions which were studied by philosophers, but actually struggle to find similar quality material on higher-level questions, which are the ones I'm facing more often in day-to-day life.

E.g. if you think about the recently-trendy problems of "free speech vs platform moderation", or "privacy vs security vs comfort", or "political correctness vs truth" - I struggle to find comprehensive answers, but if you could point me to such places I'd be grateful. There are of course plenty of interesting reads, Hacker News being an aggregator of lots of them, but it's difficult to find one which takes the arguments and provides some reasoning on where they stem from rather than finishing on something like "obviously privacy is important", "free speech, because of freedom", or "moderation, because hate speech is harmful".

Also, we've tried to spend our youth energy on a few different things already, this is one more experiment, don't worry, we have lives. In fact, I try to follow what is preached in the article and engaging in this project falls into the category of "personal mission".

(But you're right that there is some Polish element to it, mum's the word...)

You're right, that's roughly what we tried to capture, however I don't agree that "chasing" happiness is pointless. Being able to contemplate the "here and now" is absolutely important (and is listed later in the article), but some fortitude, understanding of my own needs and intentional action towards them did yield some results at least in my own experience. We haven't managed to find any quote which would touch on that and all were about the ability of experiencing of here and now, with maybe a slight twist of "give up fighting for your value, just enjoy what you already have".

Thanks for this feedback! The intro was meant to take some weight off the article, which sounded maybe a bit too serious, rather than an intriguing read. But point taken. The idea behind inversions was to show that the original quote makes sense if you try to understand what it might mean, but if you do the same exercise with a very opposite meaning, you can still try to "understand" what the author had in mind and contemplate some made-up wisdom. I.e. that the quotes don't carry that much information and that a lot our cultural context of what we take for granted is a bit hand-wavy and leaving lots to guess. But point taken, will try to avoid such games, or make the intention clearer in the future.

With the word "learn", the meaning I get is not really "to attain such ability" (which is natural), but "to get accustomed to doing". And "to let go" or "not to let go" may be also be understood as "give up" vs "don't give up", as opposed to the suggested rumination of the past.