Perhaps that is all that is required, but I don't want the minimum. I want a simple life with enough to live. I don't want to optimize everything and I don't want to live in a world which is trying to optimize every interaction I participate in.
That's why I switched to Common Lisp, its type system isn't perfect but it works well enough for my needs (especially with the occasional (describe 'sycamore:tree-insert) in the REPL).
Can you say more about the system? A lifetime ago I was really excited about gambit (and bigloo) but I never had the chance to work with them beyond messing around here and there after work.
kawa is unfortunately a somewhat shoddy project. Alot of halfbaked features / abstraction ideas (eg trying to support CL for whatever reason), dubious tooling for a java project (autotools), unclean and inconsistent code formatting. It's missing some features that are expected in a real scheme like multishot continuations; someone wrote research about it as a MSc thesis, but due to mentioned shoddiness its integration to upstream stalled and hadn't been merged.
At some point I thought of forking it to then cut out and polish the core, but then my attention got caught by graal's truffle framework as a plausibly better path for implementing scheme in java
Its funny, I can definitely sympathize with wanting multishot continuations, but I can't think of many times where I have wanted them to solve a problem.
Yes, people in government famously don't know anyone else in government anywhere else and never communicate with one another or read the same research or look at what other countries are doing.
Is there a precedent where this happened organically and the same similarities were in place in that many legislations around the world inside of half a year?
That was openly coordinated beginning with the Montreal Protocol. Those things work top to bottom with international accords in the beginning and don't suddenly pop up left and right inside of much less than a year. Getting a ban on lead in fuel took ages with Europe implementing it a decade later.
These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.
People have been talking about social media bans for quite some time, this isn't something that just showed up out of the blue. It's a problem that's been worsening for years.
Then you had the Covid years where kids ended up spending a lot of time on phones and tablets, hence social media, and everyone is seeing the myriad of problems coming out of it.
Sometimes it's not a vast global conspiracy, sometimes things just suck. Also, sometimes things suck and particular groups use it to get their way, that still doesn't diminish the thing that sucks.
Maybe I'm just spoiled with a large working memory, but I don't want an AI agent thinking or remembering of synthesizing for me. Seems like a great way to never have a new idea.
I don't know, I'm a die hard nihilist and atheist and I'm married, have kids, friends, and think life is beautiful and generally ok. I don't see why people need to believe in imaginary stuff and I don't really see how it makes people happy.
I'm not optimistic. I think an accurate assessment of the world is, in a sense, pretty pessimistic. But I don't see any reason to get worked up about it. It would be very stupid to let my mind tell me that I cannot experience pleasure in the world just because the long term situation looks bleak. I can't control any of that stuff anyway, so why bother feeling bad about it?
Religious people tend to be less lonely , more likely to be married and have children, and more happy and less likely to experience mental illness, on average.
It’s certainly not true for every religious person nor the opposite for every atheist, but the effect can be seen across populations.
It's also demonstrated that meditation and volunteering improves well being regardless of beliefs... and atheists like myself have no excuse not to be doing those things right now.
This is not true, in my experience. Men are just as, if not more, emotional and impulsive. Most women I know think way further ahead than the men I know, and improvise much less often. The idea that men are the rational ones is just a silly fantasy to make men feel better, I would argue. Rationality is much more correlated with socio-economic status than gender, I would bet.
I think many men don't even understand what emotional regulation looks like. They tend to spend much of their time disassociated and thinking that it's normal. I tried speaking to my father about emotional health and he thinks it's about being happy, while simultaneously being unable to consider the possibility that he got it wrong, thus demonstrating the point.
There is a lack of emotional health across genders, but on average, I think women are further along than men, simply because they're able to recognize that they are emotional beings much more often than men are.
If talking about a topic made one skilled at or reflected skill, millions of men would be star quarterbacks.
At a macro scale men and women often have different interests. They often cluster around different skillsets because their interests channel them into different activities. But emotional self-awareness isn't an activity, it's an aptitude that fundamentally both men and women exercise (or don't exercise) with similar frequency in day-to-day life. But because women tend to pursue more interpersonal relationships and discussions, they are more adept at the vocabulary, the way men know the vocabulary and rules around football. But, again, it doesn't follow that talking about something makes one more skilled at it. You can juggle tons of relationships and engage in endless discourse about emotional and mental health without having much if any meaningful emotional self-awareness. People with vulnerable-type NPD do this, and at the extreme end the condition is basically predicated on lacking the capacity for a self-awareness most other people, including isolated men, take for granted.
Relatedly, after adjusting for income and social status, it's notable that not even psychologists and therapists have significantly lower divorce rates. That really highlights in my mind that not even an in-depth, systematic, rigorous study of something necessarily makes one more adept at it's exercise, nor, apparently, more likely to meaningfully pursue and develop the skill. Though, presumably they're more adept at judging and analyzing others' emotional awareness and skill given it's the skill they actually apply in their occupation.
I don't see how we are disagreeing. Emotional self-awareness is an aptitude, one that is fundamentally experiential, and so talking about it is inherently difficult. I agree that many people who talk about it are not necessarily experiencing it, including therapists and psychologists, especially if they are using lots of abstractions.
I'm a man who has worked on my own emotional health very intentionally as an adult. I've found there are lots of ways to understand and engage with your own emotions, and they can seem contradictory if you're not thinking experientially.
But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences. They can talk about it very differently from other people. There is a huge multidimensional possibility space for that.
> But I've never found someone who behaves with high emotional awareness that doesn't have any language for describing their experiences.
There's potential selection bias here, though. It's more difficult to identify people high in self-awareness who aren't inclined to discuss their own emotional experiences, unless you happen to have frequent, close interactions with them. It's like when people assume learning languages is easy based on their experience meeting people from around the world who speak their language. But you're much less likely to interact with immigrants and travelers who don't speak your own language, if only because those people aren't inclined to engage with people with whom they can't or aren't interested in communicating.
My experience (often unfortunate) tells me that there are many behaviors that masquerade as self-awareness and other reflections of inner state, but don't actually reflect what we presume it does. For example, the stereotype is that women are naturally more nurturing. Nurturing is a concept that encompasses many dimensions, and it conflates internal motivations and feelings with outward behaviors and practice. We presume nurturing implies empathy and selflessness, but there are of mothers who by all appearances (and in fact) are great nurturers, but whose internal mental experience is bereft of those qualities. They're good nurturers because ultimately we can only judge nurturing by the outcome, and it's easy to presume a naturally patient person adept at applying good parenting practices possess the inner state we associate with nurturing. Even children of such people may not realize this, depending on their own capacity for emotional discernment.
Concepts like empathy, guilt, etc, are tricky. Is a person quick to apologize driven by guilty feelings and concern for other's internal state, or are they merely adept and eager at identifying social cues and applying social norms?
In principle women could be, as a group, more likely to possess a greater capacity for and to develop self-awareness. But history and feminism and racism tells me to be highly skeptical of something like this. While biologically it's possible (and I wouldn't at all be surprised), it's not self-evident to me that self-awareness is any more valuable a skill evolutionarily for women than for men, just like intelligence isn't likely to be more valuable a skill for some ethnic groups over another. For example, generally speaking, and from an evolutionary perspective, analytical intelligence is no less an asset for a group performing less stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. hunting) than for a group centered around stereotypically intellectual activities (e.g. accounting).
I think it depends on the person. As a teacher, I see this. Some kids (the gifted ones) use AI to multiply their efforts. Most kids use to just get by and are actually coming out of the class with less knowledge than they would have without one.
I think this is a deeply flawed interpretation of the original commenter's post. They are suggesting that we think very carefully about imposing our standards of what constitutes a "good" person on the unborn. I don't see the problem, honestly.
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