One thing I wonder is that - assuming no extreme personal calamity - I would be just as happy/sad/depressed no matter what life I had led. How much of our inner sense of well being is determined by outward life circumstances. Living in the first world and working in the tech industry, I live better than 99% of the people that ever lived, including all my ancestors. What’s really crazy is that I’m not insanely happy all the time with my incredible good fortune. It seems that no matter what I got from life - I’d calibrate back to where I am now.
Readit Newsmeany commented on What if you could do it all over? (2020) newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/FinnLobsien
I largely agree with the post, but less because people near death don’t know what’s important, but rather because reports of these are self-help, currated to appeal to audience and get clicks. When I’ve had meaningful conversations with e friends and family memebers near death, I’ve found they have a real capacity to help you moderate your perspective and make better life decisions. Of course the specific individual personality plays a big role in this.
Per the article suggestion, follow the happiness reasearch.
The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia. “If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.
meany commented on How to win an argument with a toddler seths.blog/2025/04/how-to... · Posted by u/herbertl
I don't completely agree. (I know... How meta.)
I have worked to be as rational as I will personally tolerate, and it has been difficult, but I've achieved some success. The key is to divorce your identity from your beliefs about the world, and to realize that the opposite of never admitting you're wrong is "always being right", which is of course impossible, so if you are TRULY interested in becoming MORE right, then the only reasonable option is that you must sometimes lose arguments (and admit it to both of you).
Are most people interested in doing this? No, and in that sense you have a point. But it's available to everyone, and who wouldn't want to be more right?
The other difficult thing to do is to aim this at yourself with full candor and work through that. Interestingly, now that ChatGPT has access to all the conversations you've had with it, and assuming you've opened up to it a bit, you can ask it: "You know me pretty well. Please point out my personal hypocrisies." If you want to make it more fun, you can add "... as Dennis Leary/Bill Burr" etc. What it said when I tried this was fascinating and insightful. But also difficult to read...
One thing I think that can help in this is trying your identity to being someone who strives to be as open minded and introspective as possible. You can turn changing your mind into a psychological reward, rather than an ego loss.
meany commented on 2024 first year to pass 1.5C global warming limit bbc.com/news/articles/cd7... · Posted by u/defrost
absolute amounts of emissions by country is an arbitrary division, more people = more (demand for) industrial activity; for the numbers to be useful and actionable, they need to be understood in the context of the people those emissions are for, no?
Doesn’t that assume that the production isn’t for export. For instance, if the EU and US export their industries to low wage, high population countries you would see their per capita numbers drop and overall leveling out. However, the damage to the climate would be equal. Essentially, you need to look at a lot of factors and think holistically about the problem.
Well, it's possible for the majority of people, it's just that the majority of people can't keep up with the things that make it possible. It's a ton of work (and money!) to keep up with a good diet, walk thousands of steps per day, and exercise 4-5x per week. Between needing to drive to do everything and making food as addictive as possible, we've designed everything about contemporary life to work against being healthy.
Not sure how I understand how it’s possible for the majority of people if they can’t keep up with the things that make it possible.
Gabapentin may be a wonder drug, helping with heretofore barely-treatable conditions and the ravages of addiction.
Weight lose drugs are just a shortcut for something that is possibly for the vast majority of people without any drugs. Don't get me wrong, they seem great! But a drug that can help with seizures, nerve pain, alcoholism and anxiety sounds a little more "wondery" to me.
I don’t think the data supports that it is possible for the majority of people. On traditional diets, Between 80 and 85 percent of those who lose a large amount of weight regain it. Source: https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-conditions/healthy-li....
meany commented on Chinese AI stirs panic at European geoscience society science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/rguiscard
The geopolitics of LLMs is definitely interesting. China censors politics. The West censors intellectual property. I am not equating the two so please excuse the edgy teen dystopia that follows:
I keep having this vision of a dystopian future where the Star Spangled Banner is sold off to a private equity firm and anyone who wants to play it has to pay a licensing fee. Of course “freedom-hating” countries have banned it long ago as well. The subversive main character is playing a bootleg copy of it in some politically ambiguous country when police break his door down, but the screen cuts to black before we find out was it the copyright mafia or the dictatorship.
I think equating censorship and intellectual property is not a good comparison. Copyright laws do not restrict sharing of ideas or opinions just specific textual instances of those opinions. Under copyright, you are free to paraphrase or quote the text to share the core idea. Political censorship prevents you from communicating specific political views, which limits dissent. I don’t see how copyright does that.
meany commented on The darker side of being a doctor (2017) drericlevi1.substack.com/... · Posted by u/fadali
I strongly dislike the way people talk about mental health as if it is just a personal problem or a disease when, often, it is a reasonable reaction to the world as it is. When we conceive of it entirely as a disease we fail to focus on making positive social changes which might make everyone's lives better. Somehow it doesn't feel like a coincidence that in capitalism the "individual problem" narrative seems to always be at the forefront.
I think the challenge is that no matter the circumstances our minds are designed to adapt to the situation. This is often called the hedonic adaption. If you live in a modern western country, your life is likely significantly better than the wealthiest and most powerful people from the 14th century. Most likely if you're prone to depression, you will reset to a negative viewpoint even if societal issues are addressed. Below is an excerpt from article discussing research into lottery winners and paraplegics.
"In 1978, a trio of researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Massachusetts attempted to answer this by asking two very disparate groups about the happiness in their lives: recent winners of the Illinois State Lottery — whose prizes ranged from $50,000 to $1 million — and recent victims of catastrophic accidents, who were now paraplegic or quadriplegic. In interviews with the experimenters, the two groups were asked, among other things, to rate the amount of pleasure they got from everyday activities: small but enjoyable things like chatting with a friend, watching TV, eating breakfast, laughing at a joke, or receiving a compliment. When the researchers analyzed their results, they found that the recent accident victims reported gaining more happiness from these everyday pleasures than the lottery winners.
This is how the study is usually written about, in a “gee whiz, ain’t that counterintuitive?” kind of tone. But what’s really striking when you look at the results reported by the researchers is how close their answers actually are: On average, the winners’ ratings of everyday happiness were 3.33 out of 5, and the accident victims’ averaged answers were 3.48. The lottery winners did report more present happiness than the accident victims (an average of 4 out of 5, as compared to the victims’ 2.96), but as the authors note, “the paraplegic rating of present happiness is still above the midpoint of the scale and … the accident victims did not appear nearly as unhappy as might have been expected.”
This is partially because of what’s become known as the hedonic treadmill, or hedonic adaptation, that annoying tendency humans have to get used to the things that once made them happy. I particularly love how the authors of this 1970s paper phrased it:
Eventually, the thrill of winning the lottery will itself wear off. If all things are judged by the extent to which they depart from a baseline of past experience, gradually even the most positive events will cease to have impact as they themselves are absorbed into the new baseline against which further events are judged. Thus, as lottery winners become accustomed to the additional pleasures made possible by their new wealth, these pleasures should be experienced as less intense and should no longer contribute very much to their general level of happiness."