#aspiring rationality

[aksemmi]

A lot of rationalist discourse is for very intelligent people and I’m just... not. I’m not smart enough for it, to participate meaningfully or to benefit from it. And like, I’m not gonna criticize this it’s prob good that it exists.

But it makes me kinda sad that I can’t do it.

[aksemmi]

I recently have been reading some writings by a person who seems to devote enormous amounts of their mental energy and time into trying to do Big Goods, and was ready to sacrifice huge amounts of their personal needs for the cause, and I found this both deeply admirable and kind of horrifying, and I realized... I’m not really sure I would want that. I’m not sure I’d be willing to sacrifice everything that way, even if I thought it would be net positive. IDK

I’ve kind of been thinking a lot about what my real desires are, what I’m willing or unwilling to do to accomplish them, what I’d be able to and willing to do differently, and how and if I’d be able to change my momentary epistemics and behavior and desires to do differently, and I’ve simultaneously realized that the gulf between my behavior and desires is probably smaller than I imagined but perhaps also more easily modified in small epistemic ways than I had imagined? But I’m not yet sure how to do any of this.

[aksemmi]

A broader question, to what extent can contribution to a wider world-system be seen as having a proportional negative impact of that world system, given

a) low number of abstainers

b) low visibility of boycott motive and existence (this is perhaps something that can be worked on, but social movements are Hard)

c) low replacability, if the system simply collapsed undirectionally without specific things happening in its replacement it’s not obvious this would be an improvement

d) unclear distinctions if any between actions of the system and inactions of the system

I don’t know how the decision theory works out here!

[aksemmi]

Huh so question regarding economics, politics, decision theory: question of effective tax evasion

So vegetarianism hurt the market for meat and decrease animals being killed and tortured that way

Let’s say I want to not contribute to prisons and cops and wars so I do things to avoid taxes

But things get tricky because, AFAICT, state spending and state income are largely detached and only occasionally does someone try to “balance the budget”

MMT says that this is because states are limited by inflation, not budget, and taxes are just a way to limit the inflation their activity generates

And like, taxes are vital to maintaining the cops and prisons and wars in that way, and occasionally a decrease in income will lead to austerity measures and budget cuts and stuff but it’s not *direct*, it’s highly obfuscated

So what should I consider the impact of paying or contributing to taxes to be? Should I deduct something? How much? When?

[aksemmi]

I’m having trouble separating understanding of my behavior by like

I won’t do a thing even if I want the outcome and would abstractly accept the cost because I don’t want to do the thing without the circumstances of a magic accept button

Vs

I’m irrational about my own desires and needs

Vs

I have some expectation of helplessness and failure without a magic accept cost button

Maybe desire is a faulty concept and I’m just being insufficiently reductionist?

[aksemmi]

Given that there were (seemingly) several very close calls to nuclear Armageddon in the Cold War, and given that the US is unlikely to retain global hegemony for long (?), should we expect a high chance of nuclear war breaking out in the 21st century and adjust our behavior likewise (stronger focus on defusing international conflict or such?) or should the previous incidents fizzling out lead us to believe that nuclear incidents in the future will probably also do so? Or is there reason to think a second Cold War is unlikely?

[aksemmi]

I don’t actually have a strong mechanism for weighing alternative explanations/expectations for complicated societal stuff and frankly I’m extremely skeptical anyone does for a lot of these things

[aksemmi]

“Theory”

There’s a sort of discourse which consists of taking some strongly salient anecdotes and constructing a plausible seeming narrative which appeals to one’s sensibilities, without much reference to strong empirical evidence and open to counter-anecdotes or counter-stories. I am the sort of person this appeals to, really elaborate stories of this sort have been one of my favorite kind of insight porn for the past few years, although it seems to be fairly universal. But the thing is... these are just stories, and I increasingly find myself responding (no doubt in a fairly biased pattern, but...) to these with just that. And i’d like to do so more. A fairly large amount of rat-adjacent insight porn fits this pattern, I think. Not necessarily unusually so, but notably so.