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I Choose Optimism

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Re: I Choose Optimism

#201

Post by jason-phillips »

actionablefiber wrote: post #157
jason-phillips wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't simply choose to do that, because... To delve a little deeper, this statement shows that it's still a _choice_, even though the choice is apparently a refutation of choice, which is interesting. Asserting that this construct simply _is_, where choice isn't there or doesn't exist, doesn't pass the smell test. The fact that one may choose to live a life only for oneself were one left to one's own devices is s…

> To delve a little deeper, this statement shows that it's still a _choice_, even though the choice is apparently a refutation of choice, which is interesting. Worldviews and beliefs are answers we come up with to the difficult questions that life asks. If you've done any work to come up with those answers, then your beliefs are built on top of a lot of observations, introspection, and analysis. For me to change my b…

Your perspective is totally valid to me. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, because you're not. At least not in the "I'm right and you're wrong" way.

I don't casually choose a belief set. I've deliberated this for decades. My beliefs, or more accurately the code that I live by, is just that, my code. I have a choice in the matter, it doesn't come from somewhere else where it's inflicted upon me. I formulated it.

> For me to change my beliefs I would need to discover some kind off mistake I've made in my work....

Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#202

Post by jason-phillips »

dredmorbius wrote: post #162
jason-phillips wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I appreciate your perspective, the construct you described allows one to invalidate others' beliefs as being "wrong" because they don't adhere to the same reference point as yourself. > All of my beliefs would be self-serving This is not a true statement. Why cannot one choose what one feels to be the most appropriate construct after careful inspection and introspection?

the construct you described allows one to invalidate others' beliefs as being "wrong" because they don't adhere to the same reference point as yourself Belief based in empirical evidence is at least bound to that evidence. Belief unmoored from empiricism --- blind faith or revelation --- suffers no such limits. Your criticism would apply all the more so to same, with the further failing that others' beliefs are "wron…

The factory owner and the factory worker can look at the same set of data and arrive at completely different world views.

The Empire Did Nothing Wrong™

Was Lucifer actually incorrect in his position in the Garden of Eden?

I'm pointing out how completely different and valid perspectives can be derived from the same set of data, the same circumstance.

The problem arises when one claims their perspective was "inflicted" upon them by some uncompromising, external agent, which implies there is no choice in the matter, which is absurd because there most certainly is.

I don't think you're wrong, by the way, I just see things a little differently.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#203

Post by orang2tang »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #187
orang2tang wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But just as sin entered the world through one man, it was defeated through one man as well, Jesus Christ. There is no condemnation for anyone who believes in Jesus. So being saved from hell is quite simple, which is why it's called "the good news" or the gospel. And that's God's plan for humanity, and he's begging you to simply seek this man named Jesus. God's wisdom is made that much more powerful in what some might…

Christianity falls apart if there is no fear or belief in repercussions after death. Why not just be a decent person without being threatened? It's how the majority of people in the world do things.

You misunderstand Christianity in the way most people do.

"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast." - Ephesians 2:9

"know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified." - Galatians 2:16

So Christianity is simply placing your faith in Jesus Christ. If you believe that God forgave your sins at the behest of Christ, and that you will enter an eternal kingdom also as a son of God, wouldn't you eventually be more liable to forgive and love others?

So being good is a side-effect, not the point, of Christianity. God will not let me enter heaven because of how good I am, and if that was the measure none of us would make it. The point of Christianity is to know God and have faith that through Christ's death on the cross, burial, and resurrection, he can impart the mercy of God onto you. That he quite literally died for every sin everyone had ever committed.

“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” - 2 Corinthians 5:21

Re: I Choose Optimism

#204

Post by actionablefiber »

jason-phillips wrote: post #201
actionablefiber wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To delve a little deeper, this statement shows that it's still a _choice_, even though the choice is apparently a refutation of choice, which is interesting. Worldviews and beliefs are answers we come up with to the difficult questions that life asks. If you've done any work to come up with those answers, then your beliefs are built on top of a lot of observations, introspection, and analysis. For me to change my b…

Your perspective is totally valid to me. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, because you're not. At least not in the "I'm right and you're wrong" way. I don't casually choose a belief set. I've deliberated this for decades. My beliefs, or more accurately the code that I live by, is just that, my code. I have a choice in the matter, it doesn't come from somewhere else where it's inflicted upon me. I formulated it.…

> Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice.

Your choice here is to live by a code, and more specifically the code you formulated. That's exercising control over your actions, which I don't dispute is a choice.

But why do you follow that code? Do you feel that that code is good for society? Good for your family? Good for you personally? The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful?

And if you do encounter that invalidates those beliefs and makes it obvious that they are wrong - can you still hold them? Definitionally I would say once you know that they're false they are no longer your beliefs.

Suppose I believe that humanity is facing incredible social, economic, technological, and environmental threats and yet our governments and societies cannot even agree that these are threats and when they do their reactions are half-hearted; that I believe the economic system we in has provided lots of powerful people and lots of ordinary people with a vested interest in protecting the most destructive parts of our status quo; and that I think most of these problems are incredibly time sensitive and if we can't address them in the next half-century then we will see cascading failures in the environment and human civilization that cause incredible amounts of death and hardship.

This all sounds very bleak, so you have to imagine that seeing peoples' comments about how pessimism is bad for your mental state, how we should be optimistic about the future because theoretically all our problems are solvable, and how we've solved problems in the past so we'll definitely solve these ones too just bounces off of that. It often feels like people are talking around the major structural problems that are not on trajectory to being solved by focusing on little bits of tech that seem like maybe they'd help in a way or extrapolating lines out from the last that can't obviously be extrapolated.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#205

Post by jason-phillips »

actionablefiber wrote: post #204
jason-phillips wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perspective is totally valid to me. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, because you're not. At least not in the "I'm right and you're wrong" way. I don't casually choose a belief set. I've deliberated this for decades. My beliefs, or more accurately the code that I live by, is just that, my code. I have a choice in the matter, it doesn't come from somewhere else where it's inflicted upon me. I formulated it.…

> Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice. Your choice here is to live by a code, and more specifically the code you formulated. That's exercising control over your actions, which I don't dispute is a choice. But why do you follow that code? Do you feel that that code is good for society? Good for your family? Good for you personally? The answers to those questions…

> The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful?

These beliefs, from your example, are something I arrived at through reason. They are always subject to change.

I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instance. However, I did not choose that path, in the end. I very easily could have, however. And that was purely my choice.

I do share your concerns, your beliefs, as you described them. There are many, many different perspectives at play there, which is one reason why it is such a difficult problem to solve, from a grand-scheme-of-things perspective. We are only human, after all.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#206

Post by davisoneee »

neilwilson wrote: post #183
davisoneee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The financial crash would like to have a word with you. Many people gave 'resources' to people who couldn't afford the debt, because with many layers of obfuscation, and perverse incentives for mortgage providers, they made it look like many more people could afford it than actually could. Further...payday loans...loan sharks...people get money for things they can't afford, and can't realistically pay back, all the t…

And bankruptcy sorts all that out. That's why we have it as the reset mechanism. Capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy is like Catholicism without the threat of hellfire.

Whether bankruptcy is necessary to capitalism is irrelevant to your point

> You must have a way of paying the debt back, or you wouldn't have been able to obtain the resource you did on a promise.

I am stating that some people _don't_ have a way of paying the debt back, and yet they have been loaned to, incurring debt, and thus ruined (as the parent you were originally replying to suggests)

Re: I Choose Optimism

#207

Post by actionablefiber »

jason-phillips wrote: post #205
actionablefiber wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice. Your choice here is to live by a code, and more specifically the code you formulated. That's exercising control over your actions, which I don't dispute is a choice. But why do you follow that code? Do you feel that that code is good for society? Good for your family? Good for you personally? The answers to those questions…

> The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful? These beliefs, from your example, are something I arrived at through reason. They are always subject to change. I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instanc…

> I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instance. However, I did not choose that path, in the end. I very easily could have, however. And that was purely my choice.

You don't choose your beliefs. You choose your actions. You don't choose to believe generosity is good; you choose to follow a code of generosity. Conversely you don't choose to believe that your own interests and self-preservation are paramount; you choose to follow a code that reflects that belief. It is not a could-have-gone-either-way single choice you make in a single moment. If you try to follow a code that is deeply discordant with your actual beliefs you will struggle with it forever. Which is why "choose optimism", which seems to be the dominant opinion in TFA and this thread, is such garbage advice. Frankly I think a much better avenue of advice to give is telling people who are deeply afraid about the future of the world how to productively cope with it instead of telling them to pantomime a belief that everything's gonna turn out swell.

In my life I've made the conscious choice not to worry too much about the existential problems that I believe will utterly destroy civilization as we know it. I did this because I need to function in society - make friends, pay the bills, marry the husband, buy the house and so on. But this is not optimism; it's not even productive pessimism; it's a selfish decision to ignore the bleak future and focus on living my own happy life and insulating myself from the worst of what's to come.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#208

Post by dredmorbius »

jason-phillips wrote: post #202
dredmorbius wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the construct you described allows one to invalidate others' beliefs as being "wrong" because they don't adhere to the same reference point as yourself Belief based in empirical evidence is at least bound to that evidence. Belief unmoored from empiricism --- blind faith or revelation --- suffers no such limits. Your criticism would apply all the more so to same, with the further failing that others' beliefs are "wron…

The factory owner and the factory worker can look at the same set of data and arrive at completely different world views. The Empire Did Nothing Wrong™ Was Lucifer actually incorrect in his position in the Garden of Eden? I'm pointing out how completely different and valid perspectives can be derived from the same set of data, the same circumstance. The problem arises when one claims their perspective was "inflicted"…

The factory owner and the factory worker can look at the same set of data and arrive at completely different world views.

My comment allows for that. Many-sidedness, a/k/a Anekantavada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada).

But many sidedness is not the any sideness which revealed or blind-faith belief permits. Experiential understanding is bound to and by that experience. Further, the cases you're referring to largely discuss social relational worldviews which are informed by status, standing, and affiliation within a society or culture. There are of course non-social instances of multiple interpretations, such as wave-particle duality, in which how one looks at a phenomenon influences the model arrived. at.

Factory owner and worker at least have beleif and understanding grounded in experience, and might be convinced of or sympathetic to the validity of views generated by the alternate experience. Your "which implies there is no choice" is reading meaning to my comment I did not intend and disagree with strongly.

The fact that people see things differently, that is, arrive at different conclusions based on different empirical evidence or experience is in fact my point.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#209

Post by jshen »

thrown_22 wrote: post #199
jshen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make sense because they will claim that the Ukrainians did it, which they’ve already started to lay the groundwork for. Also, nuclear plants can be a target for plenty of states or groups that don’t have nuclear weapons like terrorists.

There comes a point where you should turn off the television and turn on your brain.

I don’t even know what this means. Are you saying that we should expect propaganda to not work despite it working since the beginning of recorded history? If so, that is really dumb.

Re: I Choose Optimism

#210

Post by thrown_22 »

jshen wrote: post #209
thrown_22 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There comes a point where you should turn off the television and turn on your brain.

I don’t even know what this means. Are you saying that we should expect propaganda to not work despite it working since the beginning of recorded history? If so, that is really dumb.

I'm saying you should consume less pro-Ukranian propaganda and think a bit more.
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