What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less

> In fact, having depression is generally much worse than having diabetes

As a T1 diabetic, the fun part is that diabetes is highly correlated with depression. So it's very common for depression to follow diabetes. Sucks to have to deal with both. It's a vicious cycle, because depression makes it harder to manage your diabetes, and poorly managed diabetes is correlated with more severe depression symptoms.

Not exactly an "either or" problem. I'd rather just have depression, because at least there would be hope for treatment and remission. My diabetes will never be cured.

1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention, obviously.

2) I disagree on 2 counts.

a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness and we cannot extrapolate our behavior under volatility to conditions of certainty. The closest we come to it are the most meaningless actions (like me reaching for a water bottle, "knowing" that I will touch it and lift it up), but no meaningfully large action, and certainly not a single one that involves other conscious beings is ever experienced as certain.

b) Humans are not fundamentally probability-modeling animals. When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action. It is a complete category error to model human actions as such. Probability estimates have their (limited) place in (rare) human decisions, but even then it is not an exact fit.

This whole crystal-ball exercise is at best a lazy attempt by Lee, because it is easy and convenient to talk about the robo-human caricatures of his imagination. He is basically shaking his fist ADMONISHING YOU to behave more like the simplified easily-quantified caricatures so he can study you easier get his MacArthur Genius Grant goddammit.

>Obviously false statement, given the genre of fiction.

Obviously we are aware of the genre of fiction. Or science fiction for that matter. Or superhero comics, or supernatural stories, and so on. So my point wasn't that e.g. vampire fiction doesn't exist or isn't interesting to writers and reader.

But nothing in the genre of fiction is really about the impossible. That is just metaphor and plot device for what was, is, or can be.

If there's a superhero with laser eyes and super-strength, it's not about the superhero, but about the idea of heroism, the responsibility of power, the connections with people, the repercusions of actions, and so on. It's the connection with the existing and the possible that makes it interesting.

The non-realistic part is just background.

>a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness

That's not really important at the personal behavior level (the thing we're discussing, and which the article addresses) though, but more of a pedantic dictinction, isn't it?

We can't even be sure that we'll not die from a sudden heart attack in the next 10 minutes, but we nonetheless act and plan as if we have a 100% certainty that we wont, and we even feel that way (that is, we don't feel as this is an "open thing", we thing we'll live just fine - except those of us who have a related phobia and anxiety).

>When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action.

I'd say most humans will worry about somebody stepping on the glass on a public trail (or even less pressing concerns, like the impact of the litter on the environment, the possibility of the sun starting a fire through the shards, and so on) and will try to pick those shards. Heck, many will feel guilt if they don't.

Whether they run Monte Carlo simulations or just use some conscious rational logic to deduce the possible issue, is not really important to the question, is it?

So, the question would remain, why do we care for the possibility in the future of someone we don't even know stepping on the shards in 1 day or 1 year or 5 years, but not for other consequences of our actions far further in the future?

I'd say the real answer is because they're too dispersed (based on many levels of n-th order effects and cascading consequences) and too remote (1-2 generations in the future is beyond a reasonable horizon for most people).

Yeah, the kid who eats 2 marshmallows gets fat 30 years later, the one who doesn’t eat marshmallows at all ends up ding the best.