Faulty sensory appreciation is so real and gives a distorted view of the reality. You keep ignoring body signals about small pain or discomfort, have imbalanced priorities and math and estimations go for a toss. Your actions become irrational, you try hard to fix small things and in the process cause big issues.
Maybe you’re not trying
31–40 of 196 posts
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#32> It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it. Brilliant.
Reminded me of Einstein:
> We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#33This is an idea that philosophers have played with in countless varieties, perhaps the one closest to the author's wording is Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith. Faced with anxiety, guilt or overwhelming weight of responsibility, it's often easier to subconsciously sidestep the problem and pretend you don't have a choice, even if you do. This is not even a conscious decision, it's hard to be aware of our own qui…
Sounds to me like this "bad faith" mechanism has been weaponized, and is literally how the public is controlled in the United States, maintained in a state of apathy towards the violation of everything the nation claims as a core value.
That word is having a moment, it seems.
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#34[flagged]
Upvoted because many people genuinely believe that agency is an illusion and therefore there's no point in trying.
But the "therefore" part is not true.
The state of believing that you can do it is a state that precedes actually doing it. This is true regardless of whether the universe is deterministic.
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#35This sounds a lot like Learned helplessness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
> Most of the Group 3 dogs—which had previously learned that nothing they did had any effect on shocks—simply lay down passively and whined when they were shocked
What a cruel time for experimenting on animals the 1960s were...
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, people are made up of particles that behave deterministically. Agency is an illusion. I like to slap people talking this to my face. Why? I was predetermined to slap them, the universe was set up that way. But I had only one occasion to really do this. The guy was thinking about this for two days. And when I say about this every proponent of "Agency is an illusion" then has some cop-out about responsibility,…
Most people will accept a brain tumor as an excuse for bad behavior, but not low blood sugar. I have successfully convinced people that hungry judges have less agency than full ones, though. (google hungry judge effect if you're curious).
As a person who would like to excuse my overeating on confirmed problems with blood sugar, I agree with you fully. We have different amount of willpower in different situations and in the same situation between different times of day. But we still have some agency, it's not fully predetermined. And like being overweight, training can help. I would even say that combating fat needs willpower and increases your available willpower too.
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#37> I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help Does anybody else find this strange? There's this person whose name you don't even know, but somehow you know who his old friends are? This is not a situation I'm familiar with.
It doesn't sound that far-fetched. The stalker probably told her that he was planning to join her company and meet her, which gave her enough information to find his name. Once she had his name, she could find his profile on social media and see who his friends were.
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#38I think, maybe the part of the problem is that it is sometimes easier to accept the situations as they are, even if we suffer from some, than trying to resolve them. Not better, but easier. Or, at least seems easier.
Imagine trying to be conscious about every life situation and to "actually try" to do what's best every single time. How much effort this would take? So, we develop habits instead. Maybe the question is how to place the cursor between relying on habits and consciously trying. How to develop the internal mechanism to detect the condition when "actually trying" is better in long term than falling back to a habit? How to even define this condition?
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#39[flagged]
Upvoted because many people genuinely believe that agency is an illusion and therefore there's no point in trying. But the "therefore" part is not true. The state of believing that you can do it is a state that precedes actually doing it. This is true regardless of whether the universe is deterministic.
Sure and what precedes that is brain activity. You're not "willing" neurons into firing in such a way that will result in a thought to try harder.
Re: Maybe you’re not trying
#40I think the "maybe you're not actually trying" framing is not very constructive. The author did try, making decisions and taking actions that seemed appropriate for her situation at the time. The problem was that because her attempts to solve the problem failed -- again and again and again -- she stopped trying. Which is a not-entirely-unreasonable thing to do. I would frame it more like: just because you have tried…
It seems that the author balked at a rather specific level of action: getting government agencies involved. I feel there might be more the author could say about this aspect of the event, though she is not, of course, under any obligation to do so.