491–500 of 515 posts
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What you're feeling is selfishness, not sociopathy, for what it's worth! I don't think a sociopath would wonder what you're wondering here, but I'm no expert.
I think of selfishness and I think of taking deliberate actions to serve ones self at the detriment of others. Things like hoarding limited resources or taking a second slice of cake before everyone has had their first. I will never forgive you, John. You denied me cake.
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> it comes at a high cost In addition to what you mentioned, there is a hidden cost of responsibility. Once we advise people, they start holding us responsible for the result. Something goes wrong? It's now our fault.
And if your advice was good it was their idea all along. Kind of like fixing computer stuff. 6 months later something completely unrelated breaks and it's obviously your fault because they can do no wrong and you were the last person messing with it.
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How do you know? People are notoriously bad at predicting what will make them happy/unhappy. (fwiw, I'm not saying you're wrong)
I'm just saying that comment I replied to makes this sound as universal truth. Wanting children and being happy about having children are subjective things. There are people who don't have children and are happy about it, people who have children but are unhappy about it and everything inbetween. People who want to have children should have them, and people who don't want to have children shoudln't have them =)
> People who want to have children should have them, and people who don't want to have children shoudln't have them =)
I think it's fine either way! People who want to have children are often disappointed when it's not all roses as they imagined. Conversely, people who don't want to have children are often surprised at the little joys they bring...
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Ahh, the power of a cursory search to prove just about anything. What about the arguments given in the article?
The article does not provide data significant enough to support its basic assumption, that smart people fail to solve ill-defined tasks more than dumb people.
Bp's skirt the line betwen well defined and ill defined questions: there is no general rule you can follow to always solve it, but the answer can be trivially checked. I'm sure there is data on whether the ability to solve BPs is correlated with IQ, I assume so. It would be interesting if it was not, or only weakly.
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This sounds pretty intuitive, that smarter people should have better lives in general.
Why? I'd think the opposite. Smart people will on average probably be better of financially, but that doesn't transfer directly to happiness. A characteristic of "smart people" is the ability to identify and solve problems across a range of domains. That works well when the problem is some programming task, drawing a new house, gathering data for a report you write or whatever. But what if you identify problems you c…
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Problem is there is no real evidence provide to back the assertion. Is the ability to solve well-defined problems really different from the ability to solve poorly-defined problems? "One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives" seems like a circular definition. So people that feel good do so because they are better at solving poorly defi…
There's even less evidence for the idea that smart people see how bad reality really is... Even dumb people know there are "kids starving in Africa", and people beat their wife and kids in their home town.
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Good points, and I would even go one step further and cast doubt on the notion that "dumb" people don't see the awful. That is not my experience at all.
> That is not my experience at all. I think we have different experiences then. Or, maybe, your interpretation of 'seeing the awful' is different. I see 'dumb' people fall for pyramid schemes/MLM which seem obvious to me. They will only see the awful after they've lost money. We both see it, but there's a period where they don't, while I do. I see people fall for sales tactics and which are transparent to me. Getting…
Because you aren't picking sides, you will be accused by every side to be siding with the "enemy".
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"Brave new world" made a very good case for Mill's side of that argument. I found it convincing, for what that's worth.
I found both this book and the above JSM quote to be violently antithetical to the very existence of all pleasure seekers. My disdain for them led me into the arms of the philosophers who don't hate pleasure and the sensual world, like Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and the works of the critical theorists. The general disdain for hedonism felt in this world is extremely stupid. Brave New World is objectively a utopia, regar…
It's funny to see Nietzsche invoked in this context, since I'd imagine him giving much more weight to the slightly-more-ubermensch native MC than that of the society he clashed with. Nietzsche's a very subjective philosopher of course, but I'd imagine him saying that to love the world would be to refuse to engage with it in the glib way the society in BNW does.