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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Ethics is more complicated than you think it is.

    There is absolutely no reason that the set of rules you learned first would be the actual set of rules that governs people.

    As you have learned, being non-aggressive is not sufficient strategy to avoid others’ aggression.

    There’s no reason to think it would be, except that it was in kindergarten when large authority giants would easily overpower any aggressor, and would by policy do so on behalf of the nonagressive ones.

    Don’t confuse kindergarten rules for global culture. Huge mistake.

    Actual culture evolved from nature, and in nature in order to protect yourself you must retaliate when attacked. Every organism has weapons. Every organism.

    Meditate on that. Why would every organism use some of its previous energy budget building weapons? Why would evolution select for that 100% of the time?







  • Just because something doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s like saying one can grow an orchid over six feet tall. One can get a PhD. One can bench their body weight.

    Not that it happens all the time, but that it’s possible.

    I’m only saying that it’s possible to resolve differences in “beliefs” using mutual presentation and examination of evidence.

    Of course perception cannot be articulated, and can differ, and so may present unresplvable differences. But those differences can be reasoned about and recognized. A person is less touchy about their perceptions than about their values, so if you can prove to me something like “You tend to see 90 degree angles as acute”, I can (a) be thankful about that and (b) work around it.

    It’s harder to do that with values. Values are built into a person like perceptions are, below articulated knowledge, but they’re also (by definition) too important to “work around” or “correct for”.


  • My brain’s been fried at times too man, from drugs, trauma, brain impacts, etc.

    One time I had a mold problem in my apartment and didn’t know how to handle it and part of the problem was the mold itself was making it hard to function mentally and otherwise.

    In that case, having a premium subscription to chatgpt helped. Meaning having access to GPT4 instead of what they had free at the time which was GPT3.

    The LLM wrote me up a step by step plan for exactly how to determine if I had mold and then whom to email when and how and in what sequence to handle it.

    It was really helpful.

    If you can afford it, $20 to have a month’s access to talk to GPT4 or maybe Claude 3.7 might be a good idea.

    If you can’t afford it, I can spot you a month of one of these. AI isn’t necessarily superhuman in terms of precise reasoning, but it’s already superhuman in terms of just being able to articulate knowledge about all sorts of crap.

    Really useful when your brain’s recovering from being cooked or fucked up, too.



  • In my experience with bedbugs, the way I found out I had them was my sleep schedule reversed. I just found myself up all night and only sleeping during the day.

    Only later did I discover it was due to bed bugs. My subconscious responded to them before I became aware of them consciously.

    The reason I say this is that you mentioned your being a light sleeper with PTSD.

    Bed bugs will affect your sleep. You need to take this into consideration when planning your life.

    My advice leans toward saying fuck that place and finding a new one, and the reason isn’t the bedbugs but rather your landlord’s dishonesty.

    Your landlord is either lying to you (concerning) or to himself (double concerning). The fact your landlord has taken anti-bedbug measures and yet claims there are no bed bugs is a major red flag.

    Bed bugs are hard enough to deal with when everyone is on board and communicating, and not in denial about their existence. One of the hardest aspects of bed bugs is they’re easy to be in denial about. If anyone is showing signs of denial, that is in turn a sign that this might be an unwinnable bed bug fight.

    It takes a lot of coordinated, disciplined action among a group of people to eradicate a bedbug infestation. If someone in the group is lying, that’s a very bad indication for the group’s ability to succeed.

    My advice would be to confront the landlord about exactly what the fuck is going on with the bedbugs, what the history is, etc. Then, based on how authentic and trustable your landlord presents in that conversation, decide based on that.