Video of ants eating a lizard

I decided to have a little fun today by responding to some posts about this blog in a SomethingAwful thread. I don't normally make posts like this, but I enjoy the opportunity when it presents itself, and this was too good to pass up, so here we go.

Note that I am not going to post the names of the authors of the comments, because I'm lazy, and no one cares what your screenname is.

Here is the start of the "discussion" in the thread in question: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3493184&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=273


I'm going to address this first one out of order, just to get something out of the way:

"Do ultranerds just hate creative writing and music because it can't be quantified? Like, they have to enjoy some TV shows or movies right? How do they exist if they hate anything not set in a specific perfect sense. Like, no interpretations, no deeper meanings, all art must be one leveled and have one meaning. I'd love to listen to their Ipods or check their netflix list"

Ultranerds, niggers, Jews, fatties -- yeah, let's keep perpetuating what makes humankind absolutely abhorrent by generalizing people into predefined categories for the sole purpose of objectification and, ironically, obliteration of empathy. You're not partaking in Nazism here at all, no sirree. How silly of me to forget that it's not what fundamental social detriments you're promoting, it's how direct their manifestations are! It's only okay to dehumanize someone and label them when you're not shackling them and forcing them to work for you under inhumane conditions. They're just words and the other person should grow up and take it like a man, right? Or maybe I'm a fat, irresponsible, Jewish nigger-criminal for making a big deal about those latter groups being attacked unjustifiably.

Anyway, what we enjoy and what matters are obviously very different. Who cares if I enjoy chocolate ice cream, classical music, or hardcore porn? Who cares what your favorite fetish is, or how complex and subjectively fulfilling a movie is? You can do all of that in your spare time, but this blog is not about your spare time; it's about what matters. Very few of the things that I do really, truly matter, but that's part of being human. If you think otherwise, then congratulations on considering yourself special right alongside the other generation Y problem children. You wouldn't be reacting at all if I were wrong about this, and you know it.

It's important to note, here, that while this blog is about what matters, that doesn't mean that the blog itself "matters," or that it's one hundred percent accurate. Pursuit of accuracy does not necessarily warrant proclamations of accuracy, and in any case, if I really were some smug asshole getting off on "being right" and looking down on everyone else, not only would all of the entries here about no one being capable of truly knowing anything for certain not exist, but it wouldn't really be relevant to the importance or accuracy of the arguments themselves. Hitler was a vegetarian; does that mean that vegetarianism is a terrible idea? Chill with the personal drama/character assassination and focus on the arguments; to do otherwise is logically fallacious in spades. Sorry, but my eating babies is not going to make the arguments here go away, so it's up to you to, you know, argue back.

"In my experience yeah. The idea that art can have multiple meanings and is ultimately interpreted by the observer is anathema to them. They also hate anything that doesn't look like it involved a lot of technical skill."

I'm glad that I belong to a "them." What are we like in the wild? Are wild ultranerds different from domesticated ultranerds? Do our mating rituals differ? Please, all-wise Internet smartass, explain to me how people in my made-up category, who are different and should be treated differently from people in your made-up category, fail to understand that art can have multiple meanings.

Wait, what does art have to do with anything again? If we're going to bring the subject up, let's get a few things straight:

1. Art can have multiple meanings.

2. Pictorial symbolism is an inefficient way to communicate. If you want to say something important, then just say it.

3. All communication requires symbolism to some degree. However, some symbols are more efficient than others.

4. There's nothing wrong with captivating people emotionally through art. Just don't call it science, or use it to manipulate people for a cause. Make sure that they're aware that there is potential for manipulation so that they can enjoy the experience while still being in control.

5. I'd rather look at a beautiful landscape painting or listen to lush ambient music than ingest the loads of symbolism in a Poussin or pretend as though lyrics are musical in nature.

"Personally, I have no problem feeling bad for anyone who has suffered a tragedy, regardless of knowing them. And, surprise, there has never been a time when I was forced to choose between feeling bad for one person and totally ignoring someone else in a similar situation. Emotions aren't currency that you can run out of (for the most part)."

Every second, a preposterous number of horrible things occur on this planet; your ignorance of them forces you to choose those horrors of which you are not ignorant. Please stop pretending that you've attended the funerals of Africans who've starved to death, balling your eyes out the whole way. You know damn well that your mother and a starving African are not treated the same by your person.

A sufficiently advanced computer may be utterly incapable of feeling empathy for either individual, but if it's programmed to help those in need when presented with their struggles, then that's what it's going to do. It's not going to reflect on all of the wonderful memories that it had with the sufferer, or frown politely for two seconds while reading about his or her plight in the newspaper.

"loving shallow bitches. People want to have sex with you, so logically you must be dumber than me. Kneel before my superior intelligence!!!"

 Jesus Christ we are having a field day."

IQ test time:

All subjectively attractive people are subjectively desirable company, but not all subjectively attractive people are objectively intelligent.

I'm not going to search for fast cars by inspecting every red car that I encounter on the sole grounds that some red cars are fast; I'm going to inspect cars known for their speed. This doesn't mean that no red cars are fast, and it would be completely idiotic to either believe otherwise or believe that that's what I'm espousing.

"Ultranerds have the BEST ideas on education reform."

My, what a lovely, utterly empty post you have! Would you like to add anything else? Are you interested in helping people to come around to your way of thinking, or do you prefer to keep them against you so that you can feel superior? No interest in discussion, just yelling and harassment? Ah, I see.

But I'm the one with the superiority complex -- you know, the one who doesn't label people or associate them with others due to said label. The one who doesn't make snarky side remarks and instead writes thought-out premises. Right.

I might proclaim the average person to be an asshole, but if you're not the average person and I'm not lumping you personally into a category or calling you ugly for disagreeing with me, then why do you care?

"I love it when it's the ultranerds who aren't even smart enough for the STEM subjects they champion (as evidenced by his rejection of all mathematics beyond arithmetic as unnecessary). How does he plan on having Physics taught in his curriculum without a good basis in maths anyway?"

IQ test time:

Some people incapable of solving complex calculus problems would like to do away with having advanced math courses forced upon the general public using public money, or forced upon a college student as basically a commercial to the TV program that is their major. Some people really good at solving complex calculus problems feel the same way. Some people incapable of solving complex calculus problems want advanced math courses to be forced on the general public. Some people really good at solving complex calculus problems feel the same way.

Incidentally, it's amazing how every single one of you has to make these issues about flinging unfounded accusations at the opposition. Oh, I want to do away with complex math being forced onto people with no interest in it, so I must be bad at complex math. Oh, I'm not smart enough to do complex math, so therefore, people not smart enough to do complex math should be forced to do complex math and waste everyone's time and money, even though they're never going to use a single bit of it in everyday life. Well, you eat your own poo-poo, buddy. Therefore, you're wrong about everything. Take that!

"I woulda given... well, I woulda given SOMEBODY'S left nut to actually have classes on Hammurabi or the Boxer Rebellion somewhere in K-12. Also, dude's clearly never actually taken a class on Psychology OR Poli Sci"

More of the same. If you'd bothered to read more than a few lines from that post of mine, you would have encountered the bit where I stated that anyone interested in any subject should have the freedom to pursue it whenever they want, free of charge, for the betterment of both themselves and society at large. Do you really think that it makes any degree of sense to teach subjects to children if they're uninterested -- especially if the subjects have no practical value in everyday life? Why should my money go toward bored, tired children learning about the Pilgrims? Are the Pilgrims going to fix our political structure? Are the Pilgrims going to cure AIDS? If children are bored in the classroom, we've already screwed up. Maybe you love the Pilgrims, but that's your personal interest, and you're free to pursue that interest however you see fit in your spare time.

And not that it matters, but for the record, I've taken my fair share of Psychology and Political Science courses. I don't care about Sigmund Freud's archaic ideas, unfounded paranoia regarding Iran's nuclear program, how democratization is going to save poor people in Haiti from having to subsist off of selling bananas to tourists, or how four mental disorders belong in category A while another four belong in category B. And I definitely don't care about memorizing acronyms and buzz words for the purpose of passing tests; if the average person off the street understands at least a little about the process of a dominant nation leeching off of another, poorer nation for its natural resources, then it's stupid to fail them just because they've never heard the term "dependency theory" before.

"The philosophy bits are hysterical. Seriously, the reason why philosophy is taught like that is because it's part of critical thinking. The philosophy teachers want you to come to those conclusions on your own, not because the teacher proselytized you onto the One True Way like a loving cult leader.

 Also, any bet this ultranerd's idea of the one dominant philosophy is Objectivism and the not-so-famous person is Ayn Rand?"

Critical thinking should be taught from the first grade onward, and involves analysis of individual scenarios and problem-solving, just like arithmetic. If we give our children math problems, why not logic problems, or ethics scenarios to contemplate? Furthermore, why would ANY of that warrant random people's names being dropped, meaningless isms, and other excess baggage? When was the last time that you walked into a math class where children were learning times tables, and had Zhou Bi Suan Jing name dropped as being an "important person in the history of times tables"? Better memorize his name and understand his "contributions," kids, or you'll be failures at this math thing!

Yeah, or what you're saying is utterly irrelevant to actual critical thinking, which is much more about abstraction, process management, methodology refinement, and meta-cognition than being given five gigantic slabs of historical mush with cute names to memorize. How should anyone be expected to think critically when they're given only a handful of worldviews to read about, each self-contained and closed-off? Why should we be presented ANY worldviews, named or unnamed, instead of be equipped with the cognitive tools to allow us to solve everyday logic problems in an emergent manner, case by case?

"Here's transcendental idealism, Platonic realism, Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Stoicism, nihilism, epistemological nominalism, existentialism, and, uh... Foucault, yeah, Foucault. Don't forget that guy. He said some stuff once, just like everyone else to have ever lived, so that means that you should read about what he said, because, like, you can decide for yourself if it's true or not and stuff. Other people say stuff sometimes, too, but they're not famous, so... yeah, I guess you can think critically about what they say, too, but not in this class, okay? Only Foucault!"

I have no idea where you grabbed Ayn Rand from. Maybe you should read the posts on this blog tagged "capitalism," "Zeitgeist Movement," "value system," and "social transparency." I might as well be the anti-Ayn Rand.

...And the guessing game continues!

"People who fetishize engineering majors and are terrible at math are really common. Most of the time, STEM nerds who sneer at arts and humanities seem to have a habit of being bad at their own major, really. They seem to think that everything else is really easy, so their 2.3 average as an electrical engineer is worth way more than a psych/journalism/literature major's 3.6.

 Hearing a CS major call my math major underwater basket weaving and then end up complaining about having to learn proofs and set theory because they're pointless for him to know is just the most precious thing."

First, do a search on my blog for "set theory," and you'll see that I find it invaluable. Funny, though, that you're so territorial of your major that you don't even realize that set theory is not exclusive to it, and is applicable to the entire universe. Jeez, even the first portion of the second sentence of Wikipedia's article on it -- that silly, transparent site with all those wrong people -- makes this apparent!

You are not cool or important for understanding object-orientation and abstraction.

Just as a fun aside, I'll state that I hold two degrees and maintained 4.0 and 3.8 GPAs at the schools from which I got them, respectively. I will withhold the names of the schools for the sake of preserving my anonymity. I can't remember scoring lower than 100 (and often got a 105 after answering the extra credit questions) on a college math exam, either. Sure, I never got to Calc 3, but it wasn't part of either of my degrees, so I never got the chance to try.

Since I don't want to engage in a pissing contest, though, I'll stop here and chuckle a bit to myself at how bizarrely self-preserving and competitive you are. This isn't Facebook, where my cooler Internet picture warrants you checking yourself out in the mirror for an hour.

Seriously, one more irrelevant ad hominem or assertion that you know more about me than I do and I'm going to have to vomit. Your insipid insights into "why" I post what I do are nauseating, as is your insistence that any of this matters. Hopefully, we can be free of Calc courses for people who will never use what they've learned someday, and if we can't, then we might as well call ourselves the Jeopardy culture.

"His thing about freudian psychology reminds me about somebody who was bitching about calculus. "I don't know why they even teach you about limits. After that chapter you'll never use them again because you learn derivatives."

Except that guy somehow managed to pass calculus."

So did I! Am I cool yet?

"He probably still is in school. Only someone who's still in their "rebellious gently caress-you-all" phase could unironically demand history to be dropped from schools."

I'm quite out of school, and work full-time for a systems integrator maintaining their internal network. I get raises and people enjoy my company immensely. I hold the babies of co-workers and participate happily in potlucks and parties. Unfortunately, I just can't bring myself to give a shit about what I'm doing, because it isn't making society better off.

Look, if you're interested in history, no one should stop you from learning about history. I love reading about Canaanite polytheism, the Migration Period, Paul the Deacon's Lombards, Saami shamanism, Genghis Khan, the history of the Sikhs, the Napoleonic wars, and the life of Franz Liszt. But if someone else doesn't love that stuff, should I pay for them to learn and subsequently forget about it, with society not benefiting in the slightest from the hours that they'd wasted? Furthermore, how does knowing about Napoleon make you a more efficient contributor to society, which is in a resource debt, not to mention a dire need to prevent an awful lot of suffering around the world?

"I loved the bitching about trig then the fucker goes on how physics will be taught if he was the Principal of the Known Universe. Kinda need one in order to full understand the other. Oh, what's that? "Parabolas"? Don't need them.

Also, the comment about "metacognition"? I had to look that up but all it is just making memorization even more rote."

And I love your equating physics with physics as it's currently taught to older people. The entire world is physics; yes, the equations are useful to those who will be doing work in that field, but everyone should at least have a rudimentary understanding of gravity, the presence of molecules versus vacuums, forces, momentum, and maybe some of the simpler laws of thermodynamics. Does any of that require trig? I can and probably should teach it to fourth graders.

Speaking of which, that's another thing: I couldn't possibly consider myself far smarter than the average person if I view most of what I'm promoting as being understandable to small children. It's the memes inside your brains that are the problem -- not the raw hardware.

"He didn't say it, but he plans on changing the curriculum to replace Shakespeare with Animorphs."

Shakespeare is more Lit than English. If I were to teach Shakespeare to an elementary school class learning about gerunds and adverbs, I'd make a huge mess. Early modern English is as useful to us as proto-Anglo-Saxon and Old Icelandic.

"I would wager on Cs/Ds. His comment about junking the "arbitrary base 10" grading system and doing everything pass/fail suggests a guy who's seen "70" on a lot of papers, thought it was good enough, and then gotten pissed off at his parents when they told him to apply himself more.

It's also odd how he sometimes seems to be talking about college, and other times about public K-12. Unless there are universities teaching sex ed or making students recite the pledge of allegiance."

More personal attacks! Love it. I'm sure Bigfoot enthusiasts think you're an absolutely vapid moron when it comes to traipsing around a forest and searching for footprints. Guess that means Bigfoot exists, eh?

I talk about all levels of education in the post because no one should ever stop learning as long as they live, and age should not arbitrarily define what you learn about. Is that a problem?

"Where did you find that ultranerd manifesto anyway? I seriously want to see more of this guys posts. Education reform ideas by total idiots is by far my favorite dumb internet comment thing. It's the easiest way to see a person's entire thought process. Also, that dude's school would be beyond loving boring.

BEEP BOOP WE MUST ONLY LEARN GRAMMAR, MATH, SCIENCE AND COMPUTER SKILLS BEEP BOOP CREATIVITY IS FOR LESSER PEOPLE BEEP BOOP PLEASE EAT YOUR PROVIDED HOT POCKETS AND THROW AWAY ALL OF YOUR GYM CLOTHES"

Those would be required skills. What you personally want to do to contribute to society is obviously an entirely separate matter. Are you sure you're adept at reading comprehension?

Most schools are already beyond boring. My goal would be to reform the entire system so that the teacher/student dichotomy is eradicated, friendships with "teachers" are built over years rather than months or "quarters," only first names are used, multiple choice tests are kept to a minimum, practice and implementation are encouraged, correlation with economic success is done away with, stress is reduced overall, extrinsic motivators are eradicated, multiple "teachers" are assigned to one class, classes have far fewer "students" (as few as five, in some cases), and one-on-one time is a must. In this environment, not only would creativity not be discouraged, it would be the entire point.

"Honestly, ultra-nerd's hatred of things like higher maths and rant about proper formatting structure in academic papers lead me to believe he's a pissed off highs schooler with a chip on his shoulder

"Give my paper an F? I'll show you Ms Zukowski!"

Yep, and Richard Dawkins failed Sunday school too many times, so he's nerding out and getting his revenge on those evil Catholics for not being nice to him. The Buddha was terrible at asceticism and was constantly mocked by the other ascetics for failing to properly starve himself, so he gave Hinduism the finger and started his own group. Einstein was always at the bottom of the class when Newtonian classical physics was at the fore, so he got his revenge by coming up with E=mc^2.

See how easy that was?

I would never pretend to be more important than anyone else and am not equating myself with these famous people, but you get the point. Or you probably don't, but oh well.

"I couldn't make it through.

I got to this footnote; "* This is the place where I'm supposed to link you to articles proving that I'm right, but I don't feel like Googling for the obvious."



'I'm correct, just accept that as fact. Accept that I know what's best for everyone and everything. Accept that I should make all decisions for everyone everywhere. And you shall know my name is the LORD when I strike down upon you!

KNEEL! KNEEL BEFORE THE ULTIMATE INTELLIGENCE IN THE UNIVERSE!'


gently caress you. You small minded, myopic, misguided, twatty little tyrant. I bend no knee to your cause.

He's said his opinion. I don't give a Tinker's dam to read anymore of it."

Really? You're going to call me arrogant for stating that it's obvious that the music industry is in decline? Really? You must be the type to require citations and references to the sky being blue, then.

Of course, I don't really think that this is the case, and will instead chalk up your stupid exaggeration to your wanting to fit in online by making fun of any chunk of text you can find that will fit into the pre-agreed upon objective.


Well, there you have it, folks. SomethingAwful somehow manages to live up to its name constantly, while taking irony to heights never previously fathomed by mankind. Goofy Internet memes, Family Guy, and "random" (see: foundationless) humor not only are par for the course, but infest every crevice of signature and avatar space. Internet nerds lambaste those who disagree with them on the sole grounds that the counter-points damage their individual identity as an interesting, unique, and important human being, all the while never proposing substantive counterarguments. They then proceed to proclaim the originator of the ideas to be a nerd (like it really matters who's behind the ideas at all to begin with), even though they're the ones entrenched in banal pop culture references, anonymous socialization, and ego inflation -- all staples of nerddom.

Yeah, yeah, a person's character is irrelevant to their arguments, so I shouldn't bother with attacking the character of the average Internet forums-goer. That aside, though:

1. These people have no arguments to critique, so what else am I supposed to say? They outright refuse to even make the attempt to prove my ideas wrong.

2. This is a lot of fun.

"Hey, that guy claimed that his view is probably more accurate than mine, and my view defines me as a person -- a charming, witty, hive-minded keyboard warrior making important contributions to society through my college courses and affirmations of cultural integration among my peers! I know all the latest, trendy memes and absurdist jokes, I'm really good at lumping people into bullshit categories, and I make money, sometimes. The fact that all of this is utterly meaningless and often detrimental to society in the face of repugnant social ostracization, cutthroat capitalism, and valueless mass hysteria aside, my being called out on it means that the accuser is a failure at all of the above!"

Oh, if only logic were always reducible to convenient if-then red herrings and assassinations of character.

Let's suppose, for a minute, that I'm maintaining this blog just to feel superior to others and look cool. So what? I'm sure a lot of great thinkers were douchebags, but that doesn't make them wrong.

So prove me wrong.

On a final note, I will state that having a whole thread on your forum dedicated to slander, harassment, and aimless trolling just goes to show how little we've progressed as a species. I would sooner praise cowardly Roman denizens for cheering while gladiators get mauled to death by lions than praise the modern, emasculated Internetter who'd be too afraid to watch his objects of scorn get the same treatment, all the while being just as invested in using other people for his own solipsistic entertainment.

I guess failing to make the cute girl at the office laugh after reciting some ultra-obscure Internet joke laced with layers of references would lead one to retreat to a world where acceptance is garnered by ostracizing even bigger losers, like My Little Pony fans. Keep your religion if you want, but I'll have no part in it. How sickening it is that people in this day and age still abide by the "I don't like what you're saying, so you do all of the following unrelated things in your personal life, which makes you a bad person worthy of mockery" mentality. Grow up.

Buddha: Take Two

Reply to these comments

One of the great things the Buddha said that will single handedly dissolve many of your points:

"Do not believe in anything because you have heard it.

Do not believe in anything because it is spoken by many.

Do not believe in anything because it is written in religious books.

Do not believe in anything on the authority of your teachers.

Do not believe in traditions just because they have been handed down.

But after observation and analysis,

when you find that anything agrees with reason

and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,

then accept it and live up to it." 

This is all good advice, but it contradicts some of his other teachings. This could be because, like any other religious text, it was written by multiple authors, all with slightly different but socially compatible agendas. Religions, regardless of their origin points, are fueled by dogma, so any good ideas get drowned out when the fervor gets initiated; there is a lot of "Yeah, yeah, that sounds good. Put that in there, too, and we'll probably get more people to listen to us." Sometimes, what sounds good is good, and sometimes, it isn't -- but none of this matters to those more interested in control than genuine enlightenment.

Keep in mind that the Pali Canon was written four hundred and fifty years after the supposed death of Siddhartha Gautama -- plenty of time for distortion, contradiction, and multiple personal interests to sneak in under the guise of "Buddhism." Even if it's written somewhere that the Buddha said something wise once, that does not justify other written, unwise statements. Hitler said a few sensible things in his time, for instance.

Of course, both the good and the bad came from a whole posse of people, and not from some mystical man towering above us normal peons; this automatically elongates the already lengthy shadow of idiocy looming over those who foolishly venerate a single man for somehow being neurologically unique. Nothing is more intellectually dangerous, and there are strong parallels between veneration of a man who can, according to the texts, never ever arise again with such brilliant (even though they're all either really obvious or incorrect) ideas on the one hand, and a man who is the only son of god who will come only once to bring us salvation on the other. The template, to the modern observer, is cheap, obvious, and a by-product of early civilization. It is the ideal logical fallacy: "You don't agree with this idea? Well, I heard it from this guy who is special. Therefore, I'm right."

It is probably impossible for a single human to be intellectually unique, so even if the Buddha was right to declare a puny list of four assertions the end-all-be-all, that would in no way justify anyone's abandonment of independent peer review in favor of adulation. I don't care how many layers of hell you've descended into for the benefit of mankind; you can't get away with putting together definitive lists and closing them off, never even once imploring others to add to or subtract from them.

It makes no sense to declare that one should not believe something on the grounds that it's written in a religious text, then turn around and also declare that you possess not just truth -- which is elusive and maybe even impossible to attain for humans -- but noble truth.

I wonder what would have happened to Darwin if he'd declared evolution "The noble, indisputable truth of life's procession". All those other scientists with their annoying journals and independent studies can go to hell!

There really is a pretty profound difference between "I know for certain that I am absolutely right about this, but please, come to the conclusion that I'm right on your own" and "This is what the evidence is currently indicating, but let's keep running the experiment and see if something new happens, or if we're missing something." If the Buddha were ever to promulgate the latter, there would be no Buddhism.

Furthermore, the Four Noble Truths are stupid to begin with. They basically advocate the idea that one can achieve freedom from craving, desire, and other forms of suffering through the Noble Eightfold Path. Obviously, we cannot extricate ourselves from our environs while alive, so there is no such thing as freedom from negative sensation without the termination of conscious experience altogether. In the Pali Canon, the Buddha is doing exactly what L. Ron Hubbard did by claiming to know not only why people suffer, but how to end it all and enter into a state of personal heaven as well. In short, he was a sophisticated swindler, handing out pamphlets advertising his -- and only his -- special ability to fix everyone. Capitalism, anyone?

Simple, one-size-fits-all, too-good-to-be-true methods for feeling perpetually blissful should always be scrutinized -- though, again, we should be careful not to project the agendas of the authors of the Buddhist texts onto whoever really was their original inspiration, given the ubiquity of distortion in the ancient world. The real Buddha could have been nothing more than a wiser than average guy with ideas that were great for their time but antiquated today.

1. The Numbered Lists
Numbered lists are a mnemonic device from oral cultures not an exclusive enumeration of dogma. There are two possibilities- that (a) the Buddha, wishing his disciples to be able to memorise his teachings, presented them in list form, or that (b) the subsequent process of oral transmission resulted in this format.

Does this really matter, though? Prior to plumbing, it was necessary to construct wells, but their then-necessity doesn't justify our continued drinking of unclean water.

The Buddha did entertain the arguments of famous philosophers and those of other sectarians and his contemporaries. These arguments are recorded in numerous places in the Pali Canon

This parallels the mythic intellectual hero (as opposed to the real person; see a pattern, here?) Socrates' rigged fights against the sophists: Relative to the morons espousing obvious gibberish, the hero appears wise and all-knowing, which provides further justification for submission to his agenda, and even his deification. This obvious false dichotomy is also a known tactic among physical fighters, and very effective against those with limited perspective.

What the Buddha actually did was suggest that his students become enlightened themselves - to see that things were really as he described them.

And, conveniently for him, they all wound up agreeing with him! No one ever stood up and said, "This is stupid. How is getting acquainted with how my body deals with the world going to end my suffering once and for all? How is it going to help that starving baby bird over there? Where's the absolute correlation between conscious willing and physical consequences?!"

I wouldn't describe meditation as contrived or requiring extensive training: how 'contrived' is simply paying attention to one thing?

Our brains have physical limits to how long they can remain concentrated on one thing at the expense of another, especially when the other thing is your intestines hanging out.

That being said, the underlying cause of pain is getting born! The Buddha fell upon the rather obvious solution when he suggested not getting reborn. 

The way to prevent your rebirth is by promoting the idea that no one should reproduce; if no one reproduces, then the infinitude of "yous" that come and go from each sentient organism's consciousness will eventually cease to emerge. Learning how to sit really still and ignore the world's attempts to engage with you is useful while alive, but it will not prevent your rebirth.

For example, if you have a child, but then go on to become the best meditator ever, this latter change may bring you happiness in moments where you would have otherwise been very uncomfortable, but your ascension to nibbana is rendered illegitimate by the existence of your child, who is interconnected to you and will suffer throughout his or her life. The correct path to nibbana, then, is not perfect mindfulness and higher realization, but the extinction of you, your child, and every other sentient creature -- regardless of how the extinction comes about. Certainly, the planet being instantaneously vaporized by a gamma ray burst has nothing to do with enlightenment or mindfulness, yet it is the real nibbana after all.

the most authentic position of Buddhism is completely indifferent to whether gods exist or not...this point is largely doctrinally irrelevant to Buddhism.

It really, really shouldn't be. The existence of gods has profound implications regarding existence and the nature of cause and effect. If gods exist, then there necessarily is a kind of functionality inherent in the system that we call the universe, for gods are human-like in desire and overall essence. Their existence may not change the fundamental nature of sentience, but it could if there really does turn out to be a reason for all the madness which we call life.

Having observed the paranormal in front of my own eyes as a child, I am tempted to take seriously the anecdotal evidence of others' encounters with non-human beings- the type of experiences which are actually censored by current scientific dogma.

I don't doubt that someone like the Buddha had paranormal experiences, but said person also did not have access to modern scientific knowledge or methods with which to properly and negatively analyze the experiences. Today, if we encounter what we perceive to be an apparition, we can first realize the importance of negatively analyzing the encounter by actively seeking out all those alternatives which potentially discredit the default assumption:

1. We now have evidence that our perception of reality is a filtered aggregate of abstractions constructed by neurons, each programmed to provide us with an analogy of the information they receive from the "external" world. Sometimes, the analogy appears grossly inaccurate, especially when subjected to unusual stimuli. In layman's terms, we may call this phenomenon an hallucination.

2. Humans enjoy pranks and hijinks, and must not be underestimated for their ability to deceive their peers.

3. Given what we know about sleep, comas, vegetative states, mental retardation, other species, etc., it would be silly to assume that a person's soul becomes physically locked away when the brain shuts down, only to become free and fully aware after death and in the absence of that which it apparently needed in order to be conscious in the first place.

...and so on. Anyway, your misconstruction of science as not only an ideology but dogma is counterproductive and ironic. Science is a process, much like the processes of baking a cake and refining oil. The outcome of each experiment must be independently verified by unaffiliated individuals, and if such individuals refine or overturn an idea decades after its introduction, then "science" welcomes the update.

The position of suicide in Buddhism is more complex than you make out. At the same time as the Buddha, another teacher, Mahavira, was teaching a religion, Jainism, that would ultimately espouse suicide as the height of saintliness.

...And Jainism is not Buddhism, let alone the original teachings of the Buddha or his spokespersons. Anyway, if that's really what Jainism advocates, then it, too, is foolish, for suicide is a waste -- save for cases of extreme depression, terminal illness, etc. -- in the face of the source of the problem: reproducing DNA material. If we fail to end all life, then "we" will continue to exist for billions of years to come; we just won't remember any of it.

The universe feels; sometimes, parts of it remember the horror, and other times, they forget, or never experience it to begin with. If you have both stomach cancer and heart disease, the elimination of your stomach cancer may make your stomach happy, but the body is nevertheless suffering somewhere else.

Buddhism condemns violence: suicide is ultimately violence against oneself.

This is more of that goofy absolute rhetoric that I outed in the first post. It's the same as the Four Noble Truths or the Ten Commandments in its defining something as free from exception: What was the value metric used to come to this conclusion? Some things may always be bad, but we have to do the math to determine whether the outcome is negative, zero, or positive before we can say for sure.

Likewise, the trappings of a monk have persisted largely unchanged (in Theravada Buddhism) since the time of the Buddha. Wearing one's robe correctly and shaving one's head are simply part of the practice of renunciation- these things are not arbitrary ritualisations, they are the customs of those bent on renunciation.

There's nothing arbitrary in shaving your head to represent your restrained lifestyle? What if I were to tell my lackeys that they have to wear KISS T-shirts in order to symbolically express the very same lifestyle -- and what if they all were to wear KISS T-shirts, with none questioning the practice? Would that be healthy, independent rationality, or would it be, like Scientology, a manifestation of an age-old human pitfall?

The Buddha stands out among all people who have ever inhabited the earth as someone who could credibly talk about what it means to have a mind without limits.

Good show!

Question of the day

Why should I eat chicken and love my wife instead of eat my wife and love a chicken?

New blog

Say No to Reproduction

You're invited, too, Something Awful!

Sexual attraction is racism

Historically, we have proven a very myopic species. Whenever we collectively come to the realization that some facet of our culture is destructive, we never attempt to extrapolate from that realization, and instead pass it on to the next generation as "tradition" to be memorized and subsequently parroted without regard for its fundamental essence, or what essence of which it is a manifestation.

Is ritualistic human sacrifice a bad thing? Yes, very bad. Okay, we've figured that out, so we're set.

Oh, gladiatorial combat is a bad thing, too? Yeah, that makes sense. Well, it's been a few thousand years since our last decree and all, but it's still a good thing that we figured this one out. We're set now, right?

What? Don't tell me that slavery is wrong, too! Jeez, nothing fun is acceptable, is it? Well, at least we're making progress. We deserve a pat on the back, now.

You've got to be kidding me. You mean that even though other races get paid for their labor, now, they should have access to the same resources as us? Fine. That sort of makes sense. Hey, it only took us a hundred years to knock this one out. Contrast that with the few thousand that it took last time! We're obviously becoming more progressive and rational as a species.

But don't you dare propose that gay people should be allowed to get married. That is absolutely off limits.

Upon making the realization that humans shouldn't be forcefully and selfishly sacrificed to the gods, it shouldn't take much time at all to realize that homosexuals should have access to the same resources and institutions as heterosexuals. Why does each of these realizations take so long to make, in spite of their occupying the same fundamental value space?

The problem is that the realization is never that sentience is the kernel of value, or that symbolic cultural assumptions need to be rigorously and scientifically challenged; instead, it's that mass murder should not be a form of entertainment, or that blacks are people, too. In reality, these latter phenomena are just surface manifestations of the former; if eating food that tastes good is important, then we should realize this in the fundamental sense rather than make the claim that because we once ate a good-tasting apple, eating apples is important.

Of course, the above analogy gets into the nature of variability and value equations, but this blog has hit on those concepts enough by now, I think. Just keep in mind that after gay marriage, there's the right to die, and after that, there's outlawing impregnation, and after that, there's the idea that sexual attraction is racism.

When it comes to sexual attraction, we can abstract the focal qualities of an individual into two primary categories:

1. Those qualities which sexually attract us to the individual

2. Those qualities which make the individual a valid companion capable of making calculated, informed decisions and being rational overall (which increases the likelihood of the individual understanding us, reciprocating during conversations, and enjoying our company)

In the case of category 2., the individual needn't even be part of the particular gender or age bracket to which we are sexually attracted, underlying the ultimate superficiality of sex. This should come as no surprise to "antinatalists," however -- that is, if they've embraced the idea that the phenomenon of sexual reproduction is fruitless, aimless, and insipid.

It's important to understand, here, that at a racist organization, the above two categories are very much the same in the abstract, but manifest in physical substance as the following:

1. Those qualities which we have culturally -- and, to a much lesser extent, genetically -- come to embrace or find symbolic security in, due in part to the evolutionary power of xenophobia

2. Those qualities which make the individual a hard worker capable of filling the role offered at our organization

Big tits and a cute laugh are to human companionship what light skin and Caucasian facial features are to corporate employment. If you want your company to do as well as it can, then hire people based on their skills rather than their skin color; if you want your social life to be as fulfilling as it can be, then live and share your life with interesting and intelligent people rather than sexually attractive ones. We should have figured this out as soon as we stopped rolling human heads down pyramid steps, but, well, we suck.

The layers

1. Epistemological/existential - What exists? How do we know that it exists? Can we ever be sure that we know anything? Can we ever be sure that we know what exists?

2. Empirical - Does what exists and what we know -- or the appearance of what exists and what we know -- have clear, identifiable patterns that can be gleaned via our sensory receptors? Can we use the scientific method as part of a broader methodology and management of mental processes to deduce the probability of outcomes with consistency? Once we've established the extent to which we can know things, what empirical evidence is there for the existence of any particular phenomenon?

3. Systematic/mechanistic - How can all that we can sense empirically be integrated into a mental model for the purposes of processing, output, and evaluation? Is there anything that can be empirically observed that does not fit as a variable, parameter, agent, process, etc. into a system or subsystem? What are the boundaries surrounding systems? Are there boundaries surrounding reality as a whole? How does causality shape the smallest, most irreducible constituents of reality as a system as they transmute from one form to another within the soup of existence?

4. Utilitarian/value-oriented - Does causality impact systems in such a way as to necessitate value? Is there value inherent in any particular process as part of a system? How do we determine what, if anything, is valuable? Is it possible to be conscious and animated without value or the capacity to value and evaluate? If something is valuable, how do we utilize systems thinking and empirical methods to productively maximize or minimize it in the name of a goal or set of goals?

5. Pragmatic/economic - If something is valuable, how do we ensure that we're being practical in acting to the end of cultivating its value? When we make a decision, are we losing something via causality that we can never get back? If so, is the cost worth the product? What is the cost of each of our actions? Are we being cost-effective information/value agents?

Forums

All of the forums that I've frequented have more or less sucked. If you know of any that don't that are also relevant to the agenda of this blog, link to them in the comments.

Solidifying the argument

It's time to solidify the basic antinatalist argument. I've talked at length on this blog about how a value equation should be governed by how causality shapes the phenomenology -- in the forms of qualia and quanta -- of the universe. Well, there are some tangential concepts floating around this place that may not have been explicitly linked to this basic argument up until now, so let's link them once and for all and make our position as rock solid as it will probably ever be.

In a past post, I said:

If there is nothing necessary about life, then we cannot possibly justify it, given that stakes are present. We can only justify taking risks with stakes involved where it's necessary, or where the stakes are the lowest possible out of all the options. If the lowest possible number of stakes within a given scenario is zero, and the other options are not necessary, then we should choose the option with zero stakes.

So what determines whether an action is necessary or not? There are several key components:

1. Value
2. Continuity of consciousness
3. Empirical data/information
4. Probability
5. Abstraction
6. The ego as a process (independent of the phenomenon of sentience)

How can these components be linked together to coherently describe the necessity of mitigating suffering through basic utilitarian mathematical calculations? Simple:

1. I propose that, in the absence of teleology or a god, I should be allowed to stab someone with a knife, because it is physically possible for me to stab someone with a knife.

2. But stabbing someone with a knife is not necessary. Why do something unnecessary if it's probably, based on our past empirical experience of reality, going to cause suffering? Furthermore, in this particular instance, I am not stabbing a mass murderer, rapist, etc., so I am changing the other side of the equals sign (the sum) in the value equation in favor of negative sensation.

3. But why value sensation? It is physically possible to not value sensation, and there is no universal overseer, so why does it matter if we torture sensory agents?

4. Value is a necessity of our continuity of consciousness. So long as we're conscious, we are, wittingly or unwittingly, value agents. For every conscious thought that I process in favor of acting one way, I am necessarily discarding a near-infinite array of other potential actions. Therefore, if I choose to stab someone, I do so because I value that action more than all other potential actions available to me within that arbitrary moment -- including that action that we might erroneously refer to as "refraining from acting."

We could spin a wheel with "stab someone" as one of the options and then actually stab someone once the wheel stops at that option, but that would necessarily mean that we value having our decisions made for us by the physics of momentum. We might subjectively feel apathetic regarding what we're doing, but we still prefer the randomness of the action to the non-randomness of the alternatives. Put another way, it is impossible to act randomly; it is, however, possible to act according to some arbitrary rule, like what the first action is that pops into your head, or which action the wheel lands on; nevertheless, it is still impossible to randomly decide to act according to some arbitrary rule for the same reasons that determinism dictates everything else and randomness doesn't; the decision must be made according to a value system. Maybe suffering isn't valuable, but until another, more suitable thing to value is presented, we don't have a choice; there is no such thing as being simultaneously conscious and non-evaluating.

Whether we are mindful of what we're doing or not, we are sentient beings; therefore, all of our decisions are made based on sensation -- whether our own sensations, or the sensations of others. We innately value avoiding pain; our bodies always reflexively attempt to dispense with it, so our acting in favor of avoiding pain is an indication of pain's value. It is necessary, according to our bodies, to avoid pain. If you intentionally attempt to control your body's desire to avoid pain, it's because you fear a greater pain that the body cannot foresee, or because you are attempting to demonstrate a point that, if not made, will cause a kind of mental discomfort.

5. But what if I'm sadistic, and gain incredible satisfaction and pleasure from stabbing someone? What if my pleasure outweighs the other person's suffering -- and we can somehow scientifically deduce as much with acute neurological instruments? Who cares if the action of stabbing the other person is not necessary?

6. It is necessary to not act in this manner, because of our value system mentioned above. I can just as easily gain pleasure by merely thinking about the stabbing, or by doing something totally different altogether. The pleasure experienced won't be quite the same, or even as intense, but it isn't necessary to stab someone.

7. But why do we value the sensations experienced by other sentient beings just as much as we value the ones that we personally experience? If I'm altering the value equation in favor of my pleasure, even at someone else's expense, I'm still reducing the negative value of the equation, right?

8. I can still alter the equation in favor of my pleasure without stabbing someone; stabbing someone, then, is wasted suffering.

9. But how do we know that the other person's suffering is real in the first place?

10. If we empirically observe the world and the "experiment" of all [ostensibly] sentient beings who've been stabbed leans toward a one hundred percent rate of external signifiers of suffering, then the probability is high that they suffer just as we do.

11. The human individual is an arbitrary abstraction based on the process of ego; we would not be so easily swayed in favor of the belief that personhood is sacred if our egos were not continuous, discrete processes utilizing a set of sensations and experiences behind a defined physical boundary.

12. The process of ego is independent of the sensations necessary for the ego to exist; these two are not one and the same for the same reasons that gasoline is not the same thing as a motor vehicle. Therefore, the space and time occupied by a sensation does not determine its value; the value is determined only by the sensation itself. We can develop a logical understanding of why harming someone in the absence of a greater amount of harm looming overhead is a bad idea, because there is no "harming someone"; there is only "causing electricity in such a way as to elicit negatively valuable physical reflexes." If we combine this axiom with 4., then we quickly realize why the suffering of others is valuable.

Moral intuitions as abstract, anthropocentric absolutes

From this post:

Labeling an abstract action (“Nuking the world…”) as “wrong” is both anthropocentric and kind of akin to Plato’s position that abstractions can exist as universals independent of their mental counterparts.

1. Is it “wrong” for the sun to go supernova and incinerate us? Surely, accountability is secondary to the importance of repairing the universe. Why make a distinction between a human causing suffering and an inanimate object causing suffering other than to insinuate that the human must necessarily be subjected to some kind of arbitrarily quantified punishment?

There is no mathematical theorem which demonstrates that nuking the world necessitates fifty years in prison instead of twenty, but we can do simple math to determine whether preventing the event will also prevent an increase in negative value -- and that’s what matters, regardless of our intuitions or the ultimate fate of the perpetrator(s).

2. There is no such thing as “nuking the world” aside from as a conceptual abstraction useful for model-building. A specific nuclear event, however, can exist: It has a context and environmental variables that have been assigned values. Without these variables, we are shunning practical reality in favor of abstract absolutism -- a primary cause of bloviation and much ado about nothing.

Entertainment aphorism

What a world it would be if your coworkers discussed how excited they were for New Ideas Bowl 2012 around the water cooler.

An acceptable reality vs. an unacceptable reality

Many people seem to think that I'm against the existence of suffering solely on the grounds that it is a negative phenomenon, and that I'm promoting a futuristic utopia of nothing but unfeeling robots in its place. To extinguish this false notion, I'd like to present two sets of negative sensations -- one acceptable and the other not so acceptable.

Please note that these sets are somewhat subjective; the real solution would entail that each consciousness immerse itself within a simulation perfectly customized to its particular preferences -- at least, so long as said preferences do not interfere with the fundamental teachings and meta-teachings of the society, in case the consciousnesses ever need to leave their respective simulations.

Unacceptable Sensations

Suicidality and extreme depression
Starvation
Panic attacks
Pain caused by cancers and other deadly diseases
Physical torture
Vomiting
Nausea and any intensely uncomfortable stomach sensations
Fevers
Agoraphobia
Trigeminal neuralgia
Passing kidney stones
Stab wounds
Bullet wounds
Natural childbirth


Acceptable Sensations

Stubbed toes
Hunger
Thirst
Scrapes and bruises
Fatigue
Pulled muscles (excluding some back muscles, anyway)
Soreness/aches
Headaches (possibly excluding migraines)
Disappointment
Confusion
Cold and hot (excluding extreme burns, frostbite, etc.)
Itches

The latter set wouldn't really make the world such a horrible place, honestly. If that's all that our children had to look forward to, then I don't think that your having children would be that big of a deal, even in spite of the fundamental nature of deprivation as a cause of discomfort. Too bad for you -- and me -- that these are definitely not the only possibilities, and that set 1 must also be accounted for.

An important distinction

Negative sensation is, by definition, negative or bad; causing negative sensation is not. Sensations are qualified according to how our brains interpret them on the negative/positive scale, while anthropogenic causality is qualified according to the rationality scale.

Updated 7/8/12: These terms may be confusing and misleading. Think of this dichotomy, instead, in terms of the pain/pleasure and irrationality/rationality scales.

Activism aphorism

What a world it would be if the American civil rights movement of the 1960s had been birthed and exclusively led by an especially empathetic group in Thailand.

Why people are activists

Let's get one thing straight: The current populace is pretentious. The memes that dominate our culture promote everything from ego-boosting to selfishness, which in turn are manifestations of our selfish genes' primary agenda: live forever.

However, even the most selfish of memes, in spite of serving no other purpose than to complement their genetic counterparts, are justified by pitiful attempts to correct cognitive dissonance.

The majority of "activists" (whatever that really even means) have at least one of the following two agendas:

1. Preserve a personal identity partially predicated on activism. If that danged Wall Street weren't so corrupt, what would the "Occupy" activists do with their time? What would make them feel special, like they belonged to a group or had a purpose? What would make them significant in the grander scheme of things? Without something to rail against, a lot of activists would probably feel like a part of themselves had disappeared, or that they weren't special.

2. Sustain a way of life. Even if you work for a non-profit organization, you're still earning a salary. Without the world's problems, how would such people get by in life?

It's all a selfish game. Let's stop making ourselves feel good by pretentiously justifying our animalistic preservation instincts and start cracking down on reproduction. End the perpetuation of negativity by addressing causality!

Comfort is relief from discomfort

Alright, so no one is interested in the Socratic method, apparently. Meta-discussions about ideation, opportunity cost, and process management must not be as sexy as the notion that baby-making is evil. In that case, I'm going to write up a quick summation of the current state of life on this planet -- just to provide a recap of how everything works.

First of all, comfort is not the default state of existence for sentient organisms; it is the result of terminating uncomfortable sensations. Uncomfortable sensations exist, as far as we can tell, to motivate organisms -- that is, animated, selectively open systems -- to the end of perpetuating the "selfish" genes that use said organisms as hosts. Put another way, the phenotypic genetic expressions of the hosts are almost irrelevant to the agenda of the genes themselves as they replicate from one host to another.

A couple of important things to note here:

1. This gene-driven process is only optional when the host has acquired mastery of syntax. Your dog does not love its life, because it is wholly incapable of manipulating the symbolic mind-object, or conceptual abstraction, called "life"; it cannot think to itself, "I'm glad I'm alive. What a wonderful experience this is. How lovely that the alternative did not occur instead." This is because your dog cannot temporarily leave the present moment to use syntax objects to the end of creating a mental model called "life." To your dog, there is simply ending discomfort continuously through action.

If, for example, impaling itself on a wooden spike and slowly bleeding to death were to produce an orgasmic sensation in its brain, then your dog's neurons would wind up overloaded with dopamine while anticipating suicide in this manner.

Your dog couldn't care less about the beauty or miracle of its life; it merely seeks pleasure, irrespective of whether said pleasure promotes its personal existence. Your dog does not yearn to see its lineage carried into the future; it merely seeks pleasure, with said pleasure sometimes incidentally causing its lineage to be perpetuated.

Keeping in mind that evolution was not instigated with forethought, what the above essentially signifies is that relief from discomfort is incidentally conducive to life's perpetuation. "Nature" near-randomly throws relief and pleasure at sentient organisms, and sometimes, one of the manifestations of this relief leads to a certain set of genes living to see another day. Of course, if things were structured more rationally, then all pleasure would neatly lead to all genetic lineages surviving into the future, and we would never run out of room.

If mother turtles could understand that there are alternatives to life -- because of an ability to manipulate syntax objects like "life" and "death" and arrange them at "will" within the mind -- and could also understand that pleasure is only one example of discomfort being ended, then they would not will for half of their offspring to be painfully gobbled up by crabs within the first few minutes of their lives.

2. Being okay with life's continuation requires that one be okay with the whole of life, which necessarily includes billions of years of horrific future suffering. If you are okay with your child being born, then you implicitly concede that you are okay with its eventual death, as well as all struggles subsequent to its existential inception. Further, if you are okay with life continuing and are aware that this implies that you are okay with future starvation, extinction events, wars, and genocides, then you should logically also be okay with experiencing those things yourself.

If you do not want to starve to death, then you should not be okay with projecting starvation into the future by promoting life.

3. The following are all examples of what we may deem pleasurable, yet they are obviously nothing more than a return to a "normal" state of existence:

Scratching an itch. Was it pleasurable to scratch that exact same patch of skin prior to the existence of the itch?

Snow days for children. Snow days are fun, but they're nothing more than eliminating that which is not fun. Saturdays and Sundays occur every week, yet in spite of not containing content different from a Saturday or Sunday, snow days are far more fun; they are relief from an expected experience.

Stepping into a warm room out of the cold. Was the warm room immensely pleasurable prior to your having stepped out into the cold to begin with? Why does it suddenly feel so good to be "normal" again? In an hour, in spite of the temperature not changing, will you still feel really good to be out of the cold?

How about getting rid of an intensely painful sensation? If you've ever taken pain medication for something truly horrific, then you'll know how good it feels to return to a state which was previously not especially pleasurable.

4. Everything that gives us pleasure -- especially those things which we now consume in excess -- existed in relative scarcity prior to our more recent technological advancements. It feels good to eat not because hunger is an annoyance -- and certainly not because food is a fun thing worthy of silly television shows and quirky restaurant ideas -- but because not eating leads to horrible pain and eventual death.

Next time that you watch Cupcake Wars, remember that millions of people are starving to death right now all over the world, and that animals have been starving to death for almost a billion years. What you enjoy in life should not be taken lightly, for it is precious.

On humility

In spite of our need to remain humbled by our limitations as finite cognitive processes, it is perfectly permissible for us to think that we have better ideas than other people. After all, if we're not all that confident in our present assessments of the environment, then we shouldn't be presenting said assessments to the public. It is not okay for everyone to "have an opinion" on every conceivable topic. For example, because of my ignorance regarding the reliability of one spaceship over another for the purpose of getting to Mars, I keep my mouth shut on the matter; to do otherwise is to promote information pollution (side note: this is why the idea of a representative democratic republic is a poor one).

Conversely, if someone is confident in his assessments of the environment -- due, in part, to peer review and repetition -- then we should not scorn him for this, or reference his alleged "superiority complex." Of course, we should not take him -- or his independent peers -- at his word, but dismissing someone merely because he thinks that his ideas appear to be more rational than yours is a fallacy. "What, do you think you're better than me because you believe this stuff?" is not a valid argument in any scenario, and least valid where the purveyor of the assessments has no vested interest in proving his superiority.

I will say that suffering contains value instead of that it's my personal opinion that suffering contains value not because I know for a fact that suffering contains value, but because prefacing every single statement with "Gee, I guess this is kind of possibly right, but it's just my opinion, so feel free to think whatever you want and not listen to me!" would be tremendously impractical and counterproductive. Basically, the impractical part lies in the politically correct tedium of it all, while the counterproductive part lies in the ensuing "You can think whatever you want" clause, with the latter promoting the meme that all ideas are equal.

No two ideas are equal where their qualities or quantities differ in any way whatsoever, and the only apparent reason for why anyone thinks otherwise is because they associate ideas with personal identity and individuality. If no one defined themselves by their ideals or ascribed any emotional significance to the fact that they held those ideals personally, then no one would cast random accusations of superiority complexes whenever someone else felt confident in an idea; in essence, no one would ever feel threatened by new information or in any way consider it a weapon to be wielded in some struggle for social dominance. It's like gift-giving: If everyone were to give gifts out of kindness instead of to display their philanthropy to a social circle, then no one would raise an eyebrow or accuse any gift-giver of ego-boosting.

There is a clear difference between knowing that you're right and seeing the data as pointing in your direction more than in the other directions. Decision-making is a matter of both quality and quantity, and most of the time, the involved quantities cannot be represented by a binary quandary. If my idea is a 7 and yours is a 6, who's to say that there isn't an 8 out there somewhere, awaiting discovery? Even if I'm less wrong than someone else, that doesn't mean that I'm right. Approximation is all that we can do with science -- for now.

Problem-solving reminders

Two of the most important things to keep in mind when it comes to problem-solving are as follows:

1. There would be no need for retroaction if we were an adequately proactive species. Both kinds of action are presently necessary for addressing problems (or symptoms), but preventing a problem before it even begins should obviously take precedence over addressing it as it emerges, over and over again. For example, police are currently necessary for arresting civilly restless people, but if those people were to have been brought up in a more methodical and socially healthy environment (we could expound upon this for quite a bit, but that would require its own post), then there wouldn't be a need for police -- or the need would be greatly reduced, anyway.

2. Even after a problem has emerged, and we are socially obliged to be retroactive about it, we should still focus on the source of the causal chain rather than the continuously generated symptoms, or end products of the chain. For example, no, we can't rewind time and raise hardened criminals correctly, but we can still do something so that more of them don't emerge in the future. This is definitely something that police do not do at all.

There are three approaches to problem-solving, and all are valid, depending on the scenario:

1. Prevent the problem from starting; use your foresight.

2. Once the problem starts, clean up its manifestations everywhere that they appear in as practical a manner as is possible. Don't overdo it, because you might generate more problems by focusing so much on symptoms.

3. Try to stop the problem at its source after it has started.

An emergent approach trumps a traditional approach

When discussing ideas, we should use an emergent, systematic approach. This means that, as ideas emerge, we should tackle them case-by-case by addressing any apparent flaws in them, and then contrast those flaws -- or lack thereof -- with the flaws inherent in the alternatives available at that moment, per our existing knowledge base. This will allow us to determine the ideas' relative attractiveness, which is subject to change as new data -- and new alternatives -- emerge.

Further, our approach should be negative; we should arrive at logical vantage points by attacking all vantage points and subsequently determining which is least wrong. If you can manage to state all that is illogical, then what's left doesn't necessarily have to even be explicitly spoken of.

The alternative to this approach is tradition, which means deciding whether something makes sense based on one's own personal experiences and consumption of cultural values and customs. This latter approach promotes attachment and mental hoarding.

An example of the traditional approach would be someone making the claim that 2+2=5, and another person countering this claim by stating that our mathematicians have learned over the years that 2+2=4. This is a faulty way of addressing the new claim.

The emergent alternative would be to examine the claim that 2+2=5 prior to consulting past knowledge, then checking to see if there are any updates to past knowledge that contradict either the new claim, the old one, or both.

Make a claim

Keeping true to the direction that I recently proposed, I am going to issue you a request: Make at least one claim in the comments section, and we will work together to understand whether it's logically sturdy. The claim can be about any facet of the world in which we live.

The only rule is that each claim can only be one sentence in length. Of course, with this rule in mind, you are allowed to post as many claims as you want.

Go!

Let's have a Socratic dialogue

"Socratic dialogue" is an unfortunate term for it, since nothing should ever be named after anyone (Occam's Razor is one of the most notoriously awful examples), but the practice is nevertheless quite sensible. Below, I have listed a few controversial or uncommon viewpoints for you to oppose in the comments section, if you so wish. Single a few out if you disagree with them and let's get an interrogation going until we discover, once and for all, whether the statements are truly sound; perhaps you can succeed in modifying them.

Without further ado:

Out of the government, the corporate world, and the media, the government is the most benign.

The average person is a larger problem than members of any "elite" group.

Americans are no dumber or more privileged than anyone in any other first world nation.

Feminism promotes social division and frivolity.

Courting sexual partners is a demonstration of prejudice.

All pleasurable states are nothing more than relief from previous unpleasurable states.

We should do away with money as soon as possible.

No one should have children for any available reason.

The "traditional family" model suffocates and depresses people -- or at least reduces their quality of life significantly.

There is no such thing as a mental disorder.

Anarchism is selfish and myopic.

Democracy is a terrible idea, and certainly did not originate with the emergence of the United States.

Ownership (property, copyright) creates a massive amount of waste while promoting attachment and conflict.

Attachment exacerbates suffering.

It is unlikely that there are other intelligent beings in the universe.

If life exists beyond the Earth, it must be absurdly uncommon.

Hurricanes, flus, earthquakes, school shooters, terrorists, stock market crashes, and debt are not going to get you.

We have replaced god with popular entertainment and the media.

Individualism is socially corrosive.

Capitalization, apostrophes, the multiplicity of punctuation marks, and synonyms should be done away with as soon as possible.

All words should be spelled phonetically.

Most books are a waste of time. The faster that you can glean information, the more efficient you are.

Quoting people is no different from wearing name brand clothing, showing off an expensive car, or increasing the size of your friends list on Facebook.

There should be one human language; any more than this is needlessly redundant.

Civilization will not collapse at any point over the next hundred years. In fact, it has never truly collapsed since its advent some 6-7,000 years ago.

The only state of perfection is nothingness.

Investing in [modification: Committing to] any idea is foolish, given that attempting to prove the reliability of one's senses via one's senses is illogical.

Marijuana will probably become the culprit of at least some lung cancer cases over the next hundred years.

Obesity, with few exceptions, is not especially unhealthy -- and is almost never life-threatening.

Loving your partner is the same, in principle, as favoring your race or nation over the others.

Cuddling with a puppy after eating a cow is contradictory behavior at its worst.

All competitive sports are a waste of money, resources, schooling, and brain space; furthermore, they promote social division and animosity.

We should strive to attack all ideas, no matter how good they seem. If we come to favor a particular viewpoint, it should be because, while attacking it, we found that it held up better than the opposing ideas -- which were also attacked.

Fast food is a convenient way to eat in modern society, and is usually better for you than a fatty slab of steak high in calories purchased at a fancy restaurant.

Organic foods are usually worse in quality, less delicious, and more susceptible to rot than other foods.

There is nothing particularly unacceptable about smoking cigarettes.

It is a bad idea to get high or drunk in any capacity, for such activities decrease one's judgment and physical reflexes.

Lyrics, image, philosophy, and politics have nothing to do with music.

Most people are unhappy due to their own poor decision-making skills, but rather than improve or seek guidance, they blame a group for their shortcomings -- usually the government, the corporations, the media, or their families.

We should intelligently (i.e. gradually, while maintaining a balanced ecosystem) spay and neuter all animals on Earth as soon as possible.

The Holocaust was not some brilliant conspiracy to exterminate a race of people, but rather, a poorly planned, feather-fluffing set of events aimed at merely deporting said race.

The United States's involvement in World War II was unjustified; similarly, the American Civil War and American Revolutionary War should have never happened.

We will be ruined by pleasure, meekness, and popular culture long before we are ruined by torture, statism, and Big Brother.

Failing any high school course -- or even most college courses -- will have no impact whatsoever on your economic well-being.

Those members of modern society who claim to believe in a god suffer from cognitive dissonance, and believe far more in television, work, and bar-hopping than that holy book which they have never once opened.

Washing your hands after going to the bathroom accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Charities accomplish nothing other than to generate profit for various entities while, in some circumstances, strengthening societies just enough to allow them to perpetuate their own suffering.

Exploring the planets and moons of our solar system is a tremendous waste of time and resources.

Most people speak in memorized, discrete blocks of thought patterns that are essentially platitudes. Rarely does anyone recite a "belief" from outside of his or her culture -- even if the belief is purported to be anti status quo.

We will not experience a major extinction event as a result of global warming.

Nature lovers are liars, for they despise plague, disease, insects (especially maggots!), suffocating heat, frostbite, intestinal worms, shredded animal carcasses, etc.

Most jobs exist only to help others do their jobs, or to produce more crap that we don't need.

Welfare and utility are not equivalent; consequently, the modern concept of a "job" is flawed.

Sexual orientation and desire for social bonds are largely conditioned.

The less people you know, the happier you'll be. The more wants and desires that have to be accommodated, the more that compromise becomes a necessity, and knowing less people means attending less funerals.

A pragmatic approach to ideas

This has already been touched upon numerous times, but I'd like to once again stress that we should go about forming "opinions" by rigorously testing all ideas prior to implementation. The questions that we should be asking ourselves when initially considering an idea are:

1. Does the idea work?

2. If the idea works, does another one work more efficiently?

All ideas must be able to pass the test of falsifiability before being considered for implementation. If we can't see results from a test of the idea, then no one should hold an opinion regarding its practical validity.

Avoiding optimism bias

If a potential quality that you're contemplating is desirable to you, consider a potential quality of similar likelihood which is undesirable to you before deciding to chase the former quality.

For example:

1. The odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 20 million*. Yeah, those numbers are outrageous, but I'm going to play the lottery, anyway. You never know!

2. The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 20 million*. Phew, that's good to know. That's one less way of dying that I'll ever, ever have to worry about. It's basically a guarantee that it'll never happen to me.

Funny how we think about things differently depending on whether they benefit us -- even when the data are exactly the same in all instances! Regardless of what topics you're entertaining, always be sure to control for optimism bias during the decision-making process.

* These odds were fabricated for the purpose of the example.

One more utilitarian post for the road

Premise 1: An action was taken.

1. The action was imposed on a sentient being.

2. Therefore, the action was bad.

This conclusion is false. Not all bad actions are imposed on other sentient beings; some only affect the self. In this sense, they may not be "immoral," but they are nevertheless foolish. Likewise, not all imposed actions are bad, for reasons stated below.

Premise 2: An action was taken.

1. The action caused harm -- regardless of whether it violated a sentient being's will.

2. Therefore, the action was bad.

This conclusion is also false. Harm is inherently bad, but causing harm is not, for some harm leads to a reduction of harm overall.

Premise 3: An action was taken.

1. The action was imposed on a sentient being, and/or...

2. ...the action caused harm beyond being a mere violation of the being's will.

3. The action prevented a much worse kind of harm from emerging elsewhere.

4. Therefore, the action was good.

This conclusion is true.

Sometimes, you need to kill the killer, lest he continue with his deeds uninterrupted. 

The next phase: Meta-conversations

Attracting people based on any particular present position is myopic. In retrospect, it may have been better for this blog to have stuck with detailing how to formulate ideals and make decisions than to have mentioned or endorsed any specific ideals or decisions. In the future, I would like to hold discussions regarding process management, premise formation, qualitative analysis, and logic; in short, I would rather discuss how to come to conclusions than give any of my readers any specific conclusions to revolve around and rally behind.

It may be the case that my conclusions -- tentative though they may indefinitely be -- are sound, but I am more interested in how a reader might have come to the same conclusions as myself than in the mere similarity of our positions. If, for example, your antinatalism leads you to choose vegetarianism, that does not entail that all vegetarians are antinatalists, or that congregating with vegetarians without any quality control is a sensible practice.

Note that I say all of the above not because I am interested in censorship or stifling important discussions, but rather, because there should be an order to this process, with specific ideals coming into play much later on after everyone has established that they utilize similar mental algorithms for processing information.

As a final thought on antinatalism, I will say the following (note the lack of generalizations below, as I am myself an antinatalist):

1. Many antinatalists are concerned solely with refraining from reproducing, and have either weak or nonexistent socio-political philosophies; in other words, they are often far wiser than most when it comes to being proactive (in at least the fundamental sense), but could use some improvement when it comes to being retroactive.

2. Many antinatalists view the world from an anthropocentric standpoint, meaning that they are solely concerned with the end of human reproduction. They may understand that animal suffering is bad, but they very often have no ambition to do anything about it beyond becoming vegetarian.

3. Many antinatalists view "the" problem as life itself (or, in more sensible cases, sentient life). The more accurate position to take, from my perspective, is that of "the" problem being a lack of intelligent management and regulation of the universe's energy processes -- or the mere existence of energy and work in the first place.

Furthermore, if sentience were distributed in discrete executable files to volunteering computers, such computers could call sentient processes for any given duration and turn them off on demand. In this scenario, a computer without any capacity to feel pain or pleasure could make calculations on a level of sophistication comparable to that of a human, and would only call conscious, sentient experience to the fore -- or "wake up," if you will -- when it felt like it would be fun or educational to do so; this would solve the problem of deprivation.

Of course, if such experiences, through repeated observation and testing, were demonstrated to be too risk-laden, then they would be phased out -- though, again, any conscious experience would be undertaken voluntarily, without impinging on any other conscious experiences or requiring anything other than self-contained information.

In summation:

Symptoms: Sentience; deprivation/desire/discomfort
Causes: Lack of intelligence; presence of existence

We either become gods and attain absolute, one-hundred-percent certainty that our ending the universe means that it's all over forever, or we volunteer to learn and explore, given that we cannot undo our births and that some of us suffer when contemplating death. Preventing future births, while a good thing, is no more credible as a rallying point than any other philosophical position, be it the unlikely existence of a deity or something as crass as rights-based activism. The discussion of how to properly use your brain is the only true rallying point -- for now.