Death Is Bad

One of the advantages of realizing that you’re riding atop an unwieldy mass of urges is that you can stop blaming yourself for lapses of willpower and start actually fixing the situation. If you know that the elephant you’re riding gets dizzy near ditches and sometimes fall into them, it’s stupid to berate yourself for not being a strong enough driver to keep the elephant on course as you’re skirting the edge of a ditch. The reasonable thing to do is keep the elephant on the other side of the road, away from the damn ditch! There’s absolutely no reason to go riding right up to the edge if you can avoid it.

What does this mean in practice? I love pastries. Sometimes I’ll see them as I’m grocery shopping, and I’ll want to buy some. But I realize that if I buy those donuts… I will eat them. There is no reason for me to go digging that ditch and placing it right in the middle of my kitchen where I can fall into it every time I walk past it. So I keep going and soon they are forgotten.

It is remarkable how much easier and more productive life becomes when you purge your surroundings of all the things that trip you up. In the world of the internet, you no longer need cable to watch a series you like. This means you can get rid of TV entirely and not lose anything you care about – all you’re doing is removing the stream of passive content that distracts you and grabs your elephant’s tail. In fact, most “stuff” people own falls into this category. Generally, you don’t need it. Every belonging has a weight, it has a cost associated with being kept around. It’s taking up square-footage in your house, it makes it harder to find the things you actually need, and it’s using up psychological resources by vying for your attention. Every single item you own should be paying rent to you in utility to justify its costs. If it is not paying rent it needs to be evicted, promptly. Throw it away.

From a recent profile:

“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”

Things can be kept for aesthetic value – a nice decoration is providing you utility in joy or status. Don’t let it go crazy, and remember that anything in storage rather than on display is NOT doing this.

When I was single I would move every year. This quickly gets you in the habit of paring down your possessions to what you actually want and need, and it’s less than you probably think. Yes, there’s a tiny chance that item may come in useful some day. Throw it out (or sell it) anyway, and when you need it you can simply GO OUT AND BUY IT AGAIN (or simply rent it!). As long as it’s not insanely expensive you probably saved more in space & psychological costs by not having to store it in those intervening years! If you have a hard time deciding if an item is useful or not, ask yourself when you last used it was. If you can’t remember, it’s likely not worth keeping.

When you have less to trip over you can move more efficiently, and your Elephant will thank you.

Currently the 2nd Amendment is interpreted by the Supreme Court as guaranteeing a right to self-defense. This is precisely why concealed-carry is protected by the 2nd Amendment, but RPGs are not. There is no need for concealed-carry if you’re arming the populace to stop a tyranny, and there IS a need for RPGs. The protection is exactly backwards.

From the recent overturning of Illinois’ concealed-carry ban:

“We are disinclined to engage in another round of historical analysis to determine whether eighteenth-century America understood the Second Amendment to include a right to bear guns outside the home,” wrote Posner. “The Supreme Court has decided that the amendment confers a right to bear arms for self-defense, which is as important outside the home as inside.”
In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court made Chicago’s 28-year-old handgun ban unenforceable, ruling that Americans have the right to have guns in their homes for protection.

While there are some people who argue that military-grade weapons should be available to private citizens, and I respect them for their consistency, there aren’t enough of them to bother having that argument at this time.

So let’s grant for a moment that the 2^nd amendment is about personal self-defense. This seems like a good right to have. What sort of self-defense requires a fully-automatic rifle with a 30+ round clip? A pistol is more portable for when you’re out in public, and a shotgun or pistol or rifle is more than adequate for any imaginable home-defense scenario. Turns out I had a very limited imagination, because I thought in terms of individual criminals, and not in terms of all of society turning against me.

I was enlighten when a friend shared this video. At the 4:13 mark we are told what defensive use assault rifles have – the 1992 Rodney King Riots in LA. Supposedly a man held back a mob of looters with an assault rifle. These weapons are indeed handy if society has collapsed and a mob has turned on you. The obvious question to ask is – does the protection afforded by these weapons in such scenarios outweigh the harm of having these weapons widely available? Since such scenarios are already incredibly rare I doubt they’re worth the cost in criminal carnage. A few dozen shops being looted every decade is a reasonable price to pay for reducing the incidents of mass-murders.

But there’s a second question that comes up. A much less charitable one – what sort of person imagines they’d get use from this sort of weapon? Who views themselves as surrounded by violent criminals that are held at bay only by his own firepower? Not just opportunistic criminals – those are easily discouraged by a regular rifle or shotgun. This sort of weapon is for holding off a large mob that is determined to kill you. Is this not the hallmark of the racist? One who fears that as soon as the Law is no longer there to protect him all the minorities around him will rise up and consume him? An AK isn’t of much use against a tyrannical government, but it sure can mow down the dark-skinned savages that are rushing your suburban survivalist compound…

EDIT – seems this is not news. Apparently the 2^nd amendment was intended to keep the black people in control since the day it was penned. I like our new interpretation better. And in that spirit, I hold it shouldn’t protect assault weapons.

There’s a bit of a dust-up on the interwebz – Evolutionary Psychology vs Feminism. The below was originally posted by me on Less Wrong.

If there was a scientific field (Evolutionary Sociology) that declared rationalism is harmful for humanity – that Less Wrong need to be destroyed, long-time readers found and re-educated so they will not be a threat to society, and the pursuit of rationality in general to be shunned or persecuted – I suspect that the vast majority of us would not accept these claims at face value and would look to see if their research was flawed, or their conclusions didn’t follow. And if we found such evidence, we’d probably shout it from the rooftops.

Evo-Psych is, not infrequently, used as a weapon against women.

The case made for these claims is often very bad.

Every hunting man had a gatherer mother; every gathering woman had a hunting father.

This is the problem for the evolutionary psychology of sex differences: for each trait that you want to claim is a product of selection for a behavior that is different between sexes, you have to postulate a Plus that restricts its expression to a single sex.

So, sure, tell me that humans evolved cognitive mechanisms to aid in navigating by landmarks for better fruit and tuber searching, and I might well believe it to be reasonable; now tell me why you think it would only operate in women, and how it would be actively suppressed by genetic mechanisms in men. Then you can tell me why navigating by distance and direction is actively shut off in women. You’re the ones who like purely adaptive explanations: why would there be an advantage to individuals having each only half the suite of potential genetic navigation tools switched on?

If Evo-Psych is used by sexists the same way that Eugenics was used by totalitarians, it will suffer the same stigma and be abandoned for decades the same way. Seeing as this is a self-defense move by a traditionally oppressed group, I don’t blame them. Unless the crap is weeded out quickly the whole field will be disgraced. The victims are currently only pointing out all the crap, they didn’t allow it to get in there in the first place. The gatekeepers need to stop sleeping on the job, rather than trying to defend their prior shoddy performance.

Why should sex have any negative consequences? The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists put out a statement this week saying the birth control pill should be available over the counter. If anyone actually began the process of making this possible you know there’d be an outcry by the same assholes who opposed the HPV vaccine, and attacked Sandra Fluke for stating that employers shouldn’t strip women’s health from their insurance options. There is a school of thought among certain groups that sex should be as awful as possible. In particular, it should be absolutely terrible for women. Men generally get off without many consequences.

Why is that? In general it’s considered a good thing when negative consequences are avoided. No one complains that seatbelts make driving too safe or that anesthetics make surgery too painless. There’s the religious argument (“god says sex is bad, so we should make sure no one wants to have it”), but that doesn’t pass the smell test because people regularly ignore all kinds of religious prohibitions if they’re inconvenient.

I wish I’d kept it around, but I recall an article exploring the backlash against “easy” environmentalism by long-term environmentalists. Those who’d been making sacrifices and putting in lots of extra effort for years to reduce their environmental impact. New technologies and policies (such as un-sorted recycling pick-up, concurrent with trash pickup) were making environmentalism much easier. The old guard weren’t just boasting about how tough they’d had it back in the old days… some of them were actually opposed to these changes – despite the fact that the new ease of compliance greatly boosted participation and was much better for the environment. They viewed their efforts as virtuous, and the amount of work they put into saving the planet corresponded to their virtue. When the new upstarts joined in they were able to claim as much impact without putting in nearly the same amount of work – they were laying claim to virtue which they hadn’t earned, and that was offensive. The environmentalism had ceased to be about consequences and had become about identity.

I suspect this hatred of all things sexual may have a similar root. The people raising such a ruckus are those who were unable to enjoy sex. Perhaps they were born too early to enjoy many of the modern advances in the area, or they were raised in an environment which shamed them and deprived them of a sexual outlet. They took solace in the fact that they could avoid many of the negative consequences that used to be associated with sex, and prided themselves on the consolidation prize of being known as “virtuous”. Now they see people able to enjoy sex without risking their health and autonomy, and they sense that society no longer allows them to declare themselves superior – and they feel that they have been robbed. Something has been stripped from them, and their previous deprivation was for naught.

Rather than be happy that old monsters have been slain and that people no longer have to live in fear of them, they wish to return to the days were overall suffering was greater, but their personal position relative to the rest was higher. That is one example of evil. It is something we must overcome if we wish to continue to grow as a species.