hexaglycogen [he/him, they/them]
I always try my best to recognize babies and young children as very intelligent and internally thorough and complete.
I’ve found that as I’ve gotten older, my internal world and emotions and what I want to say really hasn’t changed. The biggest thing that’s changed is that I’m more articulate, able to better say what I need or how I’m feeling. Meanwhile, when I was young, I lacked the vocabulary or social know-how to articulate what I was feeling, and that adults would just about never sit down and try to work with me to figure out what I’m feeling, and they’d try to invalidate how I’m feeling because they’re better at using words, or just generally don’t take me very seriously.
When I work with kids, especially ones that can’t speak, I’ve found a little bit of respect and empathy goes a very long way. They almost always want to communicate something to me and express autonomy. A toddler whose parents insisted was very ill-behaved was very, very nice to me because I recognized that what they wanted was to handle their food on their own, go to the bathroom without being escorted, stuff like that.
I get that you’re not talking about toddlers or young children, and I recognize that functionally they’re essentially on a permanent escort mission and can’t do anything on their own, and that’s what I believe you mean by “object”. I find that line of thinking to be, I dunno, maybe a bit disrespectful? Like, certainly I can see why it’s “correct” from some definitions, but it’s not something that I’d let enter my heart. To me, babies have deeply complicated and involved inner worlds. They’ve spent their entire life in this strange, alien world with massive people and brand new, unpleasant sensations. They can’t do anything on their own, but they think, and they want to communicate, and they’re so overjoyed when they can do something and get recognition from it.
Then the optimal thing to do is to just coordinate with the other person and have one person pull the lever and one person not pull the lever. The point of the prisoner’s dillema is that it’s always “better” to “betray” the other person, but it’s going to be worse for everyone if everyone acts in a self interested manner.
Yeah it is basically a joker scheme.
Another way to look at it is like a device that you and I sit on opposite sides of.
If I put in a coin, you get three coins. If you put in a coin, I get three coins.
Putting in a coin strictly hurts the actor putting the coin in. Playing it “optimally”, there’s no reason to ever put in a coin. Even though we could easily both walk away two coins richer, if we are “purely rational, self interested actors”, we’ll both walk away with nothing.
Technically, this scenario is flawed because “betraying” the other person makes the scenario worse for everyone if the other person also “betrays”. A true prisoner’s dilemma is supposed to be pretty clear cut “always right to betray”, meanwhile in this a selfish actor would have reason not to pull the lever as to avoid losing the people on their trolley.
I am not a system but one time someone asked if I was a system because I had the addendum “68 Center Host” on my discord user name, because I was hosting the center area of a game with 68 participants.
I am not quite exciting enough to have 67 other people living in my head, but to the comrades who do, and I hope that they can find joy in their very unique experiences.
That’s wild. I typically mod Stardew and stop playing it a bit after I am done hyperfixating on reaching the bottom of the mines as quickly as possible.
This song is so great.
“You haven’t tried in two years, so why start today?” is honestly so haunting. It’s a sort of terrifying sentiment that I can see rip people up slowly and subtly over time. The idea of procrastinating and bad habits being self reinforcing because, to break them, you have to admit that ALL the time before trying to break that habit was wasted, and that every time that decision was made to “not try” was a mistake. It’s so insidiously difficult, and outwardly difficult to understand why people fall into that pattern.
this is all of politics that matters btw
black and red pill are both probably the most powerful for self interested ends, but the orange pill and grey pills allow for the most reality bending of situations.
I’d probably go for the black pill, make good documentation of working somewhere and making no mistakes, then trying to sue the company that fired me if I can find a reason to.
If I were much braver, I could use the Red Pill to act as a technoprophet or to blackmail large portions of the tech industry (they just have to believe I can permanently black them out on command, the fact that I only have 100 of them is more than enough to make them believe it), but alas, I am not nearly brave enough to try and pull a stunt like that.