It seems we were incredibly similar as middle schoolers haha. I’ve changed my views a lot since then (for the worse, of course), so perhaps I should be more doubtful of my views now.
Happiness is all well and good, but it's suffering that adds the spice to life. Many artists suffer a lot. My gut says that the great art comes out of that suffering. The joys in life are less joyful without the pain that proceeded them. And it is by that ultimate suffering, death, that life evolves...
I would say the conclusion to draw from this argument is that you should be a scout at a high-level, but act like a soldier sometimes. A useful skill to develop is "pretending" to believe something strongly, where success means that you are able to stick with something for an extended period, creating novel and intricate justifications (and having fun, of course), while also keeping track of all the negative evidence you encounter along the way, and then you should be able to "turn off" your strong belief when appropriate.
I've had a lot of success with this approach, though it does confuse some people. Next time I get questioned, I'll have to share this article.
Interesting article, but I'm gonna hyper-fixate on a very specific, totally irrelevant part of it: Fregeanism about proper names is obviously correct.
It seems we were incredibly similar as middle schoolers haha. I’ve changed my views a lot since then (for the worse, of course), so perhaps I should be more doubtful of my views now.
Happiness is all well and good, but it's suffering that adds the spice to life. Many artists suffer a lot. My gut says that the great art comes out of that suffering. The joys in life are less joyful without the pain that proceeded them. And it is by that ultimate suffering, death, that life evolves...
I would say the conclusion to draw from this argument is that you should be a scout at a high-level, but act like a soldier sometimes. A useful skill to develop is "pretending" to believe something strongly, where success means that you are able to stick with something for an extended period, creating novel and intricate justifications (and having fun, of course), while also keeping track of all the negative evidence you encounter along the way, and then you should be able to "turn off" your strong belief when appropriate.
I've had a lot of success with this approach, though it does confuse some people. Next time I get questioned, I'll have to share this article.
"After this twist was introduced, being better at math made subjects less likely to get the correct answer."
IIRC the numerate subjects weren't *worse* at the politicized question. They just didn't show any advantage on it.
The thing is: While you are having fun shooting the shit, there is a lot of preventable suffering going on.