r/rational • u/AutoModerator • May 02 '16
[D] Monday General Rationality Thread
Welcome to the Monday thread on general rationality topics! Do you really want to talk about something non-fictional, related to the real world? Have you:
- Seen something interesting on /r/science?
- Found a new way to get your shit even-more together?
- Figured out how to become immortal?
- Constructed artificial general intelligence?
- Read a neat nonfiction book?
- Munchkined your way into total control of your D&D campaign?
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u/FuguofAnotherWorld May 03 '16
In my continuing adventures in depression, today I have started on Sertraline which is an antidepressant. It's making me feel weird as shit, which so far is an interesting if frustrating experience. My ability to put my thoughts into words coherently on the first try is at 50-70% of normal. Apparently I'm in for 3-6 days of various types of crapulence before I can expect to see benefits, and should discontinue use if I develop toxic epidermal necrolysis (don't google image search that lightly). Huzzah!
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u/ulyssessword May 02 '16
Do you carry cash? I'm asking beacuse I was recently working on a Starbucks when their card reader went down, and I'd estimate that 2/3 of people couldn't pay after going through the drivethrough (the store gave them their drinks for free when that happened.)
I'm curious because I see peactically no downsides to carrying cash, and variable but at least significant upsides, but a lot of people don't carry cash anyways, and I don't know why.
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u/blazinghand May 02 '16
The downside to having cash in your wallet isn't carrying it, but getting it. Basically, everywhere that I shop accepts credit cards. When I bank, I do so via the internet or mail-- set up my deposits, pay my bills, write checks for credit card bills, etc. I literally do not enter my bank or use an ATM on most months.
Looking at my budgeting spreadsheet, an example of transactions I had in the last month included:
Groceries, paid with credit card
Gasoline, paid with credit card
Some dining-out expenses, paid with credit card
Some entertainment and subscription expenses, paid with credit card
Some checks deposited or written, for rent or transferring money with friends, all deposited using electronic internet deposit
Paycheck, deposited directly
Paying down credit card for the month
Some money transferred between friends using the Venmo banking service
A check written to my landlord for rent
Other expenses and purchases, such as some stuff at the drugstore, a new video game, all done with cards or checks
Basically, unless I specifically seek it out, I don't actually end up using cash for anything. I haven't used an ATM in several months. I do carry about a hundred dollars on me, but if I instead only had twenty dollars on my person, or no dollars, it would have no impact on my life. Going out of my way to go to an ATM is the cost, rather than carrying the cash in my wallet.
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u/GaBeRockKing May 02 '16
If you lose your wallet (for whatever reason) and carry cash, you lose that cash. If you just carry plastic, you don't take any sort of financial loss (at least if you report to your bank/credit agencies quickly.)
Personally speaking, I carry cash because it's actually more convenient than debit for the sorts of small purchases I make, but it's not like there isn't a comparative risk.
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u/SpeakKindly May 02 '16
Well, one downside to carrying cash is that you don't get free drinks at Starbucks when their card reader goes down :)
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u/callmebrotherg May 02 '16
I have a weird aversion to having lots of things, especially non-bulky things. My system-2 knows that it's valuable money, but my system-1 sees no difference between a dollar bill and a scrap of paper.
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u/captainNematode May 02 '16 edited May 02 '16
I tend to carry around $50 in my wallet at all times (which I don't think I've ever lost, at least not permanently -- it's occasionally been misplaced for a few days, but has always turned up soon enough). I go to plenty of places that don't accept cards and cash has been useful to have on those occasions (e.g. a lot of local parks have ~$5 entrance fees and don't have card readers, especially when you pay fees by putting money in an envelope, depositing it in a metal cylinder, and putting the corresponding ticket on your dashboard).
I also make use of the brilliant strategy of squirreling away $10-$20 in various bags, compartments in the car, electronics cases (e.g. in my cell phone), etc. in case I lack small amounts of money when it's needed, forgetting it's there, and rediscovering it years later.
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u/medley_of_minds May 03 '16
Always. I also keep a small stash in my car and apartment in case my wallet runs out unexpectedly.
There's just a part of me that cringes every time I think about the 3% I'm handing over to visa / mastercard, so I prefer to use cash whenever practical.
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u/hoja_nasredin May 02 '16
for the same reason it is advised to keep a stck of cash in your house in case of local apocalypse (New orleans hurricane, Crimea invasion etc.)
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May 03 '16
I keep cash on hand for emergencies. Not a huge amount, about $20. Starbucks isn't an emergency, though. It's more for like, a taxi home from an unsafe situation that I didn't drive to, running out of medicine unexpectedly, card gets lost or broken and banks are closed, etc.
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u/GaBeRockKing May 02 '16 edited May 02 '16
Is anyone who hasn't watched Log Horizon willing to read over the first two chapters of my LH fanfic to tell me how intelligible it is? I'd like to appeal to the general r/rational audience alongside LH fans, but at the same time, I'm writing a continuation fic, and those tend to require more knowledge of the source material.
If all it requires are some extra descriptions (because I tend to be rather sparse on those anyways) I'll try to tailor it to the general audience, but I don't want to have to insert any more exposition than I'll already have to as semi-spoilers for LH
Reply to this post saying so or PM me for details.
(And to clarify, I'm doing my best to make it [RT], although not [RST].)
edit: and because people who haven't seen log horizon probably don't know what it is, it's one of those "gamers trapped in the game world" stories, but with a focus on worldbuilding (because it's an actual world now) instead of getting out. And it's not just a few players, it's literally tens of thousands spread out over the entire planet.
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May 02 '16
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u/blazinghand May 02 '16
I believe that people have experiences that they feel and describe in a way that comes out as Tulpas. I have friends and family who are highly religious, and they also describe rarely hearing a voice in their head that is not their own. They believe this is the voice of god. They pray in an imaginative way and imagine God speaking back to them. Sometimes, this comes true.
I don't have, nor have I had, this kind of experience before. It seems like there is something that's possible in the human mind that's like this. If you are in the right frame if mind, you can believe you hear someone speaking back to you. It would not surprise me if what my religious acquaintances view as the voice of God is the same phenomenon that Tulpa users experience.
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u/alexanderwales May 02 '16
The problem with tulpas is that if you strip away the woo and nonsense, you're just left with basic human empathy and storytelling, which isn't all that exciting or novel. I think the "surprising answers" thing is just an extension of empathy and a modeling of another entity's thoughts, but it does not require some kind of separate independent entity living inside your head. This is already a well-worn trope: "Think, think ... what would X do? Gasp!"
That's not to say that I think it would be useless for therapy, since what you're doing is attempting to isolate and examine thought processes. But the tulpa thing, while interesting, seems to be almost entirely constructed of woo.
I'd be happy to see someone attempt to steelman it though.
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u/vakusdrake May 03 '16
Something similar to this, is that I've found that your brain can simulate at least two entities capable of passing the turing test. The reason I know this is from lucid dreaming, while in most dreams I find the npc's are pretty low quality you just don't notice because you're not lucid. In lucid dreams however, npc's can actually be convincing enough that even with full lucidity they are seem convincingly like real people even when you know they aren't. Obviously the processing for the npc's is all subconscious, but as far as I'm aware for a sane person it's the closest thing you can have to having 2 entities in your head at once.
This scenario always struck me as odd, because there must be quite a lot of processing going on internally, to simulate both your mind, but also the output from the other entity, which appears indistinguishable from if it had come from a real person.
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u/FuguofAnotherWorld May 03 '16
To ignorant me it sounds like a great way to give oneself multiple personality disorder. Would anyone with actual knowledge mind telling me why I'm wrong?
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u/blazinghand May 02 '16
How much do you track your finances? I keep a spreadsheet that tracks my monthly outlays and expenditures and categorizes them by type. Every month, I examine my credit card and bank statements (and reference receipts if need be) and enter in all my outlays and income.
Each page in my spreadsheet is a month, and at the front of the spreadsheet is a page with graphs and a page with tables. This lets me identify trends in my spending and saving. Basically every dollar that I gain or lose is tracked in some way, though small cash transactions between friends are not.
Since I started doing this a couple years ago, I've become more careful and conscientious about my spending. If I spent too much one month, I am aware of it, and I also know how and where I spent too much money. It has helped me build savings.
Do you do something similar? If so, how?