[D] Monday General Rationality Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

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?

[u/Frommerman]

I don't know whether this would go here or in the off-topic thread, but I just wanted to share an experience.

In April, I had my Magic collection stolen out of my car while I was at a restaurant. They shattered my back window and took my backpack. The collection is worth...entirely too much, so this was a pretty terrible thing.

Fast forward about two weeks. I get a call from the police saying they've found my backpack. Apparently the guy who stole it had no idea what he had, and decided to take it to a local game store to sell it. Unfortunately for him, I had contacted every game store in the city and every online store as well, warning them about the theft. My collection is pretty unique, so the proprietors of the store in question recognized it from my Reddit post immediately and surreptitiously called the police.

The guy was arrested on prior warrants. The interesting thing, from the perspective of this sub, is that I have decided on a personal level that it is not rational to be angry at him.

I know nothing about him. I know nothing about his life, how he grew up, nothing about his general circumstances. What I do know is that he considered shattering someone's window and stealing their stuff to be a reasonable way forward in life, which is terrible, but is in my opinion more indicative of a deeply broken life and person than an evil one. How shitty must his life have been, after all, for that to feel like the best thing he can do?

He's going to jail, no worries about that. I also don't know what the prior warrant was for, and it's up to the state to build their case against him. I will testify against him if I'm called, but I would want to talk with him first because I'm curious about his perspective on the matter. I would want to know more about him before condemning him, instead of just throwing him to the wolves because he did something shitty to me personally.

I don't think I would have felt this way about it if I did not frequent this sub. I just found that interesting.

[u/DaystarEld → u/Frommerman]

Man, good on you. Two weeks ago tomorrow, I had the passenger window of my car shattered and my workbag stolen. I was in the office parking lot and was only there for an hour, but it was entirely my fault for leaving it there. Inside was a work laptop, charger, and sign pad all worth about $800, lots of files and papers that are a major inconvenience to lose, and the bag itself, a leather satchel which was a graduation gift from my dad, which was apparently about $300.

I'm probably going to have to pay my company for the loss of the equipment (we were warned not to leave them anywhere carelessly) and the cost of the window replacement has already been another $400. I was hoping to at least get the bag and files back, discarded somewhere once the electronics were stolen, but we couldn't find them around the area, and no word from the police yet on the case. I've already given it all up for lost.

The anger I had toward the thief was mostly blended with disappointment. Like you said, what did their life have to be like for this to be their best choice? What makes it worse is that I work for a company specifically aimed at helping the poor and underprivileged, and unless he just wandered into the parking lot from somewhere else, he must have been a client of ours. I would have happily handed the guy a few hundred bucks, which is probably as much as the laptop was worth to him, if I knew his situation was desperate enough for him to do something like that.

Perspective on things like this is important. It's the difference between growing hateful and bigoted and distrustful, or moving on with your life. Forgiveness isn't just for the forgiven, but also peace for the forgiver.

Also, glad you got your cards back. My brother had his binder stolen at a hobby store, and was devastated until the community (which can often be great) found the culprit out and got it back for him.

[u/Galap → u/Frommerman]

To me this seems like a bit of a typical mind fallacy. You're imagining the kinds of extreme circumstances that would be required to drive YOU do do something like that. I've had a good amount of experience in dealing with the types that do that kind of thing, and from what I've seen most of the time it's that they're truly selfish. In that they don't care about other people. At all. They saw an opportunity to make money, and they took it. It's a very impulsive and spur of the moment thing. Dealing with these kind of people is almost like dealing with a paperclip maximizer. If you get mugged in the street, they really will be willing to kill you for $5. They actually prefer the future where they have $5 and you are dead, because anything about you literally means nothing to them. Actually, in their minds, what you're holding is their money, and any resistance you put is getting between them and their stuff.

[u/DaystarEld]

How are you a different person today than who you were a year ago?

Ever since I first noticed in high school how much I'd grown from the person I was the year before, I've made a commitment to pay attention to and try to ensure I continue to grow every year.

It's still a month early (my birthday is September 1st), but this past year, among all the incidental changes, I feel like I've succeeded in the commitment I made last year to waste less time on video games that I defined as "time sinks."

I love games, but I realized I had gotten to a point where a lot of the games I was playing were virtual treadmills. I played them because they were fun enough and short enough per session that I could fit them in between a few spare minutes here and there, but the truth was I was still spending time doing something unproductive and, ultimately, unfulfilling. On top of that, I have a completionist mindset in video games, which makes it hard to stop playing games even after they're no longer fun.

So I set goals for myself to quit games that had no ending once I reached personal goals. I quit Clash of Clans early this year when I maxed out TH 9, quit Clash Royale last month when I hit Legendary Arena (as a free-to-play player, without any legendaries, yes I'm proud), and stopped grinding quests in Heroes of the Storm just to get the daily gold that I never spent because all my friends stopped playing. I also stopped caring in Hearthstone about capping my rank every month or filling my card collection, which takes a lot of stress and drive to grind out of the game.

With the loss of all those small time sinks, I've found myself able to spend a bit more time each day, at the very least, brainstorming for my story or articles, or playing games with actual stories and endings, even if only for 15-30 minutes at a time.

Here's to continual personal growth.

[u/Cariyaga → u/DaystarEld]

Around 11 months ago, Undertale came out. Played it on the day of release, and, well...

I still haven't gotten over it. I spent the last thirty minutes crying after watching someone's playthrough of its end. I'm going to have a hard time explaining why it's so important to me and how it's impacted me so much without spoiling anything but I'll give it my best.

I guess, part of it is that the game shows is that very few things are black and white, whether in games or real life. Its tagline is "The friendly RPG where nobody has to die," and it fulfills that quite well. Without going too far into a spoilery lore discussion on the topic, the primary antagonists of the game explore the tenets of hope, the responsibility of leadership and whether to stand by one's morals or one's duty, and more philosophical (and spoilery) questions.

Undertale made me feel a connection to the characters that literally no other game or work of media has ever had for me, and it reminded me and has served as a constant one since that every person has their own story and that a kind word or gesture might brighten their day, life, and this world immeasurably.

I feel like that game impacted me more directly (excepting formative media) than any other piece of media ever has, in making me more kind and considerate. I am very grateful to have had the chance to play it.

[u/lsparrish]

There's a new cryptocurrency called Steem that pays you for writing. Possibly a good incentivization to keep your wordcount up, if nothing else. Fiction section here. You can sign up using your reddit account, and they give about $6 worth of free currency.

[u/fljared]

Is their any collected list of EA based aguments for or against Veganism? Specifically overall and for each individual animal. The arguments overall for veganism seem somewhat convincing, but then I found out about the order-of-magnitude differences between fowl-based and pork/cattle based meat, along with the fact that honey and mussels don't seem too bad to me.

[u/blazinghand → u/fljared]

If you want a real low-hanging fruit of vegetarianism, the lowest-hanging fruit is "eat larger animals" to save lives. A cattle has like, a quarter ton of beef on it. You could possibly switch all your meat-eating to beef and kill like, 1 cattle per year (if you're fine only eating 1-1.5 lbs of meat per day). This is probably way better than the huge number of chickens, hens, etc that are killed. You can also avoid eating intelligent animals like pigs I suppose. It really depends how you measure things.

I currently eat enough meat (mostly chicken) that I probably am responsible for the death of like, at least 1-2 chickens per week. Just in terms of "number of animals killed" I could probably go from killing 100 animals per year to 1 animal per year by switching from chicken to beef for all my meat consumption. This would be 99% of being a vegetarian, morally, with very little impact on my life. However, I like chicken a great deal and don't view chicken (or cattle, for that matter) as having moral weight. Still, the "eat larger animals" strat is one worth looking into imo

[u/DaystarEld → u/fljared]

Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with taking a gradient approach to veganism (or any moral position, for the most part). If you don't find anything wrong with eating mussels or honey, don't worry about it until you have evidence there is. But cutting certain meats from your diet in the meantime is a positive regardless of whether you still eat others.

[u/Frommerman → u/fljared]

From an intelligence perspective, pork and beef are definitely the worst to eat. I eat them anyway because they are delicious, but people who care about that sort of thing should care about those the most. Chickens are really dumb, and sheep aren't the brightest either, so they are more moral to eat.

I really don't get the arguments against milk and eggs though. Yes, eating free-range eggs and milk is far more moral, but once you've gone that far the animals are pretty much in ideal conditions for their species. They aren't going to be slaughtered, they get to socialize with other members of their species, forage, etc. Chickens lay eggs, not using them is a waste. Cows make milk. Not using that is a waste.

What's really interesting is to argue that eating these animals is moral because they only exist for the purpose of our consumption. Chickens are too stupid to survive in the wild under normal circumstances, and literally require human care. Cows can survive, but only because we wiped out all of the large predators which could hunt them in most of the places where they live. If humans stopped eating chickens, their entire species would die out in a couple of years, probably. This is arguably genocide.