Free will/choice isn't a coherent concept philosophically and I find it almost impossible to take anyone seriously when they propose "just change your mind" as a solution to anything. I am already struggling to resist the urge to leave this comment at "WOW THANKS, I'M CURED!".

Twin studies show that happiness is a stochastic phenomenon where the genetic heritability of the stable component of happiness is estimated to be almost 80% [1].

If you're unhappy and reading this with a sense of disappointment, I'd just say "don't count yourself out yet".

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1996.tb...

Are some people happy? Yes. Are there people who were not happy who now are? Yes. How? Lots and lots of anecdotes are around changing how they approached life, not how they changed their genetics.

Looking at your linked article, they are going off of a wellness questionnaire first developed 40 years ago. Looking at the broad areas of questions, I feel they also miss what it means to be happy in many cases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality...

Some questions are orthogonal to happiness include living interesting, exciting lives; enjoying being noticed, being the center of attention; being perfectionistic; being victims of false and nasty rumors; having been betrayed and deceived; enjoying scenes of violence (fights, violent movies); liking to plan activities in detail; and more.

The genetic heritability finding is not related to the free will argument, it is its own scientific finding. I don't know why the existence of those life-changing anecdotes matters at all, the research has never shown that happiness is 100% determined by genetics, only that the stable component of happiness has a high heritability. I also want to point out that "genetic heritability" doesn't simply mean "you don't got the happy gene, you're fucked", genetic inheritance is not mutually exclusive to environmental influences. Indeed, at least some gene-behavior studies will recommend "positive gene-environment matchmaking" [1] in its conclusions.

No happiness study is going to have a perfect definition of happiness, which scientifically is studied as "subjective well-being" because it's subjective. The study's definition of subjective well-being is reasonable and consistent. If you think that changing the questions will radically change results, I invite you to do or find your own scientific research. We don't exactly have a glut of happiness research, we have some modern meta-studies [1] that flesh out the relationship between genetics and behavior a little more but otherwise upholds existing heritability findings.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6

I am leaving out no-one. Joy is absolutely accessible to every living being, at all times, under all conditions.

I don't think happiness is a destination, it is a path. The happy person is happy to have chosen to turn right and to have had the opportunity to so. The unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for.

That is the decision

>That is the decision

What is the decision exactly? If unhappy people could just choose to be happy instead, they would.

It is the way one looks at and approaches the problems and/or situations. You can choose to change how you approach the problem and you can choose what you find rewarding in that problem and the approach. You can also choose to focus on what you've yet to attain.

In our little parable here, the unhappy person is still unhappy that they have not yet found what they are looking for. We are getting terribly abstract now. But they could instead focus on what traction they have gained, they could "enjoy the art of the search," or whatever else they choose to put value on. But it comes down to what they value.

Talks and whole books are written on this and I wont be able to do them justice. This mental outlook thing extends to depression. See CBT, Congnitive Behavioral Therapy, which reduces depression by changing how you think about things. One could choose to apply those techniques.

If I’m starving - I have every right to be upset. Yet in your mind - I should just learn to enjoy the search for food (even if it doesn’t exist) rather than being upset that I’m literally dying.

Since you bring up starving, I'll give you my starving story. BMI was under 18 and trending south. I got kind of abandoned for a bit in high school. My daily food was one potato in the morning (baked, plain), the high school free lunch, and, as long as I stole an extra hamburger that I could sell (which was not every day, depending on rotation), I'd have enough money to get a can of soup for the evening. This would be warmed on a wood burning stove that I also used to keep my room warm. The rest of the house was, literally, ice cold due to a missing wall (which is non-ideal in the mountains and also encourages wildlife to steal your meager food stores). What meager food I could stash away got stolen by raccoons once - there was a missing wall on my house at the time and the mountain wildlife could come on in if they could navigate a tarp.

I could have been upset with my dad for leaving me in that situation. I could be upset with other extended (and close by) family who did not help. I could be upset with neighbors who didn't help. I could be upset when I saw people wasting food (and, yeah, that stung... a lot). I could be upset that my stomach being in pain or some stints with nausea was a normal feeling. I could be upset by a thousand things in my situation (and these are but the surface of my hardships). I could have decided that my happiness was based on all that.

However, I tried to enjoy "roughing it." I took the time to enjoy searching for wood to heat my wood burning stove to heat my cold room and my can of soup that I got only because I stole and sold other food earlier. Would I prefer that to where I am today? Hell the no. I looked around and knew I did not like where my life was directed and the current state of it. So I focused on what I could do. I could get my school work completed. I could talk to friends before school if I got there early enough. Maybe a day was a no-hamberger-available-to-steal-and-sell day; I would enjoy that I got to sneak a slice of pizza from another classroom's party or I could get the left overs from a friend before they tossed something. I think I was a generally happy person despite all of my hardships (and these are but the surface of my hardships).

So I've been starving with every right to be upset. I chose to, instead, focus on things I could do something about. Slowly I improved my situation. I found food. I got good grades. I got scholarships. I starved some more. I worked crazy hours. I failed. And I failed some more. By my late 20s, I had started to figure things out and I, for the first time, could buy a pizza on the way home and not think about the financial hardship. I could avoid being hungry. Tack on another decade and I am wildly successful. However, I've also had to deal with depression, anxiety, insecurity, and feeling like not belonging along the way.

Edit: post question I meant to ask:

> self-deception/lying-to-oneself

I'm curious on what you mean here - why is that significant? This sounds like saying you shouldn't read fiction because it isn't real. When you pump yourself up (for a lift, a sports game, to ask out someone attractive), you are practicing forms of self-deception. Also, you are not saying, "this is great, life sucks." You are saying, "life sucks, but there are great things." Reality doesn't change, but the way you interpret it can.

And being upset does not mean you cannot focus on fixing the issue. You can be mad as hell but also be working on the problem. It does not mean you're helpless. Nowhere did anyone say that.

I am still the highest paid person I personally know - by a rather high margin, because of my experience as a software engineer.

Since I dropped out of university almost 20 years ago, I have been consulting and contracting, focusing almost exclusively on Python, PostgreSQL and, more recently, AWS. This simple combination (I usually refuse to learn anything new - I don't think there have been many noteworthy new technologies in the past couple of decades) has made me millions over the years and I have never been left without work for any significant period of time.

Since the pandemic began, I have actually found myself contracting multiple roles concurrently, from my home, each paying significantly above the average developer rate. I've found I can do up to 3 - 4 at a time and still deliver results for each (declining to attend regular meetings helps).

https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-nodes-in-k-group/

Maybe I'm just too stupid.

What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

What evidence is there for an increase in productivity when moving from 40 to 32 hours/week? I believe productivity increases have been demonstrated in some cases for hourly reductions when moving from overtime (say, 60 hours/week) down to 40. This is grounded in two parts - the diminishing returns of working more than 40 hours/week, and the fact that above 50 or 60 people start getting too tired and too focused on narrow tasks to make good long-term judgements. But I haven’t seen studies showing what you’re suggesting, which is a complete 100% reversal of productivity from 32 to 40 hours/week.

The logical extension, of course, doesn’t work. It’s not possible to work 100% less and therefore be 100% more productive or happier. (I mean, maybe happier, but not more productive, right? ;)) And we already know the delta change in productivity for a given delta change in hours depends heavily on how many absolute hours we’re starting with, and also depends heavily on the job at hand. So is the question about what number of hours gives people peak productivity for a given job? Or peak happiness? Or is this just about making sure employment has reasonable limits, and not even trying to optimize productivity?

* Edit: I googled it, and found the story about Microsoft Japan and it’s 4 day work week. I totally remember reading about this a few years ago. Lots of commentary on HN. The claim is a 40% increase when going to a 4 day week. It was measured for only 1 month, and they changed many other aspects (notably, they capped meeting times). Many people pointing out this is likely Hawthorne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). Personally, 40% seems completely implausible, which is why I wrote it off and forgot about it. It seems obvious that if that’s true, it means something was going terribly wrong with their 5 day week. Or that this effect isn’t measuring the change in hours at all.

We probably have some shared view that it’s Laffer-curvish without being sure of the shape.

It just seems unlikely to me that 40 hrs is a total system optimum since it was a historical accident. Personally I think it might be 50 hrs/week but it just seems strange that we’d believe that 40 is the peak of this curve.

I would say that 40 hours/week was no accident though. That was something workers battled for hundreds of years. It was the result of a prolonged debate about what is a reasonable work/life balance, in response to widespread employer abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

I’m sure you’re right about 50 for some jobs, but it really depends. There’s a big difference between blue collar and white collar work, just to point at the probably the most obvious distinction.

My own experience with long hours is in film and video game production, where in film we were on a 50 hours per week contract and it went up to usually 60-70 with overtime pay near the end of production. In video games, it was 40 hours a week with extended crunch periods of 80 or even (kill me) slightly more. At 80 hours/week sustained, all life outside of work is over, it’s barely enough time to eat & sleep and no amount of money is worth it. And my productivity went down, I’m certain. At 50 I’m compromising on my family & friends a bit, but I’m probably as productive or slightly more productive than at 40. At 30 hours/week, I feel like I’m barely working, and that meetings burn what little time I have.

When I had my own startup, when I could be flexible with hours and work from home (pre-pandemic), it was probably easier to do 60 hours/week, happily and productively, than when I was working 40 for a larger corporation.

Personally, I find the "societal outcomes" argument much stronger. I personally would like to work less and get paid the same.

Claiming that productivity will increase as hours worked goes down is a big claim that requires big evidence.

Where are these rainbow unicorns who produce 20% more value in 80% of the time?

I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week.

Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week.

There is little reason to believe the vast majority of workers can't keep the same work load with less hours. Sure - maybe 20% or your workers get 80% of your work done - and those people actually do work the full 40 hours (or more). But who's to say they won't continue working more than "required"?

For non-white collar jobs - particularly service workers - I think this is a completely different story. You can't give the same amount of hour-long massages in 4 days as you can in 5. You can't wait on as many tables or work the cash register for as many hours and so on... The thing is - most of these people are paid hourly - so you just need to find more workers (which currently, at full employment, is hard).

If you're trying to push up wages - this seems like it obviously will. I can see why businesses would be against that. But in a world where all wages go up - there's obviously winners AND losers. Not all businesses will be hurt by higher wages. If your labor inputs are a large portion of your COGS and you don't have pricing power - that's bad (traditional restaurants, discount retail). If labor inputs are low - and you do have pricing power (digital services, luxuries) - now you have many more people with higher incomes and more time to buy your products!

To me, this seems like it is good for the biggest businesses and lower-end salary workers and bad for the most common small businesses and upper-end salary workers. But I have no clue how this will turn out. I don't think anyone does, really. But I think it's a very exciting experiment we shouldn't be too pessimistic about.

> Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week.

Another way of phrasing this is that people tend to be productive for 50% of the time they spend "working". It's not self evident that people will still be productive for those 20 hours if the work day was shortened. It could just as easily be the case that people will still goof off for 50% of the shortened work day.

I actually think if I took every Friday off, I could probably hit pretty close to current productivity but I work a pretty flexible schedule and don't have to do a lot of coordination.

For the “how”, from l what I’ve been hearing, actual productivity follows a curve analogous to the Laffer curve for taxes, where 40 hours weeks is only the most effective weekly rate for manufacturing jobs in particular, while it’s probably more like 20-30 for intellectually focused work.

I have no idea what the “best” might be for e.g. baristas or bank tellers, where it’s important to have someone physically present even if there’s no actual customer at any given moment.

Clearly some tasks are more like an endless thing that can be mined at, while others are more like you are paying for the availability of some expert. Since people do a combination of both types, the proper compensation for 80% of time should be somewhere between 80% and 100%, depending on the weight.

40 hours isn't some magical "right" number. It was something that was decided before computers, Internet, global fast communication, etc etc etc.

I think its beyond late for us to reconsider those hours and decrease them.

To answer your question directly: Why would they change what's been "working" for them for decades? The only way we can see big companies change this is if a startup gets really successful and just has this as the norm. That'd create market pressure for change.

Where that market pressure doesn't exist, regulations can play the same role.

They won the 12 hour workday, then the 10 hour workday, then the 8 hour work day and that's when the unions were defanged.

And now the working hours are going back up. I can talk about my country in Europe, that after the 2008 crisis, and due to the increased competition pressure form globalization, many workers' rights and protections were reduced "to increase economic competitiveness", and many professionals, blue and white collar, are now doing more than the 8h/day either willingly or forced by the circumstances of a poor jobs market with little alternatives.

And with stuff like real estate getting more and more expensive, faster than wages are growing, it's tough for anyone but the most privileged, to have the luxury of working less than 8h/day and maintaining a good lifestyle.

We're already kinda seeing something similar in the US. Where a lot of republican voters are part of the "lower class" of society, and their anger is being taken advantage of and translated to xenophobia.

Combating this and creating a fair society is the hardest (yes, including climate change) challenge I see in us going forward.

As examples like recent protests show, the true core are people like business owners and wealthy suburbanites who are very much voting for their interests, not against them. This is also shown by how in every presidential election since at least 2012, voters below $50k always voted firmly in favor of democrats while voters above $100k voted firmly in favor of Republicans.

But thanks to global changes, country by country, this mentality will slowly be changed and finally 4-day week won't be some strange option but a norm.

ADDED: Assuming it really is a 20% cut in productivity which, for office workers, probably isn't the case but would be for many others including white collar jobs like lawyers, doctors, consultants, etc.

Then again, I'm just n=1.

And I love when I find myself in situations like this - although it happens more and more rarely as I age.

The answer, of course, is: perspective.

And there are all sorts of ways to shift your perspective, but the general heuristic is to step back, zoom out, and talk to yourself in broader, more generic terms. Details are your enemy when you're in a rut (although they turn into your best friend when you're on a roll!)

Take some time, over a number of days, to consciously and consistently quiet your mind. Just give yourself the luxury for a while to not worry or even think about the details of your situation. Try to find some broad positive themes about life in general. Some things that are, roughly, good. Just stay away from the details.

Take it easy. Disengage for a while and take time to breathe, to walk, to do simple things that are, fundamentally, pleasurable.

It won't take more than a few days to get yourself back on track. Juice will start flowing to you again soon enough. Just don't rush into it, simply let it come on its own terms, whenever it wants.

You'll be fine.

There’s a couple of different kinds of “rut,” though:

1) Ennui

    The project has become a “slog,” and I am tired of the grind.
    This happens pretty much daily, for me.

    Is this my life? Where did I go wrong? Should I just pack it in?
    This tends to happen as the project nears completion, and I’m “polishing the fenders.” The work is more “rote,” the bugs are harder to find, and I get disgusted, by looking at my code.

If it is #2, then I need to take a more significant “break.” I will often find an alternate project to work on. Many folks will take a vacation. Coming back can be difficult, but, once I’m fully engaged, again, I find I am back to full sail.

I tend to work on alternate projects. I find it invigorating, and keeps me “in the swing.” That does not work for many folks, as they need a far more comprehensive “change of scenery.” I know folks that go on wilderness vacations.

I actually did a #2 break, the last couple of days. I have been working on a project for the last year, and we are approaching ship (still a ways off, but we can see it, from here). I was starting to feel quite “burnt.” As you approach “ship,” the work becomes a lot more “picky,” you have to say “no” to other team members, and you start to feel the responsibility, settling on your shoulders.

I took on a Web site project. I’m not a Web designer, by trade, but I do OK. It took me a couple of days.

It was one of those projects, where things had been allowed to “rot,” and I was cleaning up a “mess.” Gave me an excuse to grouse and rant, while I got the site back on its feet. I do a lot of volunteer work.

I’m done, and will be getting back to the main project, now. I’m looking forward to it.

One big problem, is that employers tend to take a dim view of employees “taking a break.” This is especially true of #2.

In that case, you may not have a choice. It can profoundly affect the quality of the deliverable. The employer needs to get with reality. It may not happen; especially if they are “self-made” type As (like many startup founders). Large corporations tend to be better than small shops.

I’m semi-retired. I can do what I want. I did not have that luxury, before.

To trigger a change in perspective in me, I start cleaning and organizing. Finishing or closing projects. This brings me back where I started and I can rethink from afar.

Organize.

I don't mean that I need to tell others that I'm in a rut and need perspective change. I need the others – friends and colleagues – to help anchor my perspective to reality (or their reality) by simple having normal interactions with them.

Needless to say, the pandemic has made this hard. And I'm afraid that the older I get, the less I can rely on this very good mechanism I have for perspective change. Any advice?

(A therapist suggested I train my own ability to reality-anchor. It worked a tiny bit, but given enough time I always start doubting my own anchoring, and need peers to reanchor me. I know their view isn't canon either, but it feels objective to me. Mine feels shaky.)

It's likely you'll physically want to throw up from just looking at the images, and this bodily reaction is for me one of the "deepest" ways of my body physically understanding how good I have it. I haven't had to do this in the last 5 years, and only did this 3 times total.

This can seem like it's wrong, and maybe it is, but it worked for me so maybe it'll work for you.

There's a side benefit to this, I've become more anti-war, which I think is a good quality to have.

We need to step back and feel the bliss of small things that happens around that we miss to notice every day in life.

As it says above, don't put yourself under pressure on doing something. Just try to be aware about the things that you do every day. Taking a bath, having a meal -> Take a deep breathe do it slowly and enjoy it.

Then slowly slowly and eventually, you will come up with new perspective on how to approach life the way you want it to be. You will notice internally when this phase happens. All the very best!

Of course you won't see it glorified by HN folk, cause they're entirely elsewhere vibrationally. Too busy complaining. "Well, someone has to complain! Someone has to keep others accountable!" they cry. May be true, maybe not, but when all we do is complain, nothing gets done. Not for lack of effort and busyness, but for lack of faith and goodwill.

Take this one for example:

> bring the fire of the Sun to Earth to slay our enemies

The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.

And you cannot simply ignore the present when you do this. Any attempt to bring that future about necessarily begins by taking stock of the resources available in the present: if you try to hike to a mountain peak without taking your gaze from that peak, you will stumble and twist your ankle. But that is not a judgmental, condemnatory way of perceiving the present; it is a factual evaluation of the means available to you in the present, similar to the factual evaluation of the possibilities that exist in a possible future.

So I don't know that I agree with your thesis that progress is rooted in dissatisfaction, though many people do.

> The amount of moaning we still have to do about this? If we fail at that task, this fire stuff will be sure to be the end of us.

This comment suggests to me that you do not yet adequately appreciate the risks of pervasive surveillance and precision-guided munitions, by comparison with which the risks of thermonuclear warheads pale.

I have to say I usually regret commenting here on Character Assassination News, more or less for the reason you say. I think it's an unhealthy, self-destructive habit of mine.

Other recent comments of mine you might enjoy, though some of it is certainly "complaining":

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29327736 (calculating the energy cost of the lowest-tech-possible way to do atmospheric carbon capture, upvoted to 7)

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29880287 (offering a particularly clean formulation of binary search, downvoted to -1)

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28926494 (trying and failing to estimate the relative externalized environmental costs of using a plastic bottle and washing a glass one, upvoted to 20)

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29505838 (on the historical development of the "willful infringement" doctrine in patent law, including citations to caselaw and law review articles, and in particular how reading patents can expose you or your employer to treble damages; upvoted to 2 points and flagged)

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29697411 (on why metallurgical research is still more or less driven by experiment rather than computation, upvoted to 74)

6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28660097 (my dismaying epiphany, based on empirical data, that I'm only about three times as fast writing things in Python as I would be in C, despite extensive experience in Python, and that it's often probably not worth the drawbacks. Probably a modern C alternative like Rust would be better; upvoted to 3)

7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29815027 (on beating SciPy mathematical optimization algorithms on a circuit design problem in under 250 milliseconds with just a list comprehension, unvoted at 1)

8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29144119 (a list of the biggest unanswered questions in physics today, upvoted to 10)

The only thing they really seemed certain of was that it wasnt their fault for sabotaging their only electable candidate in the primaries.

This was my point.

> There are literally mountains of evidence publicly available, and many thoroughly researched books by respected lawyers and political scientists on the subject.

The Mueller report didn't find any such mountains. Some of the biggest peddlers of the conspiracy theory have been recently been forced into embarrassing back downs https://nypost.com/2021/11/09/ex-state-dept-spox-slams-schif...

> You can't live in denial of the obvious and at the same time have the chutzpah to accuse others of lacking evidence.

What I can say for certain is that looking past all the bluster and propaganda and claims of what exists, I have never seen evidence proving Trump colluded with Putin to hack the election.

> Who's the propaganda victim here?

The people who believe there is evidence Trump/campaign colluded with Russia are.

I'm not suggesting a solution, as I don't have one, and would be extremely sceptical of any proposed solution. Doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize it. "Know thyself" etc.

There is no hard limit, but clearly the age distribution drops suddenly (for developed countries) at 70.

There are a bunch of single points of failure in our body -- the heart, the liver, the spine, the major blood vessels, the trachea, etc.

There's only so many 9's that those components are built to last for, and they ALL have to work!

FYI: I agree that "Leading demographers ... 122 years" is an incorrect statement.

It is a random number. They could have lived to 122. But 0 have been shown to live to 150, and we're most certain 0 lived to 200 or 500.

There being a natural limit doesn't mean that "largest age found" is the limit. It just means that there's a natural (e.g. cell based) process that kills people with increasing certainty as they age, with a measured cap around 120 years or so.

Whether that can tomorrow or historically been found to be 130 or 150 in some random human that gets/got to be ultra-old doesn't mean it's not statistically more than appplicable to the 99.99% percentile of humans, or that there's no "increasing natural death certainty" with a limit towards 100% as people age.

>Just because all of your data points show the same thing, doesn't make that thing true.

It surely makes the thing statistically true (this is what happens most commonly), and points to processes and factors making it so.

>Oh, your set is all human lives ever recorded? Meh... Doesn't mean a thing. Your set is too small.

Huh? "Too small" compared to what? One that would include humans in prehistory or pre-modern-registries that might have lived more? (And we do know that they lived less too, even if they're not recorded, from the bodies/bones/etc. records we have).

Rather, the dataset is huge, and (after 20th century or so, where globally registry records are kept) close to exhaustive. Statistically if anything it's much more than required.

>To me, it is self-evident that there is no natural limit to human lifespan.

Sounds more like a wish than a self-evident truth.

>If anything, the existence of a natural limit should require proof, not the lack of it.

People die, lifetimes of billions have been shown to be capped, both in nature (pre-historical living) and civilization (modern life, diet, etc).

That points to a natural limit. And there are similar numbers/caps for all primates and mammals anyway. That's the very definition to a natural limit.

That doesn't mean an absolute limit, or a specific hard number (like "122") just a limit based on current evolution. E.g. if we modify humans genetically or whatever we might be able to overcome it. But as it is, there absolutely are natural processes towards limiting life span at play and there is a clear cap measured. That's not even contestable.

But that's a trivial observation that doesn't really change anything. 122 wasn't never supposed to be "non-random" as in some kind of physical law. The natural law concerns the increased certainty of death observed as ages > 100 approach, not a hard and fixed 122 number encoded in our DNA.

Seriously though, good piece - if a bit shallow. It's a good start. People need to hear this.

Cynicism is the only evil in the world. The opposite, of course, is innocence - and, since this can't exist in pure form, the closest second is gullibility. Not ONE person here will agree that gullibility is a good thing, but I say it's our saviour. It is truly the best you can do in life.

Look, it's not that cynics are wrong... No. They are right. That's the problem. The problem is that they are right. And that's the root of all evil. They are limited - enslaved - by their reality. There's no escaping it. So the only thing they feel they can do is fight back, with all their might... And you know where this leads? Straight to hell.

I'll make it more painful.

The ones who fight corruption are the most corrupt.

The ones who fight injustice are the most cruel.

The ones who fight intolerance are least tolerant.

Your only moral obligation in life is to make this decision for yourself: Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be good?

If it's more important to be right - you're already on the loosing team. If it's more important to be good - now you are ACTUALLY right.

Maybe the problem is an inappropriate amount of faith. Not in the religious sense of the word, but as in confidence in external things. The optimists have far too much, the cynics have far too little. Maybe we should look to the mean.

Having no faith at all offers up a breeding ground for corruption on both personal and institutional level. Having too much obscures it if it's already there.

> Your only moral obligation in life is to make this decision for yourself: Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be good?

Often the question that should be asked is "why aren't you doing the things you know you should do?" Most people already know what is good, yet they do other things instead out of sheer momentum of habit, or because they don't realize they had an option.

Why is there a "should"? Is there a unique and universal way to determine what someone should do? Given the same situation two different people can act in two different ways. Is there a rule implying that one is right and the other is wrong?

most of the time, yes!

We are not living in a void, we live in societies, complex societies. with lots of rules, dos and donts, should and shouldn't.

> Why is there a "should"? Is there a unique and universal way to determine what someone should do? Given the same situation two different people can act in two different ways. Is there a rule implying that one is right and the other is wrong?

strikes me as a rather obtuse response to that.

Objective moral truths stem from that. The unending dance with entropy. To be the belle of the ball, we also harness that entropic randomness and turn it into dances that are even more powerful.

I feel the urge to thrive and grow and improve. I find myself sympathetic to the expressions of that drive from all life. That is a priori, that emergent empathy that many of us are capable of. I see a neighbor crying, a homeless man sleeping rough, a fearful stranger, and I say to myself, "There but for the grace of God, go I." But I don't stop there, because I see my puppy, I see a bird in the sky, I see a crushed mollusk, a writhing worm, "There but for the grace of God, go I." We're many faces, but still, we're all dancing with the entropy.

Next is the question, "Will this action increase or decrease the entropy in the universe? To the many faces, is this the action of an ally or an enemy?"

Finally, we realize we could superheat everything into crystals and reduce entropy that way. The last vital factor is the synthesis of order and disorder: complexity. These are the fun dances. Art. Learning. Creation.

So, to find objective moral truths, our sieve consists of The Golden Rule, "Am I fucking things up more?" and "Am I making things more awesome?"

Extremely stable societies are often marked by low social mobility and oppressive social mores, yet they fulfill every check mark according to your definition of good. It would also deem the emancipation of slaves an evil deed, since it disrupts a stable pattern of social order that's extended for a long stretch of time.

I don't know if I would deem something like ancient egypt, which had a social order that persisted largely unchanged for several thousand years, one of the most stable societies known in history (also an oppressive theocracy), I don't know if that is my idea of good.

Merely persisting is not sufficient for something to be moral, but it is a necessary requirement. We need principles on how to behave in repeated interactions and situations over long periods, or bad things will eventually happen. That's part of the purpose of moral truths you were raising a question about.

I'd just point out that ancient Egypt had developed moral-sensemaking technology that were state of the art at the time. It's the best we as humans could do to live in a large ecosystem and we're standing on their shoulders. It's not surprising that we would find fault.

Moral incontinence is a problem most people will struggle a lot more with than convoluted scenarios involving trolleys.

Cynicism is the only evil in the world? I am cynically rolling my eyes on this one.

you can be both

but if you don't try to not be wrong, you'll never be good.

> The ones who fight injustice are the most cruel.

> The ones who fight intolerance are least tolerant.

I have not found this to be the case; and this phrasing is needlessly reductive. See also the paradox of tolerance. And “tolerance” as a bar is pretty damn low; it’s not something you should be patting yourself on the back for. It’s just showing humanity to those around you.

Part of the problem is that we live in a world where “lie, cheat, steal” legitimately does make your material conditions better most of the time. So we’re all typically equal parts “good” and “bad”, and we even have different definitions (e.g. an evangelical Christian may legitimately feel like they’re doing good by shaming gay people).

Cynicism is a recognition that not everyone shares your values, and some in fact have values that directly conflict with yours. It’s often useful, and I disagree with the original article.

I'm stealing this.

"That's just, like, your opinion, man"

In all seriousness, though, no one has your moral obligations. They're yours and yours alone by definition (unless you believe in gods, fairy tales and whatnot).

I can understand the other points, but not this one. Can you expand on that?

Of course this mindset can only ever attract other lazy people and even then only from a distance. Even lazy people desire relationships with people putting in the effort.

>The ones who fight injustice are the most cruel.

>The ones who fight intolerance are least tolerant.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. This is what this sounds like to me.

It's a self-inflicted reality which persists much longer than is needed. The state security officers are now mostly dead or in their late 70s, those state enterprises are bankrupt from long ago, yet somehow it is still a relevant identification issue when it comes to your political beliefs.

Are we sure about this one? Do we have evidence that safe spaces in college universities are worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime or the systemic genocide of natives in Canada/America? Do we have evidence that the southern poverty law center is performing hate crimes worse than the kkk?