I mean, there’s all kinds of ethical philosophy out there. I don’t really deviate too far from it.

In practice, there’s a lot that most people can agree on without too much thought, too. For example, the classical case study for how being agreeable can work against doing the right thing is how ordinary and nice a lot of Nazis were, when not being ordered into atrocities.

Or like quantum systems, in the interpretations that prevent alternate universes. The first kind is called “pseudorandomness” in mathematics.

Usually, when people say free will they don’t just mean that their decisions are random, though.

I’d actually go way higher. The ones that seem nice are the easiest to externally pressure into doing bad things, which counts as being a bad person.

Okay, you can believe what you want, but I should clear something up: Quantum indeterminacy is not free will. It just means that there’s always residual randomness (measured by classical standards) at the smallest scales. Just going by the laws of physics there’s no obvious way for the brain to be more than a meat-based computer.

What about randomness? Most people would say to be random is not to have free will.

Muscle memory is stored in the brain, if you didn’t know that already.

As I hear it described, it doesn’t even make logical sense. A thing is either random, or deterministic. People talk about decisions being motivated by something, but also somehow independent of all exterior things.

People will come back that that lets you off the hook for your misdeeds, but that’s only the case if you believe in retribution for it’s own sake. A version of incapacitation and rehabilitation could make sense against something as devoid of “free will” as a bridge or building, and deterrence only needs the target to be capable of strategy.

To answer the question a slightly different way, in light of the post text: How random the universe is will come down to fundamental physics. The simplest way of interpreting the current state of the art is that the universe is deterministic but branching.

I mean, even their wartime economy is getting questionable. They’re running out of old WWII tanks to refurbish, the cost of rural Siberian lives keeps going up, and revenues keep going down.

Yes. He says whatever he wants, though, and doesn’t worry about it being true.

I’m also starting to think this Hitler guy might have been a bit racist. /s

SDF still has a zero blocked/blocked by.

IIRC it’s like a half or a third of the population that cheats, when research has been conducted. So, it’s normal in the sense of common. But, like others have said, your reunion people sound like were trying to convince themselves it’s normal in the sense of acceptable. And anecdotally it does tend to be the same people over and over again.

Polyamory is also getting mentioned, but that’s a different thing, and poly people are a couple percent of the population at most with far fewer actually living the lifestyle.

It’s not the standard approach, but there’s definitely examples. The trick being that swans have secret affairs fairly frequently as well.

That being said, it sounds like you’re talking about being poly, and as far as I can tell most philanderers just aren’t. They cheat but don’t want to be cheated on.

Thanks!

CBT and mindfulness have been great for me, actually, but there’s no way a workplace would invest as much time as it took, except maybe through a benefits program. That’s kind of where I go with a lot of these - it’s far cheaper to just do a cargo cult version. If you say there’s evidence to the contrary, though, I’ll take your word for it.

Mmm. That sounds like something someone is selling. There’s many theories of childhood development, going right back to Freud, and they don’t necessarily have a lot in common with each other.

I’m the sum of my nature and my experiences. It was a painful way to grow up, but in some ways it’s good practice for a dysfunctional world. In other ways it’s maladaptive, and all the therapists I’ve seen have talked about finding strategies or new ways of looking at things to deal with that, not finding some way to erase it.

The thing with the former case is that basically nobody does nice things out of pure abstract altruism. Being nice can bring pleasure, be part of an identity, avoid shame and maybe boost your ego. That’s why people do it, and why they can turn around and be a monster the next moment if a new way to meet those needs becomes dominant (just open a history book). So, I wouldn’t worry too much.

Edit: Where that leaves human kindness and relationships morally speaking is a bigger question. And given that we’ve just established how little people care about abstract things, a weirdly irrelevant one.

This is the part where I’d normally give practical advice, if I wasn’t staring straight into the existentialist abyss. Anyway…

People don’t like goodness if it doesn’t come from the heart.

I’m curious if you mean in an abstract way, of if you’ve done nice-seeming things for people only for them to call you out on whatever ulterior motives.

Cool that you’re way at the end of the willing-to-face-facts bell curve, though.

Yep, that one fits. I’m not really sure there is some kind of other me, though.

More than once he’s said something that makes me suspect he’s bi. Too bad he’s also a legend-tier asshole.

It’s “just” curvature, both through space and time. The Einstein field equation literally has energy and momentum on one side, and a type of curvature measure on the other.

The trick there is that curved 2D spaces can already be pretty weird, and it gets exponentially crazier in dimensions 3 and 4. This makes it both capable of doing surprisingly a lot, like putting Earth in a fixed, repeating orbit without much local distortion, and difficult to visualise even by analogy. Interestingly, dimensions 5 and higher aren’t any worse, which is actually a pattern that repeats across a lot of geometry.

But yes the gravitational waves take is interesting, it burn my mind trying to imagine how to “trap” spacetime in itself.

There is a bit of nuance there, which is why I said “as I understand it”. Gravitational waves are classically defined in terms of perturbations of flat spacetime, and a black hole is nowhere near close to flat. It’s possible there’s been work showing how to define them in that context, but I’m not a specialist and I couldn’t name it.

If this were electromagnetism I’d just use the superposition principle, but GR is not linear. In fact, there’s chaotic dynamics that can happen in black holes related to the Mixmaster universe model. It’s also possible (to my limited knowledge) that there isn’t nice propagating waves at all so much as just adjustments to the crazy bending everything is already doing.