Last 7 years of life

^i am and always have been a pretty big optimist in people. i don't see any empirical evidence to change why i shouldn't be. Remember that you can find in history a lot of bad things people have done, but you can also find a lot of good things. Humans used to do a lot of worse things, and there wasn't any concept of moral progress until a few centuries ago. And most the evil in the world actually comes from hierarchical institutions imposing their maxims on people. people are forced to do or become evil through external constraints a large majority of the time. Even these people at the top of fossil fuel corporations that have basically known what the consequences of their actions are, they are forced by their institutions goal to maximize profit. if they didn't do that, someone would just replace them and do it themselves.

There is a famous quote by a marxian philosopher who i've never read, antonio gramsci 'pessimissm of the intellect, optimism of the will', which means we should look at the world as it is and try to change it.

It's changed my lifestyle significantly. It is important not to ruin your life over having a moral conscience. A lot of people who gain moral consciences do this and in the end it just means they can't do anything positive for anyone.

You seem pretty enlightened bro, right on. Agree with most of what I read here

I think I can tackle your position on anarcho-collectivism and hopeful of human as species at the same time.


You mention that only in recent years (past couple of centuries) we have had the only tangible moral advancement in history and I agree, and what do you think this is all about? It isnt about ideas since greek and roman philosophers stood as the best philosophical ideas for millennia, it also isnt biology, we evolve too slow to have any meaningful change, its all about technological progress that is exactly the thing that grew exponentially at the exact same time we improved morally.

Turns out that what allows us to become better people en-masse is living comfortable lives, most people cant be noble when they are starving and fearful and this exact progress is only achievable by the free market, the thing you appear to be against.

Communism didnt fail just because of presense of a state, communism failed and will always fail because it goes against human nature, angry resentful farmers were told that labor was exploitation and that the farm owners got rich out of their suffering, so they hanged the owners who were the smartest and most indostrious people in town, so naturally famine got a death grip of the Soviet Union, and as I mentioned it earlier, starving people tend to leave their morals behind... to the point where the government had to literally give leaflets reminding people that Cannibalism was wrong.

I think you are misunderstanding free market with a piece of shit corporation like EXXON, who isnt an example of capitalism but a twisted monopoly which only exists because of its alliance with the state, those entities would never exist in a free market.

You mention that only in recent years (past couple of centuries) we have had the only tangible moral advancement in history and I agree, and what do you think this is all about? It isnt about ideas since greek and roman philosophers stood as the best philosophical ideas for millennia, it also isnt biology, we evolve too slow to have any meaningful change, its all about technological progress that is exactly the thing that grew exponentially at the exact same time we improved morally.

That's a faith-based position. Not only that, but it strikes me as so absurd to praise technological progress when we would have already wiped ourselves out en-masse because of it if it wasn't for MAD, and with the Cold War 2.0 it's still a huge issue today. Technological progress is a massive double-edged sword.

Turns out that what allows us to become better people en-masse is living comfortable lives, most people cant be noble when they are starving and fearful and this exact progress is only achievable by the free market, the thing you appear to be against.

It can be, but honestly, this is only a small minority of comfortable people. How many comfortable people are there in the western world? And how many of those people are involved in effective altruism? Hardly any. Even the people who profess to want to be the benefactors of humanity like Stroggoz are focusing on their own desires and unless they have a feeling of nagging guilt, they never do anything to help reduce suffering outside of nepotism.


Probably posted these before but worth a watch/read:



https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/john-gray-interview-atheism

It can be, but honestly, this is only a small minority of comfortable people. How many comfortable people are there in the western world? And how many of those people are involved in effective altruism? Hardly any. Even the people who profess to want to be the benefactors of humanity like Stroggoz are focusing on their own desires and unless they have a feeling of nagging guilt, they never do anything to help reduce suffering outside of nepotism.

Being beneficial to others and being an altruist are two completely different things, though. You are coming to conclusions too quickly imo

It is important not to ruin your life over having a moral conscience. A lot of people who gain moral consciences do this and in the end it just means they can't do anything positive for anyone.

That's because you can easily fall into a state of moral desperation where nothing feels purposeful. I guess its a choice you make with what approach you tackle on life afterwards. Negativity is always the easy way, although people don't see it this way.

How am I coming to conclusions too quickly? Earlier you hinted at the fact that you deliberated on different issues and settled on what matters the most morally to you and essentially it came down to how you could reduce (human) suffering through your actions (which so far is your academic work). Next, this is what you wrote:

"What keeps me going are various discoveries i make. Even if they are small ones. This work i do is really long term stuff, if no one wants to read it then yes it would have been a waste of time. But there are those that have. If i can make for example, 1% of the public aware of massacres in west papua and their responsibilities to that, that could bring it to an end slightly earlier. It may save many lives. I spent half my time on actual school work as well."

This intention and these goals are altruistic in nature. You're saying you've made it your duty to raise awareness about issues that you think could save lives. Well, not exactly, as you are not really saying you are committed to getting these results, but still you have hope there. The point of effective altruism is to do that, but also to contribute financially if possible to those causes that put your dollar at work in the most efficient way possible to reduce the most suffering. Anyway, you can identify however you like, the point I was making is that comfort doesn't often lead to altruism. Certainly, more comfort doesn't lead to more altruism. Funnily enough, in my own life, the people I know who are the most generous (those on the side of my girlfriend's family) are those who are the poorest. My family is quite rich and they are all very selfish people. It's true though that they both have a certain level of comfort provided by the fact that they live in Canada and not on the streets in some shithole, but I don't think the correlation is quite there even in those extreme circumstances like Baal believes it to be.

Take Buddhist monks for example, who abandon their possessions and try to become humanity's benefactors by overcoming their own egos and helping others to do the same. It's a very noble thing to do and they are not necessarily comfortable, they rely on other people's donations to live their lives this way (it also disproves this idea that the free market is responsible for altruism). But maybe I am misunderstanding him. When he says people become 'better', I think it happens in the sense that their culture has provided a better environment for them to be more civilized, but this is more of a facade and a way to behave in the world than inner moral progress. Civilization hasn't taught them how to think and what to value for themselves so they can still be morally bankrupt people, it's just that they happen to not commit harsh crimes. But they certainly would if they were placed in bad circumstances. If you put them in a situation like the guards were in in Nazi Germany or in the Milgram experiment and you soon learn that human nature is really not pretty regardless of the economic system. Jordan Peterson talks about this at length in his lectures (mainly the Existentialism ones), so if you haven't listened to them Baal I recommend you do.

ok you've given me a lot of stuff to address baal

when i was saying the past few centuries, i was basically referring to the enlightenment. concepts like freedom of speech, and animal rights, human rights,were basically nonexistent up until the 16th century. I don't see the connection to technology, and i'm not sure if anyone knows why the enlightenment happened when it did. it must've been a complex of factors. But these moral ideas came from a few philosophers, mostly from privileged backgrounds, but were nevertheless rebellious against institutional authority. it started with those like locke, voltaire, adam smith, kant, and Rousseau. Basically the philosophers of classical liberalism. The philosophers of classical liberalism lasted up until the early 19th century, and it kind of died out a bit and there began to be a new generation with the rise of industrial capitalism.

philosophy (science and social science) grew massively during the 19th century, and you had basically 2 different types of intellectuals in that era. those that worked for the two different elite sectors in society, capitalist and aristocracy. and those that were socialists. The socialists split up in 1870 into anti statist socialists, and state socialist. being an intellectual became specialized. and you could specialize in political economy and work for the elites. The socialist intellectuals basically rebelled against this. it's important to remember that the idea of socialism, didn't come from intellectuals, but from the workers that were constantly in rebellion up until 1848. They basically fought for the 10 hour day. and it's been a pretty up and down battle since then, with the third world havn't not yet achieved any of this, but the 1st world has done it. Without those human beings fighting for those rights, technology in the hands of power would have crushed them. i mean its a fact that material conditions were worse off for those that worked in the mills in 1830's than they were for the same people 100 years earlier. the average life expectancy was 17 years as well. Same goes for civil rights movement or environmental movement. i'm sure people use technology to organize and achieve rights, but it usually through the masses of people showing the elites that they are powerful, that moral progress is achieved.

here i think it's important to read adam smith and karl marx, because they were the two economists who talked about the immense technological progress in their own day, and how it could accrue a lot of material benefits, but their critique was basically that the political /economic system didn't make use of the technology in a humane way. In marx's time you could never pay workers more than subsistance level wages because you would just go out of business from competition. technology didn't change that at all. Adam smith was also strongly against the wage system

It's similar reading some of joseph stiglitz work in todays world. he was a former world bank economist. in our time, if technology improves steel production, you lay off workers, and wages in fact go down or stagnate, because since there are more people out of work, the capitalist has greater bargaining power over the workers.
So technology progress by itself does not advance human morals. technology with human's fighting for various freedoms does. That's what history tells me.

The USSR didn't fail because it goes against human nature. There are tons of systems that go against human nature and they last for centuries or millenia. I mean, i guess we could agree that slavery is against human nature even if neither of us can prove it, it is something we can probably both agree on. slavery that lasted for thousands of years. Both the USSR and the west had propaganda systems that were devoted to calling it a communist state. the kremlin wanted to do this to exploit the good image of communism that it had created and tell its own population that it was a communist state. The west wanted to do it, to show that communism was associated with violent totalitarian states.

Now why did the USSR collapse? internal records show that it was ready to collapse as early as the 1960's, but that america pushed it inwards with its huge military spending. this is not something i have studied much in history unfortunately so i cant comment much. But when it did collapse, russia basically had a few options. implement neoliberal capitalism, implement social democratic capitalism, or continue with its totalitarian beuracratic state. They basically chose the 1st one, and the elites made themselves incredibly rich, selling all the assets to themselves at a fraction of the real value. probably the biggest robbery in history.

To clarify i'm not fully against or for the free market. I can see examples where the free market could save millions of lives from aids and starvation. like corporations engaging in protectionist policies like intellectual property rights kills millions of people indirectly right now. the free market is a solution to that and i've always supported that.

I've read enough to know that in many of the major industries, markets forces leads to agglomeration and monopoly power. we currently live in an oligopolistic system, and that is true for virtually every single major corporation. For example the media merged through market forces to be about 6 corporations that run the show in america today, and this happened over the last 150 years. In the banking system its similar. monopoly power exists because of a lack of government interference. No one who has done even the slighest research disagrees with that.

Im going to come full circle to the classical liberal philosophers. From what i can tell almost all of them agreed that it was in fact the wage slave system that went against human nature. I have read this in wilhelm von humdbolt, adam smith, kant, and karl marx (his theories of alienation), who agreed with the liberal philosophers on this thing. I agree with those philosophers for a very basic reason. If you get locked in a room and behave like an extension of a machine for 14 hours, which is essentially what wage slaves do, then imo, that goes against human natures creative instinct. human beings are genetically endowed with the capacity to create, it is inhuman to deny them of that capacity, as wage slavery does.

It is also not a 'choice', that most human beings have made. the third world has consistently opposed the market being rammed down its throats and that's why america has had to violently suppress countries that wanted to nationalize their own resources. iran 1953, chile 1973, indonesia 1965 are just examples of nationalism or communism being violently oppossed. you can read a lsummary of all 57 interventions in killing hope. It's just the same reason most of the time, to protect investor rights and prevent communist ideas from spreading (because then you would lose control of the third world). the american government hates freedom of thought so much, that they were willing to kill 1,000,000 indonesian peasants on suspicion of communist thought. They really don't want these people to choose their own political system because, as secretary of state john foster dulles admited, plundering the rich is a much more popular idea among peasants than plundering the poor.

You don't need to boldtext stuff in cannibalism. I know of the USSR's atrocities and while i never was alive when the state existed, looking through history i wouldn't support it at any stage as a model society.

On February 14 2017 11:36 Loco wrote: How am I coming to conclusions too quickly? Earlier you hinted at the fact that you deliberated on different issues and settled on what matters the most morally to you and essentially it came down to how you could reduce (human) suffering through your actions (which so far is your academic work). Next, this is what you wrote: "What keeps me going are various discoveries i make. Even if they are small ones. This work i do is really long term stuff, if no one wants to read it then yes it would have been a waste of time. But there are those that have. If i can make for example, 1% of the public aware of massacres in west papua and their responsibilities to that, that could bring it to an end slightly earlier. It may save many lives. I spent half my time on actual school work as well." This intention and these goals are altruistic in nature. You're saying you've made it your duty to raise awareness about issues that you think could save lives. Well, not exactly, as you are not really saying you are committed to getting these results, but still you have hope there. The point of effective altruism is to do that, but also to contribute financially if possible to those causes that put your dollar at work in the most efficient way possible to reduce the most suffering. Anyway, you can identify however you like, the point I was making is that comfort doesn't often lead to altruism. Certainly, more comfort doesn't lead to more altruism. Funnily enough, in my own life, the people I know who are the most generous (those on the side of my girlfriend's family) are those who are the poorest. My family is quite rich and they are all very selfish people. It's true though that they both have a certain level of comfort provided by the fact that they live in Canada and not on the streets in some shithole, but I don't think the correlation is quite there even in those extreme circumstances like Baal believes it to be. Take Buddhist monks for example, who abandon their possessions and try to become humanity's benefactors by overcoming their own egos and helping others to do the same. It's a very noble thing to do and they are not necessarily comfortable, they rely on other people's donations to live their lives this way (it also disproves this idea that the free market is responsible for altruism). But maybe I am misunderstanding him. When he says people become 'better', I think it happens in the sense that their culture has provided a better environment for them to be more civilized, but this hasn't taught them how to think and what to value for themselves and they can still be morally bankrupt people, it's just that they don't commit harsh crimes. But if you put them in a situation like the guards were in in Nazi Germany or the Milgram experiment, you soon learn that human nature is really not pretty regardless of the economic system.

um, your mixing posts by myself and spitfiree i think.

I have also seen research that shows most of the money in aid to natural disasters comes from the poor. It doesn't suprise me, if someone cares about becoming rich then whats what they are going to do. Personally i don't donate money because i don't think i have a responsibility to do it. Im not exactly wealthy. I think arguments from philosophers like peter singer have been extremely superficial and what you really need to do if your a philosopher (which is what i hope to be), is to just be honest with yourself, try to understand the world, and tell the truth/important facts to people. unfortunately the vast majority of academics fail to do this.

I don't think people who abandon their possessions are making the world a better place. It's a lifestyle choice, it has little consequence on others, except the people who get their possessions i guess. I myself have rationally calculated that while i cannot stop a genocide overnight, i could in collective action, maybe put some pressure on the government to at least oppose it, along with many others around the world. This would have a chance of ending it, as it was ended in east timor in 1999. Perhaps 100,000 people were saved. There are even worse things than genocide like global warming. This is something that cannot be stopped purely through individual action from what i can tell. The easiest is through collective action by putting pressure on governments.

I would be careful on saying what 'human nature' is. I try to restrict it to biological endowment as much as i can. Like i think a human growing 2 legs is human nature and most people agree unless they are prickly philosophers who want absolute proof. When it comes to sociopolitical analysis people start making a lot of conjectures about what is in human nature and what isn't. I won't lie, im part of that group of people, i say the wage system isn't aligned with human nature, but i admit i have no proof for it.

On February 14 2017 11:05 Loco wrote: It can be, but honestly, this is only a small minority of comfortable people. How many comfortable people are there in the western world? And how many of those people are involved in effective altruism? Hardly any. Even the people who profess to want to be the benefactors of humanity like Stroggoz are focusing on their own desires and unless they have a feeling of nagging guilt, they never do anything to help reduce suffering outside of nepotism.

I'm not sure what you mean, but i am actively engaged in activism and have been for 2 years. I don't just profess. I am certainly not focusing on my own desires, i would rather learn mathematics, philosophy or w/e in my spare time for example, and i do give up a large portion of sanity and time to do it. Polticing isn't something i just do from time to time, it is fully consuming. to have an effect i have to do it all the time, and it is constantly on my mind.

oops you're right I mixed both of you guys up.

On February 14 2017 12:53 Stroggoz wrote: Show nested quote + On February 14 2017 11:05 Loco wrote: It can be, but honestly, this is only a small minority of comfortable people. How many comfortable people are there in the western world? And how many of those people are involved in effective altruism? Hardly any. Even the people who profess to want to be the benefactors of humanity like Stroggoz are focusing on their own desires and unless they have a feeling of nagging guilt, they never do anything to help reduce suffering outside of nepotism. I'm not sure what you mean, but i am actively engaged in activism and have been for 2 years. I don't just profess. I am certainly not focusing on my own desires, i would rather learn mathematics, philosophy or w/e in my spare time for example, and i do give up a large portion of sanity and time to do it. Polticing isn't something i just do from time to time, it is fully consuming. to have an effect i have to do it all the time, and it is constantly on my mind.

Well, I think I'm just disillusioned by the type of work you are committed to, and it seems like you feel the same about some of the things I care about according to your OP post. You just brushed aside many important issues that people can affect by simply abstaining from being destructive individuals because their culture taught them that being destructive is okay. I think spreading awareness about things that people can affect without a great deal of education is better. I also think contributing to causes highlighted by effective altruism sites like GiveWell is best. I don't think I'm wrong when I say there is a lot of ego gratification involved in academic pursuits, but obviously, there are works of value there and we need all sorts of people working on different issues at different levels to improve things. I guess we just disagree on what's more pressing today and the best way to make ourselves useful.

Anyway, I think you know what I believe the #1 problem is, but here's a couple quotes from Paul Ehrlich that express how I feel about some of the discussion around politics here.

"The idea that we can just keep growing forever on a finite planet is totally imbecilic.... Julian Simon, a professor of junkmail marketing, and his kind, think technology will solve everything.... We can use up the Earth then we can just jump into spaceships and fly somewhere else.... Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland.... Fresh water and arable cropland are finite resources.... We are already far beyond what we can support sustainably.... The provincial view you get from someone living in some wealthy American East Coast city is wildly different from reality. Most of the world is tropical, hungry and poor. Visit the developing world and southern hemisphere and you get a very different view of reality."

"Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality—But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without population control."

I mean i think abstaining from certain activities is easy and great. Like america/european governments could abstain from mass murder, and robbing the third world, and imposing economic sanctions when poor countries don't do what they want. When human beings do it as individuals it has very little effect. i mean do you really think a monk giving away possessions has much of an effect on the world? multinational corporations don't care about that and they'd be fine if everyone on the leftwing went and did that. They'd then be allowed to kill/rob as many people as they want, and there would be zero checks on their power. It would actually be great for the powerful.

Like i said, individual acts don't count for much when your up against powerful institutions. The powerful are extremely happy with a population that is divided, and atomized. Individual acts do not phase them. It's not noticeable. I mean there are exceptions, like snowden's acts by himself changed a lot. But they are rare. They are also beside the point. Take a historical example. slavery. The solution there was not to donate money to slaves, but to stop enslaving people, because it is a monstrous and inhuman institution. That's the way i feel about the capitalist system and wage slavery, harsh imprisonment of young black males on drug charges, and other institutions.

i agree with you on ego gratification, i see a lot of people with that problem, and i try not to be one of those people. Although there are people on the left with ego problems who i still admire for their contributions.

We have an extremely irrational political system, and a very irrational society thanks to the PR industry. it's been the main source of political/economic oppresion for the last 100 years in the west, and it is increasingly a source of oppression in the rest of the world as well, and you can't get your way out of that oppression unless you fight it. If you can point to me some examples where altruism has beaten oppression in history, then i'd be suprised. From what i can tell it has always been awakening to that repression and fighting it through disobedience.

I havn't done any research of overpopulation, but i've heard of some humane solutions to address the problem. You could solve the big problem of climate change without reducing population, or so i've read from environmental engineers who did a study at stanford university. I've seen you argue for the mass suicide of all humanity before, which is completely insane. Hope you don't still believe that.

Agree that technology doesn't solve problems unless human beings use technology properly. it seems we have had the technology to prevent hunger for thousands of years.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/58/...ash-regs-thread-335066/index2187.html

Some regs throwing you some respect on 2+2. Likely doing something correct. Thought I'd point this out to you in case you hadn't seen it.

hmm, havn't seen it. i think taskete and solvepoker are both solid. fishmax is terrible, puredeisil list is either a troll or he is clueless.

You have been researching,
Definitely some truth to the hypocritical definitions of words.
I think your argument style needs to be compressed and more punchy in order to be effective: hostile academics are not going to sit through a half hour speech that challenges their entire worldview and career. And normies are going to be bored by the same.
Who's your target audience in this line of work? How will you reach them?
I am mildly interested in your views because I can see you have put though into them - I may learn a grain of truth. Plus I want to pick holes in your arguments and mock your inflated ego - but even for me, a motivated reader, the initial post was TL;DR

Nothing wrong with trying to understand the world better, but survival first? You've got math skills that could make bank. I think leftist philosopher is a seriously mistaken line as a career move, and that the freemarket/laws of nature will punish you. Or "the elites power structure" - it is all the same to me.

silver i'll link an index of my articles on skype if your interested. They havn't got much attention and they are mostly read by people on the left. my audience is people who would typically do something if they had the information, so it's mostly those on the left, or indeed norms, or pissed off people who want to bomb the government but havn't heard of a constructive way of fighting oppression.

my math skills arn't that good, i didn't do too well on the hardest papers in my last year and started losing interested a little bit. i could become a math teacher or an actuary i guess, but i'd really rather not do either of those. I'd prob go back and do an actuary and make mad bank and go do something else after a few years if i fail at phd.


Do you think i havn't thought about career options? I'm not that interested in money. It is like i said, im not being a lefty philosopher as a career, that would indeed be suicidal, especially if i was an intelligent one. In fact it's crazy to think you could make money out of it. No one gets into it for money and almost no one i know makes money out of being a left radical activist. The vast majority are just ordinary people like me that are trying to fight power.

I'm working on building on a theory that is at an intersection between the sciences and philosophy, which has nothing to do with politics at all. it's completely seperate. that's what i hope to get a job in.

This blog post i made, it was kind of a rant i made late at night because i was too tired to do anything else lol, and liquidpoker is the place i go to rage and rant. it would be very easy to pick holes in it. for one i gave no evidence to back anything up. but the essays i wrote i carefully checked. I would be happy for feedback.

On February 15 2017 15:48 Stroggoz wrote: We have an extremely irrational political system, and a very irrational society thanks to the PR industry. it's been the main source of political/economic oppresion for the last 100 years in the west, and it is increasingly a source of oppression in the rest of the world as well, and you can't get your way out of that oppression unless you fight it.

I'm obviously not arguing that we shouldn't fight it. We're arguing the best way to fight it. While I'm not sold on becoming a "full time" monk, I think it is certainly a valid way to fight it; you're just using the wrong frame of reference so that it will seem absurd. There are two types of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. We shouldn't downplay the capacity of humans to oppress themselves; it's not all top-down. Having the values and discipline of a monk is half the battle won. Doesn't have to be an all-in thing either; we can just say becoming more monk-like would benefit everyone, without the need to abandon society and social duties.

We agree that irrationality is the problem, but you pin it down to something caused by an industry/institution or another. I think the world is an irrational and unfair place, and it can't really be improved upon, at least not in any truly meaningful way and certainly in no way that justifies the perpetuation of human life which threatens to destroy everything and destroy us in the process. This leads me to believe the best thing we can do is to not breed more wage slaves and alleviate the suffering of those who are less fortunate than us as much as we can. Obviously if you only look at one individual you can say it doesn't help the world, but then you can say this about everything else. But even then, it accomplishes more than writing about politics and philosophy. Now I'm not saying that those works have never accomplished anything, just that they don't now. Certainly, philosophy that is personal is still very useful to people. But there is no impersonal work of philosophy you can write today that will have an impact. There are smarter people than you who have already done it and will keep doing it, so you can safely be dispensed with. The building of philosophical systems is a useless masturbatory activity and it's a big circle jerk.

I think you operate under the false Aristotlean premise that humans are rational animals and somehow it's those that are in power that have corrupted people and if only more people wrote works of philosophy and understood politics we could transform people and we would live in a more rational world. It's silly. It's not information that is missing out there, it's the number of people who can be rational (and most importantly stay rational in difficult circumstances). We're struggling every day with information overload and if anything we need to relearn how to live more simply.

And no, I'm not arguing for the "mass suicide" of humanity. Not having children or having only one child isn't remotely the same thing as commiting suicide. You might think it's insane but it's just a knee jerk reaction, you don't have a rational counter-argument against the idea of walking into extinction gracefully. We are going extinct no matter what, and if we are honest we have to say it would be a better thing if we didn't prolong ourselves. We have our head in our asses - we elect buffoons because we are a species of irredeemable buffoons, not because we haven't yet produced the right kinds of philosophical works which would produce the right kind of leaders or whatever else we're hopeful about. In the end, we will just cause ourselves much more pain and grief in our delusion that we're destined for great things, not mentioning the torturing/killing of trillions of other animals on our way to leaving a barren planet. And yes, just like everyone else, I value life and I'm curious to see the results of future technologies, but I don't let that obscure my vision of what's most desirable.

Our values and positions are too different and i don't see the value in discussing it further.

i'll end with one note

I think it's very convenient to believe that everything is hopeless and there is nothing you can do about the problems in society, since it allows you to absolve yourself from any responsibility towards others. It's a belief i come across among many people i talk to about politics. good sincere young people who are my friends tell me this all the time. And i see it widespread among peasants in the third world as well. But the empirical evidence from history says that you can do a lot to make the world a better place, so long as you work with others and overcome this slave mentality that there is nothing that can be done. And yes it is possible to avoid human extinction and the suffering that comes with it, why wouldn't it be? That is a choice that society can make.

I know the rake situation is bad down under, but I highly suggest playing live poker if you can find a good room. You would absolutely crush.

You seem like a good guy who is smart and a hard worker, good luck whatever you do.