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quotes

a bad mood

‘I remember,’ Brod writes, ‘ a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race. “We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka said. This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall. “Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.” “Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.” He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.”

The quote above seems to be the accurate quote. But I like the rendition I found on Reddit:

"Kafka said to his friend Max "We are only suicidal thoughts in the mind of God. Our entire world is just a bad mood he's having. We live in God's bad day." Max, not sure if his friend was joking, replied "Well then, there must be hope, outside this manifestation of the world we know." Kafka smiled and agreed. "Yes, an abundance of hope, an infinity of hope...for God. But not for us.""

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utilitarianism is incompatible with certain multiverse theories

This is close to McNamara's Confinement Problem, where he shows that under reasonable assumptions is morally acceptable to kill your mother. If there is an unlimited amount of utility, for example, if we can create a trust that grows over time and decide at a certain point to liquidate the trust and spend it on good works (this example is from Landesman) then there is unbounded utility. Therefore, for every world where we don't kill our mother, there is a world with strictly high utility where we do - we just wait long enough for the growth of the trust to create enough utility to make up for our mother's death.

What this shows is probably that infinite amounts of utility are non-intuitive.

McMichael says much the same thing:

"If there is a good which may exist in amounts of any size, then very horrible things turn out to be unconditionally permissible. Select any world w, however good. There is a world w' which is better than w but in which Jesse gratuitously inflicts extreme pain on many kindly scholars. To be sure, there would have to be counterbalancing goods in w', but I see nothing to prevent their appearance."

Lewis's response to this was that utilitarianism was dumb. Technically, he said "not a commonsensical view."

Stalin believed he was a social scientist

Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands…

Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khruschev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

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are we the baddies

We are always the good guys in our own story. The trick is to look at the situation from someone else's point of view and ask "Are we the baddies?"

If yes, annihilate them.

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trust game

'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.' - George W Bush

You can learn a lot from games, especially educational games. Luckilly for us, we have Nicky Case to thanks for her trust game to teach us how trust works in society. And who usually wins.

The 3 general rules as stated in the conclusion are:

  1. REPEAT INTERACTIONS: Trust keeps a relationship going, but you need the knowledge of possible future repeat interactions before trust can evolve.
  2. POSSIBLE WIN-WINS: You must be playing a non-zero-sum game, a game where it's at least possible that both players can be better off -- a win-win.
  3. LOW MISCOMMUNICATION: If the level of miscommunication is too high, trust breaks down. But when there's a little bit of miscommunication, it pays to be more forgiving.

Rule 3 explains why there is lowered trust in the current media environment. When all you read about the other side is their hypocrisy and bad-faith actions, you'll very quickly lose trust on the other side.

enlightenment

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." - Denis Diderot

"Denis Diderot (/ˈdiːdəroʊ/;[3] French: [dəni did(ə)ʁo]; 5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie"

Philosophers are very opinionated.