scrupulosity cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

my birthday is tomorrow! if you want to do something nice for me for my birthday, one nice thing would be to check out the session logs for Two-Faced Jewel, my formerly-D&D fantasy campaign i’ve been running and writing summary posts for for the past couple years. i’ve put a considerable fraction of my time and creative energy into this for a good long while, and i think like, two people besides the players ever read them? (i very much appreciate both of you. 💙)

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there’s an index of all the posts here, and a fun short-form recap of the first twenty-odd sessions here. i think i’ve done a lot of cool and interesting things with it, am seeking sweet sweet validation, and am not above invoking Birthday Law to beg!

Tags:

#I appreciate you too! <3 #keep up the good work #@readers these are great and y’all should check them out #storytime #recs #scrupolosity cw #reblog coercion cw?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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mugasofer:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

this is me thinking out loud some more, not exactly replying, but.

“kindness costs nothing” is a popular saying for why you should be nice. but if you give what costs you nothing, what merit is there in that? if you give only kindness and empathy without material, measurable help, are you giving anything at all?

it comes back to christianity, again. it always does for me. talk about brainwashing.

specifically: the widow’s mite. (a coin, like a farthing or a centime, not a bug.) the story goes – jesus was chilling near the donations box at the temple, and these rich holier-than-thou people came and put big bags of money into the box and made a big deal about how much they donated. and then this poor widow woman came and put in two halfpennies, or mites as some version of the Bible translated it.

and jesus said “see you should be like her. those other people all gave money they didn’t need, and they made a big deal about it so people would think they were holy. she gave god all the money she had, and she didn’t make any fuss about it, because she loves and trusts god That Much. y’all do that too k?”

so, yanno, i mean, brainstuff. giving more than you can afford is How To Be Good. give money, time, gifts, food, but always give what you need for yourself, not just the stuff you could spare or didn’t want anyway; that stuff is no good cos you’re not giving it From The Heart. this is the mindset.

“faith without works is dead.” i think that’s from the book of st james. it’s a Really Big Thing in the catholics vs protestants headbutting match, bc if you boil them both down to a reductio ad absurdam in the bottom of the stockpot (i might be getting sleepy and overextending my metaphors), protestants say “if you have faith you are saved! doesn’t matter what you do!” and catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)

so but like. there’s a line from hamilton the musical, i see it on gifsets. “(death) takes and it takes and it takes”. and i feel like… you give and you give and you give, and there’s a void out there of infinite… it’s like an infinite sponge. it can soak up everything you give it, your whole existence, and you won’t have even made a tiny little difference to the infinity of need. you give and you give and you give, and when you’ve given everything you are, it’s just like you never existed at all.

i know it’s late and i’m getting morose. i had thoughts about dying for a cause too but i’m not sure what they were yet. and what stuntmuppet said about revolutionary selfishness, ethan would like to expand on that at GREAT LENGTH. not tonight tho.

i will mention though cos i think it fits here. i keep feeling like a good way to do assisted suicide, like officially incorporated into society and everything, would be to drain out the person’s blood, put it all in those donation bags like the red cross uses, and then you could give the blood to other people who actually wanted to stay alive. it would be nice. if that was available i would probably do it. and i suspect part of why it seems so appealing is that you can literally give your life helping others live. (also it wouldn’t hurt much and you could just quietly slip off and stop caring.)

The thing is, food still has nutrition regardless of whether you gave it From The Heart. A dollar buys a dollar’s worth of stuff, no matter how small a percentage it is of the donator’s net worth*. And someone who gives a smaller, sustainable portion of their wealth can end up donating more over the long run than someone who goes out in a blaze of glory.

Blood donation is actually a very good example of that. An adult human body contains somewhere around 10 pints of blood, depending on the individual. The regulation quantity and frequency of blood donation is 1 pint every 8 weeks. Someone who donates every 2 months for 2 years has donated more blood than someone who gave every drop in their body, and can still donate again in another 2 months. (And, you know, they’re alive, for whatever that’s worth.) (Some people take longer to recover and can’t sustainably/safely donate every 2 months, but even if you can only do every 4 months, or every 6, all you have to do is live 6 years to outproduce a one-time 10-pint donation.)

I’ve never met a cause worth dying for, but some causes are better served by living, anyway.

(This argument does assume a basically consequentialist mindset, that the amount of help you provide is more important than how you felt while you were doing it. As you described above, there are moral systems that don’t accept this assumption. That’s something fundamental enough that I don’t think I could really talk you in or out of it: if you think “things would go better if you became a consequentialist” is a good reason to become a consequentialist, you already are one.)

I swear I have seen writings from charity nerds about how (and why) to avoid burning yourself out, but I’m having some trouble finding them. Perhaps the charity nerds among my followers know of some?

*Although sometimes a dollar can buy more than a dollar’s worth of stuff if you have enough of them, because of bulk discounts. This is why–though food donations are certainly better than nothing–food banks generally prefer monetary donations: they get excellent discounts and can stretch your dollar farther than you can.

It’s worth noting that, in both Mark and Luke, the story of the Widow’s Mite (from the KJV, which translated the relevant copper coin into the then-contemporary mite) is immediately preceded by a passage condemning … well:

45 While all the people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples,46 “Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets.47 They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”

These are clearly part of the same anecdote, and some commentators argue they should be interpreted as the same passage – rich people take from the poor, then laud themselves for being generous with their money. The widow hasn’t helped more than anyone else; she’s been cost more than anyone else.

Of course, Jesus was famously in favor of people selling their possessions and becoming wandering monks who may or may not get murdered for their troubles – it was, after all, his own career path – so maybe this theory is wrong, and it’s just a feel-good message.

Still, I think it’s important that Jesus never advocates starving. Letting people stab you in the face, sure, but not starving. Wandering preachers get fed. (And there’s a limited market for them, and it’s hard to build a movement entirely out of penniless wandering preachers; which is one reason I tend to lean toward interpretations where it’s decidedly not meant as a universal calling.)

The Widow is merely cutting things rather close, not sacrificing her life, even in the standard interpretation. 

No, I think the closest thing to the standard interpretation would be the also currency-nicknamed Parable of the Talents.

In the parable, with which I daresay most readers are familiar, different servants are given different amounts of money to look after. Two servants invest them and make good returns, and thus are rewarded; one merely holds onto it and then gives it back, and is punished.

If you just give what was given to you, then what’s the point? You’re supposed to invest it, to make more.

One person can’t save the world. Ten pints of blood is nothing against the darkness. But invest it? Use that life wisely? And that can become a whole flood of blood in what is an increasingly sticky metaphor.

Of course, even that probably isn’t enough. A servant given two talents isn’t going to make the same amount of money as one given five. But it’s better than handing back your seed money with nothing to show for it.

catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.) 

Many but not all Protestant denominations regard supererogation as a Catholic heresy.

Focusing on the bottom line is important. But there are two opposite, but related, mistakes in effective altruism that stem from focusing on it too much.

One is, of course, the rich person who goes “oh I saved fifty lives this year, why not buy another yacht?” TBH I have never encountered this mistake, but it definitely happens with non-EA charitable movements, and I don’t know a lot of rich people, it probably happens. 

But the other mistake is the opposite. 

Most people aren’t rich. It’s easy to look at your bottom line and say this is too small, I’m not doing enough because you don’t have very much to give.

But this misses the entire point. 

Utilitarianism not about getting the bigger number. It’s about getting the biggest number. Whether this is larger or smaller than the other guy’s number, whether it’s large or small on an absolute scale (probably small), is not a concern.

If you only have two pennies, and you invest them wisely, then you are a better investor than the rich guy who has an enormous amount of money and spends half of it on a yacht. Simultaneously, he has more money. But you’re still better.

Tithing is a good idea, and I’m glad EA has adopted it. 

But you have to apply that to other things too. Giving more than 10% of your blood, of your life, is definitely supererogatory.

I’m not saying that sacrifice is bad, but for most people, you run into diminishing returns after the first few sacrifices. Being smart about what you do with that sacrifice is far more effective.

And yeah, sometimes that involves “wasting” time making yourself better; using the perfume instead of selling it, being Mary instead of Martha.

Tags:

#(October 2016) #(I have decided to queue aglet posts; queue is currently set to four times per day) #conversational aglets #death tw #suicide cw #scrupulosity cw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

me: [mad at myself for some inadequacy]

the giant: you know that 99% of people don’t meet the standard you’re flagellating yourself for failing

me:

me, biting and then swallowing the bullet: then I hate them too, just as much

the giant: asldkjflskdjf, no,

Tags:

#this is not a feel that I am experiencing at this particular moment but it is definitely a feel that I know #it weirds me out that so many people recommend ways of dealing with self-loathing that #casually assume you loathe *specifically* yourself #and that if you merely judged yourself the same way you judge others you’d be fine #I suppose I understand why people would want to focus their ways-of-dealing-with-self-loathing discussions on #forms of loathing that don’t extend to the interlocutor #but it does make the advice pretty useless to me #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #scrupulosity cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

@sinesalvatorem, about the r/k thing that I’m not going to reblog under my no-guilt-trips policy:

Keep reading

I am confused to say the least. My post doesn’t have anything to do with violence? Or exploiting other people? Or taking advantage of other people’s unwillingness to push back against assholes?

(Unless you consider applying to lots of jobs even if they aren’t your ideal to be assholish behaviour? But that would be odd and surprising? Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.)

My post is about why people should be willing to take actions that are low cost even if they’re unlikely to succeed in full. But, like, I’m kind of a utilitarian – if I’m counting how costly something is, I’m definitely counting how costly it is to /everyone/.

Putting one’s sketches online isn’t hurting you /or/ bystanders, so it counts as taking a low-cost opportunity. Shoplifting may not hurt you (depending on the consequences of being caught), but it’s still taking money out of someone else’s pocket, so it’s still A Bad.

If cowardice is the only lever you have to avoid acting on impulses to hurt others, then OK, in your specific case I endorse cowardice. But almost no one I know works like this? Generally, a lot of factors go into decisions about whether to engage in violence, and they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.

If you have only one inhibitory mechanism, it makes sense to keep it at the level that helps you interface with society, but most people are using several different kinds of inhibitory signals. I just want them to put less stock in the “People will ignore/reject/laugh at me and then I will DIE” one.

Basically, for the vast majority of people my post is directed at, the negative outcome you describe just isn’t related to the thing my post is about. The fear of embarrassment stops people from dancing in public, but I don’t think it’s a major factor in stopping people from punching each other. In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.

But I still think people shouldn’t do that because 1) hurting others is bad, and 2) whether something is embarrassing is a crappy way to judge if it’s a good idea.

I think I draw the boundary lines in different places than you do.

—

>>In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.<<

Bullying people and embarrassing yourself in front of them are both members of the category “things that increase the likelihood that people will treat you badly in the future”. They increase it by different *amounts*–and I’ll accept that for many cases of embarrassment the increase is negligible–but I don’t know that I’d say they’re different in *kind*.

(And I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say they’re both forms of hurting people, though again by very different amounts. I understand that it is not *useful* to react this way, and I try very hard to avoid doing so, but my *instinct* is to treat “inflicting secondhand embarrassment on me” as a hostile act deserving of a hostile response.)

—

>>they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.<<

This, on the other hand, I *would* say is different in kind. Is it at all common for people to get annoyed with someone for trying a new food?

—

I’m not sure how to tell how many inhibitory mechanisms I have except by removing one and seeing if things still work, and I think it’s pretty clear that that’s *not* an area where failure is cheap. And while I’ve occasionally caught glimpses of a conscience around here somewhere, I’ve never caught one while angry (even when I wasn’t as good at cowardice as I am now), so I doubt that’s one of the mechanisms for this.

There is a distinct possibility that I don’t have insight into what’s actually going on here, but from the inside it feels like the thing that caused a shift to being consistently non-violent was spending a couple years on the Internet practising my flight response on bits of Discourse, until eventually I could run away from infuriating things offline too. Here, I learned how to grovel, how to phrase things carefully so as to minimise the chances of sparking a fight with anyone, how to keep my mouth shut entirely and quietly slip out. (not doing too well at that last bit tonight, but nobody’s perfect)

In an environment of *relative* safety and much more time to think than IRL, I could have the lesson hammered home that I’m almost always better off reacting to an argument or provocation by surrendering or (if available) pretending not to have noticed, rather than prolonging the pain by trying to fight.

—

>>Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.<<

Eh, I’ve definitely encountered people with hiring responsibilities complaining about completely unsuitable people wasting their time. I guess bigger companies can probably arrange better filters that put less stress on the employees involved?

I think the largest disagreement here is that I don’t think “things that increase the likelihood that people will treat you badly in the future” is a meaningful category in the first place.

I think there are lots of inputs into the specific way people will treat you, but that none of these look like increasing a “bad treatment” variable, or anything that could be a proxy for such. I think things might influence how deferent or hostile or helpful or avoidant people are in interacting with you, but that any presentation style you choose will pull on a bunch of these, and whether the end result looks like being treated well or poorly just depends on what you as a person want out of interactions.

For example, being more agreeable will tend to make people less hostile, avoidant, and/or argumentative toward you – but will increase their willingness to push your boundaries and ignore your opinions. Which direction looks more like bad treatment? This entirely depends on your priorities! I recently intentionally lowered my agreeableness because, to me, getting more confrontations was worth getting less casual boundary-crossing. Meanwhile, past!me would have put more emphasis on not having to confront people.

And neither of these poles at all looks like people deciding they want to treat you worse. Instead, it’s them shifting their interaction pattern into the path of least resistance. For conflict-averse people, conflict is high-resistance, so they avoid disagreeable people. Meanwhile, if you’re unwilling to cuss out the asshole who touches you inappropriately, they’ll go ahead and do it again, because it’s low-resistance. Is being avoided bad treatment? Is being touched inappropriately bad treatment? Quite possibly both are, but the tradeoffs are built into the interaction style.

(Of course, there are ways to avoid having either of these outcomes by seeming approachable but also like you don’t take shit. Currently, my reduction in agreeableness doesn’t seem to be scaring people off, because I still try to be approachable. But, like, there are other tradeoffs. There are always tradeoffs.)

A behavioral pattern – and all the different personality traits that influence it – sets you up as a person that it’s most convenient to interact with in some ways vs others. And everyone is going about trying to pursue their own social goals while moving through a landscape where some things are easy and some are hard. The key to getting good treatment is making sure other people believe that the best way to get what they want is to treat you the way you most want to be treated. (Where the way you most want to be treated will vary a lot by person.)

And this is why I wouldn’t put embarrassment and bullying in the same category. Even if they both lead to things you don’t want, they do so through completely different avenues. At worst, embarrassment makes you seem incompetent, so people will work less hard to gain your favour since they consider your support low-value. Meanwhile, being a bully will make you seem dangerous, so people will avoid you on the assumption that interactions are high-cost. Being high cost and being low value are really different social tags, and treating them as interchangeable will make it v v difficult to reason about the social landscape.

Again, if you happen to only have one lever to work with, by all means set it to the position that best helps you navigate the world. But you’ll still be operating at a massive handicap, because your single variable will miss almost everything that determines how interactions can go. If there were anything I could point at as the ultimate “get treated badly” variable, I would say it’s not having options.

>>At worst, embarrassment makes you seem incompetent, so people will work less hard to gain your favour since they consider your support low-value. Meanwhile, being a bully will make you seem dangerous, so people will avoid you on the assumption that interactions are high-cost.<<

Thing is, I contested this in my previous post:

“(And I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say they’re both forms of hurting people, though again by very different amounts. I understand that it is not *useful* to react this way, and I try very hard to avoid doing so, but my *instinct* is to treat “inflicting secondhand embarrassment on me” as a hostile act deserving of a hostile response.)“

Embarrassing yourself in front of people causes them pain (in the form of negative affective empathy), so they’ll want to cause you pain in return. Punching people causes them pain (in the form of physical damage), so they’ll want to cause you pain in return.

And yes, this is in large part projection. Other people almost never act in ways that would make sense if they considered “inducing negative affective empathy” to be a hostile act, and mostly don’t even act in ways that would make sense if they were inclined to see it that way but consciously overriding that. But you can’t have projection without proof of concept: it’s empirically untrue that the worst thing someone will do to you if you embarrass yourself in front of them is work less hard to gain your favour.

(Although I tend to react a lot worse to people telling me explicitly-labelled embarrassing *stories* about themselves than to them actually *doing* embarrassing things, I think because with the stories it’s very clear that they could have easily chosen to not do this to me. Accidents I can forgive relatively easily, even tradeoffs; signposting “I’m going to do something embarrassing now, specifically for the purpose of having you witness how embarrassing it is”, though, not so much.)

—

P.S. Went to check my use of “affective empathy” and found this suspiciously relevant-looking Wikipedia article.

—

P.P.S. Apparently I got ninja’d by @kit-peddler. I’m glad to see someone else picking up on my quoted paragraph.

Looking at the notifications continuing to come in as I write this, it looks like now would probably also be a good time to emphasise the very first sentence (not counting “so, about that post”) of my first post:

“I suspect we’re both projecting our own selves onto the rest of society and ending up skewed.“

Tags:

#reply via reblog #discourse cw #violence cw #scrupulosity cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

@sinesalvatorem, about the r/k thing that I’m not going to reblog under my no-guilt-trips policy:

Keep reading

I am confused to say the least. My post doesn’t have anything to do with violence? Or exploiting other people? Or taking advantage of other people’s unwillingness to push back against assholes?

(Unless you consider applying to lots of jobs even if they aren’t your ideal to be assholish behaviour? But that would be odd and surprising? Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.)

My post is about why people should be willing to take actions that are low cost even if they’re unlikely to succeed in full. But, like, I’m kind of a utilitarian – if I’m counting how costly something is, I’m definitely counting how costly it is to /everyone/.

Putting one’s sketches online isn’t hurting you /or/ bystanders, so it counts as taking a low-cost opportunity. Shoplifting may not hurt you (depending on the consequences of being caught), but it’s still taking money out of someone else’s pocket, so it’s still A Bad.

If cowardice is the only lever you have to avoid acting on impulses to hurt others, then OK, in your specific case I endorse cowardice. But almost no one I know works like this? Generally, a lot of factors go into decisions about whether to engage in violence, and they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.

If you have only one inhibitory mechanism, it makes sense to keep it at the level that helps you interface with society, but most people are using several different kinds of inhibitory signals. I just want them to put less stock in the “People will ignore/reject/laugh at me and then I will DIE” one.

Basically, for the vast majority of people my post is directed at, the negative outcome you describe just isn’t related to the thing my post is about. The fear of embarrassment stops people from dancing in public, but I don’t think it’s a major factor in stopping people from punching each other. In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.

But I still think people shouldn’t do that because 1) hurting others is bad, and 2) whether something is embarrassing is a crappy way to judge if it’s a good idea.

I think I draw the boundary lines in different places than you do.

—

>>In fact, in most cultures, bullying and strong-arming others is the opposite of embarrassing.<<

Bullying people and embarrassing yourself in front of them are both members of the category “things that increase the likelihood that people will treat you badly in the future”. They increase it by different *amounts*–and I’ll accept that for many cases of embarrassment the increase is negligible–but I don’t know that I’d say they’re different in *kind*.

(And I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say they’re both forms of hurting people, though again by very different amounts. I understand that it is not *useful* to react this way, and I try very hard to avoid doing so, but my *instinct* is to treat “inflicting secondhand embarrassment on me” as a hostile act deserving of a hostile response.)

—

>>they tend to be rather divorced from what makes someone decide whether to try a new food.<<

This, on the other hand, I *would* say is different in kind. Is it at all common for people to get annoyed with someone for trying a new food?

—

I’m not sure how to tell how many inhibitory mechanisms I have except by removing one and seeing if things still work, and I think it’s pretty clear that that’s *not* an area where failure is cheap. And while I’ve occasionally caught glimpses of a conscience around here somewhere, I’ve never caught one while angry (even when I wasn’t as good at cowardice as I am now), so I doubt that’s one of the mechanisms for this.

There is a distinct possibility that I don’t have insight into what’s actually going on here, but from the inside it feels like the thing that caused a shift to being consistently non-violent was spending a couple years on the Internet practising my flight response on bits of Discourse, until eventually I could run away from infuriating things offline too. Here, I learned how to grovel, how to phrase things carefully so as to minimise the chances of sparking a fight with anyone, how to keep my mouth shut entirely and quietly slip out. (not doing too well at that last bit tonight, but nobody’s perfect)

In an environment of *relative* safety and much more time to think than IRL, I could have the lesson hammered home that I’m almost always better off reacting to an argument or provocation by surrendering or (if available) pretending not to have noticed, rather than prolonging the pain by trying to fight.

—

>>Like, I don’t think it’s actually valuable to be cautious with a company’s time – they set up their hiring channel for a reason.<<

Eh, I’ve definitely encountered people with hiring responsibilities complaining about completely unsuitable people wasting their time. I guess bigger companies can probably arrange better filters that put less stress on the employees involved?

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw #violence cw #scrupulosity cw

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

(This is a complete tangent on a post that’s already long, so I think I’ll split it off.)

You know, while I *had* considered the possibility that my and Dad’s differing baseline approaches to household finances was a generational thing, I’d figured it was because he’s from one of the few patches of space-time where single-breadwinner middle-class households were feasible, common, expected, and he still aims for this no-longer-practical goal. I’d never thought of it in terms of differing conceptions of the *apocalypse*, and yet it fits.

For him (part of what the post calls “Generation Jones”), the central example of an apocalypse is total nuclear war. Quick, sudden, binary, inescapable. Either humanity goes abruptly extinct or it continues on as before, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it either way (unless you are (or can become) one of the few people with power over it).

For me, the central example of an apocalypse is global warming. Long, slow, gradual, mitigate-able. The world has been ending for a hundred years, and it will keep ending for a hundred more. Humanity is unlikely to go *entirely* extinct even in the worst cases, and there are many possible cases other than the worst ones. There are many opportunities (most tiny, some larger; large ones mostly only available to the powerful, but everyone has at least *some* opportunities) to make the apocalypse be just a little milder, or work just a little slower.

The goal is something a bit like longevity escape-velocity. You’re never safe from destruction, not truly. You’re only ever buying time. But you can use the time you buy to buy yourself *more* time, and so on, and with some luck and a lot of diligence, you might never get around to dying. You might even live long enough for the powerful to come up with a way to truly fix things, but even if that doesn’t happen, you can still survive, though with death always nipping at your heels.

As above, so below.

Tags:

#I say this having earlier today done a [s]three-hour[/s] 3.5-hour shift at a fast-food place #(it was going to be three hours but we were busy so I stayed late) #thereby obtaining enough income (money and free food) to cover ~3.4% of the total weekly expenses of my household #(probably more actually) #(that percentage is based on 2016 average expenses) #(and we’ve been gradually getting better at frugality over time) #(likely enough to be a bigger factor than inflation) #I was raised with an every-bit-counts mindset towards saving the world and I approach saving my family the same way #oh look an original post #death tw #scrupulosity tw #I feel like this probably deserves some additional warning tag but I’m not sure what #apocalypse cw? #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{post I was replying to}}

justice-turtle:

this is me thinking out loud some more, not exactly replying, but.

“kindness costs nothing” is a popular saying for why you should be nice. but if you give what costs you nothing, what merit is there in that? if you give only kindness and empathy without material, measurable help, are you giving anything at all?

it comes back to christianity, again. it always does for me. talk about brainwashing.

specifically: the widow’s mite. (a coin, like a farthing or a centime, not a bug.) the story goes – jesus was chilling near the donations box at the temple, and these rich holier-than-thou people came and put big bags of money into the box and made a big deal about how much they donated. and then this poor widow woman came and put in two halfpennies, or mites as some version of the Bible translated it.

and jesus said “see you should be like her. those other people all gave money they didn’t need, and they made a big deal about it so people would think they were holy. she gave god all the money she had, and she didn’t make any fuss about it, because she loves and trusts god That Much. y’all do that too k?”

so, yanno, i mean, brainstuff. giving more than you can afford is How To Be Good. give money, time, gifts, food, but always give what you need for yourself, not just the stuff you could spare or didn’t want anyway; that stuff is no good cos you’re not giving it From The Heart. this is the mindset.

“faith without works is dead.” i think that’s from the book of st james. it’s a Really Big Thing in the catholics vs protestants headbutting match, bc if you boil them both down to a reductio ad absurdam in the bottom of the stockpot (i might be getting sleepy and overextending my metaphors), protestants say “if you have faith you are saved! doesn’t matter what you do!” and catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)

so but like. there’s a line from hamilton the musical, i see it on gifsets. “(death) takes and it takes and it takes”. and i feel like… you give and you give and you give, and there’s a void out there of infinite… it’s like an infinite sponge. it can soak up everything you give it, your whole existence, and you won’t have even made a tiny little difference to the infinity of need. you give and you give and you give, and when you’ve given everything you are, it’s just like you never existed at all.

i know it’s late and i’m getting morose. i had thoughts about dying for a cause too but i’m not sure what they were yet. and what stuntmuppet said about revolutionary selfishness, ethan would like to expand on that at GREAT LENGTH. not tonight tho.

i will mention though cos i think it fits here. i keep feeling like a good way to do assisted suicide, like officially incorporated into society and everything, would be to drain out the person’s blood, put it all in those donation bags like the red cross uses, and then you could give the blood to other people who actually wanted to stay alive. it would be nice. if that was available i would probably do it. and i suspect part of why it seems so appealing is that you can literally give your life helping others live. (also it wouldn’t hurt much and you could just quietly slip off and stop caring.)

The thing is, food still has nutrition regardless of whether you gave it From The Heart. A dollar buys a dollar’s worth of stuff, no matter how small a percentage it is of the donator’s net worth*. And someone who gives a smaller, sustainable portion of their wealth can end up donating more over the long run than someone who goes out in a blaze of glory.

Blood donation is actually a very good example of that. An adult human body contains somewhere around 10 pints of blood, depending on the individual. The regulation quantity and frequency of blood donation is 1 pint every 8 weeks. Someone who donates every 2 months for 2 years has donated more blood than someone who gave every drop in their body, and can still donate again in another 2 months. (And, you know, they’re alive, for whatever that’s worth.) (Some people take longer to recover and can’t sustainably/safely donate every 2 months, but even if you can only do every 4 months, or every 6, all you have to do is live 6 years to outproduce a one-time 10-pint donation.)

I’ve never met a cause worth dying for, but some causes are better served by living, anyway.

(This argument does assume a basically consequentialist mindset, that the amount of help you provide is more important than how you felt while you were doing it. As you described above, there are moral systems that don’t accept this assumption. That’s something fundamental enough that I don’t think I could really talk you in or out of it: if you think “things would go better if you became a consequentialist” is a good reason to become a consequentialist, you already are one.)

I swear I have seen writings from charity nerds about how (and why) to avoid burning yourself out, but I’m having some trouble finding them. Perhaps the charity nerds among my followers know of some?

*Although sometimes a dollar can buy more than a dollar’s worth of stuff if you have enough of them, because of bulk discounts. This is why–though food donations are certainly better than nothing–food banks generally prefer monetary donations: they get excellent discounts and can stretch your dollar farther than you can.

Tags:

#in which Brin attempts to use her cultural osmosis from hanging out with philosophy nerds #(charity nerds are often also philosophy nerds) #death tw #suicide tw #scrupulosity tw #reply via reblog #this feels a little rambly and not-entirely-coherent and feeling-things-out #but so is the OP so I guess it fits

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screenshotsofdespair:

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#the inside of my head on a bad brain day #the really nasty part is that thinking in terms of ‘mandatory’ and ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ #rather than ‘right’ and ‘okay’ and ‘wrong’ #is itself forbidden #sometimes I think my home culture could stand to be a bit more *overtly* authoritarian #because supposed anti-authoritarianism #tends to be a euphemism for ‘one of our rules is to never admit that we have rules’ #’even to yourself’ #and that’s just cruel #(I suspect this post ties into the recent Sorting Hat post in some way) #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

jonpertwee:

Mentally ill person: I’m having a really bad and hard time right now.

Other person: Haha yeah aren’t we all.

You do realise this sort of thing encourages people not to seek treatment for their mental illnesses?

What this post is saying, to everyone not *diagnosed* with a mental illness, is that their current level of misery is normal and proper, and they should just suck it up and deal without so much as a complaint. (Technically, it permits complaining to non-mentally-ill people, but such people are not easy to find, and you usually can’t tell when you’ve found them.)

For some of the not-known-to-be-mentally-ill people who read this post, that claim will not be true. You don’t know which people they are. *They* don’t know which people they are. You have just thrown another stumbling block onto the already difficult path towards even *recognising* that they have a problem, let alone dealing with it.

(This post brought to you by someone who is regularly kept up at night by the worry that maybe she deserves better than her current mental state. Maybe the reason people don’t talk about struggling–multiple times a month, failing–to keep from being overwhelmed by the combined guilt of every wrong they have ever directly or indirectly committed is because they genuinely don’t *have* such struggles. Or maybe they do, and don’t talk about it because of living in a culture that doesn’t allow people to treat guilt as important. Who can say?)

Tags:

#posts I am almost certainly going to regret #(but what’s a few more litres in an ocean) #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost