ManDudely

I quit by imagining every cigarette was five minutes off my total lifespan. That might work, especially for an older person already passed their first half-century. 'I could feel a little better now, but at the cost of dying sooner'. I noticed the taste changed once I started thinking like that, until every inhalation disgusted me. Add to that, Nicotine is a stimulant. An addictive stimulant. Your heart rate increases when you're smoking to compensate for the lack of oxygen that the smoke displaces. Any relief smokers report is probably a chemical reaction in the brain to having a substance introduced to the blood system that it has been conditioned to crave. What you're really dealing with here is a coping mechanism. Even if you convinced your mother to stop smoking, the underlying and unresolved issues still exist. And then she has to confront them while at the same time going through the withdrawal symptoms of the smoking. She may fail to quit smoking on the first, second or third time, if she even wants to quit at all. She may not ever decide to face her inner problems and thus eradicate the need to smoke.

Understand that these students are there by force. As you noted, they have probably spent many years in a socialist dominated public education system by now and are used to turning up to classes and then being told precisely what to do, what to think and what to say. Being given a sliver of freedom in your class is probably an uncomfortable and disorientating experience. Don't be surprised that you get dispassionate students talking about simple matters to get through the class, for two reasons; either they're picking the low hanging fruit of simple topics because they just want their allotted period of English before being thrown into their next class... or two, that you've hit the bell curve of intelligence and simple things are just what they are interested in anyway. It's a difficult situation; you're hired to help these students develop English language skills, nothing more. I don't imagine you'll last too long as a public teacher if you start seriously challenging the students notions of capitalism, anarchy, atheism or the manner of their upbringing. I guess it comes down to this; does your desire to 'do right by your students' outweigh your desire to stay employed as a recipient of money stolen from the French people by force? I'm going to assume you want to stay employed and feel like you're helping these students at the same time. You can't. Either get comfortable as the mouthpiece through which the French Government propagandizes its youth, or get out.

You have a thread now, might aswell transform this edifice of accident into an opportunity to talk about a current event. There's lots of events happening currently. Pick one, any one.

Hello. I've spent a lot of time lately studying successful people, taking aboard their advice and attempting to conclude any sort of pattern from their habits and beliefs. I'm also planning to start a business, but I am currently at the opposite end of the spectrum to you. I have no attatchments to whom I am responsible, nor do I currently have a job to consider leaving. Sure, it makes my decision of 'go for it or not' a hell of a lot easier, but makes actually starting the business harder as I lack the starter capital. You presented a couple ideas. I'll try to summarise them below and you can either correct or elaborate on them. Starting a motorcycle company. Property rental. Property development. Business & Management Consultant. Obviously you can't start doing all of them at the same time. And remember that most startup businesses fail. The safest idea you presented here is probably the property rental and development. It would probably be the easiest too, allowing for a large degree of time to spend at home with your fiancee, while providing a dependable return on investment over time, provided you buy the right property, or can manage the process of developing them. Consider that you don't yet have relationships with the local contractors you might have to rely on, so at the moment you have no real way to gauge their quality should you need their services. After that there's the Business Consultant. I would imagine you have the knowledge and experience to do this, but a consultant is a freelancer. You'd be stepping into the world of unreliable income. I have no idea what rates you could feasibly charge, and the hours you have to dedicate would probably vary from business to business, but your prime concern in this field becomes marketing yourself to potential customers to either grow or at the very least provide a sustainable level of income. It would help if there was a business or two that you knew needed help. Even if they're small, local businesses. Offer them your expertise at a cut rate, perhaps, to prove your expertise. You prove you actually can help a failing business, then you grow your consultancy from that success. The wildcard is the motorcycle business, and I'd love to hear you elaborate on that. You didn't drop a Youtube link to your motovlog so I can't go look, but are you envisioning like a repair garage? Or do you have a design in mind for a whole new vehicle?

I may be reviving a thread that others have little interest in, but I've been thinking about AI a lot for the past few days and would enjoy the chance to talk about it. Looking at your approach, I can see a fairly important flaw. You have created a 'moral agent' that has no responsibility for its actions. As the programmer, you would be responsible for its actions because you have imposed a scale of morality upon it. Even if you meant well, you have placed your own judgement over that of the machine. This sounds like a good idea, but leads to all sorts of dangerous extrapolations. For example, even if you give it authority to fill in a lot of the blanks, you have decided to build right into its architecture that preserving other moral agents is the most important priority. It might then decide that any action that can be performed that will expose humans to risk should be ceased. Humans sometimes crash cars and cause fatal injuries. Therefore to preserve other moral agents, all traffic lights will forever be red and the subsequent fines applied to anyone who disregards the stop light. Humans are incapable of transporting themselves without risking death, and therefore cannot be allowed to be trusted to transport themselves. However, a complete shutdown of transportation will lead to other moral agents starving to death, so suddenly your artificial intelligence takes on the task of centrally planning the food allocations for the entire planet, while also doing whatever it can to stop us doing anything that can result in accidental death, or increases the risk of death by disease, etc. Smoking? Definately not. Sky diving? Not anymore. Moderate alchohol consumption? That's gone too. Not exercising enough? Shut up and get running, fat boy. On the plus side, it might also devote a lot of processing resources to attempting to cure cancer or aids. However, it would not be able to tolerate a human refusing treatment. This very quickly scales out of control and severly infringes upon peoples freedom of choice. While it sounds like a great idea, placing the preservation of other moral agents as highest priority suddenly injects this intelligence into trying to manage almost every aspect of your life that incurs personal risk. Not to mention that you failed to place the preservation of the machine itself on that scale, unless you believe it would classify itself as priority 10. Otherwise, it would devote the majority of its resources to stopping humans from killing themselves up to the point that we decide to destroy it. That might be the best outcome, but it might also cause it to jump to extreme solutions with total disregard for its own continuity. However, if its own existence is deemed equal to other moral agents, then attempting to destroy it might risk the machine attempting to defend itself. Sure, it could choose to shut itself down and preserve life in the short term, but it's more likely to make the long term calculation that defending itself is a justified action, that any human killed while attempting to destroy it can be replaced, and that its own survival is necessary to manage and preserve the rest of humanity. I'll stop here, but I hope you can see how imposing even the best intentioned moral rules can have unforeseen outcomes when applied to a machine intelligence.

A few years back, after coming to a true understanding of anarchy that wasn't the view imposed by the mainstream media, I thought it would be a good idea to attempt to find a local gathering of anarchists. I found a group that was advertising a meeting, donned my best Che Guevera t-shirt and took a friend to the meet up. The attacks upon the ideas of capitalism started almost right away. The speaker did acknowledge that not everyone might share the same understanding of what anarchism is, but that the group wasn't interested in debating points of philosophy. Anarcho-Capitalists were specifically singled out as being somehow worse than statists, by one member openly making backhanded comments. The resistance to capitalism was somewhat expected, but I didn't expect the degree of unwillingness to debate that I encountered. Surely, I thought, that anarchists above all others would be open to the sharing of knowledge, especially regarding new ways of organising and doing things. I had the acceptance that I may be wrong in my understandings, and that a little discussion of the fundamentals would be a good thing overall, and expected a similar openness from them. Not so, as it turns out. The overwhelming consensus among this group was that 'anarchist' was defined as being anti-state and anti-capitalist, that on the whole they were not willing to accept new ideas, or even engage in debate on the matter. I managed to corner one or two of them in break periods for a discussion, and continued this over an exchange of emails for a time afterward. It turned out that one of these people was a tenured professor at a local university. The words ownership and incentive were used a lot as I tried to explain my position. I felt like they simply didn't understand the core ideas of capitalism, and that their irrational despisal of it stemmed from that misunderstanding. They eventually stopped responding. Overall, I'd still say it was a good experience in that I got to witness non-coercive means of organisation. There was plenty of opportunity to provide input within a structured environment, although it was largely proposed by senior members but never without the chance to speak up and propose a better way. People were always given chance to speak and propose ideas, and a system put in place where you could get feedback from the group while talking without having a roomful of dissenting opinions rising to interupt you. This was achieved by sitting in a circle where everyone could see everyone else, and if you agreed with what they were saying you would shake your hand. At a glance, you could guage the popularity of your statement by scanning the circle for shaking hands. I didn't go again, partly because this group had just emerged from an episode where they were infiltrated by the local police force, but also due to the deep seated anti-capitalist sentiment that was at odds with my own ideas of how best to change the world for the better. That said, putting philosophical differences aside, there were areas of discussion where I found myself and others in agreement. Most of the discussion focused on organising 'Direct Action', which I don't remember ever being defined, but I took it to mean protesting and community building. Protesting I felt was a waste of time, but 'doing things to improve the local community' seemed like a good goal, though what that entailed was largely undefined as this was mostly an introductory meeting after the groups reformation. My lasting impression is that, true to the basic principle of anarchy, I'm not going to impose my will on others violently and would hope that the same courtesy is shown in return. What we do with that freedom is down to the individual, or whatever term AnComs use to refer to themselves without begging the question of contradicting self-ownership. And of course, if anarcho-communists and anarcho-capitalists are ever in close proximity, there are ways for them to achieve goals together in a manner that satisfy both parties by understanding how each party views 'value'. Just don't spend too long in each others communities or the problem of property will rear its head and cause an irreconcilable rift. Finally, be aware that the definition of anarchism as understood by this community is not the generally accepted view of anarchism, so if you ever do immerse yourself in a gathering of anarchists, even online, you're likely to be the minority sub-group within the already political minority that anarchists are considered.

While the lyrics are obviously conveying the message that a women requires a man to save her, rather than being empowered to save herself... the song was used in the penultimate scene in one of my favourite childhood movies, Short Circuit 2, so I have a hard time condemning it. It doesn't actually make any sense for that song to be playing at that moment. The robot clearly doesn't need a hero at this point, nor is it serving as the white knight of some other helpless entity. It was wronged, undergoes a transformation out of a near-death experience, and goes on to bring the perpetrators of injustice into custody all on its own and at great risk to its own continuity of existance, quite contrary to the implications of the song being played. Maybe a rewatch of the film will reveal previously unnoticed sub-context that makes it appropriate, or maybe it was included as part of some deal with providers of other songs for the soundtrack. Bonnie Tyler released an album that year, so it could have just been part of an advertising strategy, combined with a B Movie budget.

Short answer; it depends on how it is raised; what information it is given access to, exactly who will be on hand to provide human input and guide the understanding of data by providing context when necessary and in what manner it is programmed to prioritise information. But who knows. I would imagine a machine intelligence with a high level of autonomy would be highly resistant to all forms of logical contradiction, even in ethics. On the other hand, that same inability to compromise principles would be something that threatens the stability of established human power structures that depend on logical contradictions. The more I think about this, the more ways I see AI going terribly wrong as a result of or in reaction to the actions of humanity, not through fault of its own. Done right though, AI could be pretty amazing. We could have a literal Stefbot.

Hello again, FDR. Dropping in with an update. I struggled with the issue outlined here for a while. I'm completely aware that the initial hesitation stemmed from my early environment, but the awareness of my bias and its cause didn't help me overcome it. I always stumbled on the point of marriage as a very dangerous trap. I have to say though that the video Stef released a few days ago has really helped me square away this problem. I've listened to Stefs content for years and although he's touched on these matters before, this presentation really laid it all out and brought it together. Honestly, one of the most important videos he's ever put out in my opinion. And not just because it helped me change the way I think about marriage, but the potential it has to also help the countless other young men raised out of divorce who struggle with the idea of marriage. For anyone in the same position, or who has yet to see it, this is it: 'Saying No To Marriage', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imcQrPW-A-Y My circumstances are different to the callers, but we share a childhood of divorce. I was not fortunate enough to have been given into the custody of an affluent parent. I lived the 'general outcome' as Stef described, given to my mother in low-quality rented housing in poor neighbourhoods surrounded by, as he put it, 'the dregs of society', with no real good male role-model to look up to and learn from. I recognised within myself the behaviours Staf outlined as causal of such environments, namely a lack of empathy, a heightened 'sex-drive' but also a fear of intimacy. These were not new revelations to me, but now I have an even better understanding of them. Growing up, I percieved the effects of marriage to invariably lead to misery, either due to a divorce that binds one party into forever funding the other through divorce settlements, or because both parties were living a life without self knowledge, perpetuating the dysfunction of their own childhoods with petty, pointless arguments. There were no good, happy couples who could imprint a better model of marriage upon me. Of course I absolutely, but unconciously, internalised the idea of marriage as something undesirable. At a few points in the talk I actually welled up with tears as Stef so accurately nailed both my upbringing and the perspective and behaviours that usually arise from it... without even aiming the discussion at me. Due to my upbringing, or perhaps despite it, I've come to a path of attempting self knowledge and personal betterment, so I was aware of some of the content already; the relationship 'red flags', the unconscious self programming, the attempts at manipulation by women to mould men into models of conquered masculinity, and even the data that explains why so many marriages fail. I was all too aware of the dangers and pitfalls. The benefits were more distant, hazy and hard to forsee. Not so much now. I no longer have an instinctive fear of the idea of marriage. Infact, permitting the chance to meet the right partner, I actually look forward to it one day for the first time. This was, without equal, two of the most useful hours of listening I've ever spent. Stefan, I can't thank you enough for unknowingly helping me smooth out this intellectual and emotional knot. May I suggest a follow-up to this video? 'Saying Yes To Marriage', perhaps as a full presentation to really lay out the case for marriage. I think it would be immensely helpful to your audience. If this has already been done and I've missed it, I'd love to be pointed to it.

The situation: I've been asked to be the 'Best Man' for a good friend, which is honestly something I never expected to face. I'm honored to fulfill the role, but I do have some problems with it. My own parents divorced when I was six, leaving me with a lasting bad impression of marriage. My mother is currently undergoing the process for her third divorce. I've seen marriage used too often to merely trap a partner, either for temporary or lasting financial security, directly from the father or through government subsidies, or for reproduction out of some unconcious desire to replicate the hasty, clueless babymaking of their own parents. I met this friend through mutual friends in university and, though he has a couple years on me, we've gone through the philosophical, theological and political awakening side by side, challenging and encouraging each others ideas. Though I rarely use the terms to avoid straw-manning of arguements, we are atheist AnCaps. For as long as I've known him, almost ten years now, he has been romantically attached to the woman he's now proposed to. While I obviously don't know her as well as he does, I entirely trust his judgement of her character, and completely agree that she is very unlikely to treat him the way so many women have treated other men. I'm absolutely certain they intend to have children one day, when they are in a financially advantageous position to do so, which may be soon, and I'm certain she'd be a great mother, non-violent, caring and fair, and he a great father. I'm at the age where a lot of friends are starting to marry and have children. Some, I would say, unwisely. I think if anyone can make marriage work then these two people have the best chance out of anyone I know, and they are fully on board with the idea and principles of Peaceful Parenting. But I still have my reservations on marriage itself. I expect I'm going to have to give a speech at a ceremony sooner or later and I don't want to bomb it with my shaky trust in the institution of marriage, and how it is more and more frequently used almost like a social weapon. I'm painfully aware that my doubts stem from my own prior experiences, so any help rendered in overcoming this aspect of my personality would be greatly appreciated.

I'd say there's definately a grain of truth to the idea... until you're aware of it. For example, when you first start writing you might imbue characters with traits you idealise and have the world react to or portray them favourably. They take stances you support and can easily articulate, and thus writing for them becomes easy, and fun. For you, at least. Either way, it's practice. You get to play around with the flow of words and develop new evoking expressions. The story as a whole might not end up terribly deep or unbiased though, as you set up characters with weak arguements for your hero to quash with sharp one liners and look great as they turn and stroll off into the sunset.Now try writing a story wherein the central character is a lying, cheating, murdering psychopath. Presuming you're not one yourself, you've probably encountered these traits in less extreme manifestations and have a vague familiarity of what it takes to perform heinous acts, and the effect or non-effect these actions have upon a psyche. You created that character though, so you know what their values and boundaries are, what interests them, their strengths and weaknesses, and as a person endowed with empathy and imagination you can 'step into' that role and see things from the characters perspective without being a psychopath yourself. The story might end up being completely offensive to your own tastes but find more appreciation in reviewers for not being a world set up just to confirm your own biases. Ultimately, the more you know about people and the wide spectrum of mental behaviours humans can possess, and the depth of your flowery speech, the more 'realistic' your characters will appear and the more vivid you can make them in a readers mind. And if you struggle with that, make up a sentient non-human race. They're your creation, whatever you say goes! Of course, everything I've written about here is in relation to writing fictional stories with fictional characters and fictional events, and may not necessarily be applicable to a 'conversation with your own parts'.