h a l f b a k e r yA riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a rich, flaky crust
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A database and community whereby people submit what is
making them
miserable.
The content is studied and then there are policy changes to
make
people less miserable.
I bet most misery comes from the lack of money.
There's a misery index but no database of facts that are
making
people
miserable at any given point.
Are you sad? Do you think someone else is to blame? Post it
on the misery database.
How are you?
https://github.com/...tree/master/English
Not really, there are HFRME factors: Health, Finance, Relationships, Meaning, and Experiences to "2. Happiness." Aside from happiness there are "1. Pursuits." :) [Mindey, Mar 26 2020]
Misery database Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/miserydatabase
[chronological, Mar 26 2020]
Calvinism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism
"Abandon all hope ..." [8th of 7, Mar 28 2020]
On utility and economics
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
[Voice, Jun 11 2022]
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I would suggest, rather, lack of economic security, which
is similar but different. |
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That is, some people could be happy with a small income,
so long as they could be confident that inflation would
not devalue that small income, and that there was little
risk of losing it. |
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Galbraith wrote quite well on this subject back in 1958. |
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Just out of curiosity, [chron], how important to this idea is the
part about blaming someone else? |
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Actually, not just how important, but why important? |
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For example, is this a throwback to the 1940s idea of
"extrapunitive" thinking being an indicator of an "authoritarian
personality"? And, if not, why not? ;-) |
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It's not super important to blame others. We collectively fail
as a society to make people happy. |
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The goal is to discover why people are in pain and suffering
and find solutions to suffering. |
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If someone replies that it's actually the poster's fault, then
that works too. |
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I created a subreddit for sharing misery. |
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//why people are in pain and suffering// |
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“Bother!” said Pooh. “Isn't there anybody here at all?”
“Nobody.”
Winnie-the-Pooh took his head out of the
hole, and thought for a little, and he thought to himself,
“There must be somebody there, because somebody must
have said 'Nobody.'” |
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Could have been hallucinating |
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Define "Misery", and the difference between that and
"suffering". Buddhist practice is that we accept the concept
that all of life is suffering if you allow yourself to give in to
attachments. |
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Drat you, [bliss], we were just about to post that ! Drat, drat and double drat ! |
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The problem is one of perception. |
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It is likely that if most Buddhist monks were asked "Do you live a happy and fulfilled life ?" the answer would be "Yes". |
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Yet they have no home, and no possessions other than a robe, a pair of sandals, and a begging bowl ... |
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"Oh Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends ... " |
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"Hallucination" only has a meaning by contrast with "reality". Some
things may be hallucinations but, if everything is a hallucination,
then nothing is. |
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[+] There is a similar TED talk in which a longtime counselor describes how she used to solve people's problems. She would put groups of people into a room and ask them what they wanted. Almost inevitably someone else in the room had a solution: travel tickets they didn't want to use, etc. etc. |
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//if everything is a hallucination, then nothing is// |
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Yes, that's what I was just saying up there. |
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But are you sure you didn't hallucinate it ? |
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Are you still having the dreams about electric sheep, by the way ? |
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//attention seeking// Sorry, that was not my intent, just being terse and minimalist. What I was trying to say is nihilist in some ways (though not in the philosophical sense of denying real existence, more in a realistic naturalistic sense of denying intrinsic meaning or purpose). I try to look at the long-term view, of the unfolding of the Universe, which seems to follow the rules of entropy, in that everything started (to a first approximation) very hot and close together, and will finish very cool and spread out, and every natural phenomenon along the way is a blip, or noise in the signal. So stars, rocks, virusses, plants, human brains, are all basically contingent accidents thrown up by the ruthless logic of duplication and selection, and all of those things have (to a first approximation) zero temporal or spatial extent in the universe. |
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//I am suffering. How is it an illusion?// Well first of all, if it looked like an illusion it wouldn't be a very good one, which may bazooka my whole premise here, but nonetheless there must be other more sideways ways to tell. Suffering is an interesting one, does a star suffer when it starts to get clagged up by fusion reaction products? Does a rock suffer as it is ground down by the sea? Does the virus suffer when effective societal shutdown stymies its bid for world domination? Do you suffer when you are asleep, or unconscious? I don't necessarily think that human consciousness is different in its fundamental nature to the experience of those things. The "illusory" nature of conscious experience is the way some consciousness scholars try to describe the emergent nature of conscious experience out of biochemical and physical processes. And therefore all conscious experiences have to be understood as arbitrary. Is this not similar to the way that Buddhist ideas about letting go of material and experiential attachments operate? |
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And the idea of suffering being directly connected to entropy, is that thermodynamics inevitably means that any kind of structure in the universe will inevitably disperse and unravel, and so maintaining that structure requires effort and input of energy, which will inevitably prove futile since the structures will end up dispersing anyway. |
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You're trying to tell me that random atoms bumping into one
another created a mind. |
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There's a simpler explanation and that is God is the creator of
the laws of our universe. |
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... and the problem is insoluble, by any means you have, particularly if you subscribe to a Calvinist doctrine (predestination) <link>. |
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Specially created by the Christian church to make believers feel hopeless, powerless and utterly miserable. |
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To be fair, a view of the Universe as a huge, random, uncaring mechanistic system in which you are so minuscule as to be statistically insignificant isn't very comforting either, although it doesn't preclude you taking action to change your immediate situation and outcomes. |
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//taking action to change your immediate situation and outcomes// That is the entire point; that is the only course of action open, and it also is the only way to effect change in the universe. |
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Writing letters to Santa doesn't work, then ? |
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What about writing letters to Satan ? |
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//To explain something away by invoking a deity is indeed
“multiplying entities”// |
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Berkeley's immaterialism implies the opposite of that
(and actually works better with C20th physics than the
work of his enlightenment contemporaries). |
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//Occam’s principle was “Entities should not be
multiplied unnecessarily”// |
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Occam's principle, IIRC, was founded on theological
assumptions. |
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//make believers feel hopeless, powerless and utterly
miserable// |
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OTOH, it eliminates existential agony. Not a Calvinist
myself, but giving the devil his due here, so to speak. |
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But does that not remove one form of mental agony, merely to replace it with a different and possibly worse one ? |
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"You're doomed, and you know you are,
You're doomed, and you know you are ... "
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