09bjb

I am definitely not a trained ethicist, philosopher, etc...but my personal view is that morality in a society largely comes down to whether and how power is shared. The weak and vulnerable will stay that way without some help, and the powerful will grow more powerful without either rules or morals to check them.

So in this case, I personally would say it's more ethical to favor those born with ability rather than connections because it rewards the behavior you're ostensibly trying to instill (hard work, overcoming odds, etc.). But again, I'm not surprised by these sorts of admissions policies, and I think swinging the other way so radically that they self-destruct is probably more ill-advised than the status quo.

Extending this thought: if you thought that the primary concern of so-called elite institutions was ever "fairness", you're mistaken. They deal in Influence.

And yes, it's highly ironic that the current fashion for identity politics and all the other "post-modern" ideologies were started and perpetuated by these institutions, which don't actually engage in said ideologies outside of hiring humanities professors that say whatever they please. Even within that behavior, the hyper-left trend of said professors is much stronger outside of the Ivy League than in it. The tip-top institutions are quite conservative when the rubber meets the road.

If Harvard's "best interest" isn't fairness but rather perpetuating Harvard as an institution for the maximum amount of time into the future, then its admissions behavior makes sense. Colleges and Universities are institutions (like private companies) and (like private companies) it is very difficult to get them to engage in behavior that they perceive may shorten their own lifetimes.

Put differently, the main goal of an institution is survival. Profit (or a huge endowment, or close connections to the wealthy or those in power) is the primary factor in ensuring survival, and institutions know it.

Harvard has been focused on power over ethics for...well, I'm not sure, but certainly over a hundred years. As much as I would like to believe that admitting better-qualified candidates over "better-connected" candidates (heavy quotes here) will be better for their survival in the long run, I wouldn't put money on it. And, it turns out, neither would Harvard.

An alternative explanation is "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

Certainly holds true for me: the experience, it turns out, depends more on where I am in that stage of life than the substance in question. Cannabis is radically different for me now (at 30-something and after several intense psychedelic experiences) than at 19 or 20 when I first tried it.

And...I'm not assuming you're a man :)

I disagree that the field of Mathematics can be reduced to a definable game. Many recent breakthroughs have been a creative cross-pollination of mathematical fields...not that this will be totally off-limits to a sufficiently general AI. I didn't do much Math in college but my impression was that after you've learned the mechanics of calculus, algebra, etc., there's no obvious way to advance the field. Lots of "have people thought of things this way before" rather than crunch the numbers harder!!.

Anyone with more training want to chime in?

I agree that there's some aspect of volition, desire, the creative process...whatever you want to call that aspect of human thought that seems to arise de novo.

But speaking of de novo, I'm not at all sure that a desire to think a thought it required in order to think. The opposite seems closer: the less one tries to think, the more one ends up thinking.

I'm pivoting from your point here, but I see that bit as the hurdle we're not close to overcoming. We are likely missing huge pieces of the puzzle when it comes to understanding human "intelligence" (and intelligence itself is not the full picture). With such a limited understanding, a replication or full superseding in the near future seems unlikely. Perhaps the blind spot of the experts, as /u/leftyted alluded to, is that their modest success so far has generated a reality-distorting hubris.

Don't worry, plenty of us would consider that rude :) It's really the same as checking your phone during a conversation. Is it useful for me to give you my full attention if yours is constantly changing channels?

Yep, this is the kicker. They're not highlighting any other form of rewards (such as 2% cash back on everything, or airline miles) so it's not really moving the needle on anything other than the fact that it's Amazon-branded.

I see it as just another ploy to get you to spend more money in the Amazon ecosystem.

Welcome to pharmaceuticals in general (and many of the biggest biotech companies, come to think of it). I didn't find the exact number in a cursory search, but I've read that a fairly preposterous proportion of the drugs that have ever been produced are (unpatentable) plant molecules that were deliberately reverse-engineered and tweaked for patentability.

Agreed. I'd have to dive in more on what "relation analysis" is (you probably mean "relational analysis"?). I guess what I'm saying is that you're unlikely to get push-back from the monist crowd on the materialist front, and we're also unlikely to get "experience" (direct or otherwise) into our scientific crosshairs anytime soon. But we should certainly keep trying!

From no perspective, consciousness is subordinate to the rocks that govern physical rules /(tongue-in-cheek non-dualist "nonsense")

I think the non-dualists in the parent comment here would agree, saying something vaguely Alan Watts-y along the lines of "consciousness and matter are merely two sides of the same coin and imply each other mutually."

Come to think of it, "does consciousness arise from matter, or does matter arise from consciousness" is a modern Koan par excellence. FWIW, the last time I grooved on that for a while while on a psychedelic, the answer I came up was...decidedly spiritual. Caveat lector ;)

And yet for every one of these sadists, a Viktor Frankl pops up to say "“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I think the difficult part of all this is that "experience" has been irreducible so far and extremely difficult to isolate as some kind of physical substance or variable. We can analyze the "actual stuff" in every dimension we know how, and still come no closer to explaining why it feels like something to experience green (borrowing from Thomas Nagel here). A starcraft-playing neural net can make a comparison between some of its earlier "memories" and what it's seeing now, but that says nothing about its Awareness.

My understanding is that yes, you're not covered if the bank suffers losses and passes them on to you. The entire industry is one giant moral hazard due to complete lack of skin in the game on the part of the banks. They don't own the money and aren't responsible for catastrophic losses (see the '08 and previous bailouts), but they control it and keep the upside. You're right, that insurance sounds like garbage, but I haven't bothered to dig into the details. Caveat emptor!

"Own nothing, but control everything." -John D. Rockefeller

edit: good note from /u/snowwrestler below:

> > It's not the cash/securities that Robinhood holds as part of their business, it's the one they hold for you. You may well choose to hold 100% cash or 100% securities.

> If I'm holding 100% securities, a) SIPC offers me no protection from losses, b) I better be making more than 3% return, and c) I would not call that situation "a checking account."

Not an expert in this domain but I'll cover the basics: ecurities are a euphemism for stocks and similar. Banks have been loaning out the money you deposit since the beginning of time; it's how they make money. They don't keep all the cash that people have deposited on hand, which is why a "run on the bank" was problematic in the past. They basically keep enough cash around ("reserves") so that the average withdrawals don't get them into trouble. And yes, you are certainly not choosing the investments that the bank makes with your money. And they're not "your" investments: the bank pays you a small fee (3% in this case) and then takes risks with your money to make a higher return and keep the difference.

I'd recommend reading up on the Federal Reserve (The Creature from Jekyll Island), the modern financial system (any of Michael Lewis's books, especially Boomerang and The Big Short), and maybe the first global banking families (The Medicis: Power, Money, and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance). We're talking about the power structure of the world here and it's good to be informed on the main points.

Agreed. Not that many drugs aren't inherently risky, but stress/despair/loss of purpose cuts across lines (pun intended) of wealth and is a guarantor of increased addiction potential.

I hate to be this guy, but...how is this different from affirmative action? I'm not saying it's wrong, but affirmative action is discriminating based on race. Surely it hasn't been illegal this whole time?

Weight training tends to be moderately cardiovascular. Not an out-and-out replacement for cardio, but your heart will be pumping hard at higher weights/reps. Same thing for a long session in a hot sauna. Just throwing some nearly-as-good alternatives out there for people who hate treadmills.

Just came here to say that I think protecting your CV at all costs from any kind of "gap" is some of the most overrated career advice out there. Take risks, show some self-direction and self-respect. Companies and colleagues will help you, but only you can steer the ship of your career trajectory. Follow the currents underneath you at your own risk.

Seriously. What a great filter for people you wouldn't want to grow close to anyway. "If we can't talk about corporate servitude, why talk at all?"

/s, hilarious.

As someone who has "taken a lot of time off" to spend time _on_ the things I think are important, may I suggest answering the work question with "I'm currently working on _____" or "Right now I'm spending a lot of time on _____". There are a hundred ways to direct the conversation somewhere productive and fun, but "I don't currently work anywhere and am taking some time off" does sound like an embarrassed euphemism for "unemployed." Don't be embarrassed.

This is the kind of mindset that discourages people from taking healthy risks. There are any number of legitimate ways to explain a gap, such as, "No, I was not actually playing video games and surfing reddit the entire time! I actually wanted to invest more time in ____. Can I share with you what I learned?"

Disclaimer: my CV has often been a horrendous mess of 3-6 month "gaps" (during which time I learned many of my most valuable life lessons) and it never cost me more than a month of training myself up, networking, and interviewing.

Another disclaimer: I've always been of the habit of saving my money so that long gaps feel stress-free and I don't have to take the first job I'm offered.

Personally I'd be willing to risk open-mindedness spreading to people in society that "might not be able to handle it" rather than slide further into a dystopia where we're kept stupid on purpose because we might be harder to control if we thought for ourselves.

Just the opinion of an internet stranger here, but I think the medicinal benefits are touted because they're a way to get a foot in the door and start the conversation about the utility of these substances. Society still has PTSD (pun intended) from the out-of-control utopianism and concomitant criminalization / smear campaign of the 60s and 70s. Therefore using the substances to help those in desperate need is much more palatable for most people than the less urgent "betterment of well persons." But the latter is (or at least should be) a goal of the psychedelic community, for sure. I for one have been helped hugely, _tremendously_, by psychedelics...and never would have been diagnosed as mentally unwell beforehand.

Your best resource here is probably https://erowid.org/experiences/

Psilocybin and LSD are on their way to legalization, but the enormous host of compounds in their phenethylamine family might not be so lucky due to a systematic problem with U.S. drug scheduling policy. This family shows enormous potential for treating some of our trickiest mental health / public health problems (addiction, depression, anxiety, OCD, and the list goes on) but the policy for newly discovered phenethylamines and tryptamines seems to be "Schedule first, worry about it later." This slows scientific research down dramatically, research that we need in order to even know in the first place whether a compound might have "high potential for abuse and no known medical potential." If there is medical potential (and in these families at least there usually is), what took days to Schedule will take millions of dollars and years or even decades to reschedule...per compound.

So, while I celebrate the progress being made for a couple of promising compounds with a relatively large base of recognition and support, I'm hoping that I see a more sane approach to drug policy within my lifetime (Portugal seems to be the fashionable example these days).

I'll also second /u/jrowley 's recommendation of Michael Pollan's recent book "How to Change Your Mind" as a good primer, and would recommend the TV show "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" as another fascinating dive into the subject.

And Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan again back in the 80s...the interventionist policy has always been about U.S. corporate interests abroad, not about democracy or peace.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/Overthrow--A...

^^ Not completely without bias, but probably contains a lot of inarguable historical facts that you weren't even close to being taught in high school or even college.

With Turo (I'd imagine this service is similar), the service or the customer has to provide it. The risk with these services is competition: the better it is, the more people start using it...and then the parent business takes a bigger cut (see AirBnB).

I mean, it'd be malicious if that's what I was after. I don't engage in these discussions because I'm a troll, I engage because I think they're important. It's possible that every "believer" throughout history is delusional and yanking your chain...seems like too much work though.