Permanently Deleted
Assisted suicide for anyone with my exact name and birth
Very depressing read by a psychiatrist. It says pretty much everything I think about the subject, but in a much more eloquent way. (Summary: I’m very pro assisted-suicide)
Oh wow haven’t read SSC in a long time. Back then I was going down the whole “rationality” hole with SSC, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Gwern (?) etc etc. I got off that train when they started leading me down Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and others. Tread carefully is all I’d say. These people are very persuasive but there’s a reason they are the only ones in their fields saying what they are saying.
Yeah I used to be very into the whole ‘rationality’ thing, and I still think e.g. Effective Altruism can be good and is definitely worth studying in detail, but Scott is one of those folks who’s this close and then just doesn’t quite connect the dots. That said, Meditations on Moloch is what (eventually) led to me becoming left wing so I have a massive soft spot for him, despite him being a massive lib.
The one thing in his favour, politically, is that he’s upfront about his libbishness rather than hiding behind a ‘yeah I want <good things> but we can’t have them now’.
Tread carefully is good advice. There’s a lot of good and valuable material down that way, and it’s deeply and thoroughly mixed with quite a lot of nonsensical or outright harmful ideas. The community fell into a common liberal trap where left-wing views aren’t worth considering because any Serious Person already knows markets are perfect, while fascist views are inoffensive because any Serious Person won’t be persuaded by them.
Also don’t listen to anything Yudkowsky has to say about quantum physics.
The whole SSC and LW crowd is a wretched hive of idealism and pseudoscience bullshit as it relates to human biodiversity. The larger issue with SA et al is that you’ll get nuanced posts like this, but seemingly only applying to certain subsets of the population. There’s just a complete refusal to take a more comprehensive macro view on these things because you’re too hung up on IQ distinctions, and why Europe beat everyone else.
I used to be heavily into the evo psych stuff, but eventually the dog whistling became too much.
Assisted suicide is the ideal way I’d like to go out
100%.
An old family member in her 90s who was already plagued with a litany of health issues fell while taking a shower. She fucked up her back and legs, and they basically told her she’d be in a wheelchair from that point on. She’s a surly old coot, said “fuck it”, and went on a hunger strike because there was no available alternative. Doctors said it’d be 72 hours. They pumped her full of drugs. She lasted over two weeks. Her eyes lit up when I’d walk in the room because she knew I’m the only non-panic-driven one in the family, and it was clear she wanted me to “help”. Awful way to go out, and it made me feel like shit that I was powerless to help her.
Fuck that shit. I’d rather make own decisions than let the state decide.
If you do your research, the only reason they don’t allow it in the US is because of evangelical influence that views suffering as a sacrifice to Christ. It’s the same bullshit with Mother Theresa.