[ExI] Electoral College and 1177 BCE

[SR Ballard]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 9:41 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 8:56 PM Will Steinberg <steinberg.will at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
>  *I like this list a lot and it's pretty crazy what the effect of these
> political shitposts have been.  What happened to the awesome H+ list I
> joined?  Can't we talk about uploading or*
> *Matryoshka Brains or lab-grown organs or metamaterials or anything else??*
>
> Then do so I'm all ears, but remember that a imbecile's whim could render
> irrelevant  all our talk about the future .
>
John K Clark
>
>

Right, but this is basically a free-will/predestination type argument here.



Let's imagine this as basically a little chart, like a punnet square. The
x-axis is labeled "survive, don't survive (nuked to death)". The y-axis is
labeled "planning, no planning (succumbed to anxiety over being nuked /
political change)".

Clearly we can see that we have 4 quadrents.

Quadrent I: We survive and we planned for the future. We've developed and
worked on ideas and we pull out of everything better than ever. (Happy
Ending)

Quadrent II: We planned for the future and worked as hard as we could, but
we ended up getting nuked in the end. (Sad)

Quadrent III: We sucummbed to paranoia about being nuked and continued to
be freaked out by political changes, failing to look forward and plan for
the future, existing in a state of dread and panic for the weeks/months
before we were finally nuked to death and wecomed it as sweet release from
our anxieties. (Depressing)

Quadrent IV: We succumbed to paranoia about nukes and changing political
landscape and are sure the world is about to end, then suddenly all the fog
clears and we realize that we're not all going to die, the world didn't
end, but we've been spinning our wheels for a long time (years?) and have
really fallen behind the curve. (Frustrating)



As we can see, clearly, we should focus on interesting things, and if we
get nuked, well it's sad, but it's a whole lot better than thinking you're
going to die then suddenly realizing you're going to live, when you stopped
planning for your life a long time ago. Like when people think they'll die
before 70, but they live to be 85, so they struggle because they didn't
save enough money for retirement.
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