Words like "individual responsibility", "free Societies", "prosperous societies" are big words, big in the sense that they're fuzzy. I understand they're popular terms since Modernity. However, for the sake of communication in thread. I have a theory that finding some connection, even if on just emotional level, with the people responding here may be easier if you spoke "around" these words.

Consider for a moment that you are a social animal. For the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say that just means you're an animal that can't function long without being a part of N others like yourself. Also, let's add that there is some variance in behavior in all of these animals.

Also consider that the environment of these groups is not the same and the environment of the group has an effect on the group.

Okay run this experiment for T time based off those assumptions.

Some simple questions to ask: - If you took an individual from one group and plopped them over to another group with a different environment would you expect a difference in their behavior? - If you took an individual from some T and plopped them over to another some other T* (T* >> T) would you expect them to make different choices?

Okay this point you may feel that this is all condescending and what I'm doing here is a strawman of your original points with some nonsense assumptions.

You may feel like this whole speaking around words like "freedom" is dumb because you believe, as I believe, there is a thing called freedom and humans possess this thing. But that's our religion, we made a leap of faith to this freedom concept. Why force this model on others? It's not binary, there's a lot variations on this idea of freedom.

The thing is, I would argue as the others in this thread have implied that, we are not just born into this world, we are also born out of it.

If you follow this thought it gets really hard to buy this discourse as "veering into the fantastical". Because you have to ask what is a free society? To what extent can a society be free?

I’m not arguing that societies don’t have norms, or that social norms don’t have an effect on people. Obviously they do. I’m arguing that free individuals in those societies with the power to choose otherwise, and access to information about the consequences of their choices, don’t get to blame those norms for their behaviour.

Plenty of people in society act contrary to the norms. In fact modern developed societies are incredibly diverse relative to the way they were a few generations ago in terms of lifestyle choices. Individual people do have agency, do have the power to choose and many of them exercise it.

Do again it comes down to responsibility. Averages are a measurement of outcome, not a determinant of it for individuals in the sample.

> I’m arguing that free individuals in those societies with the power to choose otherwise, and access to information about the consequences of their choices, don’t get to blame those norms for their behaviour.

Fair enough, but I care less about how to apportion moral blame for society's collective failings, and more about how to fix it, into a society able to sustain itself and produce exceptional children.

I don't necessarily disagree with your sentiment but I think at this point it is good to take a step back and consider the magnitude of the statement you just made.

Consider the extent of human societies that have existed, what it is that we know of them and through what lens we know of them. What do we mean by the words "significantly worse"? Where does this idea of "worse" stem from? And let's not forget the average person. How do we measure what's good for this average person?

Sorry for the random remarks your comment caught my eye for some reason. The point here isn't for some bogus relativism but merely to state the obvious, that the human condition can be far more complicated than we give it credit.

What are your thoughts on GDScript? The reason I ask is I do a lot of work with Python these days and I like it most of the time. So I've been curious about a high level dynamic typed language for game dev. I have played around with Unity in the past and picked Unreal for my current project this time but kinda regretting that. I'm not doing anything technically impressive so I thought blueprints would help speed things up but I'm less than impressed.

GDScript is awesome to use from a developer experience perspective. The documentation for everything being built into the editor (F1!) is pretty awesome. The api that is provided to GDScript for everything from strings to file operations to url requests is pretty great.

That being said, GDScript has some flaws: it's performance is bad, the typing system needs work, it doesnt allow cyclical references of classes and the coroutine API is not greatly designed.

But for prototyping game code it's pretty hard to beat for developer speed.

For UI code it's top tier.

I think you'll like Godot. I generally find it faster to develop things in than either Unity or Unreal.

I've got a pretty huge toolbox of custom modular scripts for adding functionality to UIs, and a pretty solid theming and layout system.

Fortunately, those concerns are all, if not fixed, then much improved in Godot 4. Just a couple weeks ago, they increased GDScript 2.0 perf by a lot, the type system is much more present (typed arrays, real enums, exported custom resources), cyclical references got merged in a month or two ago, and they've done some work on coroutines with the new await syntax.

I'm looking forward to 4.0 coming out (well, 4.1) when they go back to smaller incremental updates and a higher focus on stability, so I can start using it for more projects. If the web builds weren't so broken I would have used it for ludem dare this month, but I went back to 3.5 and sorely missed the new features.

This chain of comments reminds of what I read in a paper regarding multilevel group selection, namely: "Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups". Though there is a bit of controversy around that if I remember correctly.

I know very little about economics but I am compelled to point out the irony in your comment.

How I understood your comment: "This whole field, consisting up of many people trying to do understand things, is just a bunch of nonsense generalizations."

Touché.

Thanks for clarifying. I was actually going to respond in a similar manner as ModernMech. Your original comment came off very defeatist towards the scientific method. I see now that it is aimed at our collective response to the scientific method. I also share your disdain towards this response, especially with pandemic response.

At the same time though, I get it and I do this too. This might be too reductionist but I think most of it comes down to trust. It's very expensive, in terms of time, to have a critical understanding of any specialized field. So taking the shortcuts like past experience, intuition, relying on others are more profitable. Especially if the goal is survival and not understanding of a system. This then becomes a game of finding the most "trustable" person but that's the catch 22.

This is pretty random and I realize your concern is safety for your family and the following point will do nothing to address that.

I just wanted to say, when I was a kid I saw a lot of homelessness and I think it helped foster some sense of humanity. One thing I still think about from time to time. I saw a kid, around the same age as me at the time, with no hands begging for money. I distinctly remember this feeling of "that could very easily be me, just a few variables different".

I guess the reason I'm saying this is as a parent, I don't wont to hide this from my kid. And this is not to say that I think your comment was to hide this from your kids. This is just what I thought about after reading it. It just gave me a lot to think about and I am not sure of a way to safely do this but I think its important. This is the system we actively participate in and endorse in one way or another. I don't want my kid to look away at the ugly parts.

I grew up near San Francisco and saw a lot of homelessness as well. You're right. Some degree of exposure helps kids build a realistic world view and how expansive the variety of human experience can be.

The wording here always confuses me, why is it called intermittent fasting? Isn't all fasting already intermittent otherwise it would be called starving right?

Yes, all fasting is intermittent or else it becomes death by starvation which is something different.

I think the term "fasting" has become more severe since the term breakfast became commonplace. It comes with baggage that implies religion (fasting during Ramadan), medicine (fasting before surgery), or protest (fasting due to hunger strike).

They needed a term to reduce the severity and it probably could just have been "moderate fasting" or "scheduled fasting". "Intermittent fasting" won because the English language is cromulent.

I may not have read your post correctly but why do you think "seeking sympathy and confirmation" is mutually exclusive to a "mature response"?

There is a tendency I have seen in people in the tech industry to try to problem solve everything. Like debugging a bug. In my experience this creates unhealthy relationships. Sometimes all we can do is listen and say, "yeah that sucks, I'm sorry".