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Author Topic: Things that made you absolutely terrified today  (Read 1758935 times)

Gunner-Chan

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15660 on: February 22, 2016, 10:11:56 pm »

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Orange Wizard

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15661 on: February 22, 2016, 10:16:05 pm »

You could probably ask the police for advice, too.

I hope it wasn't Megabus
That's horribly, ridiculously hilarious.
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Gunner-Chan

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15662 on: February 22, 2016, 10:17:46 pm »

The best laughs are the ones you want to ask yourself "What's wrong with me" but you can't because you're laughing way too hard. ... At least I think so.
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Descan

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15663 on: February 22, 2016, 10:21:31 pm »

Call the bus company.

I hope it wasn't Megabus
... You saaaaaay that, but...

...

...

thatwasn'tmybusatleast.
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Owlga

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15664 on: February 22, 2016, 10:21:57 pm »

This is my favorite part of the original series of tweets that made up the story.

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Descan

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15665 on: February 22, 2016, 10:29:07 pm »

Yeah the timing was great :P I went down to see my guy on the 13th and that's when I lost my wallet.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15666 on: February 23, 2016, 12:14:48 am »

I'm disinclined to judge people too harshly for that. Self-interest, like all other aspects of life, isn't objectionable unless it meaningfully interferes with the ability of others to live their lives. Someone who is entirely oriented around personal survival? Okay, yeah, it's selfish, but I'm not going to condemn them for a natural response to a terrifying eventuality. If they cross that line and start harming others for the sake of their own survival, then it's an ethical issue. Someone who runs away from an armed gunman when there are other, more vulnerable people present isn't admirable, but they're not the same as someone who pushes those other people into the line of fire to help themselves survive.
Funnily enough, my personal ethics almost flip what you are saying on it's head. IMO the rules in descending order go:
1) Take steps to give yourself the best chance of survival.
2) Take steps to allow as many other people as you can to survive, possibly at the expense of others (but not yourself).
So if it comes down to just me or you, then I'm not sorry, but I'll be pushing you in front of the gun, and from my ethical point of view not only will I be justified, but you will be justified in fighting as hard as you can to push me in front of the gun. Under my system fighting for your life, even at the expense of others, is always ethically justified, but them fighting at your expense (potentially causing conflict) is also justified.

That said it's important to note that the most likely to lead to me surviving in the short term is not necessarily the thing that is more likely to lead to me surviving in the long term. Throwing you at the gunman might be an almost guaranteed plow to buy me a few more seconds, but working together with you to take the gunman down, while less likely to buy me those few more seconds, is much more likely to buy me the rest of my life. Aiding others works the same sort of way. Being nice to people doesn't really cost me any of my current lifespan (in the vast majority of cases) but could lead to vast potential increases in the future. (Unlikely to, but somebody has got to win he lottery eventually, and unlike the lottery this doesn't actually cost me anything other than stuff I'm already paying).

The way I think about it is like this; if everyone is selfishly guarding their own life, even at the expense of others, then they will be taking the maximum steps to protect themselves from potential threats by eliminating them. This has the side effect that for me, being selfish, it is in my best interest not to become a potential threat to other people unless absolutely necessary; i.e. if we band together to kill all of the murderers as potential threats, then it is in my absolute best interest not to be labeled as a potential threat. Balanced against the aspect of ensuring your own survival, this means that even totally selfish survival people will still work together unless there are no other options.

Strangely enough this can also lead to cases where from my point of view, ethically, both the villain and the hero of a story are "in the right". If the villain is trying to save millions by killing thousands, then they fall under rule number 2, which says that they should save as many people as possible. On the other hand, ethically, rule number 1 says that each person in those thousands should fight as hard against the villain as they possibly can to ensure that they don't die. It can make for some very interesting stories where, for me at least, who is the villain and who is the hero can almost flip-flop depending on whose point of view the reader is currently watching through.

The problem with that sort of behavior is much the same as with the flaw inherent to unregulated capitalism: if everyone behaves like that, then all human interaction falls victim to the Prisoner's Dilemma (in a sense), as everyone is perfectly aware that every other person will screw them over if it's beneficial for them to do so. There's no motive for anyone to ever interact positively with others. There could be, if all parties could objectively know that a certain course of action is mutually beneficial and that a selfish course of action doesn't result in greater benefits for the defector, but that's functionally impossible to arrange, especially given that different people prioritize different things.

Human civilization exists solely because most of us are able to put aside personal good for the sake of communal good to some degree.

Or, to shoot for a Godwin: If everyone behaved in that manner, the Nazis would have rolled over Britain because every soldier at every rank that would see combat would have refused to fight until they were personally cornered with nowhere to flee and no alternative but death or subjugation (unless they believed that they had little to no chance of escape, in which case they would have collaborated eagerly like every other individual unable to escape Europe). But then, if everyone behaved like that, neither Britain nor the Nazis would have ever existed, because we would either have gone extinct (due to being unable to form functional family units or larger communities) or continued to exist as primitive and solitary hunter-gatherers who associate only briefly to copulate.

Unrestricted selfishness is one of the most thoroughly dangerous human traits, because it's highly beneficial for an individual operating in a cooperative society (as they can leech off of the benefits) but exceptionally destructive as a species-wide behavior. It's the reason why Ayn Rand is one of the most detestable people to ever live, for creating the most well-known basis of philosophical support for unrepentant, psychopathic selfishness.
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Empiricist

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15667 on: February 23, 2016, 01:40:30 am »

Had a skin biopsy done today. Dermatologist said it was really just for peace of mind. No family history of melanoma and the area wasn't exposed to much sunlight (in part because I dress like someone absolutely convinced that the sun is trying to murder me). Plus the only cause for concern was that the boundary was sort of blurry and it might have grown maybe. So the rational part of me is just pointing out the fact that is is almost guaranteed to be benign, not to mention that the anaesthetic hasn't given me anterograde amnesia and that even when it wears off I won't exactly be experiencing vernichtungsschmerz (what a fun word) or anything like that.

But, the hypochondriac part of me is just panickedly flailing regardless, while the paranoid part of me is yelling at me for posting information that could hypothetically, by a very long shot, help dox me.

>__<
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TheBiggerFish

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15668 on: February 23, 2016, 06:52:39 am »

Vernichtungsschmerz?
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TheBiggerFish

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15670 on: February 23, 2016, 06:55:25 am »

I'm one of today's lucky ten thousand, I guess.

Or, well, not everyone knows that but WHATEVER.  </xkcd>
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Loud Whispers

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15671 on: February 23, 2016, 10:51:46 am »

Unrestricted selfishness is one of the most thoroughly dangerous human traits, because it's highly beneficial for an individual operating in a cooperative society (as they can leech off of the benefits) but exceptionally destructive as a species-wide behavior. It's the reason why Ayn Rand is one of the most detestable people to ever live, for creating the most well-known basis of philosophical support for unrepentant, psychopathic selfishness.
Communists create their worst demons :D

i2amroy

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15672 on: February 23, 2016, 12:12:50 pm »

The problem with that sort of behavior is much the same as with the flaw inherent to unregulated capitalism: if everyone behaves like that, then all human interaction falls victim to the Prisoner's Dilemma (in a sense), as everyone is perfectly aware that every other person will screw them over if it's beneficial for them to do so. There's no motive for anyone to ever interact positively with others. There could be, if all parties could objectively know that a certain course of action is mutually beneficial and that a selfish course of action doesn't result in greater benefits for the defector, but that's functionally impossible to arrange, especially given that different people prioritize different things.
Except that real life plays out much more like the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma than a single run of it. After all people don't just disappear after you interact with them only one time. When the simulation is iterated the algorithms that do the best in the long run are actually not the "always selfish" ones; rather the algorithms that were more altruistic did better in the long run, on average, with the overall winning algorithm being a "tit-for-tat" algorithm, that would tend towards a altruistic stance unless you infringed on it, in which case it would retaliate (an even better algorithm was shown to be "tit-for-tat" with a small chance of being forgiving instead of always retaliating in kind, since it helped to break the "chains" of eye-for-an-eye that the straight tit-for-tat caused occasionally).

This is because, like the prisoner's dilemma, the benefits of both of us remaining silent (i.e., helping one another) is greater in the long run then the benefits if we both betray one another. This holds true in real life as well; the benefits of me feeding/paying you to work with me incurs a short term penalty, but in the long term it will have more benefits for me than cheating you (because such a play will make you more likely to cheat me later). Extrapolated outwards, this results in (at least for pretty much every scenario I've considered so far under this system) the altruistic path being the more favorable one, except in cases where the damage that could be caused by a loss being so extreme that the damage outweighs any long term benefits (such as my death causing the "end of the game" for me, stopping my total gained value at the current number while everything else keeps advancing).

Followup note: Studies of the "tit-for-tat" strategy have shown that in many cases being only sightly more cooperative than all of the other competitors provides basically no benefit, and can even be harmful, while being largely more cooperative provides real benefits in the long run, simply from a purely individual point of view. This is currently one of the big believed reasons why, despite it's overall gains for the individual in the long run, we see very few examples of it in nature or other parts of real life. The constant push towards the local maxima (as opposed to the absolute one) means that in the vast majority of cases evolution get stuck on the "valley" that it has to cross to move from the local maxima of not being altruistic to the absolute maxima of the "tit-for-tat" strategy on a purely selfish basis. (Despite this it is believed to occur naturally in some places, such as guppies and vampire bats).
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Xantalos

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15673 on: February 23, 2016, 11:46:47 pm »

Oh so this is what a panic attack feels like. Fuck

I think that's what this is anyway

Fuck me why did the timing of shit like that have to happen now of all fucking times

Edit: it passed. Addressing root cause asap because not going though that shit again
« Last Edit: February 24, 2016, 12:39:55 am by Xantalos »
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TheBiggerFish

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Re: Things that made you absolutely terrified today
« Reply #15674 on: February 24, 2016, 06:49:21 am »

*(platonic) hugs?*
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