I am against pet stores—there are at least 5 kinds of wild snakes snakes around here (copperheads, water snakes, green snakes, ringnecks, worm snakes, black rat snakes, black racers, maybe hognose snakes). i have mice right in my apt—i leave them alone. In another place i sometimes stay, there are corn snakes who live right out front, and rattlesnakes 100 feet away. I just look at them.
ishi
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I tend to be wary and distrustful when i see articles with titles like this—too often they are long and jargon filled (or made up jargon) and while usually basically coherent, tend to lack much in the way of innovative content—come off as school or university student papers (even if written by professors or professionals
This one is quite good and sort of amusing however. (I am not a fan of Jordan Peterson but i wonder if he goes to the events hosted by the authors of the article since he is in same city. ) I may use this article as a springboard for my own approach based on that.
I try to be in a state of happiness at least several hours a day.
(For example, since yesterday i missed my daily walk, i decided to do it last night—go see the creek—because weather prediction was the rain would start today, not last night.
So, as soon as i got outside about 11 pm it started pouring rain with alot of pretty lightening and thunder but i went anyway. I have 3 places i can sort of stay dry and not get hit by lighting near the creek—a bridge and some cliffs. I went to see the flood. Then i decided to take a dip in that dirty water. (It went from like 3 feet deep to 10 feet deep in 1 hour). I was on borderline of drowning but I can deal with that.)
I heard a radio show with a talk by some womyn who said she had been depressed and unhappy—due to things like global warming, floods, fires, poverty, lots of violence. She got some ‘help’ and medications and then became happier—she could sit in a traffic jam during daily commute and it didn’t bother her. Had a sort of stoic attitude.
I agree with the listed 8 goals in last section of the article, and also think online technologies have a role in (possibly) meeting them. I am interested in this topic but more from a theoretical perspective (mathematics, data analytics, statistics and probability, psychology and economics—complexity theory).
Partly because of my interest I have participated in several of these online research studies (most recently the SWARM intelligence study conducted by a group in Australia (i think U Melbourne) which was funded by US DoD , and one from a university in New York. I found most of these online studies (which involve answering questions ) too time consuming, so many of them i dropped out of.
Hence one ends up with ‘sample selection bias’ problems.
This is similar to polling issues—when they only poll people who have smart phone numbers.Hence i’m interested in how accurate these research studies are----perhaps I (and others like me) are ‘outliers’ (i have a smart phone but dont use it inside). Similar ideas are discussed by Heinrich in his paper W.E.I.R.D people published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences several years ago.
Sorry if this is ‘clutter’ but i will mention CCAN (chesapeake climate action network, based near Wash DC).They do good work mostly on energy conservation, solar power, carbon taxation (which may be feasible politically in this area), , mountain top removal coal ming, and fracking and pipelines in the Appalachian mountains—all very difficult political and social issues. i have disagreed with a few of their policies (ie putting wind farms in Appalachian Mountains; i support offshore wind power rather than turning near wilderness into industrial wind farms—and I think they now mostly support my position),
Its likely CCAN because it operates in an area which has many envrionmentalists and affluent people does not really need more funding (one of the EA concepts—dont put more money where its not needed)---CCAN knows how to raise funds (eg they have a 3 day comedy show benefit this weekend). But I will just put out a plug for them as being an ok group but there may be other groups with higher priority.
This subgroup of EA i find interesting and potentially useful.
This may be off topic, and I’m only connected to EA community from reading online resources, and having attended one EA discussion on ‘diversity and inclusion in EA’, and one EA group hike locally—interesting people, but I didn’t make any real continuing connections, perhaps because I come from a different tradition.
One of my main college and later (independent, mostly WWW based , and continuing fields of study has been 'evolution of cooperation' and altruism from a biological and cultural evolutionary perspective which is slightly different from what most people think of as altruism. Also most of my effort devoted towards 'doing good better' has been in community groups dealing with poverty , health and substance abuse problems, and the environment. Many of those groups are not very effective. They have lots of goals, but usually at best only achieve a few of them.I am paired with an accountability buddy and contacted her but really am not expecting anything—if something works out, fine, if it doesn’t , thats the way it is.
One of my goals which I may not achieve is to see what processes are effective and for who (similar to asking what medical treatments are effective and for who, or what college tracks are effective for people having a happy and productive life, and for who—i know people with all kinds of degrees and careers and relationships, and some are happy and some aren’t.
This is a ‘matching problem’ as they say in fields like math and computer science.I wonder if there is a way to find an accountability buddy who is an appropriate match—I think it means one needs to have compatible and complementary goals. (Stalin, Hitler , Churchhill and FDR from a utopian view were not matches made in heaven. )
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I have experienced both value drift and lifestyle drift (mostly the latter) and this has happenned in the last 3 years—and I first heart heard of EA about 3 years ago. My values are still close to what they always have been . I come from this tradition of environmentalism/nature/voluntary simplicity, social justice, tolerance, anti-authoritarian activism, ‘scientific humanism’or ‘ethical culture’, as well as scientific rationality (math based) as well as musical interests .
While I could live a lifestyle based on those values, I was fairly happy. But I got into some personal and work related environments which meant I had to compromise on many of my values—surrounded by people who variously had no interest in rationality , nature or science, didn’t like the kind of music I enjoyed, sometimes intolerant, and even ‘authoritarians’ though these people considered themselves what are called derogatoritarily ‘SJWs’—people who are ‘never wrong’ and always saving the world. If I was around scientists, not uncommonly they had limited ‘altruistic’ inclinations—much more concerned with their careers and status than with the world around them—so their Focus as used in the EA Framework was on themselves, and viewed that as the best way to better the world.
Also altruism from a biological/scientific view some say technically doesn’t exist—you can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. (Though of course many philanthropists like Carnegie and Mellon have helped others—its a time dependent process. Some historians have argued that ‘British Colonialism’ was a good thing.)
I wrote this because one of my interests are diffusion-drift equations (used in theoretical biology, physics, etc.) though I’m not an expert in them. I was sort of hoping to combine them with the EA framework, but the languages and dialects are so different, i’m thinking its a waste of time. Just as other environments I’ve been in conflict with my values, people I’ve encountered in EA personally or on-line don’t value that approach. So I’m having more value drifts—stop trying to associate with people who don’t share your values—be less tolerant. And for me, maybe stop valuing math reasoning and rationality of the kind humans do so much, because the world is fundamentally irrational.