Recap

We strongly believe A drowning baby has to be saved and that it is very important to us (our value system). In the scenario of a drowning baby, we also feel it emotionally, the need to save the baby. This we call as high emotional stimulation. In other words we are saying that we believe our feelings portrays the truth (the reality, our value system), in this scenario.

We observe several other situations involving the ‘stoppable death of a human’. In some cases we weep, in some we don’t. Knowing that life is important to us (as seen above), we realize that visually stimulated tasks seem to be able to provide the right high emotional stimulation, as opposed to non-visually stimulated tasks.

  • Important to us = baby drowning
  • Baby drowning => high emotional stimulation
  • High Emotional stimulation also found as in the “Tearing up section”
  • “tearing up section” primarily talks about visually stimulated tasks

  • Visual stimulation tasks appear with high emotional stimulation when involving a life

  • Irrespective of scenario, if the impact is the same (death of an unknown life), then all scenarios are equal
  • All scenarios with same impact should be treated as having the emotional response from visually stimulated scenario.

Time of feeling

I guess it is easy to imagine that the time of feeling is small owing to how our brain is. Heuristics work on availability, when other things are “available” it is easier for it to move on, it appears. I don’t know why. Despite the fact that I cry for a minute, the next minute I am almost back to normal. It has short term emotional memory.

Sometimes you think you desperately need a girlfriend. Life just sucks for you, but then there are suddenly moments when you are doing something else and you just forget about the depression that you were in. Just today I though I had a bad week starting owing to social events that consumed my mind, but look at me when am at the gym or when I am writing at the end of the day. What sadness I might axe!

Of course the girlfriend thing always comes back to me in the end to haunt me. But why doesn’t the thing about saving lives come back to me? It could be that I see it is in abundance here, it appears that it is available to me at large. Every person is a couple. There are so many beautiful women here. When I know I suck at being social, I know there is a problem. Until then, I am acting as though lifes fine. When nothing i can think of lasts more than an hour or half, why should feelings about life, in a remote world, be any better.

The frequency at which I think about lives and people is much higher nowadays. Outside of writing I do see myself wonder about lives. Something that didn’t happen in the past. Shit seems available to me, I guess because of writing.

Having written out something, and knowing that the brain has some really amazing biases and heuristics, I feel like I want to conclude, regarding the availability and move on.

As I sit here outside in the balcony I feel like ‘I am back baby’. My initial depression due to things didn’t last, my sadness due to lack of girlfriends is missing. I don’t feel a single bit about south sudan as fell. In fact I am feeling numb to all the feelings that make me fee like shit.

What am I trying to say?That feelings don’t last long. What do I mean by long? Feelings keep vacillating. All feelings. I cried when my grand ma died and my dad skyped me and I saw her through video. ‘I love you gramma’. Just moments later I was back to doing my own shit. Just like after watching a south sudan video.

While I was biking backhome today, 1 feeling, as soon as I met my friend and started cooking, things changed.

Could it be that your brain is smart, but then you are smarter than it. You distract yourself with other things, but what you really are comes back to you in the end?

How are we justified in ignoring this time of feeling while making decisions?

The time of feeling seems to be a something generated by the brains algorithm, based on current events, based on available events.

Action

Having seen that we can extrapolate the importance of a life, from visually stimulated tasks, we ask ourselves, what about the action then?

It is no doubt the action that needs to be taken is to save the baby from drowning. If there are 4 scenarios, that have different emotional responses owing to the fact that some are visually stimulated and some are not, and with the same impact ; if the emotional response/ importance of the scenario can be assumed to be the same for all 4 scenarios, then why should the action be any different?

Fair enough. How someone dies is completely irrelevant. And the fact that only visually stimulated tasks trigger us emotionally, implied that non-visually stimulated tasks shall be considered with the same fervor as that of their counterparts.

Going on to the question that we ultimately want to answer is how much is a life worth to me?

It is easy to say that I am ready to take with some little inconvenience such as dirty clothes or a couple hundred bucks to save a drowning life. This is all I can say for sure. Any extrapolation there on, I am not sure. I will never be sure. What do I do?

I am going round and round. I don’t know how to determine the true value.

#### I have been thinking. I have been going round and round. Everytime I seem to come back to this. How much is a life worth to me? How can I find that out?

When axed such a question, I immediately attempt to discard anything that is beyond this statement

if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

And I take this statement for granted, cause 1) otherwise I’ll become a rock, 2) I feel so strongly about this, that there is no doubt,

Now, it feels like I am talking as though, I can reason what is important. But my go to defense statement is the following:

When X is true in some cases, Y is true in other cases. How do you know X is your true value system. You want to go on a vacation, you want to spend 1.6k on that. While you also want to give money to someone who needs it. You feel both.

I am not sure about the above, but how do you determine what you are ready to give up to save a life.

#### What ever I say, shall withstand the following:

  • It shall work in all cases
  • It shall be consistant
  • It shall be resistant and consistant with differnet people

Well not everyone accepts atheism, despite being given perfectly vaild statements to get out of it. ####

Feelings are not perfect and yet everything is a feeling. It appears that I don’t have any other tool to get an answer, other than feelings and this thing I roughly described as the ‘solution inside my head’; the one that tells me if something is good or bad.

Moving on,

A loss of an unknown life, visually stimulated or otherwise, shall be viewed the same.

if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

I agree. I feel it strongly.

For the same drowning child, if you had to make a ticket of 100 euros and only then be able to save the child, would you do it?

At what point would you stop?

How would you know?

Maybe I can’t get all of the answers. How much would I pay, I don’t know. Even if I said I would, WTP and reality I suspect will be different. It’s easier said than done.

Gravity of a situation

if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. Loss of life is bad.

if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

Death of a life is bad. It hurts when our near and dear ones die, be it a dog or a human. It hurts to see people in pain, albeit for a short period, due to the way our human brain is constructed based on availability. There are quite some examples, in the past and present wherein, people go out of their way, to help a life. Sometimes it has also been us. We like to help our friends out, because we care for them. We cry when watching Gandhi, Batman. I cry atleast. The amazing human beings they were who had only one thing in their mind. People. That idea resonates like a mofo within me.

It can be counter-pointed that people are dying everywhere but it doesn’t pain us. For this we look at the fact that it is not visually stimulated. We seem to not understand a random dead body, but pain. When you see a video of 40000 south sudanians, in a swamp that is malaria prone, you don’t just shed a tear. You weep your balls out. As learnt from earlier arguments, we shall reject the counter point that it doesn’t pain us. We say that it doesn’t pain us for one reason, Brain. Also that number 40000 is super irrelavant to us. Whether it was 40k or 50 k or 100 k, I don’t believ it would have made any difference to me, in terms of feeling.This is becuase we don’t understand numbers. All we understand, is pain, that is about to befall mankind (some feeling it is), the pain when you see flyes mounting a child. The pain that comes from understanding that people are going to die everyday. And that too because of starvation, diseases, oh boy is it going to be unpleasant to just be there, let alone be the person expereinceing it.

OK

Visual stimulation seems to be the reality, it seems to be the one that can get us enough emotional stimulation and point to us what is important to our value system.

It seems to be very easy to say that I don’t feel like helping most of the times. But fuck most of the times. Look at the times when you were in the ‘D’(reference to the most important part of the football field), D being visually stimulated scenarios, where there is a claim that it is the true region.

Imagine this: A cunt fucking South Sudanese cunt, comes to you, holds your hand and begs you for food, for his 3 yr old kid, says he hasn’t eaten for days. You are very much in a position to help him out. There are 40000 more other people that fall at your feet, ask you for your help. They don’t have food for one meal even. They haven’t eaten in days. They barely managed to hold on to their lives. You have to tell them “Sorry, but I have to spend 1.6k on my vacation, which I deserve having worked for 1 year straight, point blank to their face, and then continue on your vacation while on the very side you see everyday 10 children dying, people not having food. People going to suffer AF, because malaria is a bitch etc… Not on a laptop, not on facebook, but it happens to be literally on your side.

But Only some things of all the points hit me in the heart, for example, when I talk about the pain that the children are going to face and are going to die away by starving. Fuck me. That is precisely going to be their future.

But you still want to vacation?

Granted that this 1.6 k is not going to save 1 full life even, but half a life according to AMF. But think of this like this. If the cost of delivering food to south sudan is similar to the cost of food for eating outside. Imagine the number of mouths you can feed per day assuming 3 meals a day. 106 mouths per day for 3 meals. Is it worth it?

The other point to consider and note is that the people who need help are not getting money from everyone. Granted if everyone did their small duty it would solve multiple crisis, as mentioned by [Peter Singer][], in “Famine affluence..”. There are a 7 billion people in this world, let’s hope there are some others who are ready to help along with you. For sure there are. Give well and AMF don’t just happen by themselves. Just becuase you can’t do anything significant (saving 100k lives) now, doesn’t mean you don’t do anything at all. You want to save as many lives as you want. It’s like a game, we just maximize the score for the fuck of it. In this game there are several other people who can do it as well.

Anyways, how do I choose how many lives are significant?

Wwould you walk like this, wearing gucci slippers and gucci jackets, when your fucking neighbouring street is burning down AF.

It appears that the imagine situation is no different from the life you are leading now. We have seen earlier that distance doesn’t matter, visual stimulation is important to be in sync with reality.

For some reason, everything else diminishes in value atleast internally when a life is in the picture.

Don’t wast food, don’t buy unnessarily… extralpolation

I want to now compare distinctive things in life that I am going to do, against a life. I do seevral things in life. Spend my monye. I think it is time to explicitly axe myself, if it is right or wrong.

When your negihbouring villiage is burning down, how can you eat for 20 euros? You can say 20 euros is 1/150th of the cost of saving a life. So what? If it is unnessessary, and for sure if it is not going to last long then why?

What do YOU forbid

Buying cars as a status symbol, that only serves the purpose of feeling good when others know you have it. Example, BMW and shit like that. Spending 100,000 euros on a stupid car, that could go a long way in saving peoples life. The cost to save a life is estimated to be [~3300 euros][] assuming it goes to AMF, one of the most cost effective charities. We could save about 30 lives. Although seemingly small, you are actually saving 30 lives, the feeling that would be much different if you actually were seeing the progress I guess. The same thing we discussed for visually stimulated tasks vs the others.

What about other people?

STM says accept it! I can never be convinced. I suspect I want a reason because I want to be supeorior look down upon others! Tell people that they are wrogn!

smart dog vs human

Can you convince dog about ice cream truck

intellectual rule value rule smart dog- what was the point of this example?

What magic is that? intell that is not in your script

Achiles has same rule today same rule yeterday, but then why didn’t he realize it yesterday. itself

You need to reflect on your rules, using your rules. You have a billion rules, and a billion facts

all humans are mortal so brownie is a human

Everyone can be wrong!Everyone can believe in different values

When ill achilles be wrong!

When will his understanding of the train track be wrong. When will he become terrorist

Important to distinguish hueristics and

how to undo H&B

Scope insensitivity

Diminishing marginal returns… bhel puri… 10k dollors.

Is your appetite for children the same as that of bhel puri!

Give eevryone a chance to survive

shut up and multiply!

tight resources In that situation it is hard to have value

Ideal world what do you want?

Ignore what you can do? /Has nothing to do with what you should do?

A billion happy lives is better than a million happy lives [martin]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Seligman [martin_ted]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FBxfd7DL3E [ele_intutions]:http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9/the_intuitions_behind_utilitarianism/): [ele_truth]:http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth/ [ele_circular]:http://lesswrong.com/lw/n3/circular_altruism/ [tj_solution]:/solution-inside-my-head.html [peter_ted]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Diuv3XZQXyc [sugar]:http://www.sheknows.com/health-and-wellness/articles/1025709/your-body-on-sugar-cravings [wiki_social]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof [no_link]:/story-so-far.html [stm]:http://pradeep90.github.io/The-Solution-in-your-Head.html [story_1]:/story-so-far.html [story_2]:/determining-the-value-system.html [story_i]:http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-gorakhpur-tragedy-meet-dr-kafeel-khan-the-hero-who-saved-the-lives-of-countless-children-2528035 [fuck_me]:https://www.channel4.com/news/humanitarian-disaster-in-worlds-newest-country [fuck_me_2]:http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-foster-father-sick-children-2017-story.html [peter_famine]:https://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972—-.htm [hob]:https://www.facebook.com/humansofbombay/photos/a.188058468069805.1073741828.188056068070045/695438903998423/?type=3&theater [holocaust]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQzqfsgftBo [cost_of_life]:http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-save-a-life-for-333706-and-thats-a-steal-2015-7?international=true&r=US&IR=T