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this feels deeply profound and I think shifted something for me. Taking lack of motivation not as motivation but as decision, is extremely liberating

> If you really want to do it, you will find good reasons to work harder, if you don't really want to do it, you will find good reasons to give up, it's your life, you are free.

https://x.com/orangebook_/status/1753608684830355477

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I think about James's tweet here a lot. I think the overwhelming complexity we see is often not a feature of reality. I used to feel like it was just too hard to find truth. But it just so happens, a lot of truth isn't that complicated.

> But sometimes, people with a vested interest in the status quo will attempt to flood the field with claims of overwhelming complexity,

>

> not for the sake of a better solution, but to make the problem appear intractable and drain energy and momentum needed to solve it.

https://x.com/provisionalidea/status/1804640406031765541

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(5) Actually, very little would change. For all that the two parties have different platforms, it is corruption that causes positive change not to happen; it's not really the political leanings of the officials, at all.

(4) I'd agree with you, if it weren't for the pervasion of perversion in advertising. Most platforms are doing nothing to monitor or bound their advertisers, to the point that abusive tactics and outright damaging intrusions have made their way into the advertising on most platforms. This is not truly an issue of unwillingness to pay with time for things provided free. It's a security hole.

Substack, Patreon, and other backed-creation systems are the way creators will get paid going forward. Ad revenue isn't worth alienating your audience for.

(3) Mostly in spite of it. Public schools were designed almost from the beginning to make good factory workers, not good Renaissance men or creative problem solvers.

(2) Ask lots of questions. Also, don't doctors have to get CEUs?

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"this feels very much like the fundamental disagreement within civilization. Do you participate with a chance that your (and your family’s) life will be worse, but also a chance that it may be much better? or do you withdraw and do your own thing, and have a guarenteed good/safe outcome, but not as good as it could be?"

It actually goes beyond a guaranteed good versus a potential better. The education system has been overrun by people who are not interested in preparing children for life in society, so much as pushing agendas and programming children to be good little drones who don't do exactly what you are doing: Examining biases, applying science to presumptions, and whittling assertions down to truth.

That, not the quality of the education, is behind a good percentage of decisions to homeschool children; "I want my children to learn facts, not be programmed to disdain our family's values and culture."

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"I’ve been thinking about this a lot, what exactly IS an invasive species? What makes something native? it wasn’t always there, right? (this doesn’t mean we should be OK with anything growing anywhere. The question is, how do we decide what to do?)"

I think there's a very clear dividing line: Does this species have a natural predator or disadvantage compared to species that have been local for a human generation? If it doesn't, it's going to decimate its prey, outcompete things in the same ecological niche, and otherwise disturb the equilibrium, potentially in unrecoverable ways.

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