[FRIAM] Heart Rate

[Gary Schiltz]

I don't know Jon, except from a single VFriam during the peak of the
pandemic last year. I really hope that he meant that as some sort of a
joke, though even that would be in very, very bad taste. If he was serious,
then I would say "shame on you". At the ripe young age of 63 years, I've
begun to realize how damned precious each year is that I have left. And the
prospect of losing friends and loved ones who are older than I am scares
the shit out of me, maybe even more than my own mortality. I've come to
believe that the older a person is, the more valuable they are. Despite the
technology that we have to preserve audio and visual information, the most
direct link between the past and present are stored in the wetware between
the ears of the older generations.

On Sat, Oct 16, 2021 at 12:12 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Also on Friday you said that you are happy when people my age die.  So it
> doesn't matter to you that 95% of people who die are unvaccinated.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 10:35 AM Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> """
>> You may be interested to know... that having identified a high risk
>> population... we were ethically bound to intervene in their young lives.
>> The result was that we established a Head Start preschool.
>> """
>>
>> It mostly raises questions for me about whom I would want to establish
>> a Head Start program[†]. The video I posted discusses how making a
>> "choice of basis" can lead, via category errors, to horrific outcomes.
>> I often assume that something like this is what Nick is after in his
>> endless ramblings about classification, "fair" gerrymandering and the
>> rest. My opinion continues to be that there, more often than not, fails
>> to exist satisfactorily *unique* or *stable* solutions. It is in these
>> cases that one probably shouldn't strictly "act on the science".
>>
>> Relatedly, on Friday, I made some effort to argue for those not in favor
>> of mandatory vaccination, an argument that is very difficult for me to
>> raise when I perceive the majority of the room as being ready to strike.
>> As a result, I feel that I did a very poor job of steelmanning the
>> position. I may even have disappointed a few of our colleagues.
>>
>> That said, I feel that bringing balance to the discussion is important
>> because I live in an ever more polarizing world, one where choices made
>> over the last century have significantly canalized power structures and
>> pointed the headlights of the world in the direction of mass extinction.
>> To argue in against mandatory vaccination among our group (to my limited
>> reckoning) requires a deeper discussion of what we mean by rationality,
>> what such a framework gives for free and what it doesn't. I would argue
>> that like the gerrymandering problem, we are left to make arbitrary
>> choices of bases and that implies that others that we hurry to classify
>> as crazy (or anti-rational) may in fact prefer a different outcome. I
>> suppose I desired acknowledgement, among my fellow rationalists, that
>> what we perceive as *the* rational solution can often inhibit the search
>> for clearer understanding of our situation.
>>
>> As I once read on a bathroom wall in Texas, "The road to hell is paved
>> in good intentions".
>>
>> Perhaps, this could be rephrased more awkwardly as, "The road to hell
>> is paved in an ever more canalizing gradient descent".
>>
>> [†]
>> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/751-unmarked-graves-discovered-near-former-indigenous-school-canada-180978064/
>>
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