almost unimagined values

Person 1: The US needs to institute policy X.

Person 2: That's impossible, all the Republicans in congress would just vote against it. What we really need is for the Democrats to push for policy Y, which they might be able to get bipartisan agreement on.

Person 3: That's not possible either, the Democrats are too beholden to corporate interests to support policy Y. What we really need is for the president to institute executive order Z.

Person 2: Oh come on, the president would never issue execute order Z, policy Y is much more feasible than that.

And so on and so forth ad nauseam.

I don't think these people are really arguing about politics, and I don't know if they even have any substantive disagreement with each other.

In general, when people talk about "what should be done", they are always implicitly thinking of some agent, they are speaking of "what should be done by someone". And of course when we speak about different agents, we will come to different conclusions about what they should do. This is not least because different agents have different options in front of them. For instance, if you were to give me suggestions about what I could do to make the world better, they would probably not be the same as the suggestions you would give to Bill Gates about what he could do to make the world better, or the suggestions you would give to Vladimir Putin.

Normative claims presuppose an agent, and the content of normative claims will vary by the agent that is supposed. It would be useless to suggest to me "end the war in Ukraine", or to suggest to Putin "be more selective about the discourse posts you reblog", or whatever.

The problem is that when we are discussing politics, there are many different agents that we can identify with and whose behavior we can present normative claims about, and we often do not specify which one we are referring to. Furthermore, political agents can be institutions instead of just individuals, making possible the existence of sub-agents with varying agendas, and so on. Individuals might conceivably be modeled as having these too, but that's a philosophical can of worms I won't open.

Anyway, this imprecision about what agents we are prescribing actions to leads to scenarios like the discourse above, where people who substantively disagree about very little might argue vociferously against each other because in truth they are prescribing behavior for different agents altogether. Person 1 is prescribing behavior for the US government as a whole, Person 2 for the Democratic party, and Person 3 for the president. They only disagree in that each imagines the other's agent as an object of nature governed by mechanistic processes and their own agent as possessing (practically speaking) free will. None of them are really per se correct or incorrect, I don't think.

My suggested solution to this is: specify clearly the agent you are referring to, and admit that for normative discussion to make sense at all you must model that agent as "being able to choose its action" even if deeper analysis of its internal processes reveals it to in fact be deterministic. When in doubt, recall that the only agent whose actions you can really chose (if you can choose any actions at all) are your own, and thus in a certain sense any discussion of what an agent other than you yourself should do is idle philosophizing.

I can hardly believe it but my semester abroad is oficially over! Still have to hand in my assignments but we are done with classes✨

Like I've lost count of the amount of times peaceful game or fandom servers have been ruined by people stampeding in with political rants, bitching about world issues, demanding internal activism, demanding vent channels so they can whine about their shitty parents, ect.

At some point we will, as a society, have to unlearn this idea that if you're ever caught not thinking about something serious, you must not give a shit about others. Your mind is not designed to constantly be stressed.

Your body also isn't, btw - prolonged stress without breaks is linked to all kinds of cardiac problems.

Not only will it not kill you to let the Pokemon Unite server or Naruto/Sasuke server just be about Pokemon Unite or NaruSasu, it would actually benefit you to do so.

11 May 2024

Here's what's left of the semester:

four weeks of classes (only four?!?! Ahhhh!)

one analysis in ochem

one synthesis in ochem (when am I supposed to do it?!)

two pchem labs

two ochem tests

one final

"Dinosaurs had feathers" Fine!

"Neptune isn't a beautiful oceanic blue, it's actually the same washed-out disappointing color as Uranus" I will kill you with my bare hands

24|04|2024

The week started in a very stressful way, so much so that I decided to skip class today. Yesterday was really too much for me with my commute and everything, and at the end of the day I am not missing anything too important with today's lecture. I took this as a way to start working for my English lit exam. I realized I had a pretty big block with it, I just couldn't bring myself to do stuff for this exam because it makes me very nervous (especially writing a paper for it). I decided to start with easy approachable tasks in order to get started and so far it's working. My paper will be on The Merchant Of Venice, which means that I need to reread the play and annotate the useful passages, but before I do that I wanted to write in pen all the annotations I originally wrote in pencil. So this was my main task of the day. Tomorrow I will start my first reread of the play, and once I am done with that I will plan the next move. I feel like this is the best way for me to approach a task that scares me. Just break it down in much smaller tasks and start on the easier ones.

productivity:

read first thing in the morning

small plan of my tasks for the next few days

rewrote in pen my book annotations

run some errands with my mum

updated my reading journal

Irish on duolingo

📖: Miti E Leggende Dei Celti by M. Fois

30 xii 23

going to work in the afternoon so only a short studying session today. quick revision of the plural of nouns, and with that i managed to revise everything i planned for this week. thank god cuz i can't afford any delays with this schedule (⁠ ⁠･ั⁠﹏⁠･ั⁠)