iNow

Of course they are, in MANY locations

This is the key point for me: well-being, mental and otherwise. Many people turn to alcohol. That often brings obvious social problems along with it. Drugs of various types, especially and primarily recreational or medical marijuana, can often lead to better results and fewer negative outcomes for the patient and society more broadly. There’s also been great work treating resistant depression with MDMA and and Ketamine, but I see that as requiring physician guidance much like blood pressure or diabetes medicine. Respite from being too smart or too intelligent, however? That’s a need not enough of our fellow citizens seem to exhibit.

Thank you for sharing. I’m obv new here and will surely benefit from your helpful guidance

This isn’t your blog

No thank you

Agreed

Yes

By acknowledging it’s a war we can’t win and will never end, decriminalizing essentially all drugs, and replacing investments in private prisons with investments in rehabilitation centers, low cost housing, food programs, and vocational training. What would happen if we did this? The lives of many tens of millions of people would be better, including those in no way associated with modern day addicts. Sell it to the left by speaking of its morality and humanity. Sell it to the right by speaking of its direct connection to personal freedom and autonomy. Sell it to the middle by speaking of its higher ROI across metrics.

In other words, no reason to exclude people based on their plumbing or expressed gender identity

Lack of self control?

You don’t know what I mean when I say that people are being good and helpful and kind toward one another at all times across all days and in essentially every place across earth? To be clear, I’m not saying all acts and all people are 100% good, only that it’s several orders of magnitude easier to find than the evil in human nature you suggested via an earlier post eclipses it.

I’m picturing a skinny pimply pale red headed kid with a goodwill jewel buttoned bright and brown plaid cowboy shirt and coke bottle glasses snorting snot bubbles and with a high pitched voice choking out, ”Haha… snorfle… how about if I win you let me touch your boob… snorfle snorfle… and if you win I’ll let you touch my wiener… snorfle halunk… it’s win-win, wouldn’t you say? Snorfle snottle snorfle.”

We don’t call those men. We call them insecure twat waffles. And I, for one, don’t recommend rejecting trans athletes from competing in elite sports due to all those “boys can’t lose to girls” delicate sensibilities folks out there having twisted panties about it.

No, at least not yet. We can’t. How does this matter? The goodness of the deed is determined by the deed itself, not by the motivations of the doer, is it not? Is the impact of the positive act of goodness somehow altered by the doers motivation? An argument can be made that all actions are selfish, even altruistic one’s (bc of the nice little dopamine and oxytocin dose they hit us with). Again though, what does it matter to the drowning child if the neighbor pulling them from the frozen lake is only doing it for selfish reasons?

That’s only one side of the coin. Teaching can help shape a child’s predispositions, but the clay being molded there is largely genetic. That then gets amplified by how those genes interact with the environment (including nutrition, stress, sleep, physical attachments, experiences, etc.) across time. Just look at Annikan skywalker. The lack of shame in so many of todays politics is a large part of why everything feels so dysfunctional lately. Without trust in each other or our institutions, chaos ensues and anarchy expands. Fascism and nationalism are strong tools in building those outcomes. Kindness and respect and the medicines which cure the illnesses they bring.

Interesting. Thanks. I’d say shame is not specific to humans. On another note, you should be ashamed for thinking that answers my question. Here it is again: How many examples of human goodness would it take for you to change your mind about human nature being fundamentally bad? I disagree with that. Bring me over to your view, or clarify what would bring you over to mine.

Here’s another that was hard programmed for improved experience many years ago: https://www.scienceforums.net/discover/15/

Who’s we?

Which page, specifically? If it’s easier, you can just share the source material / citation the author used in support of this claim you say they made: … so that way I may review the original source material directly myself. “Go read this book” isn’t good enough here. Alternatively, perhaps we can BOTH save some time by acknowledging that this book you keep spam pimping across various posts maybe has nothing to do with the conversation we are having about whether human nature is good or bad. We can maybe acknowledge it’s unhelpful as a response to my question regarding how many positive examples it would take to change your mind and convince you you’re taking too grim a view by concluding human nature is fundamentally bad.

You also appear familiar with having a very thin skin and behaving in a mercurial manner.

It depends also on how one defines science. Some like me (and I suspect Genady) see it as a process of making provisional models of the cosmos and how it behaves, but in a manner that minimizes our human bias. Others (and I suspect Steve may be in this camp) tend to see it as a collection of cool facts that will “Wow!” crowds and kids and maybe if we’re lucky get engineered into the world.

We appear to be aligned then

And yet they remain even when your mind ceases to function or simply is absent The territory doesn’t require the map maker for its existence.

As your desire seems to be elevating negative views over positive examples, tell me how many positive examples it would take to convince you otherwise, specifically regarding the idea that human nature tends daily and in aggregate to be far more good than bad.

Many (most?) humans showed exemplary nature by simply following public health guidance during Covid, minimizing social encounters to help limit contagion, wearing masks properly and over their nose, and getting vaccinated once hard working scientists finally made it ready. Human nature is pretty amazing, except for those parts of our brains which crowd out the positive and amplify and exaggerate the negative.