#1 Suppose you met, for all intents and purposes, a perfect romantic partner for you. They "check your boxes", and you have amazing chemistry, and you're compatible an a thousand little ways that you wouldn't even have known to care about.
How do you feel about this?
#2 Same, but now suppose that you found out that, actually, god-like aliens genetically engineered this person (from conception), specifically to be your ideal match.
Is this better than, worse than or the same as the preceding hypothetical (#1)?
#3 Suppose that YOU are the one that was created by aliens to be the ideal match for the other person.
You're so into them because part of being THEIR ideal match is being super into them. You're the key made to their lock.
Is this better than, worse than, or the same as #2?
#4 Same, but you were literally made for each other: your genomes were designed together to be maximally compatible with each other.
Is this better, worse, or the same as #2 ("they were created to match you)?
Is hypothetical #4 (you were made to match each other), better than, worse than, or the same as #3 (you were made to match them)?
"America keeps a __lot__ of people in badly inhumane prisons, and innocence doesn't reliably protect you from the death penalty."
This gives me pause.
I think I should be more steadfastly moral. I should be more outraged about this kind of thing happening, and the fact that is happening should influence and motivate more of my action.
I woke up from a weird, horrifying, dream. My immediate thought on waking up was "Oh. That's what Michael Vassar's and Ben Hoffman's worldview is like from the inside."
I wish I could remember more of it, and understood more of it. As it is, what I have is somewhat confused, but I have a sense of more meaning behind it.
The following it a digression into Eli's subconscious.
There was a guy who I expected of being a murderer.
I think that multiple people had gone missing in his general social vicinity, but somehow he was above suspicion by most of the people people in the town we were in.
Lately, I've been noticing that the women in movies are, well, hot.
When I was kid, I just thought of women in movies as "women."
Over the past year or so, I've become more attuned to generic attractiveness. Suddenly, it's starkly obvious that the actresses are all extremely beautiful.
Now, watching a movie trailer, the female characters read as "unusually attractive woman" / "sex object" / "person that I'm supposed to be attracted to."
When I was, I don't know, 10 to 19, I read a lot of comic books.
Most notably reprints of Claremont's second-to-none run on Uncanny X-men, and Stan Lee's original run on Amazing Spider-man. But also a wide swath of the big two and independent comics.
I weakly suspect that this had a pretty deep impact on me.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility, as they say.
You do the right thing, even when you're poor and down on your luck. Even if the world hates and fears you.
I obviously had a lot of power, of a sort, and I was something between bemused / angry / disdainful that most people around me were eg impulsively buying pretty stupid objects and not giving money to charity.
I'm pretty bad at reading documentation when programming. I often find it hard to parse even enough to orient, and steer toward the pages that are relevant to my problem. I'm pretty sure this is my biggest bottleneck as a programmer.
I think that part of this is because reading the documentation for a code base is sometimes an inherently frustrating task.
But I bet there are a few of discrete heuristics that would make this much easier for me.
What do you actually do, at a moment-to-moment level, when you go to read the documentation for some software (or an API, or a library, or whatever) that you're new to?
One thing about me: I don't feel like my sexual choices are fully my own to make.
They are also, partially, my future spouse's, and to a lesser extent, that of the other women I have loved.
Like, if I'm considering having sex with someone or not, one thread of that decision process is "Would having sex with this person do honor to my wife?"
Though not in so many words. I think I've never verbalized that question before; its an expression of an implicit feeling.
I HAVE sometimes (perhaps weirdly), mused "What if everyone I ever had sex with, or, alternatively, everyone I've ever loved, was in the same room? (Like a big ballroom.) So they could all see and meet each other."