zurew

Yeah, its fair to say that democracy is higher, however, what would be interesting to think about , is that, how useful would democracy be, back in the middle ages? I think it definitely requires a certain type of development first, to be able to even think about democracy. Sometimes, when the political sphere is so polarized most people can't agree on basically anything, even on the facts, then the development is really hard to continue. Of course, that does not mean that dictatorship would be better, but from an dictator's pov, it is better because by excluding people decision making,because the country can develop easier on an economic level, especially when every issue is radically polarized (assuming that economic power is the most important for that dictator).

You and Leo come to this war issue from different angles and with a different kind of epistemological package. Its clear that this diasgreement won't be solved here, because its a fundamental disagreement about how to even start to understand this issue, or to what fundamental assumptions one can make to try to understand. We can switch it up, and sometimes use different kind of assumptions to operate from, and to come to our conclusions. We can just use your assumption (that psychologist can remotely accurately diagnose Putin), when we do that we can come to the same conclusions as you, but it will be just one explanation from the many. Now we can switch it up and we can operate on the assumption that he is not a psychopath or sociopath or a narcissist, and we can travel this road all the way down, lets see what conclusions we can derive from this.

@hello1234 You can only use the information what you have on your table. Most people behave differently at home , compare to their public life. Most of the time real diagnosis doesn't happen without enough information, you don't see psychologists diagnosing randomly people remotely using only a handful amount of information. Would you be happy if we captured your most angry moments and we only showed those moments to a psychologist. What do you think their diagnostical outcome would be? It would be really distorted of course.

@Blackhawk Most of us here is not interested in the moralizing part, but more about the understanding part. In fact, if you try to understand our positions and our actions better, then you will realize this on your own, that we are here to understand the situation better. @hello1234 I think most of the time, its better to search for some nuance, rather than trying to explain complex situations and behaviour with one or two labels.

Here is a brief interview with Putin

What do you solve, or what can you achieve by demonizing Putin? By demonizing him, you are shutting down the understanding path. Because of the lack of understanding, we basically won't know how to handle a person like Putin. Only by trying really hard to understand him , can some progress be made into the 'handling Putin better next time" direction. Trying to understand him does not mean, agreeing with Putin's morals. No one is denying that war is bad, and initiating a war is bad, but you don't achieve anything by saying that over and over again, when others are trying their best to make sense of the situation.

One thing we can say for sure, that he is not dumb. He was a KGB agent, that in an of itself shows, that he has some brain.

Thats a fair point, that we won't ever see Putin in a therapy session. However, the reason why i bringed it up is because, we have to be careful how strong claims we want to make, without any proper diagnosis. As i have said before, this will be just one more perspective among the other ones, so we can't capitalize only on this perspective. Problem is ,that this perspective closes down the understanding expolartion because if what you say is true, then we don't really need to analyze Putin much more. But we don't know if its true or not, its just a speculation, so in my opinion we shouldn't count it out, but we shouldn't focus on it too much, and we should gather more and more perspectives.

I don't know the exact numbers how many people admire Putin for his actions, however we can see how many Russian people were on the streets protesting to stop the war. So there could be some hope, at the end of the day.

@hello1234 Do we have any psychological evidence for Putin being a sociopath or psychopath? I am not talking about his actions ,but about a real diagnosis. The reason why i ask is because it is very different when some psychologist assume, that someone has this or that, and when there is a real diagnosis of something. If we don't have any, then this claim that he is doing what he is doing is because he is a psychopath will be just one more perspective among many that tries to describe the reasons behind his behaviour.

Problem here is that to create oil we need millions of years. Yes the more expensive the oil gets, the less likely we want to use it as main energy. However, if you study this problem, you will find,that even to make certain kind of other energy sources we need oil for that. For example we use oil for mining, we need oil to gather oil, we use oil for fuels, we use oil for lot of things that can't be replaced with anything else (one of the largest one is plastic) above you can see just a portion of stuff that we use oil for. We even need to use a lot of oil just to make renewable energy. On an economic level oil is much more valuable compare to other energy sources. Almost no company is incentivised to change to renewable energy, because it would cost so much money for them that they won't shift soon. Yes we can see the electric car movement, and that will be good, but it will just buy a little bit more time and not solve the problem overall. We definetly don't talk about centuries here, because as i have just said it's gonna be a huge problem for basically the whole world if we don't pay enough attention to this problem. If you google it, it states, that we have about 47 years of oil left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves). Even to continue economic growth we need more and more energy, we just can't keep it up with just using renewables, we need a lot of oil as well. So we will probably see economic growth stopping at one point in the future, or even declining. GDP growth and energy use is related and goes hand in hand. If we will be forced to use less energy, decline will be inevitable. With energy problems will come a lot of other problem. So to go back to the original point, i don't see that Russia will have any problem not being able to sell their oil.

Do you think that, because of the oil? Because if thats the argument, Russia don't need to worry about it any time soon. The shift for renewable energy totally will take a lot of time, also a lot of money too. Right know oil is one of the best energy sources in the world and we use oil for other stuff too. Oil will be even more valuable as time goes on because we have about 40 years amount of left.

Maybe our own selfishness will be that will save humanity, who knows. Individual and collective egos will fight for their survival forever thats for sure.In my opinion this 21st century will decide this question , whether we really survive or not. However, nuclear war is just only one threat among many that could kill us all.

Do you think there is a fair chance to survive a nuclear war? Because if you take into account how everything would be damaged just by the radiation, i think its fair to assume, that even if you would be in a nuclear bunker, sooner or later you would be dead. But lets assume x number of people would survive, thanks to the radiation damage all waters would be poisned, soil would be destroyed, the whole ecosystem would die. So you basically can't grow any food and can't drink any water. The problem here is that in my opinion so much damage would be done, that it would be irreversible. In fact, one of the biggest reason why WW3 has not happened yet , is because every nation knows, that there would be no winners.

Maybe not as much as Ukraine but could be a threat for Putin in a political sense for sure. I think this speaks for itself : "Russia warned of military consequences if either Finland or Sweden joined Nato"

Nato try to debunk some claims that came from Russia, of course this is not objective, but this is one side: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_111767.htm#c102

@Tech36363 Yes, if we are talking about an average person only, then you are right. But i don't think demonizing the internet is the solution for that. Making changes in the algorithm and also educating people better may be the better option.

@Carl-Richard Yeah for sure , everything and every source has to be taken critically.

@Tech36363 Internet gives you the ability to search for thousands of sources if you want to. Before the internet you could only reach for a handful of sources and it was harder to get more perspective on things. But you have a point there, and i think the reason why some sites for example facebook made political things much more polarized is because of its algorithm. Its optimized for time on site, so the AI tries to make you stay on the site as long as it can. It figured out that if some posts make you more agressive or emotional, then you will stay there much more longer. This is not because Facebook is inherently made it this way, but they just using this business modell to make more money, unfortunately it has democracy destroying consequences. But it must be said here, that if a person is serious about an issue he can use internet to research about things if he want to. The problem is most people's attention span is short and almost no one wants to understand the problem, rather they just want to be right. Also there is the time problem, some problems are very hard to make sense of. Just as with almost every tech if you use it wise and right it can become a very powerfool tool to use.

@trenton https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/articles/different-ways-were-cleaning-up-the-ocean-and-how-you-can-help-339618 that link above lists 6 different technologies that can help cleaning water. Also when i talk about cleaning water, i don't just talk about cleaning ocean water or sea or rivers. I talk about tech that we can use to make fresh water from polluted water. There is already technology out there that can make frash water from sewage. Also i just googled it, there is a way to make drinkable water from saline water. That is huge too. With that kind of technology we could buy a lot more time as far as drinkable water goes. Right now, thanks to our low attention span, we need to find mediums that people use daily. If we target certain mediums that people use less, then it will be way harder to get any traction there. The question should be asked though what groups we want the message directed at, because different groups need a differently delivered message, to really hit home the information. Tiktok could be used to get traction and to share some links and those links would give them more information. I people use more and more tik-tok especially the younger generations so it could be very good to target that age group. Facebook is good for almost any age group, user usages starts to decline, however still a lot of people use that platform, and if the algorithm is being carefully studied how it works, and how you can make your post to be more seen, than it could be another good medium choice. You mentioned twitter. Twitter could only be used if you are famous and already have enough traction. Yes it could be said for all the other ones as well, but i think an argument could be made why the other two is easier to get more traction. Besides those platforms, some ads could be usefull too. For example facebook ads or youtube ads would be useful to get some traction. Of course this is heavy on the bank account, but if its not directed only at your bank account this could be realistic as well. I don't know, if oil companies are the best to target the oil crisis message at. It could be useful, however, some economic arguments need to be made for them, why they should hold more onto their oil and not sell it right now. Because i still believe most of these companies won't drop any tear by telling them , that the world is falling apart, and there will be a lot of problem if we run out of oil. Some smart arguments need to be made and some graphs about why holding onto oil more is worthwhile. Then there could be a slight chance maybe to make them to reserve their resources. Here is a video talking about energy and oil, sharing this video in an of itself could be powerful if it lands in the right places (Leo have already shared this link on his blog) I assume you have already heard about Daniel Smachtenberger's name, he is a big one on the catastrophic risk field. He is a very intelligent stage yellow guy, and he is a super great system thinker. A lot can be learned from him and he is doing great work and effort to save Earth.

I don't think there is a high chance that Ukranians will get tortured . Also you can leave Ukraine if you want to, that way you can go to other places where you can live in more peace. My problem here is that i really can't see how Russia will lose this war, thats why i argued what i argued and thats why i asked the question that what is the best argument for Ukraine winning the war. I can change my position here, but i haven't seen any good arguments for that yet. Fighting for freedom is worthwhile however, if the chance of winning the war is basically almost zero, i don't think trying worth losing lives.

You can add basically a few more thousand soldier and civilian into it not just family or relatives, and i agree with you, this war seems unwinnable to me. The longer it takes for Putin the more lives will be lost, and the more angry he will get to finish what he wants. So basically the question is what is more important your pride or the lives of others. Because other wars could be fought later too ,but with the suprise of initiation. Why do we think that Ukraine can win this war, what are the best arguments for that? Because it's easy to argue in my opinion that Putin is not planning to stop any time soon.

@trenton The more we study these problems , the more we can realise that everything is connected, and not just in a spiritual way, but basically every system has its own effects on other systems, and almost no system can operate and live without the other ones. I think a lot of system need to be changed almost at the same time, to really have the impact we want. Such a change can only occur if the whole world works together, because there is a lot of problems trying to solve global problems locally. Different countries in the world operate on different kind of belief systems different kind of value structure and so on. There is so much difference ideologically too and even on an economic level that is insane. Such differences make global change really hard. For example if our goal is to use less oil because we only have 40 years more left , than we can regulate the price. But if only the USA is going to regulate the price of oil and make it bigger, it will change the whole marketplace and USA will lose so much money because countries who got their oil from the USA before they will be incentivesed to get it from other places because it will be too expensive for them. So if we think about only the oil problem, change can only occur if all the countries change oil prices together, collectively, globally. This is very unrealistic for the reasons i mentioned above (different value system, ideology, spiral dynamics stages and so on). Maybe if we give psychedelics to the world leaders,than it would change some stuff up, but not in a root level. I don't know if it would be possible any time soon to give so much psychedelics to everyone, that most people would become more compassionate and would care about this situation more. Just as with almost everything different kind of substances and experiences will have different kind of effects on almost everyone. Your identity, spiral dynamics stage, your culture, your beliefs will determine how it will effect you. I don't want to write down psychedelics though, because it is one of the tools from many, that we can use to make the situation a little bit better. We can't really do so much more other than use the tools we can, so its not a bad idea, it can help, but won't solve it in an of itself. Right now i can sound really doomer pilled, but i believe we have a chance, but we will need a ton of luck for sure.We can say that we can buy some time until we change things on the root level, because this is the most realistic option. To buy more time to be able to have more time to change things on the root level. Indirect tools: psychedelics(as you have already mentioned) education/inforamtion spreading about this issues what we haven't talked enough about is using technology to buy some time and to solve some problems. For example using water cleaning technology can buy more time. This tech already exist in different kind of ways but right now we can't clean enough water at the rate we use water. So building more tech might be good too. Using money: If there would be an organization that could for example buy a lot of oil reserves, they could dominate in that field, and by buying up lot of oil it could be safe, because no one could use it up if you don't sell it. This way we could shorten the time about change, and change could occur faster because places and companies and some countries would be forced to change their system up to be able to survive. We could use the same mindset for other problems too. This is a very hard and unrealistic one , but if a lot of people would come together and put some money into it maybe interesting things could happen.

@trenton Yeah to be honest, if we are looking at it rationally, we need to be pessimistic about it, because a huge change is required in a lot of system and field to be able to survive the 21 st century. These systemic problems realisticaly, will only be solved if there is no other choice, but literally to solve them, so big corporations are forced to change. Besides that, we can talk about huge plans, but, yes they will all sound ridiculous because a vast change is required, which is very unrealistic.But that doesn't mean things can't change, more and more people think about these problems, and thankfully more rich person start to focus on it. Unfortunately, not enough yet. Just as our ego, most of our systems trying to spend as little energy as it can, so it can survive. Huge change means huge spend of energy and getting out of comfort zone. When the risk of human survivality will be an even bigger problem, at one point it will suprass the need for the current system's survivality,and then change will happen.