Disclaimer: I have some meditation, observation of the mind and advaita/Zen practice.
If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your mind, exclusively. The faces of your parents, your first girlfriend, your job, swimming, eating all sums up to senses which all appear in your mind/conciousness. So it is not only that conciousness exists, it is what everything you have ever known is made of. You can claim you experience something that is outside of you, but there is no proof for that. There will never be a proof. A proof would happen in your mind as well. The thoughts of 'outside of mind' will also happen in your mind. Based on experience conciousness is the only thing that really exists.
> If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your mind, exclusively.
It happened in your brain. Whether it happened in your mind or even whether the mind exists is up for debate. As we learn more about the brain, the mind recedes and it may disappear altogether. Just like how our increased understanding of physiology ended any serious notion of the soul.
The issue of the mind suffers from the same problems that soul did. Can a soul get old? Of course not. Our bodies get old. Can the mind get drunk? Of course not, our brains get drunk. If you take psychotropic drugs, do these drugs target the mind or the brain? Obviously the brain.
There's no understanding about how "it happens in the brain". Of course that supposition is the most reasonable one when we accept a materialistic paradigm. I don't discard any explanation, but I find it difficult to imagine how a material thing, the brain with its neurons and electric impulses and neurotransmiters, can be able to generate what philosophers of mind call qualia, which is something apparently non material.
I have an experience. How my brain/hardware causes the experience? Is the experience material? Perhaps. I wonder: how? e.g.: when I see a cup, where in my brain is the subjective experience of the cup? Is it coded as electric impulses? What decodes it and translates the impulses to qualia?
> but I find it difficult to imagine how a material thing, the brain with its neurons and electric impulses and neurotransmiters, can be able to generate what philosophers of mind call qualia, which is something apparently non material.
There was a time when people said the same thing about the body. How can a slab of muscle and bones move? What is moving the body? Of course, it has to be a soul. The same thing with the heavens. Look at those magnificent planets and stars. Certainly gods must reside there and are moving them.
> I have an experience. How my brain/hardware causes the experience? Is the experience material? Perhaps. I wonder: how? e.g.: when I see a cup, where in my brain is the subjective experience of the cup? Is it coded as electric impulses? What decodes it and translates the impulses to qualia?
This is basic philosophy questions. It can't be answered by philosophy. It has to be answered by science ( neuroscience ).
Honestly, philosophically pondering about the brain/mind right now is akin to pondering about the gods/planets a few hundred years ago. Or philosophizing about where the soul reside in our body ( pineal gland? heart? liver? )
Now, we see how absurd those assumptions were because we advanced scientifically and we gained knowledge. I'm fairly certain the same will happen with the mind/brain questions.
All I know is that there is no "qualia" without the brain. Applying occam's razor, why do we need the mind? Other than as a crutch for our lack of understanding of the brain?
> There was a time when people said the same thing about the body.
Movement, electric impulses, nerves, are observable/measurable stuff. I'm not sure that your example is analogous to qualia. You suppose that qualia is material. It may be, still I find it very hard to imagine how it could be. What is our subjective experience made of? How electricity and neurotransmitters cause subjective experience? It appears that there's a gap between objects and qualia because only I can see my qualia, while everybody can see a brain or measure electric impulses.
Anyway, I like your hypothesis that it could be answered by science. It can lead to interesting experiments and theories.
> It appears that there's a gap between objects and qualia because only I can see my qualia, while everybody can see a brain or measure electric impulses.
That could be true. Or it could be true that you don't really exist and the subjective experience is an illusion. The subjective self seems to be just another iteration of the unique soul. The soul is what makes you you and the soul is why you experience things.
> Anyway, I like your hypothesis that it could be answered by science.
It's the only way we can settle things one way or the other. We can argue about gods on mount olympus til the cows come home. The only real way to be sure is to actually climb the mountain and see for ourselves.
My inclination at the moment is the mind is fiction. We no more have a "mind"( aka brain's soul ) than plants which move to capture more sunlight have a "mind".
We just have to patiently wait for science to advance to answer the mind/brain questions. In the meantime, it is fun to philosophize about it.
Your concept of brain is happening in your mind right now. You think there is such a thing like a physical world and a brain but all that is really in your 'conciousness'. Can you feel electrical signals in your brain? Or can you feel senses in your conciousness?
> Your concept of brain is happening in your mind right now.
No. It's in my brain.
> Can you feel electrical signals in your brain? Or can you feel senses in your conciousness?
When people experience certain kinds of brain injury, they can lose their sense of smell, touch, etc. Some people with brain defects can't feel pain. But after surgery, if successful, these people can feel, sense, smell, touch, etc again.
I know for a certain that I can't feel without my brain. As for the mind? As I said, it's debatable.
Ultimately, we have to wait for brain science for our answer. We could sit here and debate forever, like I did in philosophy class. But that will get us nowhere. It will be like debating whether the soul exists in the liver or the pineal gland 300 years ago.
But I think all signs point to the mind going the way of the soul. At least that's what nascent advances in neuroscience and philosophical consensus is slowly heading towards.
The mind to the body is just like the soul to the body or the gods to the heavens. It's nonsense we invented to explain what we do not understand.
But only scientific advance can put this debate to rest.
It is not in your brain. Thinking "it's in my brain" happens in your awareness. You think that there is a brain and a body and a world but all these things show up in your awareness and never elsewhere. Look outside, where are the images? Where are the sounds? Where are the feelings? In your awareness. The feeling of 'something outside me' itself is in your awareness.
Where is your awareness? Can you locate it? No because it is always everything you feel. When you move and travel awareness doesn't move. It doesn't have a location or a size or any physical attributes. It is always one field representing all aspects of your life right now.
The brain has effects on the things that can show up in awareness, but not really on the experience of awareness itself. Awareness is always the simple direct experience of things (thoughts, images, sounds, body feelings). You might not get images or get modified thoughts when you have some brain diseases, but you are always this aware field of things appearing.
Well your awareness contains: beliefs you need a car, desires to do stuff with that car, concepts of money and bank account. It basically contains your life and is not incompatible with the fact of a life happening.
All that evidence appears in the mind and assumes conciousness is located in the brain, when our actual experience is that conciousness is just the container of everything and does not have a location. You can locate your brain but can you locate your conciousness? Everything you see or feel is in your conciousness right now, even the concepts of time and space. How could you conciousness have a position in space?
... which is also a completely valid philosophical point of view! (And that is a problem with philosophy in general - unlike theories in the positive science, no philosophy is refutable.)
Just a touch of optimism here. I suffered from depression for 7 years, then started meditation. I can say I am now very happy after 4 years of regular practice. I don't really care if my brain was a bit damaged then. Don't lose hope, everyone has a big potential of happiness just waiting to be explored inside. Have a happy life!
My experience with meditation has allowed me to be more accepting of my emotions, beyond just happiness - oddly enough, being willing to be unhappy has made me happier. But there are times I am rightfully sad and I allow those feelings to be felt and let go.
Maybe for you there is a lot of untapped happiness - by all means, ride that wave if you've got it. I had to figure out that I don't have that, my ocean moves with different currents.
> oddly enough, being willing to be unhappy has made me happier.
Suppressing, fighting, and avoiding feelings usually strengthens them. By contrast, calm compassionate and curious observation will often allow them to dissipate "on their own".
Deal with bad feelings like you deal with an angry person: listen seriously. Often they just want to be heard.
I am agreeing with the other comment(s) here asking if you could explain further how has meditation specifically helped you? And what/how do you meditate?
I too feel that there's another happy universe inside my head were I to distract myself to believe in another reality. But it's just biological facts that come to maul me and digesting uncomfortable thoughts by yourself is not very efficient way of solving the issue. I am not living up to my potential and the momentary voices, although painful, are a reminder to me that I have to change something to feel good about myself. I think in the heart of it is the need for a constant validation through something, other people's love and affection mostly, that you can feel that your life is worth living.
In the sense same thing (maybe) that you can do with meditation and keep those positive neural pathways from growing shut.
I’m not a fan of meditation, but recognizing that you can actually choose how to feel can be very empowering.
I suspect that some people get locked in a catch-22 like the following:
1) Because they feel down, they empathize with other people who feel down, and find it personally important to be just, helpful, extra considerate, and thoughtful toward others.
2) Because of this, any indication of injustice or discomfort feels like a personal affront to their values and identity.
3) Any anger or pain resulting from this causes a reaffirmation of #1, and the cycle is reinforced.
Well I can tell you a story about the other end of spectrum for self-reinforcing thoughts.
I don't know if you have a social anxiety but after an embarrassing social incident you ruminate on your behaviour right? Well take that to its ultimate level and you are constantly being possessed with thoughts about not thinking about a thought that is driving you insane.
Just a small idea of the feedback loop: think about a thought. Now try not to think about it. Well you probably can do it but think that you are so anxious that you actually cannot do it. And the act of thinking about it makes you anxious so there's really no way of exiting the loop. Anxiety makes you anxious so to say and you feel fear so terrible that it makes fear you even more. You wake up thinking about it and you fall asleep.
Yeah it might not sound relatable but were you to discover the feeling that I mean. Oh boy. There exists emotions inside of us so terrible that you'd wish no human would have to discover. What cured it or well stopped the loop was distracting myself long enough for the anxiety to dissipate and not to remember the feeling (and therefore not to reinforce it). If there was a similar way to do it but for a happy thought I'd be all for it.
>after an embarrassing social incident you ruminate on your behaviour
I like to reframe this as gratitude for the opportunity to reflect on a situation and come up with ideas for what I could have done differently, and eager to find analogous opportunities to test these new ideas out. Get enough of these opportunities and do enough “social experiments” and you can become more socially gifted than most.
Generally I reframe everything in terms of its positive effects, and I’ve found that some people are disbelieving — “you can’t possibly really think that way.” But it’s fantastically effective for my happiness, and I’ve noticed that excessive irrational positivity is also quite socially magnetic.
> There exists emotions inside of us so terrible that you'd wish no human would have to discover.
This. I have this terrible feeling that I cannot explain; It is so nebulous that trying to decipher it has taken lots of time, effort, intense/extreme emotional roller coasters, and I still don't know how to suppress it.
I feel like I have literally lost several brain cells in the span of a year, lost several IQ points, lost my ability of sharp logical reasoning, analytical/critical thinking and also memory retaining power.
All that I have now is emotional instability, irritability, impulsive anger.
I'm sorry that I am pouring my symptoms here, which should definitely be dealt with a shrink. But whatever.
I have the same feeling, although it is going on for more than a year. More like three. Sometimes it feels like I had a small stroke or something like that (just as a comparison, I don't want to insult anyone who had a stroke which is a thousand times worse than what I have).
Just three years ago it was so easy to learn new things, to discover... now it feels like my brain is failing me. I have to say, I feel disabled. And I hope it will get better again. Because right now it sometimes feels hard to even hold a conversation and not forgetting what other people told me ten seconds ago. And my whole train of thought feels so... scatty, if that's the right word for it. Scatterbrained. There is a psychological term for it - thought disorder, and it's a symptom of depression, but I do not feel depressed in a clinical sense. Also my grades are still ok, at a US college it would be around an A- or B+.
I miss my "old" brain though. I'll definitely try meditation.
> Because right now it sometimes feels hard to even hold a conversation and not forgetting what other people told me ten seconds ago.
Oh my God! You just described me! I forget so many things that were told to me moments ago. It's getting harder by day because I have a job now, and it's getting tougher everyday. I have to keep in mind what the clients describe, and even if I'm jotting them down, I tend to forget what was said 5 seconds ago. For example, if I was told to do something in a sequence, I would totally mess it up. I can't perform a task in a sequence. Like for instance, if they ask me to perform a task in this particular order of A->B->C, I would do F->10->#.
I seem to have lost my resolute mannerism. I rage at everything. i rage quit, rage fight. I used to solve challenges that come to me logically, now I just approach in a violent way. Like, if someone is being a bully, kill him, if someone is doing a task ineffectively, shoot him. I have episodes of deep depression and in that time I get a lot of suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Sometimes I fear myself that, given a heated situation, if someone tells me I am wrong, old-me would have approached in a logical manner and solved it diplomatically, now I just fear myself that I would kill anybody who is confronting me. I feel like if I unleash my anger onto someone, I would go to pour all my bundled up anger of over 2 years on that person and maybe kill him; My anger is pressuring up day by day.
I feel like I have so many things to do to improve myself or come out of it, but I'm too tired, lazy and impatient. Just wanted to get these things off of my chest man. Maybe this is the first time I'm opening up to someone. I should see a shrink.
For what it's worth, you've so eloquently described what I've struggled to put into words for years, so whatever brain cells you still have up and running are probably more than enough. Hang in there.
Sorry to hear you had to go through it. I feel like I'm getting damn close to finally escaping something very similar now, after several years of it dominating my life.
It's was largely a psychosomatic thing for me. It started with an RSI that I'd had for years, then I read about people with horrible RSI problems which turned out to be psychosomatic (through Sarno et al). Unfortunately, because I was already in a fairly paranoid state at this time from various things like a recent Type 1 Diabetes diagnosis (and pushing myself to use computers even though it felt painful)—while I felt I had enough evidence to confirm that my problem was psychosomatic, learning this made things go very wrong.
It seemed to me like my mind/body were sort of attacking me and giving me the RSI, and if it's not strictly physical, why should it have to be limited to my wrists? Every semi-controllable aspect of my body started going out of whack if I were to think about it happening (e.g. blushing, sweating, etc.). The longest lasting of these was a very distinct squeezing sensation on my forehead—just like a hand were placed on top of it, in a specific position. The intensity varied with my concern about it. There were times where I noticed everything was fine for a few moments and the sensations were absent—but as soon as I'd check for them they'd immediately come back and my thoughts would be dominated about how the situation was evolving moment to moment.
Anyway, I started meditating about 2.5 years ago (spent about a year reading about it before starting a regular practice, mostly avoiding it initially because I'd tried a couple times and it would horribly exacerbate the forehead squeezing sensations), and it's helped me tremendously. It's kind of like it restored a balance in which parts of my mind activate under different conditions: ordinarily someone is anxious and perhaps even aware of it, but they don't try making it go away through thinking about it—they trust at least to a certain extent that their body/mind know what they're doing and the response there is correct, and the 'problem' resolves on its own. At that point in time I essentially never left the conscious thought mode.
I can see all those possibilities of acting in one way or the other now—not perfectly, but pretty well often times. And the more clearly I see it the more often I make the choices which make things better rather than worse—finally escaping the feedback loop (woo!).
I've got a lot of thoughts on meditation now, and they're mostly positive at this point, but I also don't think I'd have gone so far with it unless I had absolutely no other choice. And it does seem a bit scary at times (mostly just from hearing stories)—but I think people tend to be fine as like as they 'take it easy': avoid extremes. I went through an extended phase where that bothered me a lot, but I feel pretty good about it now.
Oh man, I love the delicious irony of this statement. I wonder if meditation actually helped with your ego problem or just made it stronger. Have you taken psychedelics or started a spiritual practice yet?
It has definitely helped. I'm thinking less about useless stuff and feel significantly more calm and 'out of my head'. That said, I still think about things that interest me and meditation is one, so I've got some thoughts on it ;) (And I do still think about things that are probably useless and don't really interest me—but the amount has massively dropped off.)
> I wonder if meditation actually helped with your ego problem or just made it stronger
Interestingly, I think it did get worse before it got better—but I'm confident saying it's significantly better now. Not every time, but also not infrequently, I can watch it get better over the course of a few minutes during a breath watching meditation session.
I think some about how there might be room in my worldview for something that could be called spiritual. The closest I get for now is having an appreciation for how little we really comprehend of what reality is, and I enjoy trying to get an understanding of its 'character' nonetheless (but more like in getting to know another person's—not something analyzed necessarily). I guess you could call it a reverence for the mystery we're a part of.
> Ironically, it's when we heal ourselves that we can actually be of the highest service to those who are hurting.
I think it's a two fold improvement, you stop being an emotional burden to others who worry about you and you are also more able to support them with their other worries.
And in many cases the relationships we co-create when wounded are co-dependent and so those "worriers" who view emotions as a burden ultimately can't help us anyway -- if they haven't made peace with their own despair, for example, they will never be able to make room for us and will only amplify the pain.
Once we take responsibility for our own pain, we are less drawn to hide out taking responsibility for others instead of dealing with our own. And that allows us to lovingly empower others to take responsibility for their pain as well.
Of course, we can model what that looks like, we can help them feel pain that they are afraid to touch, but once we show them it's safe to hold, they will reorient towards it quite organically in my experience.
> Ironically, it's when we heal ourselves that we can actually be of the highest service to those who are hurting.
Beautifully said. After creating my own healing, I feel compelled to give back in some way. Anytime I see a thread like this, it's a reminder how much work there is to do.
Have you ever calmed yourself down when you've been upset? Or recognize that you're getting emotional and take extra care when you choose your next words? That's the type of thing I believe your parent is getting at. This is some of the motivation behind techniques like CBT. It's not implying that people choose to feel depressed, but that one can have some control over how one is feeling when in the throes of otherwise overpowering emotion.
I would describe those as coping strategies to avoid maladaptive behavior, not changing the underlying emotional state. I find it hard to see how "actually choose how to feel" can mean anything but the latter.
Then I believe, given the greater context, that you're choosing to read it uncharitably. If your point is to search for greater clarification and mutual understanding, as opposed to argument, I think you can likely do better than your current approach.
> If your point is to search for greater clarification and mutual understanding, as opposed to argument
I don't believe those things are actually opposed in any meaningful way. Also, I think it's possible to take the principle of charity too far. At some point, it's just as much putting words in people's mouths as a knee-jerk misinterpretation.
I do meditation. I don’t suffer from depression, however. It has helped me in living a more tranquil inner life. Less anger, more understanding, not just of myself but of others as well. It has definitely fostered more human connection and the value of vulnerability. How? I developed more awareness of what I cling to, which is the source of almost all my undesirable emotions. YMMV.
I like to use Calm most times but I started out by studying Mahayana Buddhism and some advaita. I practice meditation in accordance with those ideas.
I've started keeping a sleep spreadsheet (bed time, wake time, get out of bed time) to give me some actual data for myself for exactly how much sleep I'm getting.
The plasticity of the brain is tremendous. I would not be surprised if it turns out that long-term meditation and other techniques not only reverse damage from depression completely, but eventually leave their own signature changes (which are beneficial) on the brain's structure.
Would love to hear more about the type of meditation you practice. How long, how often. How hard was it to get started and be consistent. That sort of thing.
Not the OP, but I also got into meditation a while ago, and it helped a lot with my seasonal depression. I followed the instructions from John Yates' "The Mind Illuminated" book, which I actually found from someone on Hacker News raving about it. It's really straightforward with describing the goals and techniques for each stage.
I'm wondering if I've been depressed for too long for things to reach me.
I've bought that same book, probably after reading the same post about it, but I have at most read a few pages, and managed to meditate maybe a few times since then.
The world is complete information overload for me. I currently urgently need to:
1) learn a new language
2) practice meditation
3) learn react / unit testing / ML / distributed systems stuff
4) learn basic social skills
5) actually live life a little
6) ...
I say "currently", but this has been true for years.
I've suffered and still suffer from a lot same in the past. I hope sharing what's helped me can help someone else who feels like theirs so much to do / learn, but starting never happens.
For me, it's often been a result of procrastination but, just in the past couple of years, have I began to understand the source of the procrastination. My issue was fear. Fear that I would fail learning [_whatever new thing_], or not reach a deep enough state of meditation. So, my fear was compounded with some judgement of my ability.
At the moment, I'm practicing what I call "lowering the barrier to entry" and shelving perfectionism. I used to dream of progress as the grandiose "a-ha" moments; however, the reality is that progress is made up of many small moments over time.
As much as it pains me to suggest "agile for your life," I have found some success in having a personal backlog and trying to determine what matters to me most. It's the kind of thing life coaches charge you a lot of money to tackle, but most engineers / tech workers are accustomed to:
- Decide the project's top 10 priorities
- Place a value on each
- Determine their effort
- Break each down into subtasks
- Plan a chunk of work
- Start
I would also ask yourself where your motivation lies. Is it extrinsic or intrinsic. What inspires you to learn ML or React? I struggled with learning music for a long time because it always felt like something I was "supposed" to do. I still want to, but I have to come to terms with the source of that motivation.
Living is as easy as being "here," yet that's paradoxically hard for our stimulus driven brains. I've found slowing down, tasting things, feeling textures, and listening more have made me more aware and present. If you ever feel dead inside, deploy on Friday at 5.
Finally, I'll add all of this is easier to type and intellectualize than it is to live. To me, it often feels like a constant fight of putting time into the things I value to grow as I envision myself X months / years into the future.
I'm already prioritizing / cutting things that aren't absolutely necessary. I have a long backlog and it's just discouraging to see how long the items have been on there. The truth is probably that I have largely given up on myself, gradually over many years, and it feels like it has reached a point of no return.
There's just too much negative and not enough positive. I have really fought my way through life, always with the vague hope that I could turn things around. Now that I'm getting old, things are getting even harder. Seeing more and more white hair in the mirror, skin starting to sag. And I'm still plagued by terrible anxiety and depression and an overwhelming lack of self confidence. The isolation is scaring the hell out of me. It's nothing new for me, but at my age it's just much more difficult to fix.
When I slow down, I notice how damaged I am and how little I pay attention to that and to getting better. Of course this happens because I don't believe I can fix it. I don't want to pay attention because that just hurts.
I actually started reading the book about meditation and meditated for a good bit. What I read also made perfect sense to me. My brain is super reactive and scattered all over the place, and I believe it's part of the reason why I don't manage to change. I just can't focus on anything long enough because there are burning fires everywhere, and my mind is pushed around and locks onto whatever is making the most noise.
I have random jolts of anxiety and adrenaline that get triggered by thoughts, many of them repetitive. I don't even notice usually because it's so normal and everything has been bad for so long. Many repetitive toxic memories / beliefs about myself. Basically all the bad stuff that in theory you can work on with CBT and all other approaches.
Anyway, on a positive note, I have also spent some time on pluralsight and enjoyed it. You're right about questioning the motivation - it's not really me. It's mostly fear. I'm worried what happens if I lose my current job. I feel insecure about my technical skills, and the idea about ML is mostly about proving something to myself, dispelling the self doubt. My interviewing skills are...well, abysmal. I'm basically not employable through a standard hiring process even though I think I'm one of the more valuable employees where I'm at now.
There's an amazing interview with Gabor Mate on Tim Ferriss's podcast [1] where he frames early trauma and its effect on people in later life in a really succinct way.
I've listened to it 3 - 4 times, because he has a really interesting frame of mind that depression is an adaptation to trauma we've experienced at some point when emotions where too much to digest. The psychedelic bit is interesting, but I would say less say than the content before.
> I don't want to pay attention because that just hurts.
~5 years of cognitive behavioral therapy really helped me and I cannot say enough about it. It provided me with all the tools to make emotions and life manageable.
> I have random jolts of anxiety and adrenaline that get triggered by thoughts, many of them repetitive
I think a lot of people have these. It's even been linked to lack of sleep [2]. I think with mindfulness / meditation you begin to observe the thoughts and question where did they come from, and why here and now.
> I feel insecure about my technical skills, and the idea about ML is mostly about proving something to myself, dispelling the self doubt. My interviewing skills are...well, abysmal. I'm basically not employable through a standard hiring process ...
I have multiple friends who feel the same way. Of the past 7 or 8 interviews I've had for front-end and backend work, there's only been 2 or 3 where a difficult "Google style of problem" was involved. They're out there and solvable, but do take some practice. Before I 'studied' for interviews years ago, I thought the solutions people came up with were these magical, on-the-spot sort of things. Mostly, it's just practice and pattern recognition.
I began working my way through leetcode easy problems, and worked up to solving medium. I would solve the way I was acquainted with, and then go see if there was a solution with a better optimization. If there was -- I would re-do the problem and log everywhere to understand the better solution.
What I did to get better at interviews:
- Practiced my "2-3 minute spill" ... the intro where you tell the interviewer your entire career in not enough time
- Took interviews for jobs I had no interest in (Be careful though! I took one of those because I ended up liking the team / place)
- Worked on mastering the language / environment I work in
- Did 1 - 2 leetcode problems a day, often repeating one that I just barely grasped.
I hope this helps. I feel like I was in your exact shoes just a few years ago, and still don the same shoe strings and soles now.
whoa absolutely in the same boat. So fickle and can't pin down an interest - but now I've lost most motivation to even take up interest in anything altogether.
Well, tbh I don't experience it as lack of interest, I just struggle to keep up with everything. I prioritize work because not earning money isn't an option yet.
That combined with my general depression and lack of support pretty much takes all my energy. I have a little bit left here and there, but it's simply not enough to get far with anything. It's very discouraging to start anything because it instantly feels overwhelming and I know I have more must do queued up that I'm deprioritizing to get this technically optional thing done. How can I read for hours in a day if I need to do house keeping stuff, send bills to insurance for reimbursement that are a year old, get that health checkup done, ... and so on. So much stuff to do. I don't know why I experience life like this. Everyone seems to have so much discretionary time to spend, especially if they do as little as I do.
Here's some advice from a fellow beginner.
After many failed attempts to make it stick, what worked for me was a combination of two things:
- Reading about meditation in general just to learn more about it out of curiosity, not necessarily looking for instructions. This helped create a mental model of what it entailed, what to expect, what to look for. I read different books over the years, but I really like how Sam Harris describes his experience with it in his podcast.
- This app: https://insighttimer.com/ I've tried multiple apps but this one really made the difference for me. There are thousands of meditations to choose from, you can filter by duration, and there's a bit of gamification too. Another important thing, there's no "meditation course" to follow - you just search a meditation session that looks right for your mood and the time you have and that's it. These features combined removed all the friction I always found as a beginner. At first I started with only 5 to 10 minutes every morning, guided meditation with breathing exercises. As time went by, I felt I was improving in gaining control of the experience and started doing longer sessions with just soft music as background. Make it a daily routine, start small, do your best but don't be too hard on yourself.
Meditation excerbated the anhedonic symptoms of my treatment resistant depression quite severely.
Fortunately for me, it sent me back into treatment with a psychiatrist that put me on the only class of antidepressants that actually works. (Recent studies in which they throw out everyone who does not respond to treatment, handily gaming the statistics in the process, notwithstanding.) I'm unlikely to ever see remission, but I'm definitely doing better now.
Before anyone suggests it, I'm experienced enough to know I wasn't 'doing it wrong'. Being 'stuck' in the present is how depressive anhedonia feels.
Having dealt with years of clinical depression and not getting much done beyond basic 'just in time' survival I want to say the following:
Meditation may unlock or bring you closer to the bad stuff you've been avoiding dealing with that has been making you depressed or feel bad. You need to put in a lot of work and plow through it with persistence, even if in that moment you don't feel like it. It may be difficult if you feel like you're covered in mud and darkness but there is light at the end of the tunnel even if you can't see it at the moment.
I don't want to preach and I don't know your situation but I offer my perspective regardless. I may be talking completely past you because I'm not familiar with the term organic depression, and that's ok, maybe someone else will find this helpful.
I grant there may be some mechanism that can be fixed alleviated by chemicals acting on the body but everything is connected, body-mind-soul. As far as I can tell, depression is in essence a negative feedback loop of bad thoughts that flood your brain and body incessantly creating negativity and sluggishness that further shape your thoughts and behaviour.
A depressed person may not even realize their mind may be constantly telling them they suck or they're not worthy or whatever, but that is, as all thoughts and emotions are, illusionary in the sense that you don't have to take that as your own. You don't have to associate your being or identify as that chatter or the phenomenon passing through that body. You're purer and more beautiful and more deserving of love than that.
Thoughts can have tremendous energy especially if you get provoked by or stuck to them. What prolonged persistent meditation practice (say at least 2x30 min per day) may help one achieve is a sort of mental clarity or non separateness from/non attachment to thoughts, seeing how the mind really works.
> As far as I can tell, depression is in essence a negative feedback loop of bad thoughts that flood your brain and body incessantly creating negativity and sluggishness that further shape your thoughts and behaviour.
Science have a thoroughly incomplete and yet much more detailed and nuanced understanding of depression. I suggest you look into it, if you are interested enough to have an opinion on the matter.
I meditated for over an hour a day for several years - I had long term injuries that needed me to sit motionless several times a day while I treated them, so I would get myself set up, and the meditate through the session. (It wasn't a painful or otherwise sensate process.) I'd had started meditation earlier than that, with some classes and literature in college.
I'm actually up in arms now against people who insist that mediation/yoga/SSRIs/most therapists can make a damn bit of difference in the case of actual depression. I wasted 20 years of my life listening to them, when the people those things are going to help aren't actually depressed to begin with.
> I'm actually up in arms now against people who insist that mediation/yoga/SSRIs/most therapists can make a damn bit of difference in the case of actual depression. I wasted 20 years of my life listening to them, when the people those things are going to help aren't actually depressed to begin with.
Woah, "actual depression"... hardcore!
The problem isn't other people. You are the problem. Your ego is so big that it bleeds through your posts, as if it's crying out for someone to stop it.
CBT has been shown to be as effective as Prozak. We can't outright discount the impact therapy may have. All depression is "organic" depression, such that it manifests itself physically. This doesn't persist as if in a bubble independent of all other life factors; things are interconnected, they can all fall into a downward spiral, and spring back up together.
Did you read what I posted? You're making my case for me.
Did you even read the title of the article you are commenting on?
Neither CBT nor Prozac are effective treatments for actual depression. And CBT can be very counterproductive if the underlying depression hasn't been successfully treated. If this is the case, the depressed person is being set up for failure. Prozac, on the other hand, is snake oil.
People who respond to CBT alone aren't depressed. They are suffering situational stressors and a lack of cognitive behavioural skills. People helped by SSRIs are by and large simply regressing to the mean.
This isn't to say that CBT therapy doesn't have benefit to someone recovering from depression - but that it's not a cure, it's not a resolution, it's a hand helping you back up once you are well - but not until the depression is treated first.
> Before anyone suggests it, I'm experienced enough to know I wasn't 'doing it wrong'.
Hello, Walter's ego!
You were meditating incorrectly because everyone does in the west. It's not a mindfulness life hack, and there are millennia of spiritual and philosophical background that are ignored when people claim it's simple. And as I'm sure you know, the Buddha taught that ignorance causes suffering.
I had the best few weeks of my life when I started Parnate. Unfortunately the effect petered out, and upping the dosage wasn't an option.
The US is one of the few countries in the world where you can get adequate MAOI therapy, I think, which is unfortunate for the rest of the world.
The only thing I can get where I am now is Selegiline, and even that made the doctor uncomfortable.
Ouch. The first few days on MAOIs was eye-opening: I realized what it was like for 'other people', and realized why I had felt so misunderstood for so long - I was being misunderstood :) Other people had had no reference to my distress, and I had had no reference of life without it.
I tried all the MAOIs, and ended up on EMSAM - it's Selegilene in a patch form. The other (oral) MAOIs caused such profound drop in blood pressure and pulse pressure that I would frequently get the mid-low 'roaring' tinnitus that is evidence of an event causing permanent hearing damage. I also collapsed several times. I'm getting the roaring now from time to time with the EMSAM, but I really don't have any option but to suffer the hearing loss at this point.
(Fyi: doctors - even ENT specialists aren't aware that low blood pressure - even extremly short term, acute episodes - causes hearing damage, despite a significant body of academic literature on the matter.)
I have been taking it in combination with a modest amount of Provigil and caffeine, under my psychiatrists guidance. Caffeine is a much more powerful stimulant when combined with an MAOI. IMHO, it's the combination of the three that is helping me. If I stop taking either of the stimulants, I start feeling worse after a few days. I'm not cured by any means - yet, however I'm better than I have in memory. My SO concurs, too.
(I've been on EMSAM since ~September. I spent the rest of last year going on and off all the others)
IMHO, you may want to try it in combination with other drugs. Stimulants worked for me, but I'm on the ADHD spectrum, which may have something to do with it.
I had the same experience when I started Parnate - I really thought I was cured. It was a night and day difference. I still remember just walking down the street and feeling like things are overall pretty ok and I'm gonna figure everything out over time. I remember thinking how impossible my previous state was and how it was no wonder I hadn't made any progress all that time.
I also seem to respond to stimulants only. I have tried to get provigil but that's also impossible without a sleep study and a diagnosis for narcolepsy. I have access to Ritalin but it's a bit too intense when I use it occasionally, and I'm scared of long term side effects for dopamine receptors.
I'm currently taking Wellbutrin, which works (I know because I tried to stop a few months ago and I went from depressed to suicidal), but it's clearly not enough. I could take Selegiline intermittently on top of that, but it's a dangerous game to combine these. I also take a ton of supplements which seem to do something, but the problem is a lack of consistency.
I think the consistency is probably the big theme overall - I also have positive effects from caffeine if I go over my standard daily dose, but I don't see anything that requires dosage escalation as a long term solution.
Are you taking Selegiline at standard doses? I've thought about trying it again with a higher dosage into a range where it stops being selective.
12 mg patch - it's non-selective at this point. ( Fwiw, due to it being the patch, I haven't been watching my diet at all. In a post market study of ~40,000 people over and extended period, there were two hypertensive crises reported, which IMHO, are more likely to be misdiagnoses than anything else.)
Fwiw, you may want to try it with 1-3 cups of coffee next time - it may make the difference for you. Ritalin is, well, crunchy. I don't like it either. It's less unpleasant than adderral, I suppose.
The downside of the patch? The US is the only country where a drug invented in the 60s, and a delivery system invented in the 90s, that would have cost $250/month out-of-pocket in 2014, costs $250/month after insurance. The out-of-pocket would be $2300/month. Obscene.
Same here. I tried every medication, and saw dozens of psychiatrists and therapists. Nothing helped. I started meditating daily, as well as consuming various ‘gurus’ like Tolle and Sadhguru. Depression lifted steadily over a period of several months as I learned to stop thinking about myself. I’ve been ok to happy for 2 years.
What sort of meditation do you do? I tend to do a bit of "focus on your breath" meditation for 5 minutes at a time throughout the day, but I feel like I'm missing something deeper
I have been feeling that way ever since two years ago when I first looked at the language. I still don't understand why this language has such popularity. It's really bad for the reasons mentioned. C++ is a solid language where you can do everything you want and also write memory safe code in a clean way with unique_ptr. C++ is not perfect but to me no alternative come close yet, rust and go comprised.
C++ is not memory safe, and neither is uniq_ptr. Use after move on one causes a segfault. (Actually IIRC it's UB, but it usually manifests as a segfault)
C++ is not memory safe. unique ptr provides no protection against dangling references. Besides, you cannot use unique ptr to make backreferences, which is what this article is complaining about.
- Starting something new is hard, but it can get better after a while. Be patient and maybe you'll discover a better side of your job, meet exciting people etc.
- Maybe you're not doing what you really like. Try to find what you're really passionate about and do it.
- Maybe you need a deeper meaning to your life. For me it was meditation. I needed that deeper breath in my life and it gives me a lot of joy and hope. For others it might be traveling the world, family, volunteering... Your disappointment might be asking for such a change.
I disagree. If you read the atari paper you will get plenty of details and you can infer how it is applied to electricity consumption. They were using reinforcement learning. The algorithms would learn to get a better score by looking at the screen and sending actions accordingly. Here you could imagine the same algorithm with energy consumption as a score, a set of datacenter metrics as the screen (state) and change of metrics as actions.
Errr... No. Just no. Deep reinforcement learning is not some pixie dust that magically works for any problem with a reward function that you throw it at. It's astounding how commenters on HN think this is all "easy".
> Here you could imagine the same algorithm with energy consumption as a score, a set of datacenter metrics as the screen (state) and change of metrics as actions.
What you have described is easily instantiated with any numerical optimization technique of the last 40 years. The devil for any of these problems is in the details.
It will work but, it’s a violation of terms and condition of HBO now. So it's not legal :(
> (a) You must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America (“U.S.”), the District of Columbia, and certain US territories (collectively, the “Service Area”) and have reached the age of 18, or the age of legal majority in your state or territory of residence;
Here is an example for California : https://www.eff.org/fr/deeplinks/2010/07/court-violating-ter...
> the court also found that bypassing technical or code-based barriers intended to limit access to or uses of a website may violate California's computer crime law.
If you have more informations about that, I am interested
In US, sure. But agreements like EULA have been proven completely meaningless courts in different EU countries - you can break them all you like, it's definitely not illegal. The company might stop doing business with you, but you absolutely haven't broken any laws.
It says "legally" right there in the title. I'm assuming this also takes into account EULAs and the like, that would forbid consuming the content while situated in another country.
Can be a problem if you don't have a US billing address or if your VPN gets banned, depending on exactly which service's DRM/geo-locking you're trying to circumvent.
I agree about this. I wanted to give rust a go and tried to implement a graph for a DFA. I realized it was a pain. Even in general I find rust super hard to use with the references lifetimes etc. I don't understand the buzz going around rust when it's so hard to use in practice.
I am frustrated with new languages. I agree that C++ is old and needs a more modern replacement but:
- Go is weird with no templates and no functional programming.
- Nim comes close to my dream language but has a GC and some very awkward features like globally imported namespaces.
If I had to start a new project I would probably pick Nim or C++.
I don't believe in "everyone should work on machine learning".
I worked on several deep learning models but I don't really like it. It is a very different job than software engineering in my opinion. ML is more about gathering data and tuning the models as opposed to building stuff. I have spent months working on models and barely wrote any code. It is more efficient to have ML experts focus on the modeling and software engineers use the model.
I do believe however that some experience is needed to understand what is possible and best benefit from existing tools or to be able to communicate with machine learning engineers about your needs.
I concur. ML isn't programming per se; it is experimental problem-solving with a particular dataset and algorithm. Your result may/not work well, may/not generalise, and will almost undoubtedly not contribute anything new to any discipline, even to ML. When all ML work is done we'll have great pattern recognizers but nothing remotely akin to thought. And we won't understand how they work or the best way to build the next one. It isn't AI, although it is a part of AI, just as the visual system is part of AI.
I was reading Domingos' "The Master Algorithm" several days ago and a mathematician inquired about the book. He knew a group of ML developers. His opinion was that "ML doesn't look very interesting: all you do is play with the parameters, turn the knobs, and/or change the model until something works. There's no real progress there; nothing substantial."
Rather than sending a batallion of bright developers into the ML swamp where they will largely be frustrated, learn little and contribute less, I'd be tempted to guide them into other fields.
I am a mathematician by trade, and was doing development along with other stuff (reverse engineering and security work, first in my own company, then at Google). So ...
1) I think working knowledge of ML is extremely useful to many developers, and generally under-taught in universities. See the old Joel article which mentions "Google uses Bayesian filtering like MS uses the IF statement" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/17.html). A well-rounded developer should know the basics (Logistic regression, SVMs, know some things about CDNNs etc.), it will make him much more adept at problem-solving. I suspect Google's internal push to get people up to speed is not to turn them all into ML researchers, but rather to make sure that everybody "knows the basics well enough".
So I think it is useful to teach developers about the things ML has to offer.
2) Mathematically, it seems that in ML the "engineering" side has run far ahead of the theory side. The sudden breakthrough in the mid-2000s is IMO still not fully understood - and parts of it may have been very accidental. Initially, it was thought that pre-training was the big breakthrough, but it is quite unclear what the big breakthrough was. It could be that simply the increase of data / compute sizes and the switch to minibatch-SGD explains why modern DNNs generalize well (interesting paper on the topic: https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.01240). There is a lot of good mathematics to be written, but I am not sure whether the folks at Google will write it - given the incentive structures (performance reviews, impact statements) it is unlikely that somebody gets promoted for "cleaning up the theory".
3) From a development perspective: There are a ton of interesting engineering problems underneath the progress in ML. If you look at Jeff Dean, he is a superstar engineer, not necessarily a mathematician, and a lot of the progress the Google Brain team made were engineering advances to scale / distribute etc. - so by training the engineers in ML, you also get to have better infrastructure over time.
So I don't think they are sending "developers into ML swamps"; I think they are trying to reach the point where "Google uses DNNs like MS uses IF".
I don't think your points are invalid, but I think you overvalue the data that's available and relevant to most programming tasks. And without novel data, ML can offer little novel value.
Google, Facebook, M$ Research, and perhaps Yahoo are extreme outliers. They have zottabytes of broad unstructured text data, so they mine it. Everybody else has megabytes of narrow structured data, most of it commercial transations of their products. That stuff has already been effectively mined by traditional basic OLAP methods. Most/all of the value has been extracted.
Mainstream software apps have yet to show the value of using ML. Such apps have access to very limited data of very narrow relevance. The utility of ML in such domains isn't new; it's classic optimization. Or it's bayesian anticipation. But it's not a game changer. Frankly, the use of ML in most mainstream apps is more likely to add distraction and annoyance as the computer mispredicts your intent -- like Microsoft Bob did.
Maybe "life in the cloud" will create new opportunities for smarter software. But I definitely don't want free apps making their own decisions when to notify me. I guarantee that will get old immediately. So how will this work? Frankly, I can't guess. Like Apple's iAds, programming ML into the mainstream or cloud sounds like an idea that will serve the software / cloud vendor far better than the user.
I don't know why randcraw is being downvoted here: his/her points are vital clarifications.
Humans have been gathering and analyzing data for thousands of years. We have _not_ waited for Google's latest ML or neural nets to do analyses. Otherwise I'd be carving this post onto a stone for future generations to peruse.
The valuable and understandable AI, the step that will make a difference, isn't in "big data" - it's in figuring out how to do what those humans have been doing all those thousands of years.
Think outside consumer-facing applications. Medicine, biology, geology (oil, gas, and mining), finance, transportation. Tons of data, tons of dollars, and important problems.
I work in a big pharma analyzing image and experimental data. In a prior life I analyzed social cliques from vast numbers of user transactions. In both cases it seems like greater volumes of data should lead to deeper insights. But as it happens, the amount of useful actionable information in that data was surprisingly limited.
Often the available sensors/assays failed to detect reliable info. Or the phenomenon of interest interdepended on too many variables expressed with too great a dynamic range for us to detect reliably or model usefully. (The present lull in genomics R&D illustrates this well, as do automated interpretation of signals like EEG and NMR spectra.) And the signals that we can extract are often uninterpretable or sporadic. Alas, gathering more data won't yield more signal. Given the present limit on sensor resolution, you just get more mixed signals.
The potential of all ML is limited by the depth of the data that are essential for the discrimination of subtler signals. In the domains you mention (medicine, biology, geology, other sciences) I'm convinced we need better sensors more than greater amounts of the same data available now. We need better hypotheses which lead to better ideas of where to look and what to look for. In general, ML can't help with that. Until we better imagine how the mechanism might work, our questions remain too vague.
To wit, I'm afraid that applying ML to most software apps will suffer from the same limited ROI. I suspect that most app and user data is too shallow for mining to add appreciable value, no matter how clever it is.
Most of that data isn't "big data". And most of it has been analyzed thoroughly. Sure, ML will be used to re-analyze it, but with mostly the same results. As randcraw states "Most/all of the value has been extracted."
Only a wild-eyed ML "gold digger" could imagine that there is a vein of gold in those mines. The reality is that, with few exceptions, we'll find more lumps of coal.
Perhaps I should switch from an ML swamp metaphor to an ML mine metaphor? <--Hah! Do that with ML!
I think it depends on the job. Maybe a web-developer has lesser gain from extensive knowledge in ml. But I agree that every computer scientist (whether he works as an software engineer or not) should have some knowledge of ml, there are many things in the curriculum that are not as important as ml.
As a snarky remark: Maybe i am not yet qualified enough for real criticism as an cs-student, but i don't like it such sharp destinations between engineering and theory. All the "trial an error" in ml can be a useful guide to solving the theory. Also i guess the work of Jeff Dean is quite often more theoretical as the work of an average engineer. While i feel that if we have not developed a theory behind such tools, we have not really understood them, no one knows how komplex these things really are. I think/feel this makes ml-related engineering harder than software projects with a well understood theory
I just hope there are enough computer-scientists/mathmaticians at universities (or google ;) ) sharply looking on all the progess made in ml from the engineering side and asking themselves "what does that really mean?", because thats a hell of an interesting problem.
I may be wrong, my lecture on ml is next semester ;)
Is this a critique of the human mind or a praise of AI?
> When all ML work is done we'll have great pattern recognizers but nothing remotely akin to thought
Maybe our brains too are nothing but pattern recognizers. Maybe they are nothing but chemical reactions, or energy fields. But being reductionist about AI won't help us understand it either.
What we need is models that are more retrospectable - so that you can find the rules that it learned. Most of the time they will be too complex for any human understanding - but from time to time we'll find something interesting, something that we can build other things upon.
I have never used neural nets etc - but with simplified bayes spam filters this was possible and quite useful. I used to check which words were pushing a text into one or other category and which did not (when they should).
I don't know. I know some engineers who have spent months going back-and-forth over communication protocols while barely writing any code, yet somehow their job is considered to be quite core to software engineering. I don't really see how fine-tuning communication protocols is fundamentally different from fine-tuning machine learning models. But overall, I agree with your sentiment: different things are different and appropriate for different people.
Hi arbre, would you mind explaining what is possible and what benefits from existing tools in machine learning at the moment? I am clueless and find ML rather frustrating to get into.
I meant that learning about ML and getting some field experience helps you figuring out when to use ML and how. For how to get into, there are a lot of resources and state of the art algorithms/papers/implementations are freely available. For me working on ML projects at my job and talking to some experts was ideal, but I am sure it is possible to learn on one's own with enough motivation. Good luck!
Ah, yes, I understood what you meant (and thank you for pointing to where I should look next!). I was hoping, too, that you might share your ML knowledge in layman's terms.
Absolutely. In general, ML needs a collaboration between ML expertise and application domain expertise. It's very helpful if there's someone who can help bridge those two - enough app experience to understand the domain deeply, and enough ML experience to know what questions to ask of the ML gurus and what pitfalls to expect. As I see it, that's one of the goals of the ML ninja program.
"Moving data around" is what a lot of software engineering is these days. Facebook, Google etc. are more data companies than software companies (and probably close to media than communcations companies).
Only if the world were zero-sum, which it's not. Remember how only rich people used to have cell phones, and now billions of people have them? The price of most goods is close to the marginal cost of production, which means that giving more people money may actually lower the cost of many goods (by increasing volume). Artificially scarce goods, such as an apartment in SF, may get more expensive however since their price is set by the marginal ability to pay. The good news is, you don't have to live in SF.
I guess apartments in San Fransisco already cost more than what someone living off basic income could afford, so the prices should not be driven up at all. Indeed, people living there would presumably get a net reduction in income (from tax increases to pay for the BI), so the prices should go down.
If you read the article, the BI being proposed would drop off after you began earning more than $30k and the drop would stop at $60k in earned income. I imagine a rather high percentage of people living in San Francisco already earn well above $60k annually.
I've never understood why subsidies like this almost always come with income phaseouts. What's wrong with giving everyone a basic income? People who make a lot of money would more than repay it in taxes, and taxes would have to go up on higher earners, but that's not a real problem.
The difference is you have to make more money first.
"Phase out" means middle income people receive lower benefits in exchange for higher income people paying lower taxes. It's just a code word for screwing over the middle class.
I didn't write the article and I am not for the so called UBI. I am very much against it. I am willing to be convinced otherwise, and the start of this article sounded not crazy to me, but I stopped at reading at some point because later remarks reflected enormous cognitive dissonance in the writer, suggesting they really haven't thought it through and full of baloney.
It's all the same. Otherwise, you're going to increase taxes even more for people making more than the UBI to compensate. This is simply pushing numbers around on the page - either you're getting the UBI and paying it all back in taxes, or you're not getting the UBI and not paying it back in taxes.
No, it's not the same, because the big benefit of UBI is you don't have to pay a huge gaggle of bureaucrats to verify this person gets benefits and that person doesn't.
The article proposes that we replace welfare programs, social security, etc, with this UBI. Then, at some point, it says this:
Government agencies are the worst of all mechanisms for dealing with human needs. They are necessarily bound by rules applied uniformly to people who have the same problems on paper but who will respond differently to different forms of help. Whether religious or secular, nongovernmental organization are inherently better able to tailor their services to local conditions and individual cases.
I find it ironic that this individual is for the so called UBI.
> I find it ironic that this individual is for the so called UBI.
Why do you find it ironic? UBI gives people money without telling them what to do with it. It lets the market (i.e. the people) decide what they need instead of the government.
For example, you can imagine a shelter that will provide food, housing and services for the disabled in exchange for their UBI, which doesn't cover the entire cost but covers most of it and the rest is covered by donations.
Except that the marginal cost of production will go up because of the increased competition for scarce goods, of which every single produced item has some component, not the least of which is land and labor.
So yes, there is likely an inflationary effect, but it is impossible to accurately predict.
It also depends on the net change in people's overall income as most basic income proposals include scrapping piecemeal and overlapping welfare systems.
Personally I think I could be convinced if it was essentially a replacement and thus simple to administer, but would have to be coupled with strict immigration control for the first country to try it.
The price of everything would rise proportionally to the amount of consumption added to the economy - for example, if you funded this entirely by printing money, you'd get a combination of inflation and an equal amount of money going to everyone, causing a redistribution effect on its own. e.g. if you gave everyone $10,000 of newly-printed money, inflation would be very high, but unless it's 100% or more (doubtful) a poor person making $10,000 or less before the change would still have a higher standard of living - it's a redistributionary effect.
If you actually fund this by taxes, like most proposals say, you'd probably still have an inflationary effect (since the lower your income is, the likelier you are to spend each marginal dollar), but likely not enough to outweigh the extra money.
If UBI was carried out as a series of one-time cash injections (such as QE), then yes it would simply lead to inflation as a large proportion of UBI recipients would have the propensity to spend that money immediately on rent, food, debt, releasing the cash into circulation and ramping up inflation. Spending would probably remain unchanged for middle/upper class folk who would view UBI income as negligible.
If UBI was carried out as an exercise in wealth redistribution through higher taxes on the upper/middle class, then the inflationary effects would not be quite as high, although I would still expect to see some inflationary effects as middle/upper class folk drew down spending on some durable/luxury goods, while lower class folk would increase spending on staple goods. I think the overall effect would be slightly positive inflation.
I'm upper middle class, and I can already barely afford to live in this country. What we need isn't more taxes but a more judicious use of taxes that are already being levied. An effective and workable UBI scheme would replace all other forms of means-tested social support payments, foreign aid, and expenditures on meaningless warfare overseas. In such a perfect-world version of the United States UBI suddenly becomes feasible. One may only dream.
I'm going to guess you either bought a house you can't afford or have more than 2 kids or have a lot of student loan debt. (Not judging at all) Correct?
I can barely afford to live in the US because I live in a pretty expensive part of it. I'll blindly guess that my zip code is the second most expensive one in NYC. My thesis is that you (and I, and my family, and everyone else who has ever lived) live only once. I refuse to live a gazillion miles away from work while wasting countless hours of my life commuting. This costs me, as the most desirable areas of Manhattan are also the most expensive.
To be able to afford such a lifestyle, I have to make a considerable amount of money. This leads to my family being ineligible for any kind of freebies from the government. We're forced to look on while other families receive handouts in the form of food stamps, free school lunches, free healthcare and subsidized housing. Many of those families cheat the system by finding loopholes in eligibility criteria. They sneak through and enjoy significant free comforts on my dime... and that of every other taxpayer in the country.
So yes, I can barely afford to live here because I'm being taxed to the gills while freebies are flying to countless others who don't deserve it. I'd much rather cancel the whole rigmarole and just flat out pay everyone the same basic income every year. At least my family will get its fair share of it.
That's interesting. My employer is also based in Manhattan. I live in Minnesota. I live in a 4-br home that costs me $800/mo including taxes in downtown Minneapolis. I go and work in Manhattan once every 3-6 months for a week or so. I could never live there though; I would be throwing my money away. I like certain aspects of NYC, but not enough to take such a paycut. There have been a lot of studies that show that what kind of home or city has almost no bearing on your happiness. You might reconsider.
Also, seriously, if someone is on food stamps or their kids are in the free lunch program, they are not advantaged, they are not comforted: they are living on the edge. Trust me.
On the other hand, I live in subsidized housing. The mortgage interest deduction is the largest (in terms of $) subsidized housing program on earth.
Price of goods with limited supply will rise, where the price floor is mostly determined by how much people are willing to pay.
Price of goods with unlimited supply, where the price floor is determined by cost, will not rise.
Although everything kind of fall somewhere in between the two extremes -- rent will probably go up, whereas food not so much. And many things will not be affected because poor people will not buy them with or without BI.
The whole concept of countries creating way too much currency to pay their bills is a good reflection of this -- Zimbabwe and Venezuela being two recent and current examples. The irony is that all of that "extra" money actually means the recipients become substantially poorer as the supply chains get fucked up.
If it is just a little extra injection, the outcome would not be as extreme. In the most general cases, my guess is somewhere with a tight housing market would see a lot of the money just flow to landlords, in a renter's market the money might flow to consumable goods like drugs and alcohol.
If social & welfare programs are removed in exchange for BI, it is possible all the money would just have to be spent on medical and education. I don't really know the math behind everything but it could just be a restructuring of things that are already occurring. Do extra marketing and "profit" costs exceed government waste? Who knows. Certainly the ability for the government to influence social behavior would be reduced by a lot.
If UBI seems possible to pass within 5 years, that will be signal to ramp up investments in low-end rental properties. You have to do it before it's certain to pass (else the purchase price runs up), but I can't see anything happening to rents other than a sharp move up.
I still don't understand this argument. The vast majority of people who would receive the UBI are not homeless. They live somewhere now. Why would the same number of people suddenly demand substantially more housing?
Have you ever counted the number of families that live in a single low-end housing unit? It's not uncommon for it to be 2 or 3 in more expensive areas. If those families each get $20k/yr in UBI, many of them would be looking to move out on their own.
The families who live two and three to a housing unit are the ones who qualify for as much existing welfare as the UBI would provide. It would be trading food stamps for cash but you have to expect most people are still going to buy food.
Replacing housing assistance with the equivalent cash might even reduce rents because then people can decide they would rather live in cheaper housing and use that money to go to college.
The whole thing with a UBI is that unless you make it more progressive than the existing system, all you're really doing is replacing vouchers with cash. If you do make it more progressive (i.e. provide more cash than you would have provided vouchers) then you get the same economic consequences as providing more vouchers (i.e. possible price inflation), but it's still more economically efficient than providing more vouchers, because then people can choose between college or better housing or better medical coverage etc., instead of having the government decide for you.
If everyone is given money for a specific product and suppliers are universally aware of exactly how much people can spend on that product then, yes, that can happen.
However, under UBI, I think suppliers of goods and services would still be faced with the basic issue of not knowing exactly how much consumers value any given product and competition would still exist so prices would likely still be set by supply vs demand.
Consider a society with 2 members, Mr Rich (net worth $10M) and Mr. Poor (net worth $100). Mr. Rich is 100,000 X richer than Mr. Poor right now.
Institute a ridiculous UBI of $1M/year for everyone. At the end of the year, Mr. Poor has $1,000,100 and Mr Rich has $11M but Mr Rich is now only ~ 11 X richer than Mr Poor.
Now sure cheeseburgers at Micky-D's are now $700 but the fact has changed that before, Mr Rich could buy a hundred thousand burgers for every one Mr Poor could buy. Now he can only buy 11.
UBI works like gravity. Continually pulling the unequal towards a center. The rich will still stay rich, but unlike today where rich automatically makes richer, the force will be reversed. It will take "energy" to stay rich.
But what if Mr. Rich was rich because he owned a McDs? Now he's selling burgers for $700, and rolling around in his money like Scrooge McDuck.
Prices go up for two reasons, when they can and when they must. Which one do you think would be the factor here?
* Note, this is specifically in response to the parent's scenario - I actually doubt that a UBI like the one in the article would lead to appreciable inflation, as the current entitlement plans already spread around more money than this would.
I think the most popular opinion around here is that once Mr. Poor is liberated by the UBI from the impossible treadmill of minimum wage working-poor jobs and a legal system that is outright hostile to those of lesser means, he might make a few burgers of his own and compete with Mr. Rich's defacto monopoly instead of being his near-servant at his former Mcjob.
Well that's the question, isn't it. What are the (un)intended consequences of forced leveling of inequality? Especially automatic and predictable forced leveling.
Right now, it seems that Mr. Rich eats as many burgers as he wants (which isn't many really) while all of the Mr. Poors who would be happy to eat them if they could afford them, and happy to make them if someone would buy them (and then could afford to eat them themselves) sit around hungry because there's a recession donchaknow.
Its almost as if the mass of Mr. Rich's on-paper money is blocking the natural signalling between the makers and the eaters so the cycle jams up. It seems like something that needs fixing. So how?
I didn't really see any weighing of the proposition here, just motivated reasoning. Such a one-sided view is especially scary because, at least to me, the cons for this are pretty apparent and serious.
What's one big negative of funneling even more money into the government? Further centralizing power in the government, which definitely cools my own fever to implement UBI, and definitely warrants some careful consideration. Since trust in government seems to be at an all time low, this point probably deserves some addressing [1].
For one, theories of economy were created in order to better serve the people's needs and wants using scarce resources - if they can be demonstrated (as in western Europe) to represent very large increases in the hedonic calculus, they are objectively superior. For two, a liberal democracy's functioning is premised on a degree of middle class participation: a large group of people with sufficient assets that they have a stake in the future (beyond entertainment value), but insufficient assets and numbers too great to corrupt the system towards their own ends.
> if they can be demonstrated (as in western Europe) to represent very large increases in the hedonic calculus, they are objectively superior.
The only way this could be true is the extraordinarily unlikely case where every individual provably had better experienced utility in one system than another, otherwise, the fact that there is no one objectively correct method of aggregating utilities across individuals to get a single measure of societal good means that there is no objectively correct ordering.
Only if the government added money to the system without removing it elsewhere.
Any sane policy doesn't involve just printing money and giving it to people. It involves taking that money from someone else, through taxes, and THEN giving it to people.
The current government deficit is more than 500 billion. We can't currently pay for current government spending - not sure why you think the government would try and pay for a huge new entitlement when the political firestorm from that would probably kill it.
Take a food stuff. In theory the current price is the cross section of supply and demand (price equilibrium), your idea is that with BI we have just increased demand while supply remains unchanged naturally price equilibrium changes resulting in a price increase. However, with a growth in demand, the market should respond and supply should increase to meet the increased demand, thus readjusting price equalibrium. Obviously this is for a food stuff not something more finite like housing.
Still food stuffs or housing, we don't really live in a free capitalist market as much as we would like to believe. There are many government subsidies artificially impacting current supply/demand/price. One example, farm subsidies where farmers are paid to not grow crops/farm their land (~$1.3B/year). I think its ridiculous, but economists more knowledgeable than me (even if on the farmer's dime) argue its necessary to keep supply artificially low to keep prices artificially high otherwise the entire industry would fail and we would all be starving.
Assuming BI did have such an overall impact on the prices of everything or even just the basics (food stuffs, housing, gas, etc...) there are all types of mechanisms the government currently employees to artificially raise and lower prices and special interests won't be going away with BI.
The Murray UBI plan is paid for in part by eliminating agricultural subsidies. So any stabilizing effect of these subsidies would go away. Would food producers keep their prices high, since each consumer has an extra 10k to spend? Or would prices collapse as growers, with no incentive to leave fields fallow, flood the market with cheaper food?
Not sure why this person is being downvoted. It seems like a perfectly logical question. If there's a good answer for it, people should be posting that here instead of downvoting.
Allowing anonymous users would be great. For example I would like to create such a group/space for my family even though some of them do not have google accounts.
If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your mind, exclusively. The faces of your parents, your first girlfriend, your job, swimming, eating all sums up to senses which all appear in your mind/conciousness. So it is not only that conciousness exists, it is what everything you have ever known is made of. You can claim you experience something that is outside of you, but there is no proof for that. There will never be a proof. A proof would happen in your mind as well. The thoughts of 'outside of mind' will also happen in your mind. Based on experience conciousness is the only thing that really exists.