-------- 1 of 2 -------- (Once again, this may not be the email full of answers that you were looking for, although I did make a decent attempt, via a new appr

-------- 1 of 2 -------- (Once again, this may not be the email full of answers that you were looking for, although I did make a decent attempt, via a new approach, to get my intended point across. And once again I have gotten carried away, but please bear with me.) Firstly, I would like to apologize for the tone of my prior email. I was stressed out from bugs at work, and I reacted emotionally, and then foolishly proceeded to action. Sorry for that, I will try to be more disciplined going forward. However, please keep in mind that some "tension" is often inevitable in communication, due to things like topic, differing personality types and communication styles, and so on. I promise to do my best, but my best will be far from perfect. (As an example, when I first started out writing this one, once again the tone started off "not very nicely". I also realized this in my last email, but I happened to be in the bad mood at the time so I let 'er rip). > Once again, you systematically avoid answering or even addressing my questions, and go off on another sealion meta-rant, proving my point. Again, sorry, and we continue to have a misunderstanding. My prior comment was not my "big" reply to your questions, I've simply been too busy with work. But please hear this: I give you my word that I will not only answer your questions (likely to your initial dissatisfaction), but I promise I will continue to engage with you, answering as many followup questions as you like, until we finally reach a point (and we will) where you finally understand where I am coming from. I'm not going to predict that you will agree with me about the utility of my approach, but I'm confident you should be able to understand the reasoning behind it, however flawed you may consider it. You know what, I'll even go further. If you would like, if we can find a way to have an anonymous voice call (so that we can utilize the 1000x++ bandwidth advantage), I would be happy to let you grill me for as long as we both have time. To me, this is another one of those incredibly interesting & quirky things about society: so many people arguing past(!) each other, both parties believing they understand the other person completely...but don't we both know how easily such misunderstandings can occur? Communication is hard, hence the hundreds of books on the topic. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22crucial+conversations%22+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?q=%22crucial+conversations%22+... I will attempt to quickly restate the approach I described earlier that I take to political thinking, but in a bit of a different way. If this still doesn't cut it, let me know and I'll try again. Let's proceed... > If you say your goal in life is "I would like to maximize happiness for all humans beings on earth", yet you don't consider sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, pathological lying, science denial, white supremacy, etc, totally unacceptable and absolutely disqualifying, then you don't really mean what you say. That's a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you. I will lay out a mental experiment to see if explaining it that way works better. Imagine a simple alien world, where an election is upcoming involving two candidates. Since this world is so simple, people happen to have only three distinguishing characteristics (all others are identical). To make it even simpler, I will use a technique I call "exaggerated envisioning", for lack of a better term (surely there must be a name for this, considering how incredibly useful it is, but I've never encountered it). ------------------ The three distinguishing characteristics of politicians in this world are: hair color, gender, and proposed economic system. Candidate 1: Brunette, Female, Capitalism Candidate 2: Blonde, Male, Communism So now we run my algorithm, including the scores and weighting that I personally assign to each characteristic: The formula is of the form: SUM(characteristic_score * characteristic_weight), for all characteristics. (mathematical notation is not my strong suit) Candidate 1: (75 x 0%) + (100 x 50%) + (100 x 100%) = 150 Candidate 2: (50 x 0%) + (50 x 50%) + (25 x 100%) = 50 - I have a mild preference for brunettes over blondes, but it has no bearing on my vote. - I have a significant preference for females over males (because I believe females tend to be more collaborative and risk averse, and "the boys" have kind of been up to no good for quite some time now), but I only weight it at 50%. - I have a major preference for capitalism, and this is my #1 concern, by a very wide margin. <----------- Therefore, my algorithm instructs me to vote for Candidate 1.