Do you do those things because you truly get enjoyment out of them, or are they simply your drug of choice to help you cope through to the next day?

Those are all things that can be enjoyed in a healthy way certainly, but if it’s just “wake up, work, binge internet, sleep,” every day, then I’m afraid you have a problem. Maybe not a full blown addiction, but at least an extremely unhealthy coping mechanism for some deeper underlying issues.

This is something that you can work on though. Ideally with the help of a professional therapist who can help you identify why you feel the need to cope in this way and help you start breaking those destructive patterns in your life.

You say you don’t like anything or give up on everything, but what does that look like? I assume that you don’t spend 8+ hours every day staring at a blank wall. You must do something to fill your time.

But if you are truly finding it difficult/impossible to be interested in the world around you, then your issue isn’t that you don’t have a girlfriend my dude. It sounds like you’re suffering from pretty severe depression.

And I hate to break it to you, but untreated mental illness is definitely a mood killer, and not just with the ladies. You’re gonna need to get yourself into a better place, or you’re gonna drive more than just romantic partners away.

But I’ll tell you, you’re awfully fatalistic for 35. Women tend to pretty holistically prefer guys in the 33-40 bracket. You’re not past your prime in the slightest. A little self confidence and a little investment in the world around you, and I think you’ll find that you will attract people no problem.

And hey, maybe I’m wildly off base. I know I’m making a lot of assumptions based off a very small paragraph. And maybe I’m reading you super wrong. If so, I apologize.

One thing to keep in mind though. The idea of a relationship and sex you have in your head? That’s a fantasy. Both are great things certainly, but when I was younger I feel like I built them up to be something deifying in my head. That once I had them, all my greatest desires would be met, and that life would be finally “complete” for me.

Understand that relationships are work. Fulfilling work, but work nonetheless. They require just as much “sticking to it” as any hobby that you haven’t stuck with, if not substantially more. And let me tell you, you’re absolutely not going to want to do it all the time. It requires a lot of dedication and perseverance.

And don’t build up sex to something more than it is. Its great, certainly, but I promise you’re putting it on a higher pedestal in your head than it deserves.

But all that to say, right now, you’re in love with the idea of a relationship, not the reality of one. I’m confident that you’d find the reality to not be what you’ve dreamed of it. And the problems and struggles you have in your life are rarely made easier by adding more work and responsibilities.

Take care of yourself and get to a point where you love yourself and the world around you as it is, and I think you’ll find that the rest of this will kind of take care of itself.

What about it being mandated makes it unethical?

Is it the “military” part of it? Cause I think that neither of us are proposing this as a “fight and die” thing.

If it’s just the mandate in general, would you say taxes are unethical? It’s the government taking a portion of the fruits of your labor for civic gain.

Is mandatory schooling unethical? It’s the government mandating what you do with your life in large part between the ages of 6 and 17.

I just fail to see what makes this meaningfully different from any number of things that we already happily accept.

I mean, I still prefer my pitch to yours, but I wouldn’t be sad with your idea either.

I don’t think your pitch really combats the “people won’t actually want to do the work” issue. I think in either example you’ll have a lot of people who are “just here so I don’t get fined,” as it were.

But I think you’re overstating that issue in either case. Will it have that issue, sure. But so does the military writ large. Does it impact efficiency, sure. But making an efficient, well oiled machine isn’t exactly the point.

But other than that, reading your proposal again, I kinda think that the only thing that makes your proposal different from mine is the mandatory nature of the service.

The benefits you outlined are commensurate with the lower enlisted ranks in the military, so like, yeah, that’s what I’m proposing I guess.

I think the benefits of forcing people to leave their bubbles justifies the forced nature of mandatory service. It a means of helping young people escape cycles of abuse, and exposing them to other cultures. It’s also a great equalizer, in that it effects poor and rich alike, where your system ends up just admitting poor people who are desperate (not unlike the military as it stands.)

I’d also be open to having a program option where you can defer up to 5yrs to pursue a college degree if it’s in a relevant field (civil engineering, etc) and do your mandatory service afterwards utilizing those skills. The program still pays for that college time but gets relevant use out of you at the end. This prevents people who know what they want to do from having to delay and gives them relevant job experience right out of the gate as a resume builder.

I actually kinda support a mandatory civil service? Hear me out.

First, while I think structuring it like the military makes sense from an organizational standpoint, I think the focus would be on civil works projects. Maintaining national parks, infrastructure projects like federal interstate system improvements, etc.

This would serve as a way to get a big influx of money and labor into these large scale infrastructure projects in a way that’s bipartisan. The Republicans would like it because it’s cheap and they support mandatory military service. The Democrats would like it because it’s a big public works project that creates jobs and builds out infrastructure.

I think it would also be a unifier and help build a sense of national identity and break people out of their insular bubbles. They say travel is the antidote to bigotry. This would get people from all parts of this nation travelling around and intermingling. The son of a clansman from Arkansas would be exposed to, and have to work closely with, queer people from SoCal. The young gang member from Detroit would be able to get away for a few years and perhaps reinvent themselves. The son of the billionaire will have to work hand and hand and side by side with the kid raised penniless in the foster system.

It gives people a precious few years after highschool to see the nation and not have to make huge decisions about their future careers at 16 years old. It can expose them to different fields of work, and teach them skill to best prepare them for their futures.

All in all, I think a system like this could do a lot of good, both for the people in it, and for our nations failing public works.

Why not just launch it directly but background the process so it doesn’t hang up your terminal?

Yeah, I’d be interested in how many people go to the inauguration of other countries heads of state.

Like, my best guess is that it’s a dig at, like, Gov Abbott, but I agree that I don’t think I’d expect him to, even if he was a Democrat.

I think this theory of science is so prevalent in this thread because you have to adhere to it in order to dunk on Elon Musk.

I doubt most of these ardents would have taken this position in a random thread about sea cucumbers or something.

I like dunking on Musk as much as the next guy, but the amount of double-think people are willing to commit to to do it is always pretty off-putting to me.

It’s like every ArsTechnica article on SpaceX has people come out of the woodwork to say that their accomplishments are trash and not even worth reporting because of Elon, which, like, you have to be delusional if you don’t think SpaceX is absolutely killing it.

Believing in alchemy isn’t quite the slam dunk you think it is, since at the time we didn’t even know atoms existed, lol. It turns out that people who have massive gaps in the information available to them come to wrong conclusions sometimes, lol.

You’re just restating the position that I’ve already argued a ton elsewhere in the thread, so instead I’ll ask for a moment of introspection.

Do you believe you would have taken this stance if Elon Musk hadn’t taken the opposite one?

You are currently arguing that Isaac Newton wasn’t a scientist until that moment someone found his notebooks, at which point he magically became one. You’re arguing that none of the people who did the research on nuclear physics during WW2 that led to the development of the atomic bomb were scientists, since none of that research was intended for publication or peer review.

Would you have said Oppenheimer wasn’t a scientist outside of the context of this image we’re responding to?

At this point I just feel like I’m arguing against people who are knowingly taking a position they never would have taken if not to “own Elon Musk.” It’s the knee jerk reaction of “I can’t agree with that person I hate, so I’ve gotta argue the opposite.”

Which, look, I get the hate and like to see him dunked on as much as the next guy, but it’s the definition of arguing in bad faith if you don’t actually believe the thing you’re arguing for.

Peer review isn’t typically included in the list of steps to the scientific method. Or, if it is, it’s a coda, not part of the main steps.

Dictionary.com for example lists the commonly accepted steps, and then follows it up with “usually followed by peer review and publication.”

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/scientific-method

Note the “usually.”

It’s also worth noting that there is no real “formalized” or “official” scientific method. Just some agreed upon commonalities. Any dozen science books will give you a dozen different graphs of the steps, and no two will be the same.

Absolutely agreed with the sentiment. Collaboration is integral to most scientific endeavors. Especially in the modern era. I think we’re in the same page on that point.

But, like, if the person had asserted something like, “grilled cheese is only grilled cheese when you eat it with tomato soup,” and then Elon responded with, “that’s a dumb take, since you can totally have a good grilled cheese without tomato soup,” I don’t think it’s “totally owning him” to list off a ton of reasons why you believe any grilled cheese without tomato soup is an invalid grilled cheese.

Like, we can all agree that grilled cheese is best with tomato soup. That doesn’t change the fact that arbitrarily changing the definition of grilled cheese to be “only when paired with tomato soup,” is actually just kinda dumb.

Fair enough. I’ll engage, lol.

Would you say that Sir Isaac Newton was a scientist? His research was almost entirely solo and was of limited release until much later.

Stephen Hawking has no published reproducible experiments as far as I’m aware. Is he not a scientist?

Is someone conducting research into a scientific field a scientist, or are they required to publish something before they can claim that title?

Honestly, I find arguments over how words are defined kind of exhausting, so maybe we should just cut to the heart of the matter. None of the definitions of science I can find in any dictionary include the word collaboration. Do you think that that’s a failure of the dictionary? And even if you do, do you think people who are operating under the belief that the dictionary definition is correct are wrong for doing so?

I reread my post and I’m not sure what you took as aggressive? That I used the word delusional? I didn’t intend that to be harsh, but sorry if it came across that way.

But, in my experience, arguments over how words are defined are usually unproductive because language is inherently arbitrary, so I’m fine calling it here. I doubt we’d make any progress.

I hope life is treating you well and you have a pleasant evening.

Do you also assert that my other two examples aren’t science?

If so, why?

If not, then I feel like my point still stands and don’t feel strongly enough to argue semantics over this particular one.

Ultimately this is a fight over the definition of words, and I think 99.9% of people (and the dictionary) would define all my examples as science. If you want to split the hair of saying, “that wasn’t science, it was just scientific research,” have at it, but I’ll just call you a pedant, lol.

If you aren’t saying that “science isn’t science without collaboration,” can you give an example of something that is science without collaboration? I only ask because you state that’s not what you’re saying, but follow it up with what, to my attempt at reading comprehension, is you just restating the thing you said you aren’t saying.

And I would argue science done in secret can have enormous impacts beyond “simply profits.” The Manhattan Project for example. I think it would be absurd to say what was going on there was anything but science, but there was no collaboration with the greater scientific community or intent to share their findings.

And look, of course you can be a researcher without being a scientist. Historians are researchers but not scientists obviously. But when what you are researching is physics and natural sciences, you are a scientist. That’s what the word literally means. When your definition requires you to eliminate Sir Isaac Newton, maybe it’s your definition that’s wrong.

You say you see no problem with calling an apple a fruit when broadly speaking. Neither do I. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be absolutely delusional to insist that an apple wasn’t actually an apple.

Another great example.

So, first and foremost it is important to recognize we are having a definition argument. The crux of our disagreement is over the definition of “science,” specifically as it relates to the act of doing it.

Now, obviously anyone can claim that any word means anything they want. I can claim that the definition of “doing science” is making grilled cheese sandwiches. That doesn’t make it so.

So, as with all arguments over the definition of words, I find appealing to the dictionary a good place to start. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science Which, having read through all the possible definitions, does not seem to carry any connotation of mandatory collaboration.

Now, the dictionary is obviously not the be all and end all. Words have colloquial meanings that are sometimes not captured, or nuance can be lost in transcribing the straight meaning of the word. But I think that the onus is on you to justify why you believe that meaning is lost.

And note, what I’m not arguing is that science isn’t collaborative. Of course it is. There are huge benefits to collaboration, and it is very much the norm. But you have stated an absolute. “Science isn’t science without collaboration.” And that is the crux of our disagreement.

And as to why I wouldn’t just call it “research.” First, I see no reason to. By both my colloquial definition and the one in the dictionary (by my estimation), it is in fact science. But, more importantly, if we take your definition, you are relegating the likes of great scientists like Newton, Cavendish, Mendel, and Killing to the title of mere “researchers.” And I find the idea of calling any of those greats anything short of a scientist absurdly reductive.

What makes science a group activity by necessity?

Why is one person employing the scientific method to better understand the world around them “not doing science”?

Heck, I can think of a half dozen other examples of things that aren’t published and/or can’t be reproduced but would be considered science.

If I had an unpublished workbook of Albert Einstein, would I say the work in it “isn’t science”?

If I publish a book outlining a hypothesis about the origins of the Big Bang, is it not science because it doesn’t have any reproducible experiments?

Is any research that deadends in a uninteresting way that isn’t worthy of publication not science?

I like dunking on Elon as much as the next guy, but like, “only things that are published get the title of ‘science’” seems like a pretty indefensible take to me…

See, I feel like your whole post could be summarized as, “some people’s mental illness makes them unable to work and earn money, so they’re too poor to afford treatment, and therefore the morally correct thing is to just let those people kill themselves.”

And while I don’t think that’s exactly what you meant, it’s how it comes across. Almost all of your points are some variation of who’s gonna pay for their treatment and take care of their physical needs.

And I would strongly argue that the answer is instead to have more robust social safety nets to cover those needs. Allowing people to kill themselves as the solution is hella dystopian.

But, I’m not saying that this is 100% always right. This is a hard issue with no clear answers, and I am absolutely not minimizing the pain of mental illness. My point is that mental illness is much less understood than physical illness, and I wouldn’t trust any diagnosis that said the condition could never be resolved. In the same way that I would be loathe to euthanize someone with a physical illness that has an acceptable chance of being transient, I’m loath to do the same with most if not all cases of mental illness. Especially if the person is otherwise very young/healthy.