#Bayesian thinking

[usunezukoinezu]

''For Bayesianists, the world is in shades of gray. The reasons are as follows:

No one can predict the future in this complex world.

Everything is changing with the passage of time.

Even with the aforementioned uncertainties, the world is difficult to predict precisely, but we can still use probabilities to describe it.

From the perspective of worldly success or failure, winners only need to gain a relative advantage locally to surpass their competitors. Therefore, many winners can succeed as long as the probability of winning is a few percentage points higher.

Cognitive and judgment processes based on probability are a continuous approximation and evolving process.

The acceptance and understanding of uncertainty are at the core of Bayesian thinking. We need to embrace the uncertainty of things and use probability to describe and comprehend it.

Faced with uncertainty, Bayesian thinking encourages us not to fear making mistakes, to try new things, learn from failures, and adjust strategies. This aligns well with the process of personal growth.''

-crypto_chanshi

[max1461]

War man goes to vietnam and kills innocent women and children it harms his psyche and the level of adrenaline in his nervous system causes improperly weighted bayesian updating in the neural inhibitory response he comes home and yells and hoots and hollars at the restaurant embarasses his wife when the server comes and he says youll never take me alive viet cong and runs out the door. They divorce he lives on the street psychologist says you have ptsd we used to call it shell sock. Pyschologist says your flashbacks are triggered by people saying hi and shit. Young woman comes to the psychologist shes bullied and shit the other girls tied her up in the basement and called her ugly. pyschologist in 1980 says your like that soldier guy becase your nervious system. And your triggered by women that you think are attracytive. Pych says take these pills its the internet year two thousand and they say im gay I was shoved in the lockered and the bullies called me a fag the other website man says your triggered like a vietnam war big time killer. Fuck man im trigger by them calling me a faggot on the web but its the water I swim in. its 2010 and theres femininsm in the video games and some young women on the new twitter say it can trigger people to call them a gay fag all day. but some young men don't like feminsm in their video games it makes them upset in themselves and all frustrated so they say your triggered, are you triggered lib your a triggered lib. Well some clever guy one of the cleverest ever to live says more like your a triggered conservative lol your a triggered trumpter. Well now your calling them triggered and there calling you triggered and now its 2025 and im watching a video about small apartmerts in japan and the guy says "wow a lot of people in the comments are triggered by small apartments apparently" their triggered like a major vietnam killer. their triggered like the guys who did my lai and shit.

[sleepynoons]

nagumo yoichi x gn!reader, sfw, not beta read

cw: slight suggestive content, explicit language

notes: wait if you catch several typos/grammar mistakes, that's not on me, that's on ellipsus for constantly glitching out today and preventing me from making edits. this is a drabble, too, and i don't proofread those oops. anyway, i thought it'd be funny if nagumo also got into a relationship the same way sakamoto and aoi got together. i also think it's hilarious that the npcs in this series don't give a fuck lol. nagumo also comes off as weird af at first LMAO wait this was kinda meant to satisfy my belief that nagumo has a sleeper build iykwim - wait i'm realizing there are several references + tidbits in this piece so it'd be funny if y'all catch anything hehe

"WELCOME!"

greeting customers is arguably the least rewarding thing about your job. most people who walk in ignore you, some even look annoyed, and you hate public speaking in the first place. you think you lose five minutes of your life every single time you raise your voice, and those five minutes have probably accumulated to years by now.

you sigh. it can't be helped. another part-timer recently quit, and you can't possibly let the manager of this convenience store, an elderly man in his 60s, take on additional night shifts when he's already handling the early mornings.

besides, there are some pros. since the store is located near a university and a residential area, there are familiar faces. there's a group of computer science students that often drop by, and they play the occasional harmless prank on you. there's also that mother-daughter pair that buys frozen taiyakis every saturday as a reward for the daughter for finishing her weekly violin lesson. and perhaps the most intriguing of them all is a man that pops by every three days around midnight.

he wears the same tan trench coat, along with a loose patterned button-up and black pants. before winter set in, he always went straight to the freezer to fish out a popsicle, bar already in his mouth as he walked over to pay, but in the past two weeks, he's been opting for a cup of hot coffee and small packets of candy instead.

it seems he's craving sour gummies today. with a swift swipe of your arm, you grab and scan the barcode on the back of the plastic bag, and type in the amount for his drink.

"your total's ¥600."

"no discounts for your most loyal customer?"

startled, you freeze, determined to avoid eye contact. you've had conversations with other customers before, but never with him. he's always left as quickly as he came, so you're caught off-guard by this unexpected interaction.

"u-uh, not this time, sorry. i can ask the manager if we have a loyalty program, if you want."

the man hums as he nods happily and hands you two ¥500 coins. his unbothered smile unnerves you a bit, so you count the difference and return the loose change in personal record time.

but he doesn't leave, and instead, asks, "any thoughts on getting hitched?"

your spit-take's almost comical, but the absurdity of the situation takes precedent. "w-what now?"

"one of my co-workers recently got married to a convenience store worker, so i'd thought i'd give it a try, too!"

you're practically shaking from how anxious and overwhelmed this person's making you feel. it doesn't help that he's clearly not disturbed at all, which almost makes you doubt your own ethics and gut instincts. but, the more you think about it, the more you're sure there's something wrong with this man and not you.

"i-i, uh, well, i'm not interested in-in getting married right now."

"oh, that's a shame! guess i'll try again tomorrow!”

–

you wake up with a jolt, almost knocking the crown of your head into nagumo's chin. though, of course, there's no actual need to worry about that.

"hm, what's wrong?"

with a workbook on bayesian statistics in one hand, a pen resting on his ear, and his other arm folded behind his head, he looks down at you curiously. despite having just woken up, your head's never been clearer, and you sit up between his legs before looking behind your shoulder and shooting a glare at him.

you ask, "can i punch your face?"

nagumo laughs, probably already imagining your futile attempts. "sure! but can i ask why?"

"i dreamt about our first conversation, and it reminded me that you're kinda fucked up."

your boyfriend chuckles more, amused by your moral qualms. "you could say that."

the thought that your relationship is weird has never left you. you're (still) a simple convenience store cashier, and nagumo gets filthy rich by murdering people. you were never that interested in the world around you, having been too busy paying back student loans and applying to other jobs throughout your early adolescent years to care about other things, so when he told you about the JAA and the establishment of the assassin industry as a whole, you were shocked. but that's always as far down into the rabbit hole as you let yourself go.

from this view, with nagumo spread out before you, he doesn't look dangerous at all. if anything, he resembles a nerdy graduate student, thanks to his obvious passions for mathematics and reading. moreover, his short-sleeved t-shirt exposes his tattoo-riddled arms, and the bottom of it has ridden up, giving you a pleasurable view of his hip bones and happy trail. in fact, when the two of you got into bed together for the first time (don't ask how he succeeded in seducing you), you were surprised by his physique. his outside clothes certainly don't do his abs or biceps justice.

anyway, the point is, he looks like your fantasy of a dreamy, hot, geeky boyfriend, not your local professional hitman-for-hire.

you sigh. you're not going to punch his stupidly attractive face. you lie back down onto his chest, burrowing your nose into the crook of his neck. you do let yourself get away with a pinch to his cheek.

then, you mutter, "don't hurt me."

"i won't," he chirps.

nagumo presses the knuckles of his free hand into the knots around your shoulder blades and flips his book back open.

he knows you mean more than in the literal sense.

[kaurwreck]

mori speaks sincerely only around chuuya, because chuuya fought the port mafia to protect others from the old boss's reign of terror, and because when the sheep fell apart, chuuya did not blame them for being scared children, but asked mori to teach him how to lead.

kouyou speaks warmly to chuuya, likely in no small part because when she met him and told him she would take him to a negotiation, he fretted over whether he could reach others.

verlaine survived enough to be given a second opportunity to be a person by rimbaud because despite all that verlaine did to him, chuuya recognized his loneliness was ferocious love yearning, and he honored that love in verlaine.

chuuya is so special and so powerful, not because he has a storm inside of him, but because he's disciplined and self possessed enough to tame it within himself, uncertain enough to question himself, and discerning enough to know when to act and when to restrain himself.

the port mafia's leadership is wrapped around chuuya's finger; it's deranged. mori canonically unmasks around chuuya, kouyou mentored chuuya, verlaine would kill and die (and has done both) for chuuya. ace is dead.

[catboysooyoung]

Why I Find Soleum & Saheon Fucking Hilarious: a yapfest

I talked about this with my good friend Carrot today, who mentioned how it's a bit silly how Saheon, someone who's supposed to be dangerous, is utterly terrified of this harmless guy. Meanwhile Soleum, despite being a self proclaimed coward who is fully aware of how dangerous this guy could be, has so far, still remained coolly in control.

And I said that it's because they're having the funniest standoff ever, that it's like I'm watching a nature documentary whenever I see them.

Kim Soleum, the clever, benevolent "prey"

Kim Soleum constantly acts like he's a cornered prey animal inside, but he's someone who is naturally quite levelheaded, and is someone who makes it a habit to take several steps back, internalize and rationalize things a lot before acting. Combine this with his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Darkness Exploration Records and Baek Saheon's character settings, and you basically get a wild animal wrangler (the wild animal being BSH haha).

Kim Soleum fully knows of how dangerous this guy gets (after all, he was called Viper for a reason), has seen it firsthand, and knows that is barely the tip of the iceberg, but he also knows of Baek Saheon's mentality and is familiar with his behavior. He's even mentioned this before, in chapter 92, mentioning how he was starting to "miss" Baek Saheon, because at least the guy was very predictable. Lmao

Thus, BSH here is a danger he could easily "handle" and confidently contain, perhaps even going so far as taming and keeping him on a leash for his own use. And all he needed to do here, is to give him a taste of his own medicine, which is to act even more unhinged than Saheon, that is, to out-freak the guy, convince Baek Saheon that he is, in fact:

A threat (stronger and/or more capable than him)

Someone who cannot be reasoned with (due to his posturing as a "deranged dopamine junkie")

In short, you could say that Soleum is a "prey" with Bayesian Mimicry. He makes himself seem more dangerous than he really is, in order to fool the "predator" to avoid being eaten.

Of course, he naturally succeeded, rendering the "viper" into a simple garden snake, taming and containing him. And this is precisely because of how Baek Saheon operates.

Baek Saheon, the not-so gutsy predator

Baek Saheon, unlike Kim Soleum, seemed to have been reared to be a natural, opportunistic predator. He may not be at the very top, but he's the type to slither around, waiting for the most opportune moment to strike at his prey. He's got incredible survival instincts. (Not just anyone would think of knocking out somebody's eyeball to survive, let alone have the ferocity to do it.)

Saheon is someone who acts on these very instincts. They are what have kept him alive so far, after all. (And had Soleum not intervened, or even shown off that spare eyeball, he would've walked out of that Darkness, assured that he's done the best he could to survive that, and it would've bolstered his confidence enough to surpass everyone else and earned him the top recruit position.)

To Saheon, it was natural to rely on them. This is not to say that he's incapable of thinking more thoroughly, but more of... The fact that Saheon has a more... Hands on approach than Kim Soleum. He relies on his senses and experiences and he's always on edge and in survival mode. What's more, he doesn't have all the background knowledge like KSE.

You know how people say, if you see a snake where it shouldn't be, you should always just assume that it's venomous and maintain proper distance? Because even on the off chance that it wasn't venomous, you'd inevitably react with more caution and would not approach it so recklessly. So in Saheon's POV, it doesn't matter that there's an off chance that KSE isn't really the freak he's made himself out to be. There's still a huge chance that he really was, and as Saheon (subjectively) had not had any evidence to prove otherwise, he would remain thoroughly cautious of Kim Soleum, branding the guy as "someone dangerous" in his mind. He wouldn't risk it. Much. It was natural to submit to stronger people, at least to a certain point, you can't really fight them head on.

Granted, this doesn't mean he's been completely tamed/cowed. Like I said, BSH is like a snake in the grass. In contrast to Kim Soleum, he adopts a more aggressive mimicry, where he feigns meekness and weakness in order to let his "prey's" guard down, aiming to strike when they're down. To be clear, he doesn't do that to just KSE, but everybody. In fact, he's done it since episode 2. He's not as meticulous in performing it though, seeing that he's already clocked by Go Yeongeun and Lee Seonghae.

And the moments he tried to "strike" KSE down, were when he was convinced that KSE was in a 'vulnerable' enough of a state to be retaliated against. Baek Saheon is not too reckless, he just acts on instinct and calculates the risks and rewards of each action, then he charges forward immediately.

[collapsedsquid]

Here’s what I think is happening. The case for imminent AGI more or less reduces down to the notion that creative problem solving can be commoditized via large model based technologies. Such technologies include language models like the GPT family and Claude, the diffusion models that produce art and others. The thesis is that these models will soon be able to solve difficult problems better than humans ever could. They will be able to do this because of the “bitter lesson” that the “secret to intelligence,” is, in Dario Amodei’s formulation, scaling up simple objective functions by throwing data and compute at them. We will soon live in a world where “geniuses in a datacenter” can conduct fundamental research, solve the aging problem and propel us into a material paradise like that in Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels. Under this theory, we should prioritize building AI over solving other problems because AGI (or whatever you want to call it: Amodei doesn’t like that term) will be a superior and independent means for solving those problems, exceeding the problem solving capacity of mere humans. Thus, for example, both Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates say that we should build lots of power capacity to fuel AI, even if this has short term repercussions for the climate. In Schmidt’s summation, human beings are not going to hit the climate change targets anyway, “because we’re not organized to do it.” Hence, the better bet is to build out the power infrastructure for AI, to build automated systems that are better capable of solving the problems than flawed human social institutions.

There's a weird thing where we've created these text generators and even if they are fiendishly complex and intelligent they still aren't what was imagined previously as "AGI," they aren't building a perfectly updating bayesian model of the world or something that they can be used to change outcomes with ruthless efficiency. And I feel that tech people are still running their "AGI" playbook like they are.

[ceescedasticity]

I don't think anyone should say "anyone can learn to make [representational] art if they put the time and effort into it!" unless they would say the same of accounting, multivariable calculus, and Bayesian statistics.

[triviallytrue]

What is rationalism and why are some people adjacent to it or adjacent adjacent to it?

extremely abbreviated version: rationalism is a name given to an online group who are interested in both trying to think more rationally with bayesian reasoning and the potential impacts of artificial intelligence.

over time this group became something of a beacon for STEMy autistic types and people who like the social norms created by those types, but many people socially connected to rationalists were not particularly interested in bayesianism or AI, so the term "rationalist adjacent" came out as a way of saying "well i like the people but i'm not sold on the ideology." and then we entered on a treadmill where people kept adding more -adjs to rat-adj. and here we are

[canmom]

i probably would call myself a consequentialist, but not a utilitarian. my objection to utilitarianism is similar to my objection to the absolutist Bayesianism practiced in That Subculture: it's a philosophy that claims to be based around a certain computation, but actually performing that computation is completely intractable. there's no way to actually update your probability assignments of all possible statements in response to new information, any more than it's possible to aggregate the total happiness/suffering/whatever across the entire future for each imaginable course of action.

so this calculation is entirely notional. what you're actually doing is coming up with verbal arguments and vague heuristics for how you think this notional calculation would work. perhaps it's as good an entry point as any. but the supposed mathematical rigour is just rhetoric! you can talk about utilons this and QALYs that, but there is no way to calculate this shit, it's just a mathematical coat of paint.

the second objection is the 'seeing like a state' objection (or seeing like a company/NGO): the 'utility function' is a construct used to make economic models. it doesn't model humans particularly well, who have a variety of competing impulses that don't lend themselves to nice formalisms. and to demand that you should live according to a utility function is accordingly to strip the world of its complexity to make it more tractable. instead of specific people with specific desires and needs and relationships into which you fit, which aren't necessarily commensurable, you have abstract fungible units of pleasure or suffering or whatever else you're trying to optimise.

this worldview appealed to me as a teenager. I imagined that you could model an agent as a some kind of surface between it and the world - a sphere, perhaps, inside your head; the course of your life would be the movement of particles in and out of this sphere, and theoretically there would be a pattern for every instant of time that would lead to the best possible impact on the world, solving 'life' much like a tool assisted speedrun solves a game. the goal would be then to approximate this optimal run as much as possible. then I'd think of problems with this model: couldn't you just spawn high energy photons on the sphere to melt shit like a laser? we'd have to put some restrictions on it, obviously. what if the optimal run was really close to a harmful run, so a small mistake would lead to disaster? perhaps you'd be better to find a stable local maximum instead. and so on.

I'm not sure what good it did me to imagine this funny (or if you prefer, terminally STEM-brained) thought experiment, but it was very nice and mathematical-looking, and back then I really wanted my philosophy to be impossibly demanding for some reason. some weird combo of depression and autism and a self image very much dependent on being told i was good?

these days my feeling is that the pretense of mathematical rigour where it doesn't exist is untrustworthy, and particularly where people are concerned, abstracting too much loses important information. I'm not a court of law where strict consistency matters for the sake of stability or whatever, nor a government trying to figure out which levers to pull to create the ideal society - I'm an organism embedded in a bewilderingly complex system, and I can take each situation as it comes. treating the people I interact with well is important to me. I still sometimes think along utilitarianish lines sometimes - particularly 'this person could use this money more than me' - but I make no pretense to rigour or optimisation with it.

[max1461]

Bayesianism vs. frequentism... let's put these guys through a quick and dirty test on the basis of the physicalist nominalist structuralism thing that I think.

I sincerely doubt something like a measurable, quantitative "degree of belief" is cognitively real. Can you point me to the "degree of belief" in your brain? No. Bayesianism is out. On the other hand, you can't do infinitely many trials of things, at least as we currently understand the laws of physics. So the limit of a bunch of trials? Not real. Point at it. Not real.

But frequentism is closer. If I took every event in past and future history, and made a big list which ones count as "a coin flip" and which ones don't, and then looked at just the coin flips and, well, I bet about 50% would be heads and about 50% tails. Not exactly but about. That's what probability really is, I claim confidently in this post, it's literally just a proportion of two finite numbers. All the infinity shit is just an approximation. It's evident that the "true" probability of a coin coming up heads is not 50%, it's slightly different. Because if you count up all coin flips in past and future history it's not exactly 50/50. Saying it's a 50% probability is just an approximation, you don't have to do philosophical contortions to make it literally true.

Infinities just approximate large numbers well. Maybe some infinities are actually real, that's a question for physicists. Well for those I don't know.

[kaiasky]

i think if i was gonna rationality post, my neorationality corrective to the immortal science of bayesianism-kahnemanianism it would be that one should qualify one's beliefs on a two-spectrum axis, the standard credence (as determined by the odds you would accept in a bet with an atemporal all-knowing demon, as is the fashion), and the importance, as determined by the amount of utility an atemporal all-knowing demon (as is the fashion) would have to give you in exchange for magically changing your credence of that belief.

mostly i would do this so people would go around posting like, "epistemic confidence in this claim: 80% or a large pepperoni pizza"

[blubberquark]

Things That Are Hard

Some things are harder than they look. Some things are exactly as hard as they look.

Game AI, Intelligent Opponents, Intelligent NPCs

As you already know, "Game AI" is a misnomer. It's NPC behaviour, escort missions, "director" systems that dynamically manage the level of action in a game, pathfinding, AI opponents in multiplayer games, and possibly friendly AI players to fill out your team if there aren't enough humans.

Still, you are able to implement minimax with alpha-beta pruning for board games, pathfinding algorithms like A* or simple planning/reasoning systems with relative ease. Even easier: You could just take an MIT licensed library that implements a cool AI technique and put it in your game.

So why is it so hard to add AI to games, or more AI to games? The first problem is integration of cool AI algorithms with game systems. Although games do not need any "perception" for planning algorithms to work, no computer vision, sensor fusion, or data cleanup, and no Bayesian filtering for mapping and localisation, AI in games still needs information in a machine-readable format. Suddenly you go from free-form level geometry to a uniform grid, and from "every frame, do this or that" to planning and execution phases and checking every frame if the plan is still succeeding or has succeeded or if the assumptions of the original plan no longer hold and a new plan is on order. Intelligent behaviour is orders of magnitude more code than simple behaviours, and every time you add a mechanic to the game, you need to ask yourself "how do I make this mechanic accessible to the AI?"

Some design decisions will just be ruled out because they would be difficult to get to work in a certain AI paradigm.

Even in a game that is perfectly suited for AI techniques, like a turn-based, grid-based rogue-like, with line-of-sight already implemented, can struggle to make use of learning or planning AI for NPC behaviour.

What makes advanced AI "fun" in a game is usually when the behaviour is at least a little predictable, or when the AI explains how it works or why it did what it did. What makes AI "fun" is when it sometimes or usually plays really well, but then makes little mistakes that the player must learn to exploit. What makes AI "fun" is interesting behaviour. What makes AI "fun" is game balance.

You can have all of those with simple, almost hard-coded agent behaviour.

Video Playback

If your engine does not have video playback, you might think that it's easy enough to add it by yourself. After all, there are libraries out there that help you decode and decompress video files, so you can stream them from disk, and get streams of video frames and audio.

You can just use those libraries, and play the sounds and display the pictures with the tools your engine already provides, right?

Unfortunately, no. The video is probably at a different frame rate from your game's frame rate, and the music and sound effect playback in your game engine are probably not designed with syncing audio playback to a video stream.

I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm saying that it's surprisingly tricky, and even worse, it might be something that can't be built on top of your engine, but something that requires you to modify your engine to make it work.

Stealth Games

Stealth games succeed and fail on NPC behaviour/AI, predictability, variety, and level design. Stealth games need sophisticated and legible systems for line of sight, detailed modelling of the knowledge-state of NPCs, communication between NPCs, and good movement/ controls/game feel.

Making a stealth game is probably five times as difficult as a platformer or a puzzle platformer.

In a puzzle platformer, you can develop puzzle elements and then build levels. In a stealth game, your NPC behaviour and level design must work in tandem, and be developed together. Movement must be fluid enough that it doesn't become a challenge in itself, without stealth. NPC behaviour must be interesting and legible.

Rhythm Games

These are hard for the same reason that video playback is hard. You have to sync up your audio with your gameplay. You need some kind of feedback for when which audio is played. You need to know how large the audio lag, screen lag, and input lag are, both in frames, and in milliseconds.

You could try to counteract this by using certain real-time OS functionality directly, instead of using the machinery your engine gives you for sound effects and background music. You could try building your own sequencer that plays the beats at the right time.

Now you have to build good gameplay on top of that, and you have to write music. Rhythm games are the genre that experienced programmers are most likely to get wrong in game jams. They produce a finished and playable game, because they wanted to write a rhythm game for a change, but they get the BPM of their music slightly wrong, and everything feels off, more and more so as each song progresses.

Online Multi-Player Netcode

Everybody knows this is hard, but still underestimates the effort it takes. Sure, back in the day you could use the now-discontinued ready-made solution for Unity 5.0 to synchronise the state of your GameObjects. Sure, you can use a library that lets you send messages and streams on top of UDP. Sure, you can just use TCP and server-authoritative networking.

It can all work out, or it might not. Your netcode will have to deal with pings of 300 milliseconds, lag spikes, package loss, and maybe recover from five seconds of lost WiFi connections. If your game can't, because it absolutely needs the low latency or high bandwidth or consistency between players, you will at least have to detect these conditions and handle them, for example by showing text on the screen informing the player he has lost the match.

It is deceptively easy to build certain kinds of multiplayer games, and test them on your local network with pings in the single digit milliseconds. It is deceptively easy to write your own RPC system that works over TCP and sends out method names and arguments encoded as JSON. This is not the hard part of netcode. It is easy to write a racing game where players don't interact much, but just see each other's ghosts. The hard part is to make a fighting game where both players see the punches connect with the hit boxes in the same place, and where all players see the same finish line. Or maybe it's by design if every player sees his own car go over the finish line first.

[kaurwreck]

Yosano has Mori's eyes, and Dazai has Mori's Bayesian logic. Anyway, I do think they've had sex, like, at least once, to get it out their systems, and now they're quite ambivalent about where the other is and isn't like Mori (except for when they're not).

[alexanderwales]

I started Nate Silver's new book, which has been sitting on my shelf for ages, and I'm already not sure that I'm going to finish it. It's competently written, but I think it was written for someone who isn't me. I do not need another explainer on expected value and Bayesian priors, I'm coming for the cultural insights. I'm sort of assuming that this will pick up further into the book, but I'm also not sure that it's the kind of non-fiction book where it's fine to skip thirty pages ahead.

[eccentric-nucleus]

like it is funny to think about the initial google bayesian spam filter that was so good it seemed magical -- it uses statistical analysis to detect spam that differs, statistically, from non-spam!! -- and how ultimately the thing polluting the web now is oh yeah we invented a generator that creates text that's statistically identical to human-generated text. whoops!

[centrally-unplanned]

When you say Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation was prompted by his mental illness, how are you making that evaluation? Is it a simple conclusion of suicide=suicidality=mental illness? I personally feel like there are circumstances wherein a person can rationally choose to end their life, and so bristle somewhat at the implication that the act is an inherently irrational or imbalanced one, and want to clarify whether that is indeed the distinction being made.

No, it is not a simple 'suicide = ill', though to be clear that is a very strong prior and is the right default! If a Palestinian parent committed suicide in Rafah I would...like they are "mentally ill" in the sense that they are likely brutally traumatized by mass scale destruction of their entire society, but the frame is just useless, right? Its adds nothing to try to understand it through that, because all humans can respond that way, that is the human brain working 'as designed' in the sense that sure yeah the brain often cant take that.

Aaron Bushnell had a desk job in Texas doing tech work. He was leaving the military in May. He had no family in Palestine, no connection that we can see, he has never even been there as far as I know. He grew up a member of an abusive christian cult that practiced 'mind control' techniques and was a member of an 'anarchist cell' that debated what 'sacrifice' was needed to prove their mettle. The latter ofc is typically what most people call 'shitposting online' and is no grand signifier but when you literally start firebombing the walmart of the self I think we can re-appraise it a bit.

Obviously I have never met the man, i will never 'know'. But I can use those good old bayesian priors. And most people's response to reading about bad things on the news is to vote and maybe join some activist groups. Which he did! And then suddenly he went from that to publically committing suicide because he, a desk job in Texas, was 'complicit in genocide'. Those odds are *heavily* stacked in one direction, and it isnt 'rational response to one's circumstances'.

And while I would be fine with a stance of blasé neutrality on the topic I do find the widespread response by incredibly mainstream and influential people to praise suicide emotionally, personally galling. (Dont worry, I dont hold you to that stance or anything, random tumblrites arent gonna bait someone. This is directed at the Cornell West's of the world)