Have I ever claimed to have any “theories”? I claim to have skills. I have expounded on what some of these skills are at various points.
This certainly sounds like a theory, or a bunch of them, to me:
Ultimately I think that academic “the form of the good and the form of being are the same” theism is a less naive perspective on cosmology-morality than atheism is—you personally should expect to be at equilibrium with respect to any timeless interaction that ends up at-least-partially-defining what “right” is, and pretending like you aren’t or are only negligibly watched over by a superintelligence—whether a demiurge, a pantheonic economy, a monolithic God, or any other kind of institution—is like asking to fail the predictable retrospective stupidity test. The actual decision theory is more nuanced—you always want to be on the edge of uncertainty, you don’t want to prop up needlessly suboptimal institutions or decision policies even timelessly, &c.---but pragmatically speaking this gets swamped by the huge amount of moral uncertainty that we have to deal with until our decision theories are better equipped to deal with such issues.
Certainly you keep saying that you feel superior to LW:ers because they don’t know the things you do. You may call that knowledge, theory, skill, or just claims, however you prefer. But while you have expounded on it somewhat, you haven’t written anything that would try to systematically bridge the inferential distance. Right now, the problem isn’t even that we wouldn’t understand your reasons for saying what you do, the problem is that we don’t understand what you are saying. Mostly it just comes off as an incomprehensible barrage of fancy words.
For instance, my current understanding of your theories (or skills, or knowledge, or whatever) is the following. One, you claim that because of the simulation argument, theism isn’t really an unreasonably privileged claim. Two, this relates to TDT somehow. Three, that’s about all I understand. And based on your posting history that’s about all that the average LW reader could be expected to know about the things you’re talking about.
That’s what my claim of you making yourself immune to criticism is based on: you currently cannot be criticized, because nobody understands your claims well enough to criticize them (or for that matter, agree with them), and you don’t seem to be making any real attempt to change this.
In other words, what you’re saying sounds very reasonable, but are you talking about reality or instead a simplified model of the situation that is easy to write a nice-sounding analysis of?
I’m talking about my current best model of you and your claims, which may certainly be flawed. But note that I’m already giving you an extra benefit of doubt because you seemed sane and cool when we interacted iRL. I do still think that you might be on to something reasonable, and I’m putting some effort into communicating with you and inspecting my model for flaws. If I didn’t know you at all, I might already have dismissed you as a Time Cube crank.
I too used to have a disorder that made me occasionally write nonsense. In my case it turned out to be fixable by reading a lot of LW, in particular Eliezer’s and Yvain’s posts, and then putting a lot of work into my own posts and comments to approach their level of clarity. It was hard at first, but after a while it became easier. Have you tried that?
Right now your writings look very stream-of-consciousness to me, like you don’t even write drafts. Given all the criticism you get, this is kind of unacceptable. Many LWers write drafts and send them to each other for critique before posting stuff publicly. I often do that even for discussion posts.
Right now your writings look very stream-of-consciousness to me, like you don’t even write drafts. This is kind of unacceptable. Many LWers write drafts and send them to each other for critique before posting stuff publicly. I often do that even for discussion posts.
Errr… wait. We do that? Ooops. Sometimes I proof-read and sometimes I make edits to my comments as soon as I post them. Does that count?
Yeah, some of us do. Your posts are pretty good as they are, but hey, now you know a way to make them even better! I volunteer to read drafts anytime :-)
I remember thinking it was ironic how in the Wikipedia article on learned helpnessness when they talk about the dogs the tone is like “oh, how sad, these dogs are so demoralized that they don’t even try to escape their own suffering”, but when it came to humans it was like “oh look, these humans seem to have a choice about whether or not they suffer but they’re acting as if they don’t have that choice so as to avoid blame and avoid putting forth effort to change their situation”; which if taken seriously sort of undermines the hypothesis about how the behavioral mechanisms are largely the same for both animals. But you could tell it was totally unconscious on the part of the writers, and if you’d tried to point it out to them they could just backpedal in various ways, and so there’d be no point in trying to point out the change in perspective, it’d just look like defensiveness. And going meta like this probably wouldn’t help either.
This certainly sounds like a theory, or a bunch of them, to me:
Certainly you keep saying that you feel superior to LW:ers because they don’t know the things you do. You may call that knowledge, theory, skill, or just claims, however you prefer. But while you have expounded on it somewhat, you haven’t written anything that would try to systematically bridge the inferential distance. Right now, the problem isn’t even that we wouldn’t understand your reasons for saying what you do, the problem is that we don’t understand what you are saying. Mostly it just comes off as an incomprehensible barrage of fancy words.
For instance, my current understanding of your theories (or skills, or knowledge, or whatever) is the following. One, you claim that because of the simulation argument, theism isn’t really an unreasonably privileged claim. Two, this relates to TDT somehow. Three, that’s about all I understand. And based on your posting history that’s about all that the average LW reader could be expected to know about the things you’re talking about.
That’s what my claim of you making yourself immune to criticism is based on: you currently cannot be criticized, because nobody understands your claims well enough to criticize them (or for that matter, agree with them), and you don’t seem to be making any real attempt to change this.
I’m talking about my current best model of you and your claims, which may certainly be flawed. But note that I’m already giving you an extra benefit of doubt because you seemed sane and cool when we interacted iRL. I do still think that you might be on to something reasonable, and I’m putting some effort into communicating with you and inspecting my model for flaws. If I didn’t know you at all, I might already have dismissed you as a Time Cube crank.
I keep bringing this up only to have it ignored completely, but: THAT IS NOT A PSYCHOLOGICALLY REALISTIC OPTION.
I too used to have a disorder that made me occasionally write nonsense. In my case it turned out to be fixable by reading a lot of LW, in particular Eliezer’s and Yvain’s posts, and then putting a lot of work into my own posts and comments to approach their level of clarity. It was hard at first, but after a while it became easier. Have you tried that?
Right now your writings look very stream-of-consciousness to me, like you don’t even write drafts. Given all the criticism you get, this is kind of unacceptable. Many LWers write drafts and send them to each other for critique before posting stuff publicly. I often do that even for discussion posts.
Errr… wait. We do that? Ooops. Sometimes I proof-read and sometimes I make edits to my comments as soon as I post them. Does that count?
Yeah, some of us do. Your posts are pretty good as they are, but hey, now you know a way to make them even better! I volunteer to read drafts anytime :-)
I remember thinking it was ironic how in the Wikipedia article on learned helpnessness when they talk about the dogs the tone is like “oh, how sad, these dogs are so demoralized that they don’t even try to escape their own suffering”, but when it came to humans it was like “oh look, these humans seem to have a choice about whether or not they suffer but they’re acting as if they don’t have that choice so as to avoid blame and avoid putting forth effort to change their situation”; which if taken seriously sort of undermines the hypothesis about how the behavioral mechanisms are largely the same for both animals. But you could tell it was totally unconscious on the part of the writers, and if you’d tried to point it out to them they could just backpedal in various ways, and so there’d be no point in trying to point out the change in perspective, it’d just look like defensiveness. And going meta like this probably wouldn’t help either.
This is the first time I see you say that, but fair enough. I can relate to that.
Why? Or did I accidentally stumble across a private forum with secrets?
Why? Or did I accidentally stumble across a private forum with secrets?