Like what?
27chaos
Karma: 741
But the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Social justice is about culture, not just legal rights.
I feel like general stupidity does exist, in the same way that general intelligence does? Not sure what you like about this quote. The idea that biases are diverse, maybe?
I think there’s a joke to the effect that if you’re bad in life then when you die God will send you to New Jersey, and I don’t know anything about translations of earlier versions of the bible but I kind of hope that it’s possible for us to interpret the Gehenna comparison as parallel to that.
“Oh, but I only detest the mouth of the lion, where its fangs are kept; I do not detest the ear of the lion, nor its tail.”
But the ear is how he found your brother, and when he leapt on your sister, the tail kept him straight.
Tycho of Penny Arcade, on the importance of systems thinking.
I couldn’t help but be distracted, sorry.
A consequence of this observation is that we should expect Marxists, who believe the free market doesn’t work, to lie much more often than capitalists, who think it does. Empirically, however, Democrats seem to lie much less than Republicans (see, e.g., a recent NY Times report on PolitiFact checking of the Presidential candidates), even though Republicans have much more faith in the free market.
This is an extremely terrible proxy for the question you’re interested in.
No, there are a lot more constraints, like material resources, or time, or even luck.
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
I am somewhat uncertain about whether people who are kidnapped and tortured are in control of their happiness. I know there are at least a few people who’ve been in those situations or similar ones, like the Holocaust, who report that they retained some control over their own thoughts and perspective and this was a source of comfort and strength to them. I think it is possible that people who are tortured are in control of their own happiness, but they generally tend to make the choice to break.
One example that comes up in discussions on this is medical depression, which I have. From introspection, it feels like it is both true that I have control over my happiness and that it is not true that I have control over my happiness. I can recall occasions on which I have consciously chosen to lie in bed and be unhappy, and I can also recall occasions on which I have consciously chosen to uproot myself from misery. However, there are also occasions where I’ve attempted to do this but failed. I think the answer to our dilemma lies in compatibilism: we are in control in the sense that what happens inside our heads matters, but not in the sense that we can transcend our physical limitations and become omnipotent.
Also, it was listed as an instrumental rationality quote.
All of that said, I downvoted the original comment. While I think it is a defensible point of view, I want rationality quotes that are insightful and compelling, not ones that regurgitate conventional wisdom which some people will automatically believe while others will not.
The actual developments of society during this period were determined, not by a battle of conflicting ideals, but by the contrast between an existing state of affairs and that one ideal of a possible future society which the socialists alone held up before the public. Very few of the other programs which offered themselves provided genuine alternatives. Most of them were mere compromises or half-way houses between the more extreme types of socialism and the existing order. All that was needed to make almost any socialist proposal appear reasonable to these “judicious” minds who were constitutionally convinced that the truth must always lie in the middle between the extremes, was for someone to advocate a sufficiently more extreme proposal. There seemed to exist only one direction in which we could move, and the only question seemed to be how fast and how far the movement should proceed.
FA Hayek, Intellectuals and Socialism.
The warning against the golden mean fallacy is useful but standard, what I like best about this quote is that it brought to my attention the importance of constructive imagination in political reforms. I think this implies we’ll get more and better thinking at the margins of policy if there are many different views about what policy’s grand goals ought to be.
Yup.
Either way, fullspeed was best. My mind had been naively averaging two courses of action—the thought was something like: “maybe I should go forward, and maybe I should go backward. So, since I’m uncertain, I should go forward at half-speed!” But averages don’t actually work that way.
Averages don’t work that way because you did the math wrong: you should have stopped! I understand the point that you’re trying to make with this post, but there are many cases in which uncertainty really does mean you should stop and think, or hedge your bets, rather than go full speed ahead. It’s true there are situations in which this isn’t the case, but I think they’re rare enough that it’s worth acknowledging the value of hesitation in many cases and trying to be clear about distinguishing valid from invalid hesitation.
It seems to me that we should be very liberal in this regard: biases which remain in the AIs model of SO+UO are likely to be minor biases (as major biases will have been stated by humans as things to avoid). These are biases so small that we’re probably not aware of them. Compared with the possibility of losing something human-crucial we didn’t think of explicitly stating, I’d say the case is strong to err on the size of increased complexity/more biases and preferences allowed. Essentially, we’re unlikely to have missed some biases we’d really care about eliminating, but very likely to have missed some preference we’d really miss if it were gone.
You frame the issue as though the cost of being liberal is that we’ll have more biases preventing us from achieving our preferences, but I think this understates the difficulty. Precisely because it’s difficult to distinguish biases from preferences, accidentally preserving unnecessary biases is equivalent to being liberal and unnecessarily adding entirely new values to human beings. We’re not merely faced with biases that would function as instrumental difficulties to achieving our goals, but with direct end-point changes to those goals.
I like rationality quotes, so whatever happens I hope that stays alive in some form. Maybe it could move to /r/slatestarcodex.
Please do.
Same. I like my arguments modular. I say this despite liking EA a lot.
The key to avoiding rivalries is to introduce a new pole, which mediates your relationship to the antagonist. For me this pole is often Scripture. I renounce my claim to be thoroughly aligned with the pole of Scripture and refocus my attention on it, using it to mediate my relationship with the antagonistic party. Alternatively, I focus on a non-aggressive third party. You may notice that this same pattern is observed in the UK parliamentary system of the House of Commons, for instance. MPs don’t directly address each other: all of their interactions are mediated by and addressed to a non-aggressive, non-partisan third party – the Speaker. This serves to dampen antagonisms and decrease the tendency to fall into rivalry. In a conversation where such a ‘Speaker’ figure is lacking, you need mentally to establish and situate yourself relative to one. For me, the peaceful lurker or eavesdropper, Christ, or the Scripture can all serve in such a role. As I engage directly with this peaceful party and my relationship with the aggressive party becomes mediated by this party, I find it so much easier to retain my calm.
George Dyson, comment on Taleb’s “The Fourth Quadrant”.