B.A. in Philosophy by University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, and technical analyst at a Brazilian railway lab.
alexgieg
The issue with the buttons is that 4chan has a campaign to mass downvote anything she does, maybe even bots to do this automatically. Her texts have disappeared from the main page even though they’re very popular, and every comment she posts appears almost immediately with downvotes. The removal of downvotes wouldn’t solve the underlying problem, sure, but it’d make the abuse much more difficult to implement as to remove her texts from public view it’d require the abusers to mass upvote everything else rather than just downvoting her own specific contributions.
I’ve taken the survey.
By the way, nice game at the end. I didn’t do the math but it seemed evident that defecting was the logical choice (and by reading the comments below I was right). I cooperated anyway, it just felt right. So, defectors, I probably just made one of you a few hundredths of a cent richer! Lucky you! ;-)
Done.
Let me chime in briefly. The way EY handles this issue tends to be bad as a rule. This is a blind spot in his otherwise brilliant, well, everything.
A recent example: a few months ago a bunch of members of the official Less Wrong group on Facebook were banished and blocked from viewing it without receiving a single warning. Several among them, myself included, had one thing in common: participation in threads about the Slate article.
I myself didn’t care much about it. Participation in that group wasn’t a huge part of my Facebook life, although admittedly it was informative. The point is just that doing things like these, and continuing to do things like these, accrete a bad reputation around EY.
It really amazes me he has so much difficulty calibrating for the Streisand Effect.
I asked a friend of mine to read the story. He’s a reincarnationist and he liked it a lot, although he preferred the first ending to the second. He sent me an interesting commentary on the reasons for this preference, which I’m copying and pasting below. I guess the few reincarnationist observations he made won’t be of much interest to most here, but the other considerations are very well worth the reading:
This is one of the most amazing and uplifting stories I have ever read – at least in the ending one scenario.
I am glad that the superhappies want to end the suffering of the babyeater children. Making them eat the children at an age before sentience is a solution that could be achieved in the present day, but uplifting the other species to not feel pain is an even more important solution in the case that these beings become sentient before expected.
The idea that the superhappies would adopt babyeating and force it into humanity was disturbing at first, but being a reincarnationist, I can actually relate to the radical shift of desires. In previous lives, I have eaten cockroaches and considered them delicious, but in this life with social conditioning, I consider the idea disturbing and disgusting. The superhappies have a method of instantaneously zapping that very repulsion away, so I don’t understand why the people in the story are so resistant to this change knowing that after the zap they will have no disgust for this act, and will on some level desire it.
I have imagined myself in the position of an uplifted baby who in the very rare instance gains sentience before expected, and whether eaten whole or cut to pieces first, being slowly or quickly digested, without the ability to feel pain or fear, and without worldly experience to demonstrate that something was wrong, the experience of being eaten would be like falling asleep and would be thankfully, boring.
The process of being zapped by the superhappies from a normal human into an uplifted human comes across as fearful because the individual doesn’t know how they are going to be afterward. The idea of removing so much fear instantly is itself a big change, which strangely causes fear. It is the same reason why people who suffer from anxiety are often afraid of taking medicine to remove their anxiety. Yet as scary as the moment of having these fears removed may be, most should be able to come to terms with it knowing that as soon as it’s over, they will not fear again. For some it may be more comfortable to be sedated before being changed.
A philosophical argument could be made that the act of eating babies becomes pointlessly arbitrary at best, and that the other species shouldn’t adopt it because it serves no purpose, but the fact is it does serve a purpose: to better relate to the babyeaters. In the last sections we see that the superhappies changed the design of their ship to better appeal to human and babyeater aesthetic. This raises the willingness of the two species to work with them. When the uplifting process is complete, all three species will be in many ways one species. I believe that when any one of the new super-species meets another alien race, the babyeating tradition will be removed from all of their societies to be replaced with some other aspect of the new species encountered because the meaning for its tradition will have been lost through history, but even if this doesn’t happen the super-species will continue to change and grow without fear.
Fear is the resistance to change and the extent to which a person resists change is the extent to which a person fears it, or so sayeth the psychology books. Progress is rapid change for the better. After the uplifting the species will trust each other enough to share their scientific progress, while on a spiritual level, the beings within each society can exist happily through the progression of their lives. To a far deeper extent, if it should somehow happen that a spirit born from one species would find their incarnations in the bodies and societies of either of the other two species, that spirit would be just as happy and satisfied in that life as they would in their original species, which even for the superhappies and especially for the babyeaters would be a greater satisfaction than before the time of the three’s contact, and that is beautiful.
I think the OP is referring to the fact that, while mystical experiences are usually thought by non-practitioners as being random bouts of subjective insight with no objectivity at all, hence fundamentally little more than noise, that isn’t actually the case. Mystical experiences follow structured patterns, which is why schools of mysticism develop over time with a well established progression system so that more advanced practitioners can evaluate and teach less advanced practitioners. Basically then, while all of those practitioners are having strictly subjective experiences, those experiences are similar enough they can be objectively discussed by, and worked upon, by those others who also have had close or similar enough ones, including those from outside that particular school.
This means those experiences are neither purely subjective, as is the case with someone suffering from schizophrenia or other mental illness, nor purely objective, in the sense of someone who knows nothing about electricity being able to use electric devices thus extrinsically validating the physics on which electrical engineering is based. Rather, they’re in a category of their own, which for lack of a better term some call “subjectively objective”.
The field of subjectively objective experiences is scarcely studied by modern science, which focus heavily on the other two. There are some initial efforts in that direction, with brain scans of mystics during deep meditation, that kind of thing, but those still focus much more heavily on the strictly objective side of things (what’s physically going on in the brain) than on the specifics of the experiences. This happens, I think, because there aren’t well developed and agreed upon hard scientific methodologies for dealing with problems that are impossible to study via double, much less triple, blindness. Rather, this category of problems isn’t evaluable even via single blindness. To study it researchers would have to go “zero blind”, becoming practitioners themselves and examining it from within, which so far is a huge no-no for anything evidence-based.
So, to go back to the OP, when he says mysticism can observe ethics in absolute terms, I infer they mean ethics itself is neither objective, nor subjective, but rather a subjectively objective field, hence why it can be evaluated only by means of mystical practices, which for now are still the only ones directly addressing this third category of problems.
I think that mental illness also follows structured patterns.
Yes, but not shared ones. To use LW’s terminology, consider the map vs. territory distinction.
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In a strictly objective scenario, all or almost all individuals agree that their respective maps agree with all others and correlate with the territory mostly the same way. At most individual maps differ in precision and resolution, but they all overlap in such a way that overlap is clear to most everyone.
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In a purely subjective scenario, the opposite happens. Individual maps differ radically from each other, and hence either one map (or a set of overlapping maps) correlates with the territory, the other mutually contradictory maps not correlating to it, or in the extreme none of the maps correlates with the territory.
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A subjectively objective scenario is an in between situation. You have a wide set of individuals from many different backgrounds who all share a set of clearly overlapping maps, differences between those individual maps also clearly being only in precision and resolution, as is the case in the strictly objective scenario. At the same time, however, this set of overlapping maps isn’t shared with all/ almost all individuals.
From the perspective of mystics, the set of overlapping maps they share among themselves doesn’t contradict the set of overlapping maps everyone else shares. They see theirs as the wider map of which everyone else’s is a subset, and understand themselves and their techniques as means to access and map more of the territory, areas others usually don’t draw into their own maps because they don’t look that way often, or even don’t look at it at all, and therefore these maps cover a smaller territory.
From the perspective of non-mystics though, the map mystics share among themselves correlates to nothing, as it’s talking about a section of the territory that doesn’t exist, there being nothing “there” to be mapped. Rather, at most mystic techniques activate some weird neurological pathways which, being present in all human brains, work similarly when active, and that would better explain the shared similarity among their maps than the supposition that there’s a large section of the territory most everyone doesn’t perceive unless they train to perceive it.
Occam’s Razor favors this second take, but the shared nature of the map mystics hold remains intriguing, and there’s always the possibility it may indeed refer to existing territory.
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There are “shared” phobias, and common types of paranoia. There are also beliefs many people share that have little to do with reality (...)
These analogies relate to surface similarities. Individual mystic schools provide methodologies that provide highly repeatable sets of results in a progressive sequence, and the ability for advanced 3rd party practitioners to evaluate said progression. If you enroll in one and follow the program you’re almost guaranteed results, in the sequence that method delineates. Hence, even if these experiences don’t correlate to something extrinsically real, they point to some interesting cognitive features that are little explored. At a minimum there’s an entire area of “psychological engineering” waiting to be properly developed under those methods.
(...) the mystics are also influenced by each other.
True, but the practices at the earlier “grades” tend to be very different between different schools even if high level practitioners from different schools can easily dialogue with each other. For example, a high level mystic trained in the Isma’ilic method can at some sit down and talk with a high level mystic trained in the Advaita method, both having a quite productive discussion about their respective experiences while still rejecting each other beliefs, but when it comes to what beginners and mid-level practitioners of either school do in practice, there isn’t little similarity. Any such influence then, if it does indeed trickle down from those high level discussions, happens at some meta level once or twice removed from the concrete practices.
Why do you think Occam’s Razor favors the second perspective?
Because assuming there’s a larger territory means, within a reductionist perspective such as the one favored by LWers, assuming a larger set of first principles, while assuming it’s an incorrect perception retains the same set of first principles. Hence, Occam’s Razor favors the second alternative. But only as long as there’s no further evidence for the first, at which point the likelihood for both hypothesis would slide accordingly.
What I’ve known of religions certainly are contradictory maps.
Yes, but this is a separate issue. Indeed, mystical practices are very often religious and expressed through a conceptual framework based on theistic and supernatural ontologies, but they can be practiced without any of that, and still yield the same subjective experiences, which means these don’t depend on those. In fact, mystics of different schools, while they agree one the validity of each other experiences, still usually argue about whose interpretation of those experience is right.
For example, while a Muslim mystic, a Yogi mystic, a Buddhist mystic, and a Neoplatonic mystic may all agree they experienced their self-identities stopping under such and such circumstances and restarting afterwards, the Muslim one, who interprets their experiences as “uniting with Allah”, won’t be keen on the Yogi one’s interpretation of it as “dissolving in the Brahman Supreme”, who in turn won’t be keen on the Buddhist one interpreting it as “manifesting the Buddha Nature”, who also won’t be keen on the Neoplatonic one interpreting it as “ascending to the One”, and so on and so forth.
So, while the experience may be shared, it doesn’t actually offer any kind of concrete answer about what is really going on. This is where modern scientific approaches would, I suppose, provide something more concrete, specially if more skeptics were to practice those techniques to completion and then frame them within more down-to-earth notions.
Because if I do not follow a universal standard of ethics then my entire ethical system will be founded on nothing more than transient fashions.
Alas, you won’t find that in mysticism, as mystics’ ethics isn’t universal either.
What I observed reading and listening to many mystics over the years is that, while their ethics did indeed change in a more or less similar way due to their mystical experiences, it didn’t do so in a “big G” way, but rather only in a “little g” way. Basically, their experiences change their utility function in a very specific way: they end up believing that achieving those experiences is a value unto itself, that everyone should have them, and so they propose changes and tweaks to their pre-existing, culturally conditioned moral framework that, if applied at large, result in facilitating and encouraging more people to achieve mystical experiences.
Now, this isn’t to say that having those experiences doesn’t provide objective benefits. It seems to do, as it’s been shown that people who’ve had them are in general calmer, more focused, less anxious etc. But that’s a far cry from “understanding the universe”. Mystical experiences don’t provide for that, for if they did, mystics wouldn’t all keep disagreeing with each other about how the universe works, which they definitely do, on most of everything.
Also, depending on how those tweaks to pre-existing moral norms are done, the end result sometimes can be worse than the original. For a remarkable example check Kelley L. Ross’s article Zen and the Art of Divebombing, or The Dark Side of the Tao, which shows how incredibly wrong things can go in that area.
If you want to prove your point, take that random noise image from your other post, and make it turn into a cat image by using the same algorithms and techniques the black hole photo crew used. Do this for two or three more perfectly random images becoming anything you want them to become. Explain precisely how you managed to make those specific algorithms turn random noise into pre-selected images, providing the specific parameters needed so that anyone can reproduce them. Then you’ll have constructed the targeted counter-examples that’ll provide the hard-evidencial basis for your conceptual criticism.
Until you do that, what you’re providing is philosophical speculation. It may or may not be valid, but by itself it isn’t enough.
Making such a simulation is exactly what gjm did and he inadvertently proved his thesis false.
You haven’t shown this mathematically, only conceptually. This isn’t enough. Do the calculation and present them.
The point of the post was to explain the root causes of the mistakes EHT and gjm are making, not to prove that they made a mistake by tying themselves in knots that prevented them from seeing what they’d done.
Unless you can provide specific counter-examples demonstrating your affirmations in practice, you aren’t actually proving there are mistakes. If no mistake has been strictly demonstrated in the first place, there’s no talking about root causes, for the very presence of mistakes still is, by this point, a speculative hypothesis, making any discussion about root causes a speculation on top of a speculation.
If the fact that mistakes were made isn’t obvious to a reader, there isn’t really much that anyone can say to help that person understand.
This is, at its core, pure math. Applied to physics, yes, but still math. As such, there’s no need to appeal to subjective notions of obviousness (or lack thereof). All one needs to do in such a case is to provide the equations and parameters that result in one or more counter-examples. This will prove the presence of mistakes, at which point, yes, discussing their potential root causes becomes feasible.
Organizing your data according to how weird it looks to you is not scientific.
Taboo the words “weird”, “looks”, “scientific”, then restate your affirmation so we can actually understand what territory you’re mapping.
That is all you need to know to understand what EHT and gjm did.
Any solution or counter-argument to a complex problem that begins with variants of “It’s simple! Just...” is almost always, almost invariably, wrong.
This is a form of censorship that would ordinarily be considered shameful in any community that held itself to any form of intellectual standards.
Actually, this is by design.
In parts 1 and 2 Luna is shown as being at the same time a paranoid conspiracy theorist[1], as well as a skeptic, and someone possessing, for whatever reason, a natural resistance to perception filters[2], all of these traits combining into making her into someone who questions everything and everyone, even if that questioning tends to look pretty random to everyone else. Therefore, it seems to me pretty reasonable for her to question the truthfulness of the map, as it looks a little bit too convenient, a little bit too easy, for a paranoid who takes to heart the notion the best place to hide is in plain sight, to accept. Those with that inclination tend to think “What better way to hide the top secrets if not by making available carefully curated lesser secrets that will redirect curious folk away from the truly important secrets?”, witness QAnon, and therefore go after the presumed true secrets.
What’s distinctive in this case is that Luna’s paranoia is actually merited, and leads to the actual uncovering of actual deeper secrets behind the shallow, distraction secrets.
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Which fits with her canon counterpart.
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It wouldn’t surprise me if, differently from her canon counterpart, this Luna were able to see thestrals despite never having seen someone die. I’d like to suggest @lsusr to change chapter 1 slightly to refer to her mother as still alive. Those who remember from the books she’s able to see thestrals because she saw her mother die in a magic accident will then wonder.
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This bit bothered me too, it’s pretty out-of-character for them. I think they’d indulge her going over it once, but not twice or thrice, so it’d be better if @lsusr rewrote this chapter to add some reactions of theirs and some reason they’d accept it, and her managing to figure it out after that one single attempt.
One option might be her figuring out one smaller-ish thing at her first attempt, let’s say, the Chamber of Secrets, making them excited. Then drop the second attempt, moving straight to the third attempt, where the two truly secret areas are revealed, and adding their reaction at this.
Three data points from which to infer a possible result for this thought experiment:
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AFAIK, feral children rescued after the age for developing language passed have extreme difficulty learning words and abstract concepts. Their vocabulary ends up limited to about 400 words, all about simple, concrete things, and they don’t develop past that. This despite them having had several years of sensory stimulation.
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Some people who go into coma and remain conscious while unable to provide any feedback. Eventually their despair ends, and their minds settle into a dreamlike state that may last for years, during which they construct fantastical worlds, sometimes partially awakening due to some perceived external stimulus, followed by falling asleep again. Once they get out of the coma and back into a proper awakened state their memories of those imaginary events becomes fuzzy and fades.
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The human visual cortex requires movement as much as color for visual processing to function or even, I suspect, to develop. You may try this yourself: fix your sight on a single point devoid of any mobile stimulation, while managing to not move your eyes at all, and it’ll shutdown, your field of vision filling with something akin to grayness irrespective of whatever it is your eyes are fixed on.
Your thought experiment seems to be a combination of all three. Such a mind would be incredibly crippled from a cognitive standpoint, and even if it managed to somehow developed something at all in that department (maybe the whiteness is imperfect so it caught on the smallish of variations?), it’d be in a permanent state of dreaming about the raw sensory input of “noise” (which is what pure whiteness is, maybe the closest to “nothing at all”), without any possibility of any abstractive mental counterpart to that one single sole raw sensory reference, as there’s nothing to compare it to to draw distinctions.
Then, once you put it into any other environment it’d develop somehow, but by that point most of his neural pathways would have atrophied, so whatever this mind developed would be orders of magnitude simpler than a feral children could do. I imagine it’d be mostly in a vegetative state, simply empty.
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I think sticking to a strictly literal interpretation of the 1st amendment is problematic for the reason that the politically and economically powerful seek, almost by virtue (or vice) of their positions, to always amass more power. Paraphrasing Gilmore’s widely know quote, the powerful interpret power-limiting rules as damage, and route around them. And since full free speech is a strong way to limit the power of the powerful, in all cases in which either laws make it hard or even impossible to censor, or public perception make it politically unfeasible to censor, we may expect those in power to seek means to achieve as much censorship as materially possible through as many indirect means as possible.
Therefore, it’s important to look at this from a Consequentialist perspective and ask whether certain forms of speech are being effectively reduced thanks to coordination between private agents to actively reduce it, and if yes, ask a classic cui bono? If the the answer to this latest question is “those in power”, then for all practical purposes there was censorship, even if it’s a censorship that manages to carefully sidestep the legal definition.
This doesn’t mean that Twitter banning Trump, or all the big tech players banning Parler, is itself wrong. It’s right, but a right that comes from mixing two wrongs, as argued by Matt Stoller, a well known anti-trust researcher who writes extensively on the topic, on his recent article A Simple Thing Biden Can Do to Reset America, from which I quote these two paragraphs (it’s well worth reading the article on its entirety, as well as the one linked in the quote):
My view is that what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. This is exactly what I wrote when I discussed the problem of platforms like Grindr and Facebook fostering harm to users. But what Parler is doing is *not* illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligation for what its product does. So we’re dealing with a legal product and there’s no legitimate grounds to remove it from key public infrastructure. Similarly, what these platforms did in removing Parler should be illegal, because they should have a public obligation to carry all customers engaging in legal activity on equal terms. But it’s not illegal, because there is no such obligation. These are private entities operating public rights of way, but they are not regulated as such.
In other words, we have what should be an illegal product barred in a way that should also be illegal, a sort of ‘two wrongs make a right’ situation. I say ‘sort of’ because letting this situation fester without righting our public policy will lead to authoritarianism and censorship. What we should have is the legal obligation for these platforms to carry all legal content, and a legal framework that makes business models fostering violence illegal. That way, we can make public choices about public problems, and political violence organized on public rights-of-way certain is a public problem.
Unless something like this is done so as untangle the two sides of the problem so that this outcome comes instead of two rights, there will always be the potential for a fully legal, fully 1st-amendment-respecting, “Great Firewall of America” to grow and evolve up to the point free speech will exist de jure, but not de facto. Conversely, if done right, that workaround would be closed, the risk itself ceasing, all the while the promotion of concretely damaging speech still being effectively curbed.
It’s strange to have this as my first comment on LW but I’d like to mention that the fanfic’s author is currently being targeted by Internet trolls due to her transhumanist stories, among which this one, to the point of receiving death threats. See this blog post of hers for details.