arborealhominid

Karma: 337

arborealhominid 21 Dec 2013 1:00 UTC
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in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: Rationality Quotes December 2013
Good point; I hadn’t really thought about it that way! I had interpreted it as reminding you to update your probability estimates based on observed evidence.

arborealhominid 19 Dec 2013 2:45 UTC
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on: Rationality Quotes December 2013

If we work around this assumption of being cis as the default… like, for example, if we stop thinking about the fact that as an abstract, general question a random human being is much more likely to be cis than trans, and instead consider the question in terms of whether, given everything we observe in ourselves, and everything we feel, and how strong our feelings are about this question of gender, which (cis or trans) is more likely for us… if we consider “is it really all that likely that I’m just a cis person who has somehow managed to convince myself that I’m trans to the point that I’m having this kind of crisis?”… if we reframe it, then the question becomes something very different, and more manageable.

Natalie Reed taking a very Bayesian approach to gender identity

arborealhominid 5 Sep 2013 0:08 UTC
24 points
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in reply to: JQuinton’s comment on: Rationality Quotes September 2013
Another good one from the same source:

Truth can be sliced and analyzed in 100 different ways and it will always remain true.

Falsehood on the other hand can only be sliced a few different ways before it becomes increasingly obvious that it is false.

arborealhominid 29 Aug 2013 0:01 UTC
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in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98
I wonder if this will somehow play into Quirrell’s plot to have both Ravenclaw and Slytherin win the house cup.

arborealhominid 28 Jul 2013 0:40 UTC
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in reply to: jacoblyles’s comment on: Cult impressions of Less Wrong/Singularity Institute
Moreright.net already exists, and it’s a “Bayesian reactionary” blog- that is, a blog for far-rightists who are involved in the Less Wrong community. It’s an interesting site, but it strikes me as decidedly unhelpful when it comes to looking uncultish.

arborealhominid 27 Jul 2013 23:36 UTC
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in reply to: mavant’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
I don’t actually remember why I retracted it. I tried to un-retract it afterwards, but I don’t think that’s possible.

arborealhominid 26 Jul 2013 1:36 UTC
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in reply to: ygert’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96

If you put the cloak over someone who is dying, they would stay alive, at least until the Cloak is removed and death can find them again.

I’m surprised Harry didn’t try this for Hermione, then. Maybe he wouldn’t have expected it to work, but it’s still an easy hypothesis to test.

It was amazing how many different ways there were to kill your best friend by being stupid.

arborealhominid 22 Jul 2013 0:05 UTC
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in reply to: Lambda’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95
You’re right; it is.

arborealhominid 17 Jul 2013 0:25 UTC
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in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Rationality Quotes July 2013
The emphasis I used was in the original, but I agree that it would work better with the emphasis on “think.”

arborealhominid 16 Jul 2013 21:22 UTC
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on: Rationality Quotes July 2013

Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it.

Thelonious Monk

arborealhominid 14 Jul 2013 0:52 UTC
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on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94
On the Wild Mass Guessing page on TVTropes, someone made the following prediction: “Hermione is the enemy Voldemort will use in his resurrection… which will result in female!Voldemort(e), after using his mother’s bone in the ritual.” (They also mentioned that he would use Bellatrix’s flesh for said ritual.) When I first read this, it seemed rather silly. However, now I’m starting to wonder if it’s an actual possibility. Hermione’s body is missing, and although I think it’s more likely that Harry took it to resurrect Hermione, there’s definitely not enough evidence to rule out Quirrellmort having taken it. Also, note the following highly suspicious quote (rot13′d) from Eliezer’s feminism rant: “W. X. Ebjyvat perngrq pregnva ebyrf naq nffvtarq gurz traqref. Gur fgbel bs UCZBE vf ohvyg nebhaq gur cnenyyry-havirefr irefvbaf bs gubfr ebyrf, naq gubfr ebyrf (jvgu bar rkprcgvba) ergnva juvpurire traqref gurl unq va pnaba.” IIRC, this is the second time Eliezer’s said something like this, although I can’t remember where the first one was (probably a previous Author’s Note).

arborealhominid 14 Jul 2013 0:09 UTC
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in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: “Stupid” questions thread
And there are, in fact, several people proposing this as a solution to other anthropogenic existential risks. Here’s one example.

arborealhominid 6 Jun 2013 15:31 UTC
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on: Rationality Quotes June 2013
The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable: one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone ‘a gentleman’ you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not ‘a gentleman’ you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said- so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully- ‘Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?’ They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man ‘a gentleman’ in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is ‘a gentleman’ becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object; it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A ‘nice’ meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualised and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.
- C.S. Lewis (emphasis my own)

arborealhominid 7 May 2013 1:46 UTC
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on: Rationality Quotes May 2013
“If someone tells you their results before the results are gathered, be suspicious.”
- I Fucking Love Science

arborealhominid 5 May 2013 15:52 UTC
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in reply to: Morendil’s comment on: Rationality Quotes May 2013
Thanks for the fact-check! In retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea for me to fact-check this before I posted it.

And yes, the other story is odd indeed. I actually hadn’t read it before I posted the link.

arborealhominid 3 May 2013 13:13 UTC
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on: Rationality Quotes May 2013

One of the biggest tasks, according to Gardner, was tracking information and beliefs back to their roots. This is always important, but especially in a field as rich in hearsay as herbal medicine. One little piece of information, or an unsubstantiated report, can grow and become magnified, quickly becoming an unquestioned truism. She used as an example the truism that the extracts of the herb Ginkgo Biloba might cause dangerous bleeding. Everyone says it can. The journalists say it. The doctors say it. The herbalists say it. Even I say it! It’s nearly impossible to read a scientific paper on Ginkgo that doesn’t mention this alleged danger. But why do we say it—where did the information come from? Turns out, there was one case report—of a single person—who couldn’t clot efficiently after taking Ginkgo. Another 178 papers were published that mentioned this danger, citing only this one report. Those 178 papers were cited by over 4,100 other papers. So now we have almost 4-and-a-half thousand references in the scientific literature—not to mention the tens of thousands of references in the popular press—to the dangers of Ginkgo, all traceable back to a single person whose bleeding may or may not have been attributable to the herb.

-Adam Stark

arborealhominid 14 Mar 2013 0:24 UTC
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on: Rationality Quotes March 2013

There’s a funny irony in “tell your story” and “speak your truth”, in that those two things are fundamentally at odds with each other. Stories and narratives aren’t, and can’t be, the truth of our actual lived experiences. Real lives don’t follow the structures of narrative, they don’t move in linear tidy sequences of causes and actions and effects and consequences. Real lives are big jumbled messes that are almost impossible to make real sense of, and the act of imposing a narrative on them, sorting out our “life story”, is always an act of editing.

-Natalie Reed

arborealhominid 2 Mar 2013 0:28 UTC
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on: You can’t signal to rubes
But can you signal to bleggs?

arborealhominid 1 Mar 2013 2:59 UTC
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in reply to: pragmatist’s comment on: [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We?
I’m not totally clear on the distinction between representationalism and sense-datum theory. Do you think you could explain it in a bit more detail?

arborealhominid 17 Feb 2013 3:25 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Sarokrae’s comment on: LW Women: LW Online
Thank you! I voted on both.