And at the same time, they were both victims, as are we all, of human nature. Never let it be said that if you are a victim, you are only a victim.
Articulator
I have to say, though I recognize that this is four years on, I would be extremely interested in your actual shot at Applied Fun Theory. The best thing I’ve ever read in that category so far is Iceman’s Friendship is Optimal, which you of course are already aware of.
I, along several others, were perplexed at your distaste for the world it portrayed, and while I’m sure better could be achieved, I’d be interested to see exactly where you’d go, if you found FiO actual horror material.
This looks really interesting—do you have a timeframe on a playable demo, Kaj?
I sympathize with you on the Java—easier than most other methods, but oh god the lack of style. I think even just making those choice buttons a little less default (non-serif font, lose the blue shading) could move it a fair way toward being presentable.
My primary concern currently is that even if you have a robust engine to abstract much of the coding, this looks like it would have a very poor input to output time ratio. Do you have any plans for circumventing that, or do you have enough time to brute force it?
Let’s not even pretend that physical attractiveness, especially facial, doesn’t factor just as highly, if not more-so, in the female perspective. That’s about the hardest thing to cheat, especially for guys, who can’t make use of make-up as easily, both social-acceptability-wise, and simply never being taught how, in most cases.
Furthermore, for many people, sociability and ‘faking it’ are by no means easy. For instance, I have Aspergers, and let me tell you, sociability for me is likely a lot harder than wearing a push-up bra, just as an example.
Even if none of the above was true, or mattered, women are just plain pickier, because evolutionarily, it makes sense.
And lastly, they don’t need a technique. The only reason it would become a problem for 90% of women (random made up rhetorical statistic disclaimer) is if they’re aiming high. Men don’t even bother aiming high, in general, unless they’re so low down that the only direction is up. In modern society, sexual and to a lesser extent, romantic relations conventions are largely dictated by the woman. On equal footing, attractively, what is the likelihood a man is going to turn down a woman?
Maybe women have slightly less mobility, but they start with a massive offset, in my experience.
Pretty sure that the average IQ on LessWrong is above the mean, though. Therefore, a group with higher variance is more likely to have member in LessWrong.
The causality of that statement is atrocious, but I think the overall picture should still come through.
Hi everyone, I’m The Articulator. (No ‘The’ in my username because I dislike using underscores in place of spaces)
I found LessWrong originally through RationalWiki, and more recently through Iceman’s excellent pony-fic about AI and transhumanism, Friendship is Optimal.
I’ve started reading the Sequences, and made some decent progress, though we’ll see how long I maintain my current rate.
I’ll be attending University this fall for Electrical Engineering, with a desire to focus in electronics.
Prior to LW, I have a year’s worth of Philosophy and Ethics classes, and a decent amount of derivation and introspection.
As a result, I’ve started forming a philosophical position, made up of a mishmash of formally learnt and self-derived concepts. I would be very grateful if anyone would take the time to analyze, and if possible, pick apart what I’ve come up with. After all, it’s only a belief worth holding if it stands up to rigorous debate.
(If this is the wrong place to do this, I apologize—it seemed slightly presumptuous to imply that my comment thread would be large enough to warrant a separate discussion article.)
I apologize in advance for a possible lack of precise terminology for already existing concepts. As I’ve said, I’m partially self-derived, and without knowing the name of an idea, it’s hard to check if it already exists. If you do spot such gaps in my knowledge, I would be grateful if you’d point them out. Though I understand correct terminology is nice, I’d appreciate it if you could judge my ideas regardless of how many fancy words I use to descrive them.
My thought process so far:
P: Naturalism is the only standard by which we can understand the world
P: One cannot derive ethical statements or imperatives from Naturalism, as, like all good science, it is only descriptive in nature
IC : We cannot derive ethical statements
IC: There is no intrinsic value
C: Nihilism is correct
However, assuming nihilism is correct, why don’t I just kill myself now? That’s down to the evolutionary instincts that need me alive to reproduce. Well, why not overcome those and kill myself? But now, we’re in a difficult situation – why, if nothing matters, am I so desperate to kill myself?
Nihilism is the total negation of the intrinsic and definitive value in anything. It’s like sticking a coefficient of zero onto all of your utility calculations. However, that includes the bad as well as the good. Why bother doing bad things just as much as doing good things?
My eventual realization came as a result of analyzing the level or order of concepts. Firstly, we have the lowest order, instinct, which we are only partially conscious of. Then, we have a middle order of conscious thought, wherein we utilize our sapience to optimize our instinctual aims. Finally, we have the first of a series of high order thought processes devoted to analyzing our thoughts. It struck me that only this order and above is concerned with my newfound existential crisis. When I allow my rationality to slip a bit, a few minutes later, I stop caring, and start eating or taking out my testosterone on small defenseless computer images. Essentially, it is only the meta-order processes which directly suffer as a result of nihilism, as they are the ones that have to deal with the results and implications.
Nihilism expects you to give up attempting to change things or apply ethics because those are seen as meaningful concepts. However, really, the way I see it, Nihilism is about simply the state of ‘going with the flow’, colloquially speaking. However, that’s intentionally vague. Consider: if your middle-order processes don’t care that you just realized nothing matters, what’ll happen? They’ll just keep doing what they’ve always done.
In other words, since humans compartmentalize, going with the flow is synonymous with turning off your meta-level thought processes as a goal-oriented drive, and purely operate on middle-level processes and below. That corresponds, for a Naturalist, with Utilitarianism.
Now, that’s not to say “turn off your meta-level cognition”, because otherwise, what am I doing here? What I’m doing right now is optimizing utility because I enjoy LessWrong and the types of discussions they have. I bother to optimize utility despite being a nihilist because it is easier, and less work, meta-level-wise, to give in to my middle-level desires than to fight them.
To define Nihilism, for me, now comes to the concept of passively maintaining the status quo, or more aptly, not attempting to change it. Why not wirehead? – because that state is no more desirable in a world with zero utility, but takes effort to reach. It’s going up a gradient which we can comfortably sit at the bottom of instead.
I fear I haven’t done the best job of explaining concisely, and I believe my original, purely mental, formulations were more elegant, so that’s a lesson on writing everything down learned. However, I hope some of you can see some flaws in this argument that I can’t, because at the moment, this explains just about everything I can think of in one way or another.
Thank you all in advance for any help given,
The Articulator (It’s kind of an ironic choice of name, present ineptitude considered.)
This comment, archaeologically excavated in the future, amuses me.
The most enjoyable part of reading through these comments is that everyone is in a combined state of ethically relaxed and mentally aware. Makes for stimulating conversation.
We are just simply too good at taking our own norms for granted. Thank you for explaining this in a way I can really get behind.
I think we sometimes forget that not only is all ethics relative, but that we have skewed weightings based on what is ‘normal’. The number of people driven to depression and suicide by legal means...
I wonder, if certain negative strains of human social interaction were made illegal, and guiltworthy, while rape was made legal, and we waited for a couple hundred years, would people still rank them in the same order? If rape was something to ‘get over’, while surprise polygamy (trying for a word with as few connotations as possible—couldn’t find anything) and bullying were horrible events to ‘survive’...
Hmm, it’s certainly a good question. Now, since I’m not a rape victim, I couldn’t presume to guess very accurately, but perhaps the knowledge that it’s a bad thing reinforces that it’s a bad thing? I can’t help but draw a rather unfortunate parallel with the broad range of human experiences that are scary at first, and then enjoyable. Before I get voted down into submission, consider that I have used the most physical descriptions I can, since those are the ones we are less likely to change.
In the least offensive way possible, would we want to go bungee jumping (again) if it was treated as a terrible thing? If we were told it was terrible our entire lives, then forced into doing it? Traumatic in the extreme. Consider, however, that some people are pushed in these heights-based sports. Off cliffs, out of airplanes, onto ziplines. They enjoy it in the end, so it’s ok, right? Would they enjoy it if they weren’t supposed to? If it was rape?
Interesting questions.
Don’t worry for my morality, if this musing leaves you fearing for your orifices. I’m a perfectly well-adjusted nihilist, who values his continued (enjoyable) existence enough not to do anything silly.
If you have to pay them, then this is likely not satisfying their values in itself. Surely satisfying your values without dissatisfying others’ is better?
Also, really? You think Dating Advice is enough?
That was prior to PT.
Okay, whoa, hey. I clearly and repeatedly explained my lack of total understanding of LW conventions. I’m not sure what about this provoked a downvote, but I would appreciate a bit more to go on. If this is about my noobishness, well, this is the Welcome Thread. Great job on the welcoming, by the way, anonymous downvoter. At the very least offer constructive criticism.
Edit: Troll? Really?
Edit,Edit: Thank you whoever deleted the negative karma!
But I don’t think it would be at all bad if people continued to have normal relationships, but occasionally fooled around with a catgirl on the side.
Especially when it comes to non-mutual fetishes. Why should you bring down your own satisfaction if you don’t have to?
It is a false dilemma, but the Super Happies won’t give you one half without the other, I fear.
Eliezer may think so, but I have feeling that this is at least partially foreshadowing a disconnect between these future humans’ values and our own.
They’ve done a really good job of making it a pejorative. Anything’s a slur if you hate them enough.
The first rule of Transfiguration: you do not guess.
Harry proposed a hypothesis, but no further testing was committed. Without knowledge of PT, I’d rate the inability to transfigure all air (as a conceptually-singular entity) as an equally (or more) probable explanation.
With all due respect, I feel like this subject is somewhat superfluous. It seems to be trying to chop part of a general concept off into its own discrete category.
This can all be simplified into accepting that Expert and Common majority opinion are both types of a posteriori evidence that can support an argument, but can be overturned by better a posteriori or a priori evidence.
In other words, they are pretty good heuristics, but like any heuristics, can fail. Making anything more out of it seems to just be artificial, and only necessary if the basic concept proves to difficult to understand.
Or, perhaps, the “if” rightly implied a hypothetical scenario, and the contents of the room as he perceived them were entirely irrelevant.
Spoken like somebody who’d far enough up the food chain that the difference between them seems pretty small.