Bangalore, India, honest confession, a lurker more than a commentor. I feel i don’t know enough.
blogospheroid
What parameters did you track your rationality / calmness on?
How about bodily energy levels? - muscle mass is affected by testosterone, i have read.
How much time you were spending/using up earlier thinking about sex?
What personal goal other than becoming more rational have you achieved? - the sacrifice you have made is huge. I would’ve asked from the devil more than my due here.
What marginal benefit did castration give you that earlier testoterone lowering drugs did not?
Voted up because dealing with uncooperative people is a necessary part of the art and war is the extreme of “uncooperative”.
Handle: blogospheroid - (I’m fat)
Name: Prakash Chandrashekar
Location: Bangalore, India
Age: 29
Education: Btech (BS) in civil engineering, Post Grad diploma in Management
Occupation: Functional consultant for Enterprise software implementation
Hobby: Browsing the net. I lurk a lot, comment very little.
Political beliefs—georgist libertarian, enthusiastic about dynamic geography
Religious, ethical beliefs—Atheist about omnipotent god, Agnostic about simulation controllers/watchers, believer in karma and reincarnation, searching for a true dharma in this weird age, greater intelligence is one of the few true ways of finding win-win situations
philosophical influences—vivekananda, ayn rand, nietszche, pirsig, eliyahu goldratt, the economist/technophile cluster, yudkowsky
Short term goal—Lose fat, keep job
Medium Term goal—conquer fear (of failure, mostly), achieve financial independence
Long term goal—expand mental capacity and live a full life
It will definitely help to have people from completely different backgrounds understand rationality. People with different sexes is absolutely awesome, because what is being implied here is a genuine non-understanding of the other sex, a slightly alien intelligence. A genuine new piece of information on which much new science can be built. The enthusiasm of George Dvorsky and David Brin for uplifiting animals seems to make much more sense in this light. (I hope that comment didn’t violate the rules)
But a certain doubt does arise. When different people with different paths start from different points and try to explain this multidimensional problem, then each begins simple and then as they continue to post, the effort of the others to understand them rises as the inferential distance from new comers on the path increases.
The ability to understand the many paths, to really learn their lessons, to incorporate them within your bones, we have faith that this is possible within one human mind, whichever point it began from.
For the sake of the reason that shall not be named, lets hope this is true.
I need a clarification. In the PD with the supertintelligence, you are not in a position to negotiate because values cannot be negotiated, right? However, epistemology can be negotiated, right? You can point out the various symptoms that make it sure that it is malaria. he can point out the various symptoms that make it sure it is bird flu. You can agree to tests and counter-tests.
There are no tests for wants and desires. But we can agree about ways to find out, can’t we?
A big positive here would be the book being published, like the freakonomics blog took off after freakonomics got popular and then they added more contributors who would add research that would be of interest to freakonomics readers.
That was precisely my point. After the book gets published, the wiki and the blog will get popular. People, who are successful in other fields and who have got interested in x-rationality will have a background to understand posts better and will contribute to better discussions.
Not enough of an expert on buddhism, but I live its mother religion—hinduism. There are enough similarities for me to comment on a few of your comments.
Rebirth—The question of which part of your self you choose to identify with is a persistent thing in OB/LW. When X and Y conflict and you choose to align yourself with X instead of Y, WHO OR WHAT has made that decision? One might say, the consensus in the mind or more modern answers. The point is that there are desires and impulses which stem from different levels of personality within you. There are animal impulses, basic human impulses(evo-psych), societal drives. There are many levels to you. The persistent question in almost all the dharma religions is—what do you choose to identify with? Even in rebirth, the memories of past lives are erased and the impulses that drove you the greatest at your time of death decide where in the next life you would be. If you are essentially still hungering for stuff, the soul would be sent to stations where that hunger can be satiated. if you are essentially at peace, having lived a full life, you will go to levels that are subtler and presumably more abstract. You become more soul and less body, in a crude sense.
Vedanta does believe in souls. I’m holding out for a consistent theory of everything of physics before i drop my beliefs about that one.
Mencius Moldbug believes that if we were living in a world of many mini sovereign corporations who compete for citizens, then they would be forced to be rational. They will try to seek every way to keep paying customers (taxpayers).
Another dune idea could be relevant over here—The god emperor. Have a really long lived guy be king. He cannot take the short cuts that many others do and has to think properly on how to govern.
Addendum—I understand that this is a system builder’s perspective, and not an entrepreneur’s perspective, i.e. a meta answer rather than an answer, sorry for that.
Increasing the level of fruit in my diet helped me maintain a positive mood for longer. I tried it when i was in alone for a while in a foreign country, so i’m not sure if it was a placebo affect.
I would try very hard to understand a theory that has been proclaimed by the majority of scientists as a true TOE.
In particular, I would try to understand if there is a possibility of transmission of information that is similar to the transmigration of the soul. If there is no such comfort in the new theory, I assume I will spend a very difficult month and then get back on my feet with a materialist’s viewpoint.
Thanks for all of the posts, Eliezer. You are an inspiration. I hope that entropy works slowest amongst your neurons. ( I know, praying and hoping is just wasted time, but can’t help myself here.)
I guess one is supposed to keep this dignified, but one small nit-pick. Please postpone your plans of doing a salinger / richard rainwater only after giving a full and proper book tour where you have had a chance to debate a lot of people. just a small piece of advice.
Yes, to get ideas refuted also, though the marginal benefit may not be much since a good number of people have tried and tested these ideas in the debate rooms of OB/LW. I think it will be more to introduce these ideas to a larger audience with the purpose of finding out any unspoken/unmentioned emotional connections that these ideas might have/introduce.
It has been mentioned before that our kind might have similarities that are not obvious to us. We have to step outside our own box. We may be a little less egalitarian compared to a society that atleast pays major lip-service to egalitarianism. We might be more willing to move around with ambiguity and uncertainty about certain topics, where the average journalist might want certainty. We might need more certainty and non-contradiction about other matters (science related) where the average journalist might just agree to disagree.
A book tour would also help you prepare story metaphors that would work among a wider range of people. If your idea of friendly AI is still CEV, it would help you get a better feel for what the extrapolated wishes of humanity would be, I hope. Am i right or wrong? Or is it besides the point?
In many eastern philosophies, there are meditational practices which seek to see without ego. In less wrong and other places, i got ideas that autistic people don’t construct stories, they see things as they are.
A topic you could try is—When an autistic person sees within himself, there is something present there, not just nothing ness.
Such research could be useful in constructing artificial conciousness and uploading applications. Kudos!
After thinking a little while about this article, (very well written, btw) I was trying to come up with a counter-example.
I think the complaints that the average left-leaning person has towards entrepreneurs who suceed is also similar to Goliath’s complaints in the article.
They socialists know the rules, the economic parameters. Yet somehow, something emerges that is socially horrifying, or in this case horrifying to the person viewing it. And these people end up creating documentaries like the corporation that compare a corporation to a psychopath. The way out is to design a better system. If they are so concerned, let them use half that brain power to design better rules.
however the nice part is that this populism created a backlash effect in this financial crisis where a huge number of people are in favour of the wall-street bankers collapsing, saying “they knew the rules they were playing under. let them collapse. no bailouts”
More to the topic, Marketing warfare by al ries and jack trout details strategies for every level of strength. what to do when u are the leader, when you are level 2, when you are a minnow. etc.
And yes, of course the ancient Greeks attempting such a policy could and probably would have gotten it terribly wrong; maybe the epic failed Earths are the ones where some group had the Darwinian insight and then successfully selected for prowess as warriors. I’m not saying “Go eugenics!” would have been a systematically good idea for ancient Greeks to try as policy...
And you shouldn’t, too. Ancient India tried both intelligence and warriors, infact it tried a 4-fold caste system.
Brahmins—intellects and priests
Kshatriyas—Warriors and Rulers
Vaishyas—Merchants, traders
Sudras—Manual Labour.
It might have worked for a while, and probably did. Indian monuments and works of art, literature and philosophy from that period are good. Faith differences were resolved by dialogue and not by the sword. Trade happened with Egypt and China. Damascus steel originated actually in India. Surgeries took place and the traditional texts prescribed rituals for 120 yrs of life.
And some where in the past, entropy took over. Too many different tribes with different ideas came and the system could not handle them. Education became the ability to articulate properly the texts that were already in place and little new knowledge was added. The prosperity that was previously present was lost, slowly, but surely.
I hope I understood your question correctly..
Defenders of the caste system say that the system began just as job segregation, but that doesn’t explain the endogamy that is prevalent in the system.
A majority of the people in India still have issues in marrying outside their caste.
The breeding may not have been deliberate as in blood type matching, but the duties of every caste and how a person matched the ideals of his caste were factors in deciding marriage.
Brahmins give their daughters away in marriage to learned pundits. Kshatriyas gave their daughters away in marriage to soldiers who achieved victories and kings who had territory. Vaishyas gave their daughters away in marriage to rich merchants and so on..
Deliberate notion of heridity, yes I think that is true. We match for the patrilineal and matrilineal lineage and avoid marriage with someone who is of the same patrilineal lineage for more than 3 generations and matrilineal for 1 generation.
Interesting question—Probably only in the kshatriya caste where polygyny was practiced. Not so in the other castes.
The Georgist idea seems to have a place here.
For both land and patents, let the owners float the properties in the market and price it themselves. They will be taxed based on the value that they themselves place on the patent/property.
If the usage is truly efficient, they wouldn’t mind paying the tax. If it is not, then they themselves will mark down their property/patent value, thus allowing others to buy them out.
Ofcourse, the hidden assumption here is that the government is the real property owner (of all properties in its borders) at all time, which in a de-facto sense is true today, even if it may not be true de-jure. (If the government came to grab your property, would you really have any option against them?)