Chris_Leong

• Chris_Leong 2 Jul 2020 12:03 UTC

  4 points

  on: Si­tu­at­ing LessWrong in con­tem­po­rary philos­o­phy: An in­ter­view with Jon Livengood

  “And the differ­ence in grad­u­ate train­ing in the two pro­grams is, HPS you come in, write some pa­pers, get out in 6-8 years, get a job, ev­ery­body does that. The Pitt Philos­o­phy pro­gram you come, think some things, try to think the deep thoughts; the very best peo­ple go on to an awe­some ca­reer, the rest of you, well, we’re happy to burn through a hun­dred grad stu­dents to find a di­a­mond.”—I found this pas­sage sur­pris­ing. I’d ex­pect that the ease of find­ing a job in an area such as philos­o­phy or HPS would be based on the availa­bil­ity of fund­ing, not differ­ences in ap­proach.

• Chris_Leong 30 Jun 2020 8:35 UTC

  8 points

  on: Chris_Leong’s Shortform

  I re­ally dis­like the fic­tion that we’re all ra­tio­nal be­ings. We re­ally need to ac­cept that some­times peo­ple can’t share things with us. Stronger: not just ac­cept but ap­pre­ci­ate peo­ple who make this choice for their wis­dom and tact. ALL of us have ideas that will strongly trig­ger us and if we’re hon­est and open-minded, we’ll be able re­call situ­a­tions when we un­fairly judged some­one be­cause of a view that they held. I cer­tainty can, way too many times to list.

  I say this as some­one who has a re­ally strong sense of cu­ri­os­ity, know­ing that I’ll feel slightly miffed when some­one doesn’t feel com­fortable be­ing open with me. But it’s my job to deal with that, not the other per­son.

  Don’t get me wrong. Open­ness and vuln­er­a­bil­ity are im­por­tant. Just not *all* the time. Just not *ev­ery­thing*.

• Chris_Leong 24 Jun 2020 23:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: What is meant by Si­mul­cra Levels?

  Thanks for writ­ing this com­ment. I agree with you that simul­cra lev­els and the un­named ob­ject level vs so­cial re­al­ity grid should ideally be sep­a­rated as con­cepts. Also thanks for sav­ing me the effort of adding my own the­ory here (I was plan­ning to even­tu­ally, but I have a ten­dency to pro­cras­ti­nate). Any­way, I’ll just add that the main pur­pose of my char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion was to try to ex­plore some of the re­li­gious lan­guage that Bau­drillard was us­ing.

• Chris_Leong 24 Jun 2020 6:46 UTC

  4 points

  on: [META] Build­ing a whisper net­work.

  I like the gen­eral idea, but I’d be wary of ven­tur­ing so far in terms of pri­vacy that the us­abil­ity be­comes ter­rible and no-one wants to use it.

• Chris_Leong 19 Jun 2020 1:03 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What is meant by Si­mul­cra Levels?

  In­ter­est­ing. I like the grid model and in some ways it is more nat­u­ral than the four seper­ate lev­els.

• Chris_Leong 17 Jun 2020 3:43 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: elriggs’s comment on: Does equa­nim­ity pre­vent nega­tive util­ity?

  “”Bad” re­quires defin­ing. Define the util­ity func­tion, and the an­swer falls out”—Ex­actly. How should it be defined?

[Question] What is meant by Si­mul­cra Levels?

• Chris_Leong 17 Jun 2020 1:04 UTC

  16 points

  on: Creat­ing bet­ter in­fras­truc­ture for con­tro­ver­sial dis­course

  I guess there is The Motte on Red­dit, but I could see benefits of some­one cre­at­ing a sep­a­rate com­mu­nity. One prob­lem is that far more meta dis­cus­sion needs to oc­cur on how to have these con­ver­sa­tions.

• Chris_Leong 13 Jun 2020 6:09 UTC

  5 points

  on: Prag­ma­tism and Completeness

  One thing this leaves out is how prag­ma­tism con­tains the risk that you are com­pletely mi­s­un­der­stand­ing what is go­ing on. Some­times the risk is worth it, other times it isn’t, al­though it is hard to tell in ad­vance.

• Chris_Leong 11 Jun 2020 22:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ricraz’s comment on: Does equa­nim­ity pre­vent nega­tive util­ity?

  The later

Does equa­nim­ity pre­vent nega­tive util­ity?

• Chris_Leong 8 Jun 2020 8:38 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: What is Ra?

  Maybe I should have said that there two sides to Ra—the in­sti­tu­tional in­cen­tive and the rea­son why peo­ple fall for this or (stronger) want this

• Chris_Leong 8 Jun 2020 8:36 UTC

  4 points

  on: Leg­i­bil­ity: Notes on “Man as a Ra­tion­al­ist An­i­mal”

  I’m re­ally keen to see the later posts in this se­ries, since Lou’s posts are of­ten some­what tricky to de­crypt.

• Chris_Leong 6 Jun 2020 22:15 UTC

  8 points

  on: What is Ra?

  I formed my own opinion at the start, but I didn’t post it right away since I didn’t want to pos­si­bly bias other peo­ple into agree­ing with me. I guess the way I’ll an­swer this will be slightly differ­ent from the other an­swers, since I think the dy­nam­ics of the situ­a­tion are more com­plex than an ideal­i­sa­tion of vague­ness. Pjeby seems hot­ter(/​closer) in es­ti­ma­tion when they say it’s a prefer­ence for mys­te­ri­ous, pres­ti­gious au­thor­ity, but again I think we have to dive deeper.

  I see Ra as a dy­namic which tends to oc­cur once an or­gani­sa­tion has ob­tained a cer­tain amount of sta­tus. At that point there is an in­cen­tive and a temp­ta­tion to use that sta­tus to defend it­self against crit­i­cism. One way of do­ing that is pro­vid­ing vague, but ex­tremely pos­i­tive-sound­ing non-jus­tifi­ca­tions for the things that it does and use the sta­tus to pre­vent peo­ple from dig­ging too deep. This works since there are of­ten so­cial rea­sons not to ask too many ques­tions. If some­one gives a talk, to keep ask­ing fol­lowups is to crowd out other peo­ple. Peo­ple will of­ten as­sume that some­one who keeps ham­mer­ing a point is an ide­ologue or sim­ply lose in­ter­est. In any case, these can usu­ally be an­swered with ad­di­tional lay­ers of vague­ness.

  This also re­minds me of the con­cept of hy­per­real or realer than real. Or­gani­sa­tions that util­ise Ra be­come a simu­la­tion of a great or­gani­sa­tion in­stead of the great or­gani­sa­tion that they might have once been. By pro­ject­ing this image of perfec­tion they feel realer than any real great or­gani­sa­tion which will in­evitably have its faults and hence in­spire doubt.

• Chris_Leong 6 Jun 2020 21:55 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: pjeby’s comment on: What is Ra?

  Great to hear that this ar­ti­cle helped you

[Question] What is Ra?

• Chris_Leong 3 Jun 2020 8:36 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Suspended Reason’s comment on: Con­cep­tual en­g­ineer­ing: the rev­olu­tion in philos­o­phy you’ve never heard of

  Oh, one more thing I for­got to men­tion. This idea of Con­cep­tual Eng­ineer­ing seems highly re­lated to what I was dis­cussing in Con­struc­tive Defi­ni­tions. I’m sure this kind of idea has a name in episte­mol­ogy as well, al­though un­for­tu­nately, I haven’t had the time to in­ves­ti­gate.

• Chris_Leong 3 Jun 2020 5:08 UTC

  3 points

  on: Con­cep­tual en­g­ineer­ing: the rev­olu­tion in philos­o­phy you’ve never heard of

  Thanks for writ­ing this post. Bet­ter con­nect­ing the dis­cus­sion on Less Wrong with the dis­cus­sions in philos­o­phy is im­por­tant work.

  Also, how is the idea of con­cep­tual en­g­ineer­ing differ­ent from Wittgen­stein’s idea of lan­guage as use?

• Chris_Leong 24 May 2020 12:22 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: “It’s Okay”, In­struc­tions, Fo­cus­ing, Ex­pe­rienc­ing and Frames

  Why do you say it isn’t an emo­tional state?

• Chris_Leong 20 May 2020 3:18 UTC

  2 points

  on: Chris_Leong’s Shortform

  I’ve always found the con­cept be­lief in be­lief slightly hard to parse cog­ni­tively. Here’s what fi­nally satis­fied my brain: whether you will be re­warded or pun­ished in heaven is tied to whether or not God ex­ists, whether or not you feel a push to go to church is tied to whether or not you be­lieve in God. If you do go to church and want to go your brain will say, “See I re­ally do be­lieve” and it’ll do the re­verse if you don’t go. How­ever, it’ll only af­fect your be­lief in God in­di­rectly through your “I be­lieve in God” node. Put­ting it an­other way, go­ing to church is ev­i­dence you be­lieve in God, not ev­i­dence that God ex­ists. Any­way, the re­sult of all this is that your “I be­lieve in God” node can be­come much stronger than your “God ex­ists” node