Under typical game-theoretic assumptions, we would assume all players to be strategic. In that context, it seems much more natural to suppose that all evil people would also be liars.
Why? Maybe some evil people are ok with kicking puppies but not with lying—that’s part of their utility function. (If such differences in utility functions can’t exist, then there’s no such thing as “good” or “evil” anyway.)
Wouldn’t more moral uncertainty make people less certain that Communism or Nazism were wrong?
A free market isn’t a lawless jungle of arbitrary one-shot interactions. It’s an engineered game where participants can’t be forced into deals and should keep promises. That pushes the great mass of interactions away from “predatory” and toward “positive-sum”.
Wait, this doesn’t seem right. Say 49% of people are good and truthful, 49% are evil and truthful, and 2% are evil liars. You meet a random person and are deciding whether to be friends with them. Apriori they’re about equally likely to be good or evil. You ask “are you good?” They say “yeah”. Now they are much more likely to be good than evil. So if the person is in fact an evil liar, their lie had the intended effect on you. It wasn’t “priced into the equilibrium” or anything.
The technical explanation is still correct in the narrow sense—the message can be interpreted as “I’m either good or an evil liar”, and it does increase the probability of “evil liar”. But at the same time it increases the probability of “good” relative to “evil” overall, and often that’s what matters.
Sometime ago I tried to come up with a theory to Make Sense Of It All, it went something like this—suffering is a tool of evolution, but in us evolution came up with creatures that can achieve creativity with joy instead of suffering. We’re agents who should bring that change about more widely, and also living proofs-of-concept that it’s possible.
Not sure I can give advice on this… it feels different every time, and it probably differs between people as well. You’re on your own :-/
I don’t think it makes sense to search for your one true love or one true calling in life. It’s more of a mutual process: you encounter a person or calling, ask yourself if it could work out, then invest. There’s always a free choice, a leap of faith. Isn’t it nice that the world works that way, instead of funneling you to one predetermined answer?
I spent most of the lockdown in a small town by a lake and loved it. The future I’d like to see is a future where good jobs are less tied to cities, due to remote work tech like this.
Thank you! It looks very impressive.
Nono, I meant “talk its way out of the box”. Have you tried something like that?
Has anyone tried to get it to talk itself out of the box yet?
If our children are better than us, I hope they’ll offer us the same forgiveness and gratitude as we did to our parents.
That list of names is amazing! I realize now how many like-minded people are out there, I’m not as alone as it felt before. Let’s not delete it quickly, it’s great that we’re all able to find each other.
I don’t know the US situation firsthand, but it seems like it could get worse toward the election. Maybe move to Europe?
Maybe stochastic matrix?
Paper by Chalmers, maybe people will find it a good intro.
Overall I agree with your point and would even go further (not sure if you’ll agree or not). My feelings about colloquial language are kind of environmentalist: I think it should be allowed to grow in the traditional way, through folk poetry and individual choices, without foisting academisms or attacking “old” concepts. Otherwise we’ll just have a poor and ugly language.
Yeah. A steel string acoustic guitar is “a friend for life” as Mark Knopfler said. Another versatile instrument is the electronic keyboard.
I met him once and didn’t feel much charisma, he just sounded overconfident about all things. I’m sure it works on some people though.
Yeah. For me the aha moment came from Drawing the Head and Hands by Loomis, which is like an extended version of the post you linked. It feels great, you draw a sphere and some helper lines and end up with a realistic head from any angle.
I mostly agree. Though it can be hard for a person to tell when this advice applies, as it’s a bit absolutist, like “drink more water”. Some kind of reasonable-person criterion could work here, like “if you say this is causing you X worth of problems, but you aren’t taking reasonable steps that cost less than X and could help with these problems, then maybe stop complaining so much.”