David Gross

Karma: 1,412

David Gross 11 Jul 2024 15:30 UTC
3 points
0
on: Effective Empathy
See also: Notes on Empathy for more suggestions and some of the research / theory behind them.

David Gross 8 Jul 2024 21:56 UTC
6 points
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on: Announcing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto: A new philosophy of progress for the 21st century
What I don’t see in your outline, and what I think would make your proposed manifesto stronger, would be a chapter along the lines of “this is the steelmanned case for why continuing progress in technology is problematic and dangerous and for how humanity could prosper or avoid disaster by putting the brakes on it.”
Otherwise it does look like a preaching to the choir thing. Manifestos are often that sort of preaching, so maybe that’s okay for what you’re after, but for all the usual LW-communications-ethos reasons, I hope you decide on something better.

David Gross 23 Jun 2024 18:38 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Suffering Is Not Pain
I’ve seen dukkha translated as something more like “unsatisfactoriness” which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you’ve been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you’re dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won’t make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.

David Gross 23 Jun 2024 4:05 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: jbkjr’s comment on: Suffering Is Not Pain
My point is that in English “experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain” would be considered an uncontroversial example of “suffering”, not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there’s a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.
I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker “Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again” they would assume you were claiming that this would include “never experiencing such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain.” If this is not the case, I think they would be justified to feel they’d been played with a bit of a bait-and-switch dharma-wise.

David Gross 19 Jun 2024 2:48 UTC
30 points
22
on: Suffering Is Not Pain
There can be pain without suffering. If pain is experienced without attachment and aversion, there is no resulting suffering. If the Buddha were to stub his toe, there would be pain, but he would not suffer as a result.
I wonder whether “suffering” is an adequate translation. I get the feeling that the Buddhist sutras and our common vulgate are talking past each other. See for example MN144, in which Channa slits his wrists to end his pain, and the Buddha says he was sufficiently enlightened that he will not be reborn. Channa complains: “Reverend Sāriputta, I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. The winds piercing my head are so severe, it feels like a strong man drilling into my head with a sharp point. The pain in my head is so severe, it feels like a strong man tightening a tough leather strap around my head. The winds slicing my belly are so severe, like a deft butcher or their apprentice were slicing open a cows’s belly with a meat cleaver. The burning in my body is so severe, it feels like two strong men grabbing a weaker man by the arms to burn and scorch him on a pit of glowing coals. I’m not keeping well, I’m not getting by. The pain is terrible and growing, not fading; its growing is evident, not its fading. Reverend Sāriputta, I will slit my wrists. I don’t wish to live.” If that’s “not suffering” then “not suffering” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

David Gross 6 Jun 2024 13:28 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: PhilosophicalSoul’s comment on: Philosophers wrestling with evil, as a social media feed
Anselm: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for the existence of God, which this tweet is too small to contain. 🙏😇

David Gross 4 Jun 2024 22:48 UTC
3 points
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on: Has anyone here written about religious fictionalism?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnNNGWQEX7CgaqBt2/notes-on-reverence
Excerpt:
“I am an atheist, and am addressing an audience in which, if I’m not mistaken, respect for the tenets of established religion is fairly low. But I want to explore reverence — in the spirit of Chesterton’s Fence — because it is common to many virtue systems across cultures and across time. Among the questions that concern me:
- “Are there aspects of reverence that are valuable that rationalists can preserve and nurture in their own ways in their own traditions?
- “Is reverence perhaps so valuable that it is worth taking a ‘leap of faith’ beyond the limits of rationalism in order to practice it?”

Philosophers wrestling with evil, as a social media feed

David Gross3 Jun 2024 22:25 UTC

48 points

2 comments16 min readLW link

David Gross 2 Jun 2024 18:10 UTC
2 points
0
on: In the very near future the internet will answer all of our questions and that makes me sad
Took a couple of years, but my dystopian future has arrived:
May, 2024: Google search starts to put “AI Overviews” above its web search results. [BBC] “Google’s new artificial intelligence (AI) search feature is facing criticism for providing erratic, inaccurate answers. Its experimental ‘AI Overviews’ tool has told some users searching for how to make cheese stick to pizza better that they could use ‘non-toxic glue’. The search engine’s AI-generated responses have also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day.”

David Gross 1 Jun 2024 1:47 UTC
2 points
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on: Notes on Moderation, Balance, & Harmony
my current best guess
FWIW, from Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (p. 323): “If we study one moral concept we soon see it as an aspect of another. It is true on the one hand that as moral agents we tend to specialise. The high-principled statesman may be a negligent father (and so on). It may seem as if we have a limited amount of good motivation available and cannot expect to be decent ‘all round’. There are familiar ways of characterising people in terms of individual characteristics. Yet also a closer look may show this as superficial, and we then wish to say that the impulse toward goodness should stir the whole person.”

David Gross 29 May 2024 17:14 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: David Wynne Owen’s comment on: Notes on notes on virtues
Here ’tis: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iofy4cWC9AWzZDtxc/notes-on-gracefulness

Notes on Gracefulness

David Gross28 May 2024 18:40 UTC

19 points

2 comments25 min readLW link

David Gross 24 May 2024 2:28 UTC
2 points
0
on: Are most people deeply confused about “love”, or am I missing a human universal?
If you are worried that nobody obsessively overanalyzes the concept of love in a desperate search for something solid at the base of the concept, worry no longer.

David Gross 21 May 2024 18:51 UTC
4 points
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on: rough draft on what happens in the brain when you have an insight
I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about how insight-frisson might be induced by psychedelics/marijuana in terms of your model. Anecdotally, these drugs seem to promote both a lot of false-positive insight-frisson experiences (the feeling of having an insight is vividly there, but the insight itself seems to dissolve upon inspection) and genuinely insightful insight-frisson experiences (a conceptual discrepancy you didn’t even realize you had suddenly comes to light, and a way of resolving it follows soon after, in a way that endures beyond the acute drug experience).

David Gross 17 May 2024 22:27 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: David Gross’s Shortform
It sounds like you want to say things like “coherence and persistent similarity of structure in perceptions demonstrates that perceptions are representations of things external to the perceptions themselves” or “the idea that there is stuff out there seems the obvious explanation” or “explanations that work better than others are the best alternatives in the search for truth” and yet you also want to say “pish, philosophy is rubbish; I don’t need to defend an opinion about realism or idealism or any of that nonsense”. In fact what you’re doing isn’t some alternative to philosophy, but a variety of it.

David Gross 17 May 2024 16:32 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: David Gross’s Shortform
A hypothesis that explains the perceptions can be a just-so story. For any set of perceptions ζ, there may be a vast number of hypotheses that explain those perceptions. How do you choose among them?
In other words, if f() and g() both explain ζ equally well, but are incompatible in all sorts of other ways for which you do not have perceptions to distinguish them, ζ may be “evidence for the hypothesis” f and ζ may be “evidence for the hypothesis” g, but ζ offers no help in determining whether f or g is truer. Consider e.g. f is idealism, g is realism, or some other incompatible metaphysical positions that start with our perceptions and speculate from there.
An author I read recently compared this obstinate coherence of our perceptions to a GUI. When I move my mouse pointer to a file, click, and drag that file into another folder, I’m doing something that has predictable results, and that is similar to other actions I’ve performed in the past, and that plays nicely with my intuitions about objects and motion and so forth. But it would be a mistake for me to then extrapolate from this and assume that somewhere on my hard drive or in my computer memory is a “file” which I have “dragged” “into” a “folder”. My perceptions via the interface may have consistency and practical utility, but they are not themselves a reliable guide to the actual state of the world.
Obstinate coherence and persistent similarity of structure are intriguing but they are limited in how much they can explain by themselves.

David Gross 17 May 2024 15:51 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: TAG’s comment on: David Gross’s Shortform
It’s a characteristic of philosophy, too, at least according to the positivists. If you’re humoring a metaphysical theory that could not even in theory be confirmed or falsified by some possible observation, they suggest that you’re really engaging in mythmaking or poetry or something, not philosophy.

David Gross 14 May 2024 23:33 UTC
7 points
2
on: David Gross’s Shortform
This is a brief follow-up to my post “Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method.” Since I wrote that post:
1. Scott Alexander boosted (not to be interpreted as endorsed) my post on Astral Codex Ten, which helped to give it more than typical reach.
2. In a flinchy spasm of post-SBF timidity, GiveWell explicitly told me they did not want to get their hands dirty with my donations of redirected taxes any more.
3. My tax arrears for 2013 ($5,932 original tax + ~$5,467 in interest & penalties) were annulled by the statute of limitations.
4. I made a $5,932 donation to Charity Entrepreneurship to celebrate.

David Gross 12 May 2024 15:08 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: David Gross’s comment on: David Gross’s Shortform
According to Seigen Ishin (Ch’ing-yüan Wei-hsin):
“Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.”
(D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926, London; New York: Published for the Buddhist Society, London by Rider, p. 24.)

[Question] Resources for learning about poise / gracefulness?

David Gross11 May 2024 18:30 UTC

14 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

David Gross

Philoso­phers wrestling with evil, as a so­cial me­dia feed

Notes on Gracefulness

[Question] Re­sources for learn­ing about poise /​ grace­ful­ness?

Philosophers wrestling with evil, as a social media feed

[Question] Resources for learning about poise / gracefulness?