Rationality: How to Become Less Wrong.
Decius
Karma: 1,700
… This page is now the top Google hit for Young Cryonicists Gathering scholarship. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that not everybody knows what you are talking about.
Don’t ask a question if you don’t want an answer.
If you’re missing a lot of flights, you should arrive at the airport sooner.
I think that ‘awesome’ loses a lot of value when you are forced to make the statement “Watching lot of people die was the most awesome choice I had, because any intervention would have added victims without saving anyone.”
I propose ‘lame’ and ‘bummer’ as antonyms for ‘awesome’. Instead of trying to figure out the most awesome of a series of bad options, we can discuss the least lame.
Referencing Rand would bring along a lot of baggage from Objectivists as well as Objectivist Haters.
I would love to attend, and the $6k price tag (including estimated transportation and the value of the leave I would have to take to attend) is not a bar.
However, I need several weeks in order to secure time off, and the expected value of the summit is significantly less than the expected loss of my current employment from not showing up on those days.
Is there a way to become informed of these type of retreats at least a month in advance?
Strict Wednesdayism is undefined on Wednesdays. Orthodox Wednesdayism is false on Wednesdays. Reformed Wednesdayism requires you to personally decide if it is true on Wednesdays.
I’m assuming a multiple-choice exam, and invalid answers don’t count as ‘wrong’ for that purpose?
Otherwise I can easily miss the entire exam with “Tau is exactly six.” or “The battle of Thermopylae” repeated for every answer. Even if the valid answers are [A;B;C;D].
That’s only useful if the outside advisor has some level of veto power. I’d suggest something like allowing them to trigger a discussion meeting /outside of Dragon Army Territory/ with the advised, optionally including the Commander and/or other members, and also at the option of the advisor including legal counsel or a medical practitioner.
Not because I expect anyone to need the safeguards involved, but because making those explicitly part of the Expectations makes it harder to coerce somebody into not getting help. Making coercion of the type “You’re fine, no need to waste time and leaving your ingroup to try to explain to some /outsider/ what’s going on, they won’t understand anyway” ring red alarm bell flags is a feature.
For someone who thinks that they are immune to being shunned, you sure do use an anononym.
Oh, it’s very munchkiny, and a very valid way to become immortal is to change yourself into something which is easy to make immortal. You just lose everything about yourself that death would have taken.
The Talmud discusses the legality of farming flowers that make for bad tasting honey when bees use them to make honey, and when one can plant such flowers near the property of someone who owns beehives.
I know it’s a little off topic, but it’s interesting to point out when you can almost reconstruct the situation that was patched by a specific rule by looking at the rule.
It seems like the core issue underlying all of these specific examples is that “gather more information about the expected outcome and seek additional options” choice isn’t considered.
Sometimes the price gouging actually is someone who is making an obscene profit even considering their expenses. Price-fixing in that specific case can just be the socially desired outcome, but the policy maker has to have detailed information about the specifics of that specific case.
So far the idea that an embryo will become immortal if it exits the womb alive has been taken as an article of faith by people who claim that abortion is bad because it results in a death; if the choice is examined as including an option where the death is preceded by little suffering and an option where the death is preceded by an expected lot of suffering and little redeeming quality, the position that abortion is bad because death is bad loses all basis.
If someone is drowning (literally or metaphorically) and you don’t consider the option of calling a trained lifeguard or other person more competent or better equipped than you,, you haven’t considered all of the easily available options.
If you only consider the complete social pressure against ever blocking anyone for any reason or the policy of blocking people who are persuasive about things that you refuse to allow people to be swayed about, you completely miss the possible option of only blocking and banning people who are actually toxic or harmful.
And if you are raising a child who wants to hang out with someone harmful, like a white supremacist or someone who talks in the theater, your options include allowing closely supervised activities, not just blanket permission and blanket refusal. You can bribe them to practice piano (although that also probably won’t get you what you think you want), or you can try to identify what the aversive thing about piano practice is and figure out an option that addresses it directly- if the problem is that they are frustrated that their skill is increasing slowly, setting better expectations about what skill growth looks and feels like could completely resolve the aversion to practice (but that’s just me taking five actual minutes to think about the generic class of problem; anyone actually experiencing a specific problem of that class should be able to develop several different intentions of action based on their actual situation).
One of the core problems informing the entire process is that “spend some resources (time, money, attention) to get more options or more information about the options” is often not considered to be one of the options, and that course of action is declined not because the cost-benefit ratio is too low, but because it was not considered at all.
Would an apt summary be “Expertly used Dark Side techniques have a high local maximum of instrumental rationality, but there is a region of higher instrumental rationality that involves epistemic rationality techniques that are incompatible with Dark Side techniques”?
That which is made immortal by such a method is not me.
I think ” “So, do you actually read Less Wrong, or did someone drag you here?” has a significantly different subtext from ” “So, do you read Less Wrong, or did someone drag you here?”, which is also significantly different from ” “So, do you read Less Wrong?”
The “actually” implies that the target has already made an indication of reading LW, and that the speaker is asking for verification of that indication. The “or did someone drag you here” has some of the same tones of “are you available?”
Rebranding HPMOR would probably be too costly to be worth the book title.
And at least one person considers snakes and the time to kill them less valuable than the time it takes to identify dangerous snakes and not kill harmless or beneficial snakes.
Replace ‘snake’ with ‘human’ and ‘[venomous] or potentially harmful to me’ with ‘kittens’ and ‘rabid’, you might realize that the ick factor of reptiles is more important to you than the actual danger.
I’m working the three holidays this season, and will donate the incentive pay from that.