What? I thought they were Xtreeeeme Rays!
DoubleReed
Hello everyone!
I am a unwitting victim of HP: MoR, and of course it led me here. I’m still reading up on the sequences, which have plenty of intriguing content. My background is in Mathematics (specifically cryptography, not much probability theory) and Music (specifically bassoon and composition). Right now I work for the US government. I grew up as a secular Jew, so I didn’t really have that much of a crisis of faith or anything. I must say I found Eliezer’s description of Modern Judaism (“you are expected to doubt but not successfully doubt”) as surprisingly accurate and amusing.
Though, after reading through things, I don’t really think I can call myself a rationalist quite yet. I need more practice, honestly. Maybe I just need to successfully update :D
Perhaps I just need to look around more, but hopefully I can contribute to the more artistic ideas of the site. Reading through what is on the site, it makes me wonder how to apply rationalist methodology to the arts.
That reminds me of that game that girls sometimes play “Given three choices of guys, which would you sleep with, date, or marry?”
The point is the minority population becomes the hybrid, and the majority population changes relatively less.
Yes, I am American. Certainly I’m rushing to race, but that’s the point I was having trouble with. If I didn’t consider race, then I don’t see how I would have found it so surprising in the first place. Regardless of American’s obsession with race, race is still a simple example of this. Race. :D
I believe he was using ‘modern art’ in a nontechnical sense, but my point doesn’t really change. Just replace John Cage with a Total Serialist composer.
I mean modern art (that is, early 20th century art) was the time period where we had an explosion of different ideas in all the different artforms. Dismissing them as ‘uniform’ in any way is crazy. Many of Stravinsky’s works are perfectly accessible to non-music people. It’s not like Realist Artwork or Tonality just vanished or something. There is Modern Realism and Modern Tonality.
Edit: Besides, isn’t this aggression towards modern art a “curiosity stopper”?
Isn’t the idea that modern art is “uniform” in any way just ridiculous?
In the early 20th century we had a huge mix of different ideas. The idea that it’s all just a big swath of ‘generic modern art’ is just silly. I’m better at music in terms of knowledge, but I find it odd to immediately denounce Stravinsky’s works simply because it’s ‘modern.’
I mean I don’t denounce John Cage because it’s ‘modern.’ I denounce it because it doesn’t sound and makes no aural sense and things like that.
I disagree. All the scam artist has to know is your method of coming to your conclusions. Once he knows that then he can probably exploit you depending on his cleverness (and then it becomes an arms race). If anything, trying to defend yourself from being manipulated in that way would probably be extremely difficult in of itself. Either way, my initial guess is that your methodology would still be superficial pattern-matching, but it would just be a deeper, more complex level of it.
This seems to be what Eliezer is doing with all the various scenarios. He’s testing his methodology against different attacks and different scenarios. I’m just suggesting is to change your viewpoint to the Bad Guy. Rather than talk about your reliable reasoning, talk about the bad guy and how he can exploit your reasoning.
Let me put it this way. You’re saying that “it doesn’t make any sense to be in that position.” But that is exactly and precisely the situation we’re describing. So it makes me think you either misunderstand the issue or simply lack imagination about real world events.
Edit: Clearly relationships are going to be different for different people. I personally would never expect my spouse to always give in to my desires or the other way around. And the idea that I would be legally obligated to is strange to me.
Well, even if marriage was a contract to say “I want to have sex with you” it’s a little ridiculous for it to say “I want to have sex with you whenever you want.”
Aw, no mention of Necrophilia? It’s even a victimless crime!
Haha, I don’t know. Given that I was just introduced to it, I don’t know even really know the arguments for/against. I’ve so far only come up with arguments in my head, and they point me toward deontologist.
Uh… any culture? The Jews have gone around and if you notice Sephardic and Ashkenazi look incredibly different, because they mixed with the people in the different areas. Asia (and specifically China) has a variety of races that have all mixed with each other over the years.
In the Americas we also saw lots of mixing of the races with hispanics, despite amazing racism and hatred. Hell, American slavery caused a lot of mixing despite it being entirely based on racism. I mean when races don’t mix, like Japan’s harsh xenophobia, seems to be the exception.
While xenophobia and racism is so much of a part of history and so many cultures, why is all this mixing happening if we are attracted to similar people?
I’m not saying that they aren’t status-signaling, but I would argue that it isn’t just status-signaling and tax-deductions.
After all, because there are so many avenues of pursuit, there must be some way for people to decide which to take. I mean if there’s a contemporary art gallery I’m bored of, and an impressionist art gallery I like, I wouldn’t donate to the contemporary art gallery because of status. I would donate to whichever I like the most. Both of them give me status.
Again, there are Neoclassical works that “the public” love just like “the public” love the old masters. Pulcinella Suite is a direct example that “competes,” but really anything from that era of Stravinsky is a great example. Francis Poulenc’s work is immensely popular (his clarinet duet and clarinet concerto are particularly good). In fact, directly after WWI is when all this stuff came out because europe couldn’t afford large orchestras.
This idea that modern classical music can’t be fun and entertaining is just plain strange! Serialism really gives modern music a bad name. People still compose tonal works, and tonal music is not considered “uninteresting.”
- 13 Nov 2011 4:39 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Making History Available by (
I think I’ll prefer ECDSA for my documents. Elliptic Curves are so much sexier.
No no no. You can’t do that. We’re talking about consent. If you are going to say “I just want to make you happy, so even though I’m not in the mood I’ll still have sex with you,” then that is consent. You are consenting. We are not talking about that. If that is your thought process, then that is still consent.
What we’re talking about is if you say “No, I don’t want to have sex with you right now,” and your wife has sex with you anyway.
(also, even with consent you can still have statutory rape, though it’s debatable whether that’s a “natural” subcategory of rape)
If I’m not mistaken statutory rape is based on the age of consent. The law is claiming that the people do not have the right to consent to such acts, much in the same way that children many times do not understand what is happening in cases of pedophilia.
Specific laws and ages of consent have problems and flaws, of course. But when you say “even with consent,” that is what people are disagreeing about. Do they really have consent?
Yea, the major issues I’ve seen are when consent is ambiguous, like pedophilia/bestiality, but also with long term damage. After all, if something is permanent, then they may not want it later. It is impossible to give “eternal consent” as far as I’ve seen and that is where there are serious moral ambiguities. Like if someone asked you to kill him. That has a permanent effect of a hopefully temporary state of mind.
Filled out the survey. Neat!
I didn’t know those versions of morality. There wasn’t an option for “don’t know” but I guess leaving it blank is the same thing.