EphemeralNight

Karma: 400

EphemeralNight 9 Feb 2016 14:29 UTC
−9 points
0
on: The Fable of the Burning Branch
Well, first, I’ll admit up front that I logged off and metaphorically hid for a day after posting this, so I would not be tempted to engage in a pointless argument in the comments. And yet, I was somehow still too optimistic about what I’d find when I looked.

First point of order, this isn’t about me. I’ve been on this site a while, it should be obvious by now that I have no qualms sharing gooey personal details about myself. So. Stop making it about me. If it was about me, you’d know.

Second point of order, the pronouns assigned to the characters do not matter and I think it says more about you than me that you fixated on that. So. Stop making it about sexism. Perhaps I could have chosen some other combination of genders, but I had hoped that commenters here of all places would be egalitarian enough to see those genders as the placeholders they are.

Third point of order, the parable was never meant to reflect reality. If it seems one-sided, that’s because it is. It is meant to reflect a generalized emotional journey that I think is valid for a lot of people, of all sexes and orientations, who are too scared to speak up because they, rightly, expect to get nothing but vitriol for doing so.

Fourthly, if the parable even has a moral, it is about prostitution and modern attitudes towards prostitution and not really anything else. If you think the parable is advocating anything else you don’t like, that, again, says more about you than me. I am astounded that I have to explicitly point this out, but there is a difference between not actively helping a person and actively interfering with help reaching a person. So. Stop putting words in my mouth. We should be above that, here.
What links here?
- TheAltar's comment on The Fable of the Burning Branch by EphemeralNight (12 Feb 2016 15:11 UTC; 9 points)
- TheAltar's comment on The Fable of the Burning Branch by EphemeralNight (12 Feb 2016 13:54 UTC; -1 points)

EphemeralNight 15 Jan 2016 5:01 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Consciousness and Sleep
That is actually what I meant. But the way you’re phasing it re-introduces confusion on the word “you”.

What this means is, neither branch is privileged, neither branch takes precedence, there is no soul that only goes to one or the other, the subjective “you” prior to duplication does have a 50% chance of experiencing either branch. After duplication, there are two people, who are both, objectively, “you”, but neither subjectively experiences being in two places at once.

One experiences the destination and subsequent existence, the other experiences a split second of dawning horror and then oblivion. Each time a “you” steps into the badly designed dupli-teleporter, that “you” has a 50% chance of either experience.

EphemeralNight 9 Jan 2016 5:02 UTC
−1 points
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on: Consciousness and Sleep

In this problem, we imagine that you are cloned perfectly in an alternate location and then your body is destroyed.

In which case, “you” have a 50% chance of dying, because your self-continuity forks and one fork is then destroyed. The obvious answer to this dilemma isn’t a metaphysical one. It’s that this is a stupid way to design a teleporter.

If we instead imagine that you are destroyed and then duplicated perfectly in an alternate location, there is no longer an extra self-continuity branch that terminates. Correct order of operations in the engineering solution is all it takes to solve this problem.

EphemeralNight 31 May 2015 14:30 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Fivehundred’s comment on: Stupid Questions June 2015
I think maybe not if you sign them up for cryonic preservation?

I think it may be much more on point to talk about it being unethical to have children pre-singularity, for the inevitable needless suffering that will occur. I do believe that the moment we solve aging, it is a moral imperative to stop having children until we can be assure that we’re not bringing new people into existence just to suffer.

I don’t think it is unethical to keep having children today, but only so far as it is necessary to actually reach the singularity. I think ethically, we should be trying to minimize the portion of human mind-space that must experience pre-singularity existence, but not to the point of delaying the singularity.

EphemeralNight 28 Apr 2015 18:47 UTC
−2 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ephemeral correspondence
Consciousness is the most recent module, and that does mean that. I’m sorry, I thought this was one point that wasn’t even in dispute. It was laid out pretty clearly in the Evolution Sequence:

Complex adaptations take a very long time to evolve. First comes allele A, which is advantageous of itself, and requires a thousand generations to fixate in the gene pool. Only then can another allele B, which depends on A, begin rising to fixation. A fur coat is not a strong advantage unless the environment has a statistically reliable tendency to throw cold weather at you. Well, genes form part of the environment of other genes, and if B depends on A, B will not have a strong advantage unless A is reliably present in the genetic environment

Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)

EphemeralNight 27 Apr 2015 2:19 UTC
−2 points
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on: Ephemeral correspondence
There is a wrong-note in the reasoning of this post that immediately started niggling at me, but it’s subtle and I’m having trouble teasing out the underlying assumption. I want to say that you’re taking “The purpose of consciousness is consciousness” as a given, when that is arguably false. Likewise, I want to accuse you of drawing causal arrows from consciousness to other modules of human mind design, which as far as I know is ruled out, evolutionarily speaking.

I offer this:

The “executive process” as you call it is part of the world-modeler. It is the world-modeling module that evolved in response to a very unique world-modeling challenge. There is a critical difference between sky-color and insult-vs-complement that you seem to be glossing over. A given wavelength of light always has the same properties. A given array of posture, facial expression, tone, etc. does not always map directly to the same social reality.

We can’t chose to see a smile on a scowling face any more than we can chose to see a green sky, but unlike the sky, the same facial expression can mean vastly different things depending on context, because the causes underlying any given expression depends on a thing that is just as complicated as you are.

The “executive process” is how evolution solved the entirely new problem of adding other world-modelers to the world-model and that’s what it does. If it is glitchy and unreliable, well, it is still very new. The very first functional wing to evolve probably wasn’t all that good at producing lift, either.

EphemeralNight 17 Apr 2015 23:41 UTC
0 points
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on: The “supernatural” category
I think there is a strict and useful definition of “supernatural” to be had, that suitably reduces the concept.

Take the game of life as an example. In the cell grid, the rules governing individual cells are the laws of physics. Those rules completely define natural phenomenon in that universe. It seems clear to me, then, that the definition of supernatural phenomenon points to operations on patterns of cells, IE, anything that edits the outputs of the natural rules.

For example, “Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.” is natural, while “If glider for x iterations, then pulsar” is supernatural.

EphemeralNight 6 Apr 2015 12:47 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Stupid Questions April 2015
I think you may have misunderstood. I’m talking about my router, which is a separate device from my modem. I have never observed the router rebooting to fix a problem, and have on several occasions observed the reboot to cause a problem. I just want to know if there is something nonobvious going on that will cause problems if the router does not reboot once a week, keeping in mind that it is a separate device from the cable modem.

EphemeralNight 6 Apr 2015 11:05 UTC
0 points
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on: How has lesswrong changed your life?
I’ve gone from rock-bottom self-esteem and hopeless crying, to… rock-bottom self-esteem and StepfordSmiling. LessWrong has helped me become much less self-centered by providing the skills to quantify exactly how I am not, in fact, worth anything to anyone, and am, in fact, entitled to nothing.

I talk about transhumanism and cryonics instead of nihilism and suicide.

I went from feeling like I’m always in hostile territory waiting to die, to feeling like I’m always out in the cold looking in on something beautiful that will never include me.

I get much less enjoyment and relaxation from my passtimes because I’ve internalized the fact that escapism isn’t.

It took an hour to compose this post instead of ten minutes, because I have a more realistic expectation of the results.

EphemeralNight 6 Apr 2015 6:59 UTC
1 point
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on: Stupid Questions April 2015
Okay, so I have a “self-healing” router that ostensibly reboots itself once a week to “allow channel switching” and to “promote network health”, and given that this seems to NOT mess up my internet access in one of several ways every tuesday morning only MOST of the time, it has been causing me stress absurdly out of proportion with the actual danger (of being without internet access/my ONLY link to the outside world, for a short time).

So, my question is, what the HECK does “channel switching” or “promoting network health” even mean, and is it actually important enough that I shouldn’t just flat out disable my router’s “self-healing” feature?

EphemeralNight 20 Mar 2015 18:05 UTC
1 point
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on: Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015
I have a random physics question:

A solid sphere, in ordinary atmosphere, with a magical heating element at one pole and a magical refrigeration element at the other. If the sphere itself is stationary and at room temperature; one pole is super-cooled while the opposite pole is super-heated. (Edit: Assume the axis connecting the poles is horizontal.)

What effect does this have on air-flow around the sphere? Does it move? If so, in which direction?

EphemeralNight 3 Feb 2015 16:56 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, January 2015, chapter 103
That just means that the spell inventor doesn’t need to know anything about or implement natural language processing. To get magical primitives like ontologically basic mental parts you still have to have complex and fully reducible algorithms running over the base physics outputs somewhere even if that somewhere is “parallel to or between frames of the simulation”.

EphemeralNight 12 Dec 2014 3:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: timujin’s comment on: Stupid Questions December 2014
I sometimes have a similar experience, and when I do, it is almost always simply an effect of my own standards of competence being higher than those around me.

Imagine, some sort of problem arises in the presence of a small group. The members of that group look at each other, and whoever signals the most confidence gets first crack at the problem. But this more-confident person then does not reveal any knowledge or skill that the others do not possess, because said confidence was entirely do to higher willingness to potentially make the problem worse through trial and error.

So, in this scenario, feeling less competent does not mean you are less competent; it means you are more risk-adverse. Do you have a generalized paralyzing fear of making the problem worse? If so, welcome to the club. If not, nevermind.

EphemeralNight 31 Jul 2014 7:05 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: SeanMCoincon’s comment on: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale
I’m wondering if this is the kind of confusion that can be cleared up by tabooing the right words.

I believe it can be taken as obvious that the image in the muslim woman’s head upon hearing the phrase “monkey’s transformed into humans” isn’t at all similar to the image in the mind of someone who understands evolution, as even to my ear it comes across as, at best, misleading.

Thus my response would be more along the lines of:

I don’t believe monkeys can change into humans. I believe that both monkeys and humans belong to a larger category of creatures called apes, and it seems very suspicious to me that if a hypothetical omnipotent being created humans in His image, that the image would be just another species of ape rather than anything unique.

With greater time and preparation, I don’t think it would be too hard to demonstrate how a human body and a chimp body are almost the same machine, just shaped a little different. In the ‘explain in twenty minutes’ scenario, I think the critical insight is scope insensitivity. It is legitimately difficult to imagine the number of generations involved. You’d have to describe a family tree, point out how the less distance up you need to go to find a common ancestor, the more similar any two individuals will look, and then… zoom out, massively.

Even if your non-evolutionist then believes that family tree will eventually lead back to Adam and Eve or whoever, rather than connecting to the animal kindgom once you go far enough back, it moves the competing suppositions out of the realm of absurdity and creates an actual disagreement rather than merely a confusion.

It is hard to argue that magic was not involved in the origin of the human species when the other person cannot conceive of the possibility that humans could even exist or function without magic being involved. And that is not a trivial thing. Even many of today’s educated people, who pay lip-service to the idea that humans are biology and nothing else, still believe in souls-and-elanvital-by-another-name. There are modern martial arts that still believe in Ki. You can’t trip over your own feet without stumbling on “science” fiction that treats sentient thought as something ontologically fundamental. Likewise, “science” fiction where things like age can be disconnected from people and moved around. And just try to ask the Worm fandom what the difference between telepathy and precise telekinesis acting on the brain, is.

EphemeralNight 25 Jul 2014 1:34 UTC
1 point
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on: Open thread, July 21-27, 2014
There are a lot of games that can be played with a standard deck of playing cards, but it has occurred to me that I’ve never heard of a skill-based strategy game that minimizes luck-of-the-draw, meant for ordinary playing cards.

So, I tried my hand at inventing such a game.

Unfortunately, I have no practical way to play-test it, so I’m putting it out there for other people to try.

Suggestions on a name for the game are welcome. I have considered and dismissed “Card Chess” as derivative and inaccurate.

EphemeralNight 11 Jul 2014 20:37 UTC
0 points
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on: Open thread, 7-14 July 2014
Question for anyone who knows:

I’ve been getting “cannot connect to the real...” error messages in Google Chrome when trying to access several websites, which I gather has something to do with invalid certificates. I would like to know if going to Settings > Advanced > Manage Certificates and simply Removing everything under every tab will a) fix the problem and b) not break anything else. If not, then I would like to know what will.

EphemeralNight 3 Jan 2014 0:54 UTC
7 points
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on: What are you working on? January 2014
Earlier last year, I set out to write a crossover fanfiction, that crossed something popular over with something completely original that nobody had ever heard of before, to see where my writing skills stood when it came to introducing an unfamiliar setting.

The fic is titled Forever After Earth, and as of today is over a hundred thousand words long and has gotten mostly positive reviews. I think I’ve learned a few things about how to get important details across without bogging down the narrative, from where reviewers were confused or outright wrong about something I thought I had clearly established.

It has also been a good exercise in recognizing Magic By Another Name, weeding out Separate Magisteria, and Asking the Right Question.

EphemeralNight 23 Nov 2013 16:18 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Dentin’s comment on: Effective Altruism and Cryonics, Contest Results
Place your fingers on your pulse and feel your heartbeat. If you’re sitting at rest, every beat you feel is accompanied, somewhere in the world, by two or three people running to the end of the time nature allotted and being annihilated forever.

Short term solution is exactly that. People are dying RIGHT NOW. And cryonics is a way to potentially save those lives RIGHT NOW.

The following is merely my own intuition and guess, but… I suspect that the future will look back on this era, see that we had cryonics and CHOSE not to use it, and condemn current funeral practices as systematic murder.

EphemeralNight 23 Nov 2013 16:03 UTC
0 points
−1
on: Happiness and Productivity. Living Alone. Living with Friends. Living with Family.
I’m trying to answer this, but I can’t help feeling like is overly arbitrary. I’ve lived with family, but which family? I’ve lived alone, but how alone? I might have lived with friends, or not, how do you define “friend”? What about living situations that are not covered by those categories, such as living with a lover, or living with coworkers?

This question seems meaningless to me without a lot more specificity.

EphemeralNight 20 Oct 2013 0:44 UTC
1 point
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on: Better Rationality Through Lucid Dreaming
I’ve had some success of my own with lucid dreaming. Relatively speaking.

The problem I have is that I dream so rarely that it is almost impossible to develop habits. I still manage to go lucid about half the time I do dream, and manage to go lucid without inadvertently waking myself up about half again of those times.

I don’t know if lucid dreaming has improved my rationality, but I do think that my rationality helps with the “oh, this is silly and must be a dream” reflex. There is correlation, but it is not obvious in which direction there is causation, if there is at all.

The hardest part in my experience is actually staying asleep once I go lucid. I have to very deliberately pay attention to the physicality of myself and my immediate surroundings in the dream, while ignoring any signals from my real body, or the dream will evaporate in seconds.

For me, the key to manipulating a dream was figuring out that dreams, even lucid dreams, don’t seem to run on willpower. I can will something to happen with all my might, and nothing will happen. Rather than wielding willpower, I have to wield expectation. If I expect to see something, I will. There is an exception to this that I don’t have an explanation for, though: I’m telekinetic in my dreams. All my dreams, no matter what they’re about, whether they’re lucid or not. You’d think this would make it easy to check if I’m dreaming, but I’m just so used to it that half the time it doesn’t register as strange.

Does anyone know possible causes for rarely-dreaming-at-all?