frelkins

Karma: 118

frelkins 17 Feb 2009 5:38 UTC
−1 points
on: Cynical About Cynicism
@mitchell

“Cynicism is fundamentally about self-defense from future pain”

I find this confusing. Aren’t cynics actually Idealists? That is, their fundamental position is that there is Virtue to be found once the falsity of fame, power, wealth, vanity, and pomp are cast aside? They don’t seem to be defending themselves from pain, rather the almost seem to seek it—that’s why they wandered homeless like wild dogs (cynic, from cyne, Greek for dog) or at best lived unwashed in barrels?

frelkins 16 Feb 2009 17:50 UTC
4 points
on: An African Folktale
@Tyrell:

“read to me like a self-satisfied expression of condescension towards an audience so naive as to expect some justice in this world”

Tyrell, actually it appears a standard part of the traditional African folktale formula. Remember, most folktales were not told in private settings. African folktales were traditionally told by people with social performance/storyteller roles at public events. African folktales often end with a similar “proverb” and a statement by the story teller that the tale is done, and discussion of the moral can begin or be considered. See the African folktales book above for a detailed description of the traditional experience.

But formalism is a key part of all folk-telling. In the West, folk tales begin with “Once upon a time” and formally end with “They all lived happily ever after.” In Russia, since that’s come up, a common beginning is “In a certain kingdom, in a certain land” or “In a certain village, not far, not near, not high, not low,” while my favorite may be “Once upon a time in a wide white world, in a wide white kingdom, across the nine white lands.” (Russian Fairy Tales, Aleksandr Afanasev)

Russian tales tend to end “And they all began to live happily together for the glory of the people.” (Since many Russian folktale books are in fact, as stated by Vladimir, Soviet anthropology, that last bit might be Soviet style.)

You can compare this to the elaborate and beautiful stylization of the Arab folktale, which traditionally were often told by women storytellers to other women as amusements at events like births and weddings. “Once upon a time there was or there was not—for we know nothing except by the grace of God, only Allah knows all. . .” Also extended families in the secluded women’s quarters told stories while women were embroidering, thus openings like “There was or there was not, shall we tell stories or sleep in our cots?”—meaning shall we sew or be lazy? (from Arab Folktales, Iner Bushnaq)

These Arab folktales tend to end with a rhyme “We left them happy and back we came/May God see your life’s the same” or, since many of these are wedding stories, they end with a formal vouch for eyewitness truth, “And I know this to be so, for I attended the wedding myself, and never have eaten cakes so sweet....” or some other testament to the celebration of the day.

frelkins 16 Feb 2009 6:48 UTC
4 points
on: An African Folktale
@daniel

Because we in the West also say “no good deed goes unpunished,” we do not mean that one shouldn’t do good deeds, or that the failure of others to correctly respect good deeds is a fact of life that should cause us to throw up our hands and collapse gloomily at the unchanging evils of the world. Rather it is an ironic statement in sympathy with the person whose good deed was unrewarded, to show that we recognize ourselves the goodness of good deeds, unlike those other nasty monkeys who aren’t “nice.”

@Robin

What? Of course it is a realistic story, but it is told as form of warning! Don’t behave like this—be nice instead! Think and display gratitude—don’t abuse hospitality & kindness! Isn’t this in keeping, Robin, with your idea that stories are about niceness and to reinforce that we value it and are nice ourselves?

frelkins 16 Feb 2009 4:06 UTC
28 points
on: An African Folktale
EY I think you completely misinterpret the meaning of this important story:

″. . .one of the most pervasive features of [African] tales: the use of them as a discussion of how to act correctly. . . This is the way of the small community worldwide, for the well-being of the group resides in the sharing of this kind of [moral] knowledge, through which family and friendship obligations are woven into the web of community.

This process of engagement, of using moral tales to open rather than close off discussion, is precisely the modus operandi of a group of African stories. . .

Throughout Africa there are stories that “belong to” animals like Mouse or some creature who intrudes itself into a human community, but acts as if its still in a wild state. It is Hare and Spider and Jackal and the other clever creatures living near man, but hiding in holes, in the nooks and crannies, in the borders that test culture.

Living in the in-between places, they share the power of nature and the products of human culture, but with their bad behavior they obey neither the moral rules of man nor the proper laws of nature. Thus these animals thrive on not only upsetting rules, customs, and boundaries, but also on attacking the family, friendships, morality, and all the ways people have learned to live in harmony. One must remember that when naughty tales of these trickster animals are acted out, it is to gales of laughter.

These tales within an oral world. . .argue then by analogy, not only with regard as to how people should and should not act in society but also as to how actions affect the whole community. Because such stories and proverbs are indirect means of entering into deep moral discussions their use is considered good manners in Africa.”

-- African Folktales, Roger D. Abrahams, from the Introduction

This seemingly simple and slightly risque African folktale then should be understood as the way Africans start moral discussions, in this case, on the features of gratitude. That naughty trickster Snake sneaks in & abuses the hospitality of the Farmer, and Snake dies for it; but the Farmer himself cannot see that he duplicates Snake’s lack of gratitude and good manners in his treatment of Heron! Heron likewise also fails to behave. Thus the Farmer suffers harm to his wife and so gets his comeuppance. No doubt Heron will come to a bad end too, for his lack of proper gratitude.

Snake’s initial “prank” turns out to disrupt the entire social order and results in real pain. This says nothing about gloominess—it doesn’t counsel “defection,” rather the tale talks about how even small slips of good manners can spiral out of control to wreak people’s lives. In traditional African cultures, where the group always comes before the individual, this would be considered an important lesson.
What links here?
- novalis's comment on [SEQ RERUN] An African Folktale by MinibearRex (1 Mar 2013 17:17 UTC; 4 points)

frelkins 12 Feb 2009 3:07 UTC
0 points
on: Cynicism in Ev-Psych (and Econ?)
Some might like to listen to Robin’s podcast on signaling.

frelkins 9 Feb 2009 20:07 UTC
−1 points
on: (Moral) Truth in Fiction?
@billswift

“Nearly all people for thousands of years thought it was perfectly all right to keep slaves”

And many still do today—for example, Shari’a endorses slavery. Our Western values are far from universal and cannot be taken for granted.

frelkins 8 Feb 2009 0:31 UTC
1 point
on: Epilogue: Atonement (8/8)
@Anon.

“if there is a reason to expect human rightness to be in some sense coherent”

Alas there probably is not. Sir Isaiah Berlin speaks powerfully and beautifully of this so-called values pluralism in his book Liberty.

There are several ironies—if not outright tragedies—of life and this is one: that we don’t want what we want to want, and that the things we think we ought to want often conflict with each other as well as our underlying motives. We are not in charge of ourselves and we are mysterious to our own hearts. Men and women are conflicted and, due to evolution, conflict.

frelkins 22 Jan 2009 5:25 UTC
10 points
on: Interpersonal Entanglement
@Mike Blume

“On Firefly, Kaylee is beautiful, has an above-female-average sex drive, and falls in love with the introverted, socially awkward intellectual character—isn’t she exactly the sort of catgirl most male sci-fi fans would want?”

No. That would certainly freak the nerd out. M. Vassar and I have several times discussed this problem—nerds seem to integrate their low status, so often if any even half-decent skirt shows an interest in them they reject instantly, thinking “wow, I know I’m a loser, so you must be worse to like me.” Nerds would do better to uncoil from the defensive crouch of that identity ASAP.

frelkins 14 Jan 2009 19:27 UTC
3 points
on: Building Weirdtopia
Economic weirdtopia . . .after the Ultimate Crash of 2105, the best ems got together and created a new universal atomic currency, based on not just on gold, but on reserves of quark-gluon plasma made from gold nuclei in deference to mankind’s historical preferences.

Sexual weirdtopia. . .since death is over through nanotechology or uploading into perfect android bodies you can get on a 3-year-lease, there’s no need for birth. If ems want to create a new being from themselves, they just copy different brain modules from the catalog and create the perfect “children” who share all the traits & values they want them to have.

Technological weirdtopia. . .once we found gravitational waves, we decided few things were as beautiful as watching black hole spin-flips. How majestic to see the jets reverse—like Niagara Falls but much much better. They become the new lunar eclipses. The AIs decide for retro-aesthetic reasons to resort to communicating only via gorgeously polished and highly decorated ebony “punch cards.”

Cognitive weirdtopia. . .since unlimited thinking power is available via copy & merge for ems, or simple access to AIs, thought has become devalued. Who wants it when it isn’t rare? Real physical sensation becomes more highly valued than ever, and people pile hop into giant “cuddle piles” with numerous artificial cats just to feel the warmth.

Governmental weirdtopia. . .we discover the aliens learned long ago how to encode their whole being into several kinds of waveforms. Thus the first message SETI finds is actually the ambassador itself. It informs us of the spectral rules governing the bands given to various alliances and tells us where to find the repeaters. The cosmos is governed by a universal FCC.

frelkins 12 Jan 2009 15:47 UTC
0 points
on: Eutopia is Scary
@Eli “Ben Franklin, say” Franklin is probably the best person to come to the here—it’s very well-known he wished to preserve his body in Madeira so he could be revived to see the future, yes? Plus if you’ve actually read any of his letters and other writing, you see how much more flexible his mind was than just anyone you have ever met. My impression is that he would find today less shocking than probably 75% of those who live now do.

“talking about science in public is socially unacceptable” This is already true in many places around the world and has been for several decades now, yes? I don’t just mean Kansas.

@Robin ” I would be out of place there in many ways” Considering “The Nerd Identity,” (Matt Damon stars) don’t you and Eli both rather revel in how out of place here you are in many ways? In light of that, wouldn’t the future you have proposed in some ways also be more congenial to you?

Isn’t the shock caused by the rigidity of identity, as Ben Jones implies? By re-thinking how identity functions, wouldn’t the shock be far less? Altho’ honestly I don’t see why the idea frightens anyone, as it has been a core notion of both Hinduism and Buddhism for millenia—we should all have had time to integrate the concept apart from the dogma.

frelkins 8 Jan 2009 17:13 UTC
1 point
on: Living By Your Own Strength
@Cameron

My understanding of the disagreement appears different than Eli’s. My impression is that the core of the disagreement lies in Robin’s statement:

“This history of when innovation rates sped up by how much just doesn’t seem to support your claim that the strongest speedups are caused by and coincide with new optimization processes, and to a lesser extent protected meta-level innovations”

The fwoom!, god-to-rule-us-all, and issues around models all seem to me to fall out of this contention.

After the discussion around the disagreement, I gave Hal Finney my original and new estimates on these issues. I would be willing to repeat them here if Hal will likewise repeat his, but I’m unsure if anyone is interested anymore.

frelkins 5 Jan 2009 5:16 UTC
3 points
on: Changing Emotions
@Doug S

“stuck”

Stuck!?!? Tiresias is said to have enjoyed his time as a woman: “Of ten parts a man enjoys one only.” Ahem.

frelkins 5 Jan 2009 5:10 UTC
7 points
on: Changing Emotions
@adept42

Thank you for such an honest telling of your perspective. It’s very moving. I embrace you.

“that gendered behavior is hard-wired into the brain at birth”

Eli I think here is very careful to say “genes on your Y chromosome that tweaked your brain to some extent”—note the some, he avoids speculating as to how much—and uses the term “emotional architecture” as well as correctly in his comments distinguishing between the terms sex and gender. As a cisgendered F, I hope you will accept my word that Eli is scrupulous in his language here and well-intentioned.

I find neither Robin nor Eli are narrow-minded in these things. I hope you will join the OB community on a regular basis.

frelkins 5 Jan 2009 4:23 UTC
0 points
on: Growing Up is Hard
@Doug S

“Borges”

Gwern is referring to the famous story by Borges, Funes the Memorious, I believe. It’s in Ficciones.

frelkins 5 Jan 2009 2:53 UTC
10 points
on: Changing Emotions
@Anon

“ranma”

It’s no curse to be a girl, honestly.

@Simon

“If you want to try being female for a while”

I mean, if anyone wants to check it out, just try Second Life. Most guys who try it tho’ in my experience scarcely last a day—if you think it’s hard to talk to girls as a guy, try to see if you can manage to talk to girls as a girl—they flunk the shoe chatter and reveal themselves quickly.

I know only two who are convincing for more than a couple of hours in regular conversation—and one of them is a filmmaker who writes screenplays for a living, which is how he learned to really “hear” and create feminine dialog.

frelkins 5 Jan 2009 0:20 UTC
−1 points
on: Free to Optimize
@Toby Ord

It seems to me that Eli is interested in the known branch of anthropology known as ludology, or game studies. The first ludologist I ever knew of was the eminent philosopher Sir Michael Dummett of Oxford, an amazing, diverse guy. The history of playing cards is one of his specialties, and he has written 2 books on them.

Games can be silly (apparently the only truly universal game is peekaboo—why is that?) or profund (go). They of course are intriguing for what they say about culture, history, innate human ethics, their use of language, their unique sense of time, how they bring diverse people together or start riots, what they “mean,” what happens to people who play them, what the heck is play anyway, why do we enjoy them? Why are primates fascinated by them?

This is such a British study—“fair play” is such a crucial British cultural idea! But now you can meet ludologists who work for video game companies—these are usually anthropologists who study human-machine interactions by hanging out with users. My college pal Anne McClard used to do this for Apple and now does this freelance.

In the future, if Eli is both lucky & right, we may have the ethical and moral problem of having nothing to do but play games. Those who might be against Eli’s plan might argue this is a reduction of humanity to infantilism, but it could actually reinforce the most beautiful and important human behaviors.

So yes, Eli is interested in ludology, in ludic ethics, and ludic morality.

frelkins 4 Jan 2009 16:26 UTC
1 point
on: Growing Up is Hard
@James

“overclocking”

Forgive me, I don’t see how any of your list displays overclocking, or increased speed.

I was speaking just Friday to a shrink acquaintance of mine on the subject of Asbergers. He in fact argues these autism spectrum disorders are due to underclocking and poor brain region synchronization, as based on recent discoveries from brain imaging studies. That is, austism spectrum people may have a lot of stuff up there, and parts of it may seem overconnected, but those links seem weak and underperforming, while other parts of the brain are underconnected and underperforming.

High functioners and idiot-savants have lucked out in that the parts that are overconnected for them perform normally—thus their ability—but the rest is still underwired and underperforming. Or so he argues.

In contrast, I ponder about all the truly overclocked I have known. These are people who really do think much faster than the rest of us. Due to my background, they have tended to be physicists and applied mathematicians. Since it seems unlikely that their wetware actually has higher hertz, I wonder if what we term “overclocking” is really the re-use of certain brain areas for calculation.

For example, they may repurpose areas other people use for short-term memory, resulting in what is often called “absent-mindedness.” Or they may not have as well-developed visual senses, again repurposing that giant area of our brains for calculation. They may have also found a way to improve their pattern skills. Several in fact have suggested this to me as the key to the way they think when I have asked them.

The majority of the overclocked do seem to be male, but I have been introduced to a few female overclockers, who were mostly in the biological sciences, such as pharma research. Thus I speculate there is some link to testosterone in very early utero development, but of course no one knows. Intelligence is only moderately valued our society, as OB readers will themselves attest, so I doubt we will solve this mystery soon.

frelkins 2 Jan 2009 19:38 UTC
0 points
on: Free to Optimize
This post has got me thinking about my after-froze/after-upload career path. Hmm. Great! I think I’ve now found 3. So now when I retire, I know what to pursue to improve my odds of adapting successfully later.

frelkins 1 Jan 2009 18:31 UTC
2 points
on: Dunbar’s Function
On TV addiction:

“Recent studies have found that 2 to 12 percent of viewers see themselves as addicted to television: they feel unhappy watching as much as they do, yet seem powerless to stop themselves.”

-- NY Times

“On average, people have 35 to 40 hours a week of discretionary time and spend about 21 hours near the tube. The [University of Maryland] study found that the happiest people estimated they tuned in to television 18.9 hours a week. For the least happy, it was nearly 25 hours a week.

The study, published in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research, is based on the General Social Survey, with public opinion data from nearly 40,000 people ages 18 to 64, as well as time-use diaries that detail how people spend their days.

The study controlled for differences in education, income, age, race, sex and marital status. On average, the down-and-out reported an extra 5.6 hours of tube time a week, compared with their happiest counterparts.”

-- WaPo

On Internet addiction:

“In the Stanford study — which Aboujaoude said is the first large-scale, random-sample epidemiological one ever done — the researchers conducted a nationwide household survey and interviewed 2,513 adults. Because no generally accepted screening instrument exists for problematic Internet use, the researchers developed their questions by extrapolating from other compulsive and addictive conditions. The researchers found that 68.9 percent were regular Internet users, which is consistent with previous studies, and that:

° 13.7 percent (more than one out of eight respondents) found it hard to stay away from the Internet for several days at a time. . . .Aboujaoude said he found most concerning the numbers of people who hid their nonessential Internet use or used the Internet to escape a negative mood, much in the same way that alcoholics might. “In a sense, they’re using the Internet to ‘self-medicate,’” he said.”

-- Stanford Med School

So let’s say maybe 12% for TV and 14% for the net. Close. They seem equally addicting—for the unhappy! - thus I’ll say that there is just a certain percentage of people who are unhappy and use either the TV or the net to “self-medicate” their unhappiness. One is not more addictive than the other per se.

However it does seem as if there may be a niche for a cognitive therapeutical practice here!

frelkins 31 Dec 2008 5:29 UTC
6 points
on: Dunbar’s Function
@Patri

“Instead of winning by being the best female monkey”

Girlworld isn’t like that, Patri. Isn’t that guyworld you’re describing? I don’t have be the best skirt monkey at all to “win,” if you consider what my chick definition of winning is. “Being the best” is what male monkeys need to be—the gorilla troupe’s got only 1 alpha silverback.

Whereas all I need to be is just high enough in the harem hierarchy that the silverback will do me when I solicit him and I have enough social support among my female relatives to raise his kids—or the kids I am passing off as his. As a female, I like a larger social network very much, more help with child rearing and more useful alliances.

However a larger group does make it harder to be that 1 silverback, I agree.