Good going :)
h-H
Karma: 60
hmm, another positive reference to Buddhism.. I’m personally biased against in all of it’s versions, more than I am of say christianity etc-IMO it does not deserve all the praise/advertisement it’s been getting on LW of late, and my bias aganst it is confirmed by the ease with which it has suddenly creeped up LW.
as a rationalist-not technophile/libertarian etc but as one who seeks to be more rational, do you seriously believe in what Buddhism preaches? all of it?
if you’re going to cherry pick then why call it Buddhism and praise it so? I fail to see this as being “less wrong” in any way, maybe I just don’t get it, and if so I would greatly appreciate a simple and rational explanation of why I-or Eliezer or anyone else-should take “good” Buddhism seriously in our pursuit of rationality?
my problem is mainly, the attachment of Buddhist teaching with ‘meditation’-which seems to be universal and not only a Buddhist practice-of some value but not more than say studying human bias or generally reading the average LW top post.
a reaction to cuteness more than anything else?
to put it mildly I don’t believe anyone can address that objection satisfactorily, as wedrifid put it eloquently, the math is part of the map, not territory.
if the math of QM does describe reality to some degree or other—then that’s >enough for the quantum tests of particle identity to work exactly.
agreed, that was partially my point a couple of posts ago. for practical reasons it’s good enough that the math works to a degree.
good point about the map/territory distinction, that was what I intended to say but couldn’t put into so few words, thanks :)
and no, it seems that not even Frog can escape this, I’m not sure about it’s significance here though?
I noticed, but there was a clear difference that I felt was necessary to point out regardless.
yes, I had that specific post in mind when I presented the atom example. you’re correct here though, I should have said particles,I shouldn’t write so late after midnight I guess..
now I admit that my understanding of quantum mechanics is not that much above a lay persons’, so maybe I just need to apply myslef more and It’ll click, but let’s consider my arguement first:- here’s what EY said in reply to a post in that thread-emphasis mine: “There can be properties of the particles we don’t know about yet, but our existing experiments already show those new properties are also identical, unless the observed universe is a lie.”
and then: “Undiscovering this would be like undiscovering that atoms were made out of nucleons and electrons.
It’s in this sense that I say that the observed universe would have to be a lie.”
here I believe he’s making a mistake/displaying a bias; the math-of Quantum Mechanics in this particular instance- does not determine physical reality, rather it describes it to some degree or other.
to suggest that the mathematics of quantum mechanics is the end of the road is too strong a claim IMO.
numbers are quite useful, so we don’t/shouldn’t do away with them, but the math is never a complete substitute for the observable universe.
writing down ’20 sheep’ doesn’t physically equal 20 sheep, rather it’s a method we use for simplicity. as it stands, no two sheep are alike to every last detail as far as anyone can tell, yet we still have a category called ‘sheep’. this is so given the observed recurrence of ‘sheep’ like entities, similar enough for us to categorize them for practicality’s sake, but that doesn’t mean they’re physically all alike to every detail.
it could be argued that sometimes the math does equate with reality, as in ‘Oxygen atom’ is a category consisting of entirely similar things, but even that is not confirmed, simply an assertion; no human has observed all ‘Oxygen atoms’ in existence to be similar in every detail, or even in some arbitrarily ‘essential’ detail/s. yet it is enough for the purposes of science to consider them all similar, and so we go with it,otherwise we’d never have coherent thought let alone science.
it might very well be that all Oxygen atoms in existence are physically the same in some ways, but we have no way of actually knowing. this doesn’t mean that there are ‘individual atoms’, but it doesn’t negate it either.
ETA: as pengvado said in below post, replace ‘atom’ with ‘particle’.
thanks, that’s actually what I wanted to know.
a belated reply:
now, as a generality your first statement is correct, but after searching for some years I’ve concluded the easiest method is in fact mild support for a partisan anti war website, reason being; on average wars are more destructive than no-wars, and definitely inductive of irrationality.
a note about the particular partisan site, it’s not a single source by any means-I believe this is the cause of contention?- it’s actually an aggregation of ‘anti war’ news from multiple sources including mainstream channels and others. as such the ‘single source’ label is negated.
second statement: yes, science and politics are connected, but I believe this misses the point, in the domain of national policy, the more hawkish elements have been in control for quite a while now, pitting the US against third world destitute farmers and shepherds. that’s not exactly a rational path, and so, as much as we should support stem cell research for eg. that wasn’t the angle I was coming from.
third; answered, see above.
fourth; it does as an issue to be concerned with, but surely not in context of the discussion? strategic theorizing on possible crypto use by say an afghan warlord concerned for his poppy production is quite a marginal concern compared to the US government launching wars that cost trillions and benefit humanity little to nothing while increasing likelihood of retaliation etc.
true, but there are no ‘negative sheep’, only numbers arbitrarily representing them.
agreed, it’s not like scientific analysis requires the laws of physics to have no quantum randomness source etc, rather it is satisfied with finding the logical necessities between what is used to describe the observable universe.
but we shouldn’t concern ourselves with counter factuals if they aren’t part of our observed universe.
But there are no non-partisan sites, are there? but that aside, I meant political world news, not scientific.
I get the point about politics being icky, but we Do live in this world, and IMO the way of the cloistered monk doesn’t seem to be a viable option.. also, could you go into more detail about how is it that crypto is so vastly important given the ideology of the website? not to mention you reached that conclusion rather quickly, hmm
http://antiwar.com/ I use this site to get most of ‘world news’, what about you guys?
It might have an opposite effect to what is intended since the number would simply be too large.
but that seems to miss the whole point of depressions: over inflation Has to lead to deflation or X, and X is bad (angry masses, civil unrest, collapsed government, large scale wars etc). not many people have much money to begin with, and we should raise prices of homes and whatnot? people who have foreclosed Need to foreclose, just like companies that go broke Need to-the bailouts were a huge mistake- or else your financial model is broken and you actually want to support net negative behavior in the economy.
now, I’m no economics major, but I don’t that degree to know this: in a nutshell, if you have an asset-house for eg.-and it’s market price is 100k but it and all the other houses in the area are being sold @ 500k and someone-most people anyway-actually buys that house by borrowing money they can never hope to pay back with interest in any reasonable amount of time, then that house’s price simply Has to go down or else you have X.
how does ‘increasing inflation’ solve the fundamental problem of there being no more wealth to pa for anything with? the US has simply borrowed more than it can pay back for decades if ever, inflation will only cause matters to worsen to improve.
yes all governments have debt and survive, and a government having zero debt is unlikely to happen anytime soon, but that’s fine as long as the debt is manageable, and it might seem like that if we take ‘official’ reports of the Outstanding Public Debt being around $13.3 Trillion, even though that’s pretty bad, we’d just need tighter purse strings and some measures here and there and in a few decades it’ll be mostly payed off, but unfortunately that’s not going to happen.
Factor in the remaining ‘unfunded liabilities’ ie. the benefits-money- promised by government to the elderly, sick, unemployed and so on-social security et all- and our debt is over $60 Trillion, each citizen’s burden of an equal share amounts to around a quarter million $US.
put raising inflation deliberately in such a context and you’ll see how pretty bad it all actually is.
I know this is strong language from a non economist, but again, this is not such a hard thing to grok, see http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/stimulus/2010/jun/30/forgive-us-our-debts/ or http://cynicuseconomicus.blogspot.com/2008/09/banking-bailout-why-will-help-bankrupt.html
nitpick,; not all geeks are aspiring rationalists.
This, down to the white room and being pulled. Omega doesn’t Have form or personality. He’s beyond physics.
true- I usually go with cleaning my Bookmarks instead of physical books though-it helps a lot since not doing stuff or lacking enthusiasm for what I do are my main reasons for slipping into a nihilist mood.