I suspect that rationalist Homestuck fanfiction would be interesting and received fairly well (assuming it’s noticed, which is unlikely). That said, I don’t consider myself equal to such a task.
hesperidia
The alternative is an OC session, where the mechanics are used but the characters are different. In that case, if you did use a Rationalist Premise, it would almost certainly end up as leisure reading for people who are already familiar with the concepts (as opposed to leisure reading for people who are familiar with the canon but not the concepts). It would not be Useful.
It would be interesting as entertainment, given the existing composition of Homestuck and the sheer ease at which the game can be twisted out of recognition, but most of the reason I don’t is because I can’t model people like that.
Out of curiosity, where did the Irvine meetup go? It doesn’t seem to be on the SoCal LW Meetup Calendar, and the mailing list is devoid of posts saying anything about what happened.
For the reference of people reading this thread in the future (most likely), there is a personality trait called alexithymia, which refers to the inability to classify one’s own emotions. As the sibling comments point out, though, ability to distinguish and ability to feel emotions are probably orthogonal and the parent commenter just happened to get the short end of the stick.
Hi,
I recently found myself making a rather impassioned defense of how living logically does not preclude living morally. As I have found monitoring my actions to be more reliable than introspection, this was a much better confirmation of “I think this is the right thing to do” than my saying to myself that I think this is the right thing to do.
Other proximate causes include TVTropes via Methods of Rationality (obviously), one of my acquaintances linking several articles in succession from this site, and the fact that I find myself extremely prone to hero-worshipping anyone who happens to be more intelligent than I am.
I have historically had some hang-ups around the concept of “right” and “true” and am currently attempting to disentangle my rather weird upbringing (and its non-religious but nevertheless absurd repurposing of the concept of “not being wrong”) from the practice of matching map to territory.
Meanwhile I am an 18-year-old psychology/biology major in college who enjoys actually reading from scientific journals on subjects that include evolutionary psychology and theories of autism spectrum disorders.
Personally, I have some unusual experiences involving actually caring about large numbers of people, the topic of which I am not sure I want to broach immediately. (That, however, is why I’m excited about transhumanism. If my mind is augmented then I can coherently think about large numbers of people without either compressing or ignoring them. And my day won’t be ruined if I happen to accidentally read yet another news story about hundreds of thousands of people dying. Suffice it to say, screw the 24-hour news cycle, I have to remain ignorant of most news in general for my own sanity—if you guys have anything for that, please let me know.)
I seem to underweight such news, mostly because of the difficulty of speculating on what “would have happened”, although another contributory factor is that such news is rare and frequently suffixed with a number of disclaimers about how it could still happen somewhere else, etc. etc. (Yes, I am glad that the Fukushima nuclear reactor didn’t end up exploding; but other reactors in other parts of the world are at least as old and prone to breaking down if they’re looked at wrong.)
Hm. Well, this I have not thought about in detail, but my immediate emotional reaction is “so what?” which is not really helpful to me on any count.
This is probably exacerbated by the aforementioned difficulty in determining “could have beens”. I will sit on this question overnight and see what happens.
I’ve already seen plenty of comment here on just how awkward this post is to be so early in the Sequences, and how it would turn people off, so I won’t comment on that.
However: Seeing this post, early in the sequences, led me to revise my general opinion of Eliezer down just enough that I managed to catch myself before I turned specific admiration into hero-worship (my early, personal term for the halo effect).
I seriously, seriously doubt that’s the purpose of this article, mainly because if Eliezer wanted to deliberately prevent himself from being affective-death-spiraled this article would read more subtly.
That said, if it is agreed that it would be good for a post like this to exist early in the Sequences (that’s a pretty big if), I would hope that it could be written to invite fewer pattern-matches to the stereotype of “socially-oblivious, obsessed-with-narrow-intellectual-interest geek/nerd/dork”.
Noting that this thread is nearly two years old: AS is highly correlated with deficiency in executive function. This would explain the bread incident, although not the other two.
There are places on the Internet, if one is so inclined, to socialize and talk shop with other intelligent kids.
I’d recommend the ones I came from, like Gifted Haven and Cogito, but the former is a tiny community (really nice, but there are maybe a dozen regulars, total) and the latter requires talent search scores (although I might be able to bend an ear if you can’t find one).
From what I’ve seen the AoPS community looks pretty good, but I have no personal experience.
Would anyone be interested in following a liveblog of the Sequences on Tumblr? I plan to use this as a public opportunity to think in depth about many concepts that I skimmed over on my first read-through.
Currently wondering whether a blogging service is the best medium for such a project. Currently leaning towards doing it. Undecided if I should use my main or a sideblog.
Now up at lwliveblog.tumblr.com. The About page contains information about myself (the writer) and ground rules for my interaction with any audience (or lack thereof).
To read in chronological instead of reverse chronological order, use this link.
You don’t need to register for tumblr to follow the blog and comment on it! You can use the RSS feed, and disqus comments are available if you click into each post’s individual page.
edit: fixed formatting
- 15 Apr 2012 4:41 UTC; 9 points) 's comment on Our Phyg Is Not Exclusive Enough by (
I’ve actually been running a LW sequence liveblog, mostly for my own benefit during the digestive process. See here. I find myself wondering whether others will join me in the liveblogging business sooner or later. I find it a good way to enforce actually thinking about what I am reading.
The SCP Foundation creepypasta wiki used to use a very complex application system, designed to weed out those with insufficient writing skill. It turned away a fairly significant number of potential writers due to its sheer size. It was also maintained through Google Docs by one dedicated admin for several years. I’m not sure anyone here would give up their free time to maintaining bureaucracy rather than winning, and it seems counterproductive to me, but it’s theoretically possible that it can be kept to a part-time job.
Social conservatism has a very healthy respect for the concept of a slippery slope, which in and of itself is just fine from an epistemic point of view. The idea that social issues themselves are one unified slippery slope, though, is crucial to US-like social conservatism.
The idea of social issues being one unified slippery slope may or may not be true. (Unlikely. p<0.1, I think.) It is definitely informed by contemporary religious organizations, though.
At the time that I encountered rationalist fiction, I thought it was interesting but not especially relevant.
Then I skimmed through the Sequences briefly and realized that I was already working out a concept extremely similar to this one, under a different name but with the same methods and goals. This convinced me that at least some people in this subculture probably knew what they are talking about.
Encountering a more developed concept of luminosity that looked like my previous concepts of “radical self-knowledge” also gives me a good place to link to when explaining the concept to the uninitiated and better keywords to search with when looking for books and articles. (It’s called heuristics and biases, not structural brain quirks...)
I have used similar techniques independently discovered to increase happiness*. I also frequently draw comment for being unusually self-aware.
Alicorn, thank you for writing this sequence. I like not feeling like the lone dissenter, however effective the methods actually are.
-* There was previously another statement here that it turns out was extremely premature. 6-10-12
- 20 Dec 2012 23:47 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Open Thread, December 16-31, 2012 by (
Lab rat research may not generalize to humans.
Possibly related to the Center for Modern Rationality’s ongoing attempt to formulate good rationality exercises. (Good bit of overlap there, I think.)
Hmm. Why does schadenfreude exist? I don’t seem to have that emotional response to the humiliation of someone I don’t like or don’t know.
Likewise, I don’t understand absurdist humor. (I enjoy wordplay and puns, though.)
This reminds me of the bicameral mind hypothesis. Certain people (corresponding to your “schizophrenic side of the schizophrenic-autistic spectrum”) may well still receive the results of unconscious processing as “voices in their head” rather than a coherent deliberation on all facets of the truth. (The bicameral mind hypothesis holds that said “voices” are the ancestral condition, which is probably unprovable but intriguing nevertheless.)