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Slimepriestess
Karma: 777
There have been a bunch of different potential names thrown around for this phenomena, and narrativemancy always seemed like the weakest contender out of them. The Thing definitely involves narratives, don’t get me wrong, but narrativemancy is just...unaesthetic, and I feel like it misses something?
I generally refer to this idea as metamancy. I do also feel as if your approach, while solid, tends to overgeneralize, and there are times where it is instrumentally useful to temporarily believe in things that don’t cleave to reality at all.
Jan Bloch’s Impossible War
Sure! I’d be willing to do that.
How would I set that up, and is there anything I would need to change retroactively?
There is presently no list of posts by date, however the sidebar should have all of the essays (aside from the two most recent ones I haven’t added yet).
It’s worth noting as well, a lot of my older posts aren’t very good and a lot of them I don’t fully endorse anymore. Sometime over the next few months I intend to go through and do a review of all my old content, find everything I no longer endorse and indicate that I’ve updated away from it. For now though, just be aware that everything from before the summer of 2018 is not going to be as good as the stuff that comes later, since that was prior to my major identity death and rebirth event.
Time Binders
My blog is about the only thing I have going for me at the moment, so I’d really prefer to keep my essays on my own site where I could theoretically make a little money off of them.
Thank you so much for pointing this out, this is what I get for skimping on research in places, the next drafts of this post will be edited to change this.
Shorter definitely seems better. Ideally I think there’d be a version that was less than a hundred pages. Something as short and concise as possible. Do we really need to list every cognitive bias to explain rationality? How much is really necessary and how much can be cut?
Change Your Mind
Even if your Voice Shakes
Yeah I’ll PM it to you, I didn’t want to list it on the blog because it has my legal name attached to it.
Did I actually do the right thing here? I honestly couldn’t tell you. There’s certainly an argument that could be made that I didn’t fully think through the consequences of my actions or what effect they would have on me. There’s also an argument that could be made that my defiance was rather pointless since the olive bar is still open, and if I was going to do something that crazy, I should have saved it for when I knew it would make a difference.
The problem is that barring near-omniscience you can’t really know when that will be, all you can do is play your hand and let the cards fall where they may. Would I have still tried to do this knowing everything I do now? Probably not. Not because of the consequences to myself, but because it didn’t end up working. The olive bar remains open so my act of defiance didn’t accomplish what I set out to do. If it had resulted in the olive bar being closed, I think I would have done it despite the consequences. Maybe there was something else I could have done to force the issue more, maybe I should have tried to outright sabotage the cooling mechanisms, maybe I should have called the local news, maybe I should have tried to convince my coworkers to go along with it to make it harder for them to get rid of the problem person, I really don’t know and hindsight is 2020. It’s always easier to tell after it’s too late to matter.
Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon
These are sufficiently good questions that I want to research them and I’ll get back to you.
Gods! Robots! Aliens! Zombies!
Occam’s Guillotine
″ it’s obvious that designing a society also involves solving questions outside the hard sciences”
these questions should not be outside the hard sciences, that’s the point Alfred Korzybski was making all the way back in 1921. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be trying to treat ethics and psychology like hard sciences.
I can see the basis of arguments that ethics could not be solved with hard science, I disagree with them but they at least have some basis. But psychology? Really? Are human beings not part of reality? Are human brains just magical boxes beyond our mortal comprehension? The hard problems of consciousness will be solved eventually. Cognitive neuroscience is making strong strides. Once we have a map of the connectome we’ll be well on our way to really understanding how brains work. Psychology should absolutely be treated as a hard science.
I was considering something like a bike ‘assistance’
A bike is a form of mechanical leverage assistance that allows us to reach speeds we would not otherwise be able to with the human body. Similarly, hang glider wings and the like are a form of mechanical leverage that allows us to fly when we would not otherwise be able to with the human body. Humans are kind of pathetic without technology, we can’t do so much as push a nail into a piece of wood without some form of mechanical assistance.
Oh hey look. Also, we have an account here now, wew.