“On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”
Charles Babbage
So inasmuch as possible, we’ll need real world meetings : humans are social beings, and it was customary to see, hear, touch, smell even, people who’d be in your group in the environment of adaptation. Do we have any rationalist bonfire in preparation ? Excursions ? Doing sport together ? Watching films ?
It’s pretty difficult to bond as strongly—and more importantly, as richly—to other people if you don’t meet them in real life. That bond is what makes us work together so well, what can oil a well working machine. Families, groups of—real life—friends, are not uncommonly the starting point for successful ventures.
And I think it’s not just the meeting in real life part. We need to build up a link, to feel the presence of the other, as another human being, as we would a friend. We need to share activities outside of just meeting an planning stuff.
We need to get to know and like each other on that fundamental level, by using the goddamn social machinery that’s in our head. We’re human beings before being rationalists, and we need to use that to our advantage, down to the last bit of it, rather than constantly forgetting about that fact. We run on corrupt hardware, we aren’t rational, disembodied pristine minds. If we deprive ourselves, as well as our community, from that social background, then we will not thrive, and may even wither.
Side question, do we have anything secular, not religious, that looks like religious institutions ? Like, non religious monasteries where people would study, work together, live together ? The closest thing I can think of is the academia, but the academia doesn’t seem like what I have on my mind.
What about religious feasts, celebrations, rituals even ? Do we have a lot of non religious rituals around, that could be recuperated, or at least inspire us ? We could use that, at least on a human level, it’d help foster people’s willpower, brighten the fire inside. So long as we can direct that energy towards rational goals, and keep watch for any sign of becoming cult-ish, couldn’t we benefit from such things ?
Maybe no interest in anything in particular, but what of the sexual gratification itself ? Children do masturbate, it’s a known fact. Though maybe it’s not universal. But the brain-specific hardware seems to be in place already at any rate.
http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/pa/pa_bmasturb_hhg.htm
Engines of cognition was the final thing I needed to assimilate the idea that nothing’s for free and that intelligence does not magically allow to do anything, has a cost, limitations, and obey the second law of thermodynamics. Or rather, that they both obey the same underlying principle.
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/02/second-law.html
Ok I’ll react. I for one have wound up following my desires as they are.
I mean, far too often I could see the two sides of a coin, like “chocolate tastes good | that’s going to ruin my health”, and realize that indeed, the first part was stronger than the second one. Since I incur a net willpower cost for the weaker side, whenever I try to fight off the stronger impulse, I slowly but surely learned the habit to instantaneously bow and submit to my impulse, rather than wasting resources on what would turn out to be a lost cause in the end, anyway.
At first I did it only on those occasions where it didn’t look like it was even relevant to push myself. Then I expanded the set of occasions where I’d submit, again and again. I could often see how it was either harmless to concede ground, or irrelevant to keep it. And now I’m pretty much ridden with akrasia and laziness.
The state where you follow your “rational” judgment is more fragile, and artificial than the one where you follow the natural impulse. It’s easier to fall out of it than back in. And if you don’t train it constantly, and if you grow into the habit of yielding, then you’ll get even better at repeating the same pattern next time.
I’ll give just one more general example, that is when you think something along the lines of “oh, I want X, but I shouldn’t; ok, I’ll just do a little bit of it, then I’ll stop”, where X can be a lot of things, like this apple pie, gaming time while you’re studying, getting a wee bit too close to that special person you can’t be close to, etc. Well, if it’s already difficult to fight it off at first, it won’t get easier once you’ve had a bit of it. To the contrary. And if you’re sophisticate enough to generalize past experiences, pleasurable ones, then any such “mistake” will help you choose the impulse over the rational choice, next time.
On an absolute sense, I’d tend to believe that something fragile needs to be protected. Also, not a few of the actions I’ll take against my best judgment, I know to be nefarious in one way or another.
Yes, I damn want those things I think I shouldn’t want. In some cases, to the point where I’ll actually defend them against myself or other’s interference, even though I know that if I have to be consistent with my own values, I shouldn’t, rather should I fight them. That , in general, sounds almost like a plea for help from the part of a mind that knows it’s right, but too fragile to survive once it’s made a few mistakes and has to compete with something much more vivid. If we end up saying that whatever side wins oneself over, is right, as long as you like it, then it’s only selecting for the strongest of both opponents. Does might make right ?
I used to have a system of implicit moral contract with myself.
I saw my own situation as an iterated prisoner dilemma; any of my future selves could desist against its other selves, negating the hopes and dreams of past selves, depriving further selves of certain prospects, all of that for a short term benefit that would have negative long term consequences. The first to desist would win something on the moment, the others loose their investment or their potential. So I tried to keep to my word and plan ahead.
Not sure if I’m still strong willed enough to affirm I’m working like that. Actually, probably not in most cases.
There’s no such thing as an absolute denial macro. And I sure hope this to trigger yours.
Philosophy easily triumphs over past and future evils. But present ones, prevail over it.
Maxim 22 François de La Rochefoucauld
I think there’s a strong impulse in many people here to idolize Eliezer, I know for myself that he’s one of the only persons, if not the only one, who manages to really awe me. The questions would be, does that go against the objective of building a rationalist community, do we want that community to begin with, and if the answer to those is yes, twice, then, what can we do, as aspiring rational gentlemen, to do better than so many failed communities that fell for X or Y such as cultish-ness or whatnot ?
I think we have our chance, and, like, a sense that more is indeed possible, regardless of what Eliezer or anyone else said.
Ditto for the karmasystem, it has much potential to degenerate into a vain collection of E-status.
I’m 25 too btw.
There will always be a large difference between those who’d ask themselves “why won’t things work as they are meant to” and those asking themselves “how could I get them to work”. For the moment being, the human world belongs to those who would ask “why”. But the future belongs, necessarily, to those who’d ask themselves “how”.
There’s a lot of nonsense I daydream about, like how it seems like my life is actually repeating itself again and again as if I was stuck in a time loop and was the only person to faintly remember bits of those preceding iterations. I like to play pretend with such ideas, though I don’t believe in them in the rational sense, more in the “I don’t believe in ghosts but I’m still crept out at night”
The closest I come to believing something rationally, which is still not rational in the purest, Occam sense, is that we may be living in a simulation that is running in a reality that is ontologically different from ours. After all, if we were running in a simulation, why should it be run by our descendants, or even in an universe like the one that was simulated ? To assume so is to fall for an observation selection bias I think. Why not from a place where “place”, “running” and “simulation” do not necessarily take the same meaning as they do here.
Like, you know, it is common to muse about universes with different physical rules and constants, I’m just taking this a step further; a reality whose rules of “mathematics” would encompass and supersede ours, that is, there would be mathematical, or ontological principles, that would exist up there, but not here. We would be prisoners in an ontologically impoverished reality, without even the tools to understand the higher realm, let alone break out of ours.
In such a reality, the equivalent of mathematics would not obey Gödel’s theorems, they would be consistent and all statements would be true and provable; that would need and imply at least one supplemental axiom there, the one that would at least not exist here, that would permit it, and open a whole new branch of mathematical truths and possibilities.
Like, if we all have a God-shaped hole in our soul, then mathematics has a Gödel-shaped hole in its own, and I wanted to imagine what it’d be like to have it filled.
I don’t really see how we could ever prove or disprove that though. Maybe some variation of that idea, might be falsifiable. If not, then it’s an irrational belief too.
On a side note, we have religious schools where a religion, such as Christianism, is part of the cursus. This indoctrinates young minds very early in their life, and leaves them scared, biased in most cases for the rest of their existence.
If we had, on the other hand, schools where even just basics of rationality and related topics, such as game theory, economics, scientific method, probabilities, biases, etc. were taught, what a difference it would make.
The sooner you kickstart rationality in a person, the longer they have to learn and practice it, obviously. But if those teachings are part of their formative experiences, from childhood to early adulthood, where their personalities, dreams and goals are being put together, how differently would they organize their lives …
Funnily enough, you realize this is quite similar to what you’d need to make Chalmers right, and p-zombies possible, right ?
How many deaths, directly or indirectly derived from the pope’s prohibition, would be enough for his influence to be considered negative in this case ?
And the interesting question is : given decentralized censorship, or even no censorship at all, what sort of community can emerge from that ?
My impression is that 4chan is resilient from becoming a failed community, because they have no particular goal, except maybe every one doing what pleases themselves on a personal basis, given it doesn’t bother everyone else.
Any single individual will, pretty naturally and unwittingly, act as a moderator, out of personal interest. 4chan is like a chemical reaction that has displaced itself towards equilibrium. It won’t move easily one way or the other now, and so it’ll remain as it is, 4chan. But just what it is, and what sort of spontaneous equilibrium can happen to a community, remains to be seen.
How long will the superhappy-human-babyeater conglomerate last ? How many other species will they meet in the universe ? How arbitrary can and will be the aesthetics, morality, utilities of those new species ? If they are arbitrary enough, and enough of them are met, what will the resulting following compromises look like ?
Depending on how many goals, values, etc. are more or less universal—and some would perhaps be, since after most if not all those species will have come into being through evolution in the same universe—then those are the only thing that’ll remain, the only values and particularities. As the rest is arbitrary, the average will probably cancel any subtlety out.
The longer you go, the more monomaniacal and bland the resulting compromise will become. In the end, you’ll have something like orgasmium, for maybe a handful of values that were shared between a majority of those species. The rest, noise. Would that be ok ?
Don’t overcompensate ? Reversed neutrality isn’t intelligent censorship, and downvoting people more than usual, just to obey the idea that now you should downvote, won’t work well I think. Take a step back, and some time to see the issue from an outside view.
1 ) That human beings are all individual instances of the exact same mind. You’re really the same person as any random other one, and vice versa. And of course that single mind had to be someone blind enough not to chance upon that fact ever, regardless of how numerous he was.
2 ) That there are only 16 real people, of which you are, and that this is all but a VR game. Subsequently results in all the players simultaneously being still unable to be conscious of that fact, AND asking that you and the AI be removed from the game. (Inspiration : misunderstanding situation in page 55-56 of Iain Banks’s Look to Windwards).
3 ) That we are in the second age of the universe : time has been running backwards for a few billion years. Our minds are actually the result of the original minds of previous people being rewound, their whole life to be undone, and finally negated into oblivion. All our thoughts processes are of course horribly distorted, insane mirror versions of the originals, and make no sense whatsoever (in the original timeframe, which is the valid one).
4 )
5 ) That our true childhood is between age 0 and ~ 50-90 (with a few exceptional individuals reaching maturity sooner or later). If you thought the ‘adult conspiracy’ already lied a lot, and well to ‘children’, prepare yourself for a shock in a few decades.
6 ) That the AI just deduced that the laws of physics can only be consistent with us being eternally trapped in a time loop. The extent of the time loop is : thirty two seconds spread evenly around now. Nothing in particular can be done about it. Enjoy your remaining 10 seconds.
7 ) Causality doesn’t exist. Not only is the universe timeless, but causality is an epiphenomenon, which we only believe because of a confusion of our ideas. Who ever observed a “causation” ? Did you, like, expect causation particles jumping between atoms or something ? Only correlation exists.
8 ) We actually exist in a simulation. The twist is : somewhere out there, some people really crossed the line with the ruling AI. We’re slightly modified versions of these people : modified in a way as to experience the maximum amount of their zuul feeling, which is the very worst nirdy you could imagine.
9 ) The universe has actually 5 spatial macro dimensions, of which we perceive only 3. Considering what we look like if you take the other 2 into account, this obliviousness may actually not be all too surprising.
10 ) That any single human being has actually a 22 % probability of not being able to be conscious of one or more of these 9 statements above.