How would reality go about being not normal? Or more specifically, what is normal, if not reality?
Insert_Idionym_Here
I missed newton by over 150 years. Pray for a curve.
Guys play it too.
Better late than never.
I… Er… What. Where did the whole ‘amplitude’ thing come from? I mean, it looks a lot like they are vectors in the complex plane, but why are they two dimensional? Why not three? Or one? I just don’t get the idea of what amplitude is supposed to describe.
- 17 Dec 2011 1:30 UTC; 4 points) 's comment on Feynman Paths by (
It might be more accurate to say that pretty much everything, including what we call biology and physics—humans are the ones codifying it -- is memetically selected to be learnable by humans. Not that it all develops towards being easier to learn.
I think that perhaps you may be missing the point.
I think you enormously over-state the difficulty of lying well, as well as the advantages of honesty.
Are you saying that cryonics is not perfect, but it is the best alternative?
I think cryonics is a terrible idea, not because I don’t want to preserve my brain until the tech required to recreate it digitally or physically is present, but because I don’t think cryonics will do the job well. Cremation does the job very, very badly, like trying to preserve data on a hard drive by melting it down with thermite.
How is “unquestioning reductionism” possible?
I cannot speak for Eliezer, but I can speak from my experience. Because you are reading what appears to be only one side of an issue, you cannot get all the facts. Whatever he may write, he cannot write beyond the constraints of the information he currently possesses. If you want to have the whole picture, you need to talk to, and observe, everything, and everyone, not just this blog. So, perhaps Eliezer is beating a straw man. Go talk to some more people, gather some more information, and find out.
To be perfectly honest, at the time I simply planted my face on the table in front of me a few times. I was at a dinner party with friends of my mother’s; I would have sounded extremely condescending otherwise.
But don’t you want to understand the underlying principles?
Yes. I believe that because any suffering caused by the 3^^^3 dust specks is spread across 3^^^3 people, it is of lesser evil than torturing a man for 50 years. Assuming there to be no side effects to the dust specks.
That is what happened to me.
The lack of this knowledge got me a nice big “most condescending statement of the day award” in lab a year ago.
It seems that in order to get Archimedes to make a discovery that won’t be widely accepted for hundreds of years, you yourself have to make a discovery that won’t be widely accepted for hundreds of years; you have to be just as far in the dark as you want Archimedes to be. So talking about plant rights would probably produce something useful on the other end, but only if what you say is honestly new and difficult to think about. If I wanted Archimedes to discover Bayes’ theorem, I would need to put someone on the line who is doing mathematics that is hundreds of years ahead of their time, and hope they have a break-through.
I believe the point is that we do not know how much more is possible, or what circumstances make that so. As such, we must check, as often as we can, to make absolutely sure that we are still held by our chains.
I have attempted using this in more casual decision making situations, and the response I get is nearly always something along the lines of “Okay, just let me propose this one solution, we won’t get attached to it or anything, just hear me out...”