i’m from são paulo and would enjoy meeting some of you. my facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000668530806
joaolkf(Joao Fabiano)
Karma: 368
I don’t think it would be adaptive that our emotions could have such a simple and immediate functioning. They are complex, structured and often have a lot more to do with high level events in your life then with a slight scent of morning glories before meeting some one (I’m exaggerating your hypotheses a little, I know). Emotions play a fundamental role in human decision making and it would be very unadaptive if evolution made then so uniforming about ours lives long-term prospects. You may reject evolution’s work, but you have to deal with the fact that you are her work. It’s seems to me that you only made your process of ignoring your emotions a little more resistant to some kinds of criticisms, but you are still ignoring them. If you get insomnia and start thinking about your life, odds are that there is in fact some kind of problem with your life. Why did you get insomnia in the first place? Why did you start thinking about how your various projects would fail instead of how your breakfast tasted so awful?
Maybe having months or even years gaps in your CV can make it harder for you to have a perfect career path. But in Brazil, it doesn’t count as something so serious. If you are graduated or if you speak English, you WILL get a job with 99% certainty -I’m not saying it will be a job you like—no matter what. If you have both, then turning your CV public will make you receive 1 to 2 job proposals a day, for 3 to 4 weeks, no matter how many gaps you have. Jealous? Maybe diegocaleiro have a empty bedroom for rent.… Although it’s hard to believe the situation in US is that different.
If your thesis were true, there would be a clear drop in productivity in the summer, when you have up to 20hrs of sunlight and temperatures go up to 40ºC. And I believe this is not the case.
“Period Independence: By and large, how well history goes as a whole is a function of how well things go during each period of history; when things go better during a period, that makes the history as a whole go better; when things go worse during a period, that makes history as a whole go worse; and the extent to which it makes history as a whole go better or worse is independent of what happens in other such periods.”
How far can this go? If I slice history in 1 day periods, each day the universe contains one unique advanced civilization with the same overall total moral value, each civilization would be completely alien and ineffable to another, each civilization only lives for one day, and then it’s gone forever. This universe holds the same moral value as the one where only one of those civilizations flourishes for eternity?
Data point: I have emailed the top ~10 researchers of 3 different fields in which I was completely naive at the time (social psychology, computational social simulation, neuroscience of morality) - giving a ~ 30 total -, and they all tend to engage my questions, with a subsequent e-mail conversation of 5 to 30 emails. I had no idea how easy it was to make a top researcher engage in a conversation with a naive person. Knowing this made me much more prone to apply the prescription of this post—one I am in agreement. (I understand that what this post prescribes is far more complex than actually engaging in a conversation with the top researchers of an area.)
Bunnies prevalence on EEA is uncertain, at best. There are few species so widely hunted as the bunny, but it might be the case that the cute ones were slightest less hunted and reproduced more. Or, we might have selected then for neoteny, as we do whenever we have a chance (dogs, cats, cows, donkey), it makes them more docile and easy to slaughter and enslave. We finding them cute would be then both a side effect of (1) evolutionary pressures for not wasting energy in building an excessively fine tuned cuteness-taste and (2) the fact the most easy way to select for easiness-to-slaughter-and-enslave is to select for baby-like faces. Evolution is a nasty, lazy, immoral mistress.”Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse and murder.”
Interesting analysis, not so much because it is particularly insightful on itself as it stands, but more because it gives a hard step back in order to have a wider view. I have been intending to investigate another alternative: a soft take off through moral enhancement initially solving the transference of value problem. This is not the only reason I decided to study this, but it does seem like a worthy idea to explore. Hopefully, I will have some interesting stuff to post here later. I am working on a doctoral thesis proposal about this, I use some material from LessWrong—but, for evil-academic reasons, not as often and directly as I would like. It would be nice to have some feedback from LW.
Fixing akrasia: damnation to acausal hell
This will increase cryocrastinating by a factor far greater than the number of people actually being cryopreserved because they randomly told a love one about this.
Sure. Thanks for pointing that out. Any acausal trade depends on precommitment, this is the only way an agreement can go across space-time, it is done on the game-theoretical possibilities space—as I am calling it. In the case I am discussing, a powerful agent would only have reason to even consider acausal trading with an agent if that agent can precommit. Otherwise, there is no other way of ensuring acausal cooperation. If the other agent cannot, beforehand, understand the due to the peculiarities of the set of possible strategies is better to always precommit to those strategies that will have higher payoff when considering all other strategies, then there’s no trade to be done. Would be like trying to threaten a spyder with a calm verbal sentence. If the other agent cannot precommit, there is no reason for the powerful agent to punish him for anything, he wouldn’t be able to cooperate anyway, he wouldn’t understand the game and, more importantly in my argument, he wouldn’t be able to follow his precommitment, it would break down eventually, specially since the evidence for it is so abstract and complex. The powerful agent might want to simulate the minor agent suffering anyway, but it would solely amount to sadism. You might want to consider taking a look at the acausal trade wiki entry, and maybe TDT entry, probabily they can explain things better than me: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Acausal_trade http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/TDT
Didn’t quite catch what you intended to convey here. If anything, I am pretty sure I argued against that view you may have hinted there.
Adding that to the post.
Thanks for the tip. You are right, it is not clear when I am using the word in a game theoretical framing or in psychological framing. That made my argumentation easier but more likely to be flawed. Mostly I was referring to precommitment as in TDT, but then by the end I changed to psychological precommitment, it’s fuzzy (and wrong). I will rewrite the post tabooing precommit when I have the time, probably tomorrow.
I don’t believe it could work that way. If you don’t precommit and you could have, your next observational moment will likely be of extreme suffering than not. It is rational to precommit, if you can, that’s the whole issue. You are common sensing game theory. You cannot suddenly start choosing which consequences you accept or not from your model of rationality based on hidden intuitions. If you care to explain further your views in light of TDT os related theories, this could be a fruitful discussion (at least for me).
Yes, it was a typo. Thanks for the correction. I agree that akrasia can be advantageous. Obsessing over one goal wouldn’t be advantageous in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. It might not be advantageous at the present time, on average. However, I think that for those on the intellectual elite, it seems that not being able to overcome akrasia is, on average, modulo my post, bad. We are often confronted with very long term goals that would payoff if followed, our lives are quite stable and we can trust better the information we have. (Although, there’s more need for fine tuning probably). But, you being right is one more reason for my conclusion, and it remains a fact that (most) rationalists are trying to overcome akrasia in general, without paying attention to the specificities.
You just lost me there. I thought I knew what you were talking about before, but I have my doubts now, since I have no idea of what you are talking now. I do not understand what is the relation with depression. Further, as a data point, I can say that I’m not depressed (happiest than 100% on my ZIP code), never been depressed, nor have depressed friends, or want to have depressed friends or think this is a good and justifiable approach to life. But mainly, I do not understand how this relates to the question.
Yes, because we can’t precommit. That’s one of the points on my post. But might be other reasons, I would assume so. Nevertheless, it seems to me it is still the case that precommitments would make this scenario more likely and that this is undesirable.
And why this invalidates it? Do you chose theories based in their distance of Christianity or based on arguments? I didn’t assume that hilarious thing you said either, on the contrary.
A cognitive module for cuteness only needs to make us find babies a nice thing and enhance the probability of parental care. It simply doesn’t matter if, besides doing that, the same cognitive module make us find bunnies or orthorhombic sulfur crystals at low temperature cute, so long this doesn’t have any deleterious effects. Probably a cognitive module that can find cute only human babies and not bunnies is more evolutionary improbable and developmental costly having the same relevant behavioral results of a more cheap and universal cognitive module for cuteness. Evolution only needs to shape cognition in order to generate, more or less, the right type of behavior. It DOESN’T have to, and in most cases it doesn’t, shape cognition nicely, in a way we would look at it and say “nice work”.