Luke Allen

Karma: 80

Luke Allen 26 Jan 2021 16:08 UTC
2 points
in reply to: waveman’s comment on: Leaky Delegation: You are not a Commodity
Which, indeed, is why I categorized “certification” as Status or marketing: the product gains standing in the eyes of whoever believes the certification has merit, but gains negative status with whoever distrusts the certifier.

Luke Allen 25 Jan 2021 20:27 UTC
2 points
on: Leaky Delegation: You are not a Commodity
I have a very simple rule of thumb for evaluating the value of products and services: Agency, Resource, Status, and Experience. It reminds me that in everything I buy commercially, I’m paying for ARSE:
- convenience (better Experience, and I keep more of my time Resource, but I trade away more of my money Resource)
- customizability (more Agency with Burger King’s “Have It Your Way!”)
- reputation in the marketplace by brand name and commercials, or with public or private quality checkers such as “Certified USDA Prime Beef!” “Underwriters Labs” “Consumer Reports Top Pick” (high Status), or buying store brands (lower Status and implied lower quality Resources, but I keep more of my money Resource)
- higher quality or more versatile products (more useful Resource)
Aside from the pithy mnemonic, it’s also helped me categorize when thinking of ways to improve the offerings of businesses or hobby groups I’m involved with, such as my local Toastmasters club. I haven’t yet found a fifth category of value that I’d consider as primary as these, but I haven’t looked much.

Luke Allen 8 Jan 2021 1:09 UTC
7 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Fight Me: Incumbent religions still get too much leeway
I was thinking about the various services and ministries provided by my small-city church, and to reconstruct its social impact, you’d have to have at least these things:
- a community center where children are, weekly, taught morality and good behavior from nursery through high school, and then graduated into adult morality study classes
- a social club where the members donate ten percent of their (sometimes not inconsiderable) income for the good of the community
- a TV studio with live audience seating and up-to-date A/V equipment where professional speakers and singers can perform live for an audience, and have their content recorded and published to the web
Increasing its positive impact on the city would be easier without having to avoid certain rulings which would (especially in light of the narrowness of the Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruling) require us to host events for people antithetical to our core purpose as a church: pointing people to Jesus. And because Cthulu swims left and Moloch consumes all, we’re caught between the Charybdis of relaxing our standards and the Scylla of dying off before enough new members show up to repopulate the church.

Luke Allen 4 Jan 2021 22:05 UTC
1 point
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
I’m trying a live experiment: I’m going to see if I can match your erisology one-to-one as antagonists to the Elements of Harmony from My Little Pony:
1. Prickly: Kindness
2. Opaque: Honesty
3. Nitpicky: Generosity
4. Disengaged: Loyalty
5. Shallow: Laughter
Interesting! They match up surprisingly well, and you’ve somehow also matched the order of 3 out of 5 of the corresponding “seeds of discord” from 1 Peter 2:1, CSB: “Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all slander.” If my pronouncement of success seems self-serving and opaque, I’ll elaborate soon:
1. Malice: Kindness
2. Deceit: Honesty
3. Hypocrisy: Loyalty
4. Envy: Generosity
5. Slander: Laughter
And now the reveal. I’m a generalist; I collect disparate lists of qualities (in the sense of “quality vs quantity”), and try to integrate all my knowledge into a comprehensive worldview. My world changed the day I first saw My Little Pony; it changed in a way I never expected, in a way many people claim to have been affected by HPMOR. I believed I’d seen a deep truth, and I’ve been subtly sharing it wherever I can.
The Elements of Harmony are the character qualities that, when present, result in a spark of something that brings people together. My hypothesis is that they point to a deep-seated human bond-testing instinct. The first time I noticed a match-up was when I heard a sermon on The Five Love Languages, which are presented in an entirely different order:
1. Words of affirmation: Honesty
2. Quality time: Laughter
3. Receiving gifts: Generosity
4. Acts of service: Loyalty
5. Physical touch: Kindness
Well! In just doing the basic research to write this reply, it turns out I’m re-inventing the wheel! Someone else has already written a psychometric analysis of the Five Love Languages and found they do indeed match up with another relational maintenance typology.
Thank you for your post; you’ve helped open my eyes up to existing research I can use in my philosophical pursuits, and sparked thoughts of what “effective altruism” use I can put them to.

Luke Allen 15 Dec 2020 20:58 UTC
7 points
on: Motive Ambiguity
I posit four basic categories of value: resources, experiences, esteem, and agency. You’ve listed a group of esteem games.
In the first example, let’s assume your spouse likes the other restaurant significantly better than the one you both like. You deny yourself a specific potential positive experience by using your agency to grant her a more positive experience, and in doing so, you obtain the esteem of the sacrificial as well as the esteem of the generous in your spouse’s eyes.
If it’s a healthy relationship, that esteem is a side benefit which gets folded into the gestalt benefit of relational harmony enhanced through generosity. But if the esteem is the main goal, the sacrificer is exhibiting unhealthy codependent behavior. Alternatively, if your spouse likes both restaurants equally well, the esteem is the only benefit; gaming that system is more obvious and may negate the granting of any esteem.
I won’t go through the other examples, but in each case, your actions are a gamble, a statement about yourself that pays off with esteem from someone whose esteem you value.

Luke Allen 15 Dec 2020 18:57 UTC
1 point
in reply to: fiddler’s comment on: What confusions do people have about simulacrum levels?
I define SL4 in terms of a description I heard once of a summary of Baudrillard’s work: a simulacrum is when a simulation breaks off and becomes its own thing, but still connected to the original. And whether or not that’s how Baudrillard thought of SL4, it’s a useful concept on its own. (My simulacrum of “simulacrum” as it were.)
For example, a smartphone is a miniature computer and video game console that also has telephone capabilities; it’s a simulacrum of Bell’s talk-over-telegraph-wires device.
The iPod Video is an almost identical piece of hardware and software minus the telephony, and even that can be simulated with the right VOIP app. I can imagine someone saying, “Well, it’s still essentially a smartphone.” But we don’t say the same of a laptop computer using a VOIP app, or even a jailbroken Nintendo Switch or DSi. We’ve reached the edge of the simulacrum.

Luke Allen 3 Dec 2020 20:20 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Pain is not the unit of Effort
In the late 00′s, I was made aware of the Hero’s Journey memeplex, the sequence of all Western stories, based on Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. At some point after that, I recognized that it’s the same set of instincts as the Stages of Grief—or rather, the stages of grief, when experienced as a Hero’s Journey, lead to the successful end of a particular grieving.
The first stage of grief is denial, and the first step of the hero’s journey is life in the “doomed village”: things look normal and sound normal, but something’s profoundly wrong in the world, and it’s about to crash in on the hero.
What really spun my head around was realizing my emotional traumas were imposed on me by someone whose subconscious was abusing my Hero’s Journey instinct to make me walk through his pain to slay his demons for him. After that, I was able to let go of his narrative thread and try to find where I’d dropped mine five years before.

Luke Allen 4 Nov 2020 19:20 UTC
3 points
on: Don’t read news
The map is to the territory as the corporate media complex is to the Truth.
- The media used to be history as it was being written, a level 1 simulacrum, a simple descriptor.
- Then it was level 2, assumed to still be level 1 but from a reasonable perspective with obvious implications.
- Then it was level 3, promoted as level 1 but known by insiders to be level 2 or 3.
- Now it is level 4, known by most to be a tool, but still mistaken for level 1 or 2 by those not paying attention.
Why should I believe a level 4 simulacrum of the election results when all the superweapons are both at stake and in play?

Luke Allen 6 Oct 2020 17:58 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Periergo’s comment on: Rereading Atlas Shrugged
Let’s get our ontology correct. She used philosophical tools to approach philosophical problems, and wrote essays on the results in philosophical terminology. That makes her a philosopher. If her results were incorrect, at worst she’s an incorrect philosopher like so many others throughout history who moved philosophy into “less wrong” territory.
The same is true of Buddhism, and Christianity too: in addition to being religions, they’re philosophies, making ontological and ethical statements and explaining how those were reached. And atheism, while a philosophical viewpoint, also has had religious social structures built around it, such as taboos against self-coding as religious.
Exploring the philosophical “realm” and “mining” new seams of gold ore (or fools’ gold) is what makes one a philosopher, whether one comes in with a pickaxe and mule like the ’49′ers or a bulldozer and dynamite like the industrial strip-miners.

Luke Allen 16 Sep 2020 15:12 UTC
6 points
in reply to: ozziegooen’s comment on: Why haven’t we celebrated any major achievements lately?
Agreed on tech change. We now expect a new generation of video game consoles every five years, a new version of Microsoft Office every three (but did NOT expect the name change to “Microsoft 365,” an increasingly ominous claim of ubiquity), and new phones every other year.
The only real technological surprise I’ve had in a good long while was yesterday when I suddenly realized Notepad.exe now has a “New Window” menu option, which simply spawns another instance of Notepad. To me, this is cause for celebration, and I find myself wondering why there wasn’t more fanfare for this superb productivity hack.

Luke Allen 27 Aug 2020 23:22 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Teerth Aloke’s comment on: The “Outside the Box” Box
Yes, and still a young-Earth creationist too. On here I’d probably clarify my concept of omnipotency as “axiomatic ultra-ability”, more similar to a programmer of a simulation than a lightning-tosser in a cloud-chariot in the sky.
As a geek-for-life and dedicated devourer of SF, I compare and contrast the details of what I believe with all the god-fictions out there, from Aslan and Eru Ilúvatar to Star Trek’s Q and The Prophets, to the God and Satan of Heinlein’s Job, to the Anu/Padomay duality at the core of Elder Scrolls lore and the consequent universe literally built out of politics and necromancy. Recently, reading the SSC classic blog post “Meditations on Moloch” helped me coalesce an idea that had been bouncing around my head for twenty years about the “weakling, uncaring opposite of God, waiting with an open mouth at the bottom of the slide.”
I just wanted to find a community of experimental theologists who were as willing as I am to ask these questions and posit potentially heretical theories during the process of trying to better model God in our words and minds. Apparently I’m missing an absurdity heuristic that keeps more people from being like me.

Luke Allen 26 Aug 2020 16:56 UTC
8 points
on: On Suddenly Not Being Able to Work
The COVID Procrastathon claims another good mind.
I had to push through something similar in July. What finally broke my dam of pent-up work was one sudden realization regarding an incident I’ve long suspected was behind my procrastination:
The very first time I procrastinated hard, and lost something because of it, was the first time my parents said they’d take away something if my homework wasn’t complete. I panicked and was in tears for two hours, pleading, but they were steadfast in their abandonment of me to my dark fate. I asked my mom to watch me do the first problem on the worksheet, just the first problem; “to prove I can do this” my mind screamed, not realizing that my mind itself was that entity to which I wanted to prove it. She refused. I didn’t get to watch that night’s episode of my favorite TV show.
Here’s the realization: that was the first time my mother had treated me transactionally instead of personally.
That’s it. That’s the big realization that allowed me to start working really hard again. I don’t know if it’ll help you, or anyone else reading this, but that unexpected switch of mode was the secret abandonment behind the yawning pit of “why am I not working right now?” behaviors.

Luke Allen 25 Aug 2020 23:27 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Devin_Finbarr’s comment on: Competent Elites
It makes me think a republic is the best form of governance possible among humans, as long as the real smarties are running the show and they have good priors. Real smarties with bad priors may be worse than average successful achievers with good priors.

Luke Allen 25 Aug 2020 23:21 UTC
1 point
on: The “Outside the Box” Box
I remember the late 90′s, when I first gained access to the Internet. Here were my people, people who enjoy thinking, minds communicating at a bare-metal level about interesting and smart things.
It was around that time I ran across the concept of a “free-thinker” and started mulling over that label in my mind. It sounded like a compliment, something I’d like if people started calling me that. After all, I don’t think the way other people do (thanks, autism!), and I had always felt like a mind trapped in a body. But the first time I brought up being a free-thinker was in a discussion about religion with an Internet Atheist. I was promptly and patronizingly informed that I couldn’t possibly be a free-thinker because I believe in God.
Oh.
Free-thinker = atheist, apparently. A one-to-one correspondence, a synonym, and a hope for esteem from my peers crushed.
Never mind that I treat the Bible and young-Earth creationism as seriously and geekily as I treat the canons of the various Star Trek series. Never mind that I try to get past the rah-rah-our-team side of religion to follow Jesus’ commands to love each other with radical, boundary-breaking see-from-their-eyes empathy. Never mind that I’d been hurt by church hypocrisy as any former-Catholic or raised-Baptist Internet Atheist among my circle of friends.
No, this badge of uniqueness was not for me. I was too unique for it.

Luke Allen 24 Aug 2020 7:39 UTC
8 points
on: Mental Mountains
My own experience with my mental mountains has led me to what I call the “One, Two, Many” model of emotion formation and annihilation.
1: There is an initial event which causes a sensory memory of the experience to get stuck in my mind, usually a visual/tactile memory with an associated specific type of feeling bad, or more rarely, feeling good.
2: There is a reinforcing event, which has a specific similar characteristic that makes my mind go, “these are the same type of thing,” like having a hard time remembering the names of both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro at the same time. (Seriously, I had to google a De Niro role just to be able to type his name right now!)
Many: Every subsequent event that shares that characteristic gets lumped into the sea of “it always happens” or “it never happens” barring further conscious examination, but I can only remember the current or most recent such occurrence no matter how often or rarely such events actually occurred in my past.
For me, the “TNT” that can usually blast through this mental mountain is to identify the similar characteristic by tracing the memory of that specific type of feeling bad. I trace it back to the pair of self-reinforcing memories, and they disintegrate, turning from sense memories into simple narrative of something that happened to me, usually with a sense of relieved tension mingled with the feeling of being miffed that I had been tripped up by my own mind’s processing artifacts.
I perform my process using the “fourth step” tools developed for Twelve Step programs, which I now believe function on UtEB-style self reflection. The “fourth step” tools work because they focus on the interaction between a resentment emotion which drives behaviors, the person and specific action which caused that resentment, and one’s updated (sober) understanding of the world.
I wouldn’t be surprised if UtEB-style reconsolidation underlies the success many have reported with Twelve Step programs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the people who drop out of Twelve Step programs do so before they experience a mental mountain’s disappearance from their minds.

Luke Allen 20 Aug 2020 0:04 UTC
1 point
in reply to: wolajacy’s comment on: On Need-Sets
Stability’s value is as a loss-prevention or expense-prevention resource: a status of being predictable or being resistant to immediate entropy in some way. It’s such a broadly applicable concept that its benefits are practically ubiquitous, and it adds all the types of value to various circumstances.
Stability of a situation, as in the expectation of not having to anticipate much change, allows you to conserve resources you might otherwise need to devote toward anticipation of contingencies; you can also thus experience the opposite of anxiety.
A medical patient who is stable is in less danger of dying; this kind of stability is a resource both to the patient’s continued existence (agency, experience, utility to society as a resource) and to their medical team who don’t need to expend resources to immediately and actively maintain the patient’s life medically.
Being seen as a stable person by the standards of a given group grants you esteem from that group, because you’re predictable and will not cost them sudden, unexpected loss of things of value such as their group’s esteem in the eyes of whichever society they esteem. A person being perceived by police as mentally stable and/or morally stable (in the sense of being unlikely to commit assault or other crimes) grants the police a sense that you’re predictable and thus not an immediate danger that needs to be violently subdued. In other words, you have the esteem due a member of the law-abiding community.
Stability of government gains a country more opportunities for international trade (resources) and gains its citizenry and businesses a credit rating (which is a resource based on how much one is esteemed as a reliable payer of debts by lenders).
Stable isotopes, which are not radioactive, are radiologically safe to touch or handle. However, this doesn’t mean it’s entirely safe! Lead is not safe to touch because even though it’s stable enough to be used for radioactive shielding, it has neurotoxic chemical effects. For low-energy purposes such as home-building, stable chemicals and elements are more valuable resources; for high-energy purposes, such as weapons or manufacturing, unstable chemicals or elements are more valuable resources.
That was a lovely example, thank you!

Luke Allen 17 Aug 2020 21:18 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: On Need-Sets
I’ve been working on something similar myself. I’ve identified four qualitatively different categories of “things of value” that we humans seem geared toward:
- Experiences—Disneyland, for example, sells both the experience of riding the rides (which can be had at any amusement park or carnival midway) and also the experience of entering a world of stories and imagination.
- Esteem—Every culture and subculture has a preferred form of esteem, usually expressed in measures of respect granted to people. The desired flavor of esteem can be signaled via clothing and/or body language when in mixed company such as walking down the street.
- Agency (which is to individual choices what wealth is to currency)
- Resources—anything which can be used to reach a goal or fulfill a purpose.
All products and services on the market can be described as a mix of these, or in terms of avoiding their loss. Economics is the study of human motivation toward things of value and away from their loss, either for one’s self, one’s ingroup, or for hire.
More concretely, “wants” are emotions inclining the feeler toward things of value and “needs” are emotions inclining the feeler away from their loss. It’s a simple binary, and we can construct the “forest” of economics by zooming out from our focus on individual “trees”.
Example: I want to eat, to gain the experience, and I need to eat, to avoid hunger and eventual harm from lack of food (starvation). Eating at a fast food restaurant alleviates the need for me to cook in order to eat. I perceive myself purchasing convenience, which is at once a resource (savings of time and energy in cooking and cleaning up after cooking), a measure of esteem (I pay a group of servants to cook my meal), an experience (I sit in my car waiting and listening to the radio and don’t have to experience the moment-to-moment vagaries of cooking for myself), and a measure of agency (I am able to do all of the above, free to make this decision which affects my future in the short and long term, as long as I can pay to do so). Therefore, when hungry or craving, I see fast food as a net positive thing of value.
Grieving, consequently, is the process of processing and limiting the loss (in the present, potential future, or remembered past) of things of value. Grieving occurs when needs aren’t met.

Luke Allen 7 Aug 2020 7:54 UTC
1 point
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: April 2016 Media Thread
In the scrapped early version of the script, the world is a much darker place. Carnivores are made to wear taser collars that activate when their emotions (measured by physiological stress) reach a point that the collar believes the carnivore is attacking someone, or about to.
The beast at the top of the scheme we see in the movie is power-mad with a Napoleon Complex, tired of being put down and put upon. But it’s too well done, too well-funded, to be just a rogue politician. No, this has money behind it. And I have no doubt that were this fiend’s plot to have reached its conclusion, there would surprisingly quickly have been a taser collar around the neck of every carnivore in the city.

Luke Allen 15 Jul 2020 16:29 UTC
6 points
on: What do we now know about long-term consequences of a COVID-19 infection?
What we know so far is that there tends to be vascular damage: the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels are the cells most affected. The longer a person has it, the worse the damage will be. In this case, what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The lungs have a huge network of very fine blood vessels which are particularly vulnerable. Obesity and diabetes negatively impact the circulatory system. Some cancers have ACE2 expression which results in higher risk. Thinking of COVID-19 as a circulatory disease is a better model than thinking of it as a respiratory disease.

Luke Allen 9 Jul 2020 22:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Maxime Riché’s comment on: Covid 7/9: Lies, Damn Lies and Death Rates
According to right-wing media I listened to with half-an-ear and thus cannot repeat their methodology, “they” changed the definition of “case” to include something related to contact tracing.
Man, it’s hard to filter out noise in this environment. The Lancet has a paper from April on how China redefined cases to account for asymptomatics and contact tracing, and saw a huge jump in cases. But if the definition of “case” changes and there’s a jump in the number of “cases,” it probably means nobody’s reinterpreting the previous number of cases with the new definition, either to scare people into wearing masks or so as not to confuse the public with changed numbers.