Congratulations, but I still don’t want to hear about your baby.
EDIT: It occurs to me that the correct way to perpetrate baby-photos is to create an “Early Childhood advice repository,” or a “Social Open Thread” :P Or, and I like this one best, a satirical “welcome to LW” comment.
Hitting yourself on the head with a rock—Works on important physical skills, similar benefits to martial arts. Helps you overcome limitations. Reinforces actual reality of macro-scale objects, even when quantum mechanics is true. Teaches you about the difference between good and bad ideas.
Make it easier, or automatic, for people with a LW account to have a LW-wiki account.
In fiction, villains start with some great scheme to do something awesome, and that immediately makes them fascinating to the reader. The hero—if you’re doing this poorly—sits at home and just waits for the villain to do something awesome so they can respond. This is a problem. The solution is for your heroes to have a great and awesome scheme also, that just isn’t evil.
I would recommend just correctly estimating everything, really.
I may be overreacting, but I don’t even want to hear or discuss anything from that direction.
[later]
It’s threatening to ignore, ostracize, or attack those who disagree with their sacred cows. That’s an unconscionably bad habit to allow oneself.
throws hand in air
You’d think if we were such hot stuff at dispassionately debating things, we could handle outgroup criticism like this without either ignoring opposing views or devolving into tribal politics. But as Tarski would say, “if we can’t, I want to believe we can’t,” and I admit I’d rather not discuss this sort of thing than always discuss this sort of thing.
I’d like to see this on the main page.
Anyhow, since you brought up the sensory homunculus, titillating homunculus quote:
Komisaruk also checked what happened when women’s nipples were stimulated, and was surprised to find that in addition to the chest area of the cortex lighting up, the genital area was also activated. “When I tell my male neuroscientist colleagues about this, they say: ‘Wow, that’s an exception to the classical homunculus,’” he says. “But when I tell the women they say: ‘Well, yeah?’”. (ref)
Mestroyer keeps saying this is a personality flaw of mine, but I’m not actually interested in what theistic philosophers have to say when questioned directly. Asking them tough questions is like a ritual challenge, which they will respond to with canned responses that don’t make much sense to you.
Cultural questions would interest me far more.
“How do your religious beliefs now differ from when you were growing up?”
“What parts of other religions do you find particularly appealing?” (maybe come prepared with some common applause lights) “What about your own religious practice do you wish were more like that?”
And maybe indirectly tough questions, to see what they’re thinking.
“if you could improve one thing about the world, what would it be?” (This question can be turned into a trap if combined with the problem of evil—but again, there is little to be gained by ritually combatting them, presenting the parts of the trap disassembled and seeing what their thoughts on it are is more interesting.)
“How accurate do you think our picture is of the historical Jesus? Moses? Noah? Adam and Eve?”
Oh please no, let this not become a persistent thing. We can think for 5 minutes and find a better way.
Synonym substitution: clique, clan, sect. Perfectly serviceable.
Functional replacement: “Balanced approaches to hanging out with highly admired public figures.” Also a good choice, may be more clear than calling things “cliqueish,” but requires a little more effort than ctrl+f.
Comical google overloading: require all instances to read “cult pancakes” so that the previously mildly bad google autocomplete becomes “lesswrong cult pancakes.”
It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the “plan of creation” or “unity of design,” etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact.
-- Charles Darwin
And bits for the really important drills.
My desire to hang onto familiar words reminds me of a joke.
“I’m a great communicator, people just keep misunderstanding me.”
I downvoted because this is trying to explain a broad cultural change in terms of the response to a single incentive. To pull that kind of thing off you need an outstandingly airtight explanation, not an average one.
The difference between the dust specks and the white room is that in the case of the dust specks, each experience is happening to a different person. The arbitrarily big effect comes from your consideration of arbitrarily many people—if you wish to reject the arbitrarily big effect, you must reject the independence of how you care about people.
In the case of the white room, everything’s happening to you. The arbitrarily big effect comes from your consideration of obtaining arbitrarily many material goods. If you wish to reject the arbitrarily big effect, you must reject the independence of how you care about each additional Mona Lisa. But in this case, unlike in dust specks, there’s no special reason to have that independence in the first place.
Now, if the room were sufficiently uncomfortable, maybe I’d off Frank - as long as I was sure the situation wasn’t symmetrical. But I don’t think we need surreal numbers to describe why, if I get three square meals a day in the white room, I won’t kill Frank just to get an infinite amount of food.
Here’s his 2008 paper, “Life Extension versus Replacement,” which explores an amendment to utilitarianism that would allow us to prefer Life Extension
I feel like the thing that should allow us to prefer life extension is the thing that makes people search for amendments to utilitarianism that would allow us to prefer life extension.
Railroads in Monopoly.
Railroads in an actual railroad monopoly.
Time spent with individuals—I’d rather spend time with friends than strangers.
Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2005.