Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren’t yet people.
I would recommend against expressing this opinion in your OKCupid profile.
There are plenty of other constraints.
Many of these factors seem, with high probability, like genuine constraints (e.g. a second generation star). But I wonder whether others might be examples of anthropic generalizing from one example (e.g. availability of a specific ratio of elements). Presumably alien life would adapt to whatever conditions actually exist in their world.
Hello everyone, it’s so great to be here. I was introduced to LessWrong by a post left by C. Russo on Freedomainradio.com back in late July, which dumped me right into How to Actually Change Your Mind. Since then, I have found myself spending progressively more of my free time here, reading both old and new content.
Over the last several years, I’ve made a habit of spending my evenings online, blown by the winds of curiosity. While this has led me to the vague sense that I needed to make some adjustments to my map, I didn’t have a good sense of the tools I needed to edit it.
I grew up in a religious (Mormon) family (was even a white-shirt-wearing, door-knocking, Book-of-Mormon thumping missionary for two years), but gave up my belief in my mid-twenties after searching for—and failing to find—a convincing argument for my belief. I had been taught to identify a specific and powerful feeling with “The Holy Ghost,” but when I reflected on my experiences, I realized that I had felt that feeling on many occasions that seemed inconsistent with the idea that God was giving me information in those moments. I have, furthermore, felt that feeling many times since my apostasy, which seems (to quote Cyan), like icing on the coffin of that false belief. A few days ago, I read a comment on A Rationalist’s Tale by summerstay which gave my feeling a name (frisson), and a scientific explanation.
I manage a small group of analysts at a large corporation, and have of late been on the lookout for ways to infuse LW concepts into our group discussions. On a related note, I read Raising the Sanity Waterline today, and wondered whether anyone has thought about or attempted to actually create a Youtube series corresponding to Eliezer’s four-credit undergraduate course with no prerequisites, designed to secretly make people more rational.
Sorry for the ramble; again, it’s a pleasure.
If all you know about two mammals is that they have different brain sizes, then it seems plausible to guess that the one with the larger brain (especially if the brain is larger by mass and as a ratio to body size) has greater overall functionality. This doesn’t seem like a particularly privileged hypothesis, just the baseline observation.
but somehow miss the intended target site.
...and miss rather badly, at that.
The Aliens solution seems a bit harsh, though probably effective. I estimate P(wart comes back|wart nuked from orbit) < .1
Radical phalangectomy; it’s the only way to be sure.
“Ish,” yes. I have to admit I’ve had a hard time navigating this enormous thread, and haven’t read all of it, including the evidence of demonic influence you’re referring to. However, I predict in advance that 1) this evidence is based on words that a man wrote in an ancient book, and that 2) I will find this evidence dubious.
Two equally unlikely propositions should require equally strong evidence to be believed. Neither dragons nor demons exist, yet you assert that demons are real. Where, then, is the chain of entangled events leading from the state of the universe to the state of your mind? Honest truth-seeking is about dispassionately scrutinizing that chain, as an outsider would, and allowing others to scrutinize, evaluate, and verify it.
I was a Mormon missionary at 19. I used to give people copies of the Book of Mormon, testify of my conviction that it was true, and invite them to read it and pray about it. A few did (Most people in Iowa and Illinois aren’t particularly vulnerable to Mormonism). A few of those people eventually (usually after meeting with us several times) came to feel as I did, that the book was true. I told those people that the feeling they felt was the Holy Spirit, manifesting the truth to them. And if that book is true, I told them, then Joseph Smith must have been a true prophet. And as a true prophet, the church that he established must be the Only True Church, according to Joseph’s revelations and teachings. I would then invite them to be baptized (which was the most important metric in the mission), and to become a member of the LDS church. One of the church’s teachings is that a person can become as God after death (omniscience and omnipotence included). Did the chain of reasoning leading from “I have a feeling that this book is true” justify the belief that “I can become like God”?
You are intelligent and capable of making good rhetorical arguments (from what I have read of your posts in the last week or two). I see you wielding Gendlin, for example, in support of your views. At some level, you’re getting it. But the point of Gendlin is to encourage truth-seekers desiring to cast off comforting false beliefs. It works properly only if you are also willing to invoke Tarski:
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
Survey complete. Had to answer “there’s no such thing as morality” because I can’t imagine a configuration of quarks that would make any of the other choices true. What would it even mean at a low level for one normative theory to be “correct?”
Have you experimented with sleep posture? A cursory search turned up a 2000 study showing that sleeping in a supine position might contribute to lucid dreams. Some of the subjects suffered from hypnopompic sleep paralysis:
Dahmen N; Kasten M. REM-associated hallucinations and sleep paralysis are dependent on body posture. Journal Of Neurology, 2001 May; Vol. 248 (5), pp. 423-4
.Please look around you. Does it look like we have got dumber in the last 20,000 years? I’d say this is tons of data. It may be hard to estimate in Bayesian terms, but certainly not less than +100 db of evidence against the alternative.
What I see when I look around is largely the product of millenia of cumulative invention and discovery.
I won’t argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist—some state of a region of the universe—then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.
I find I have very little access to my own motivation algorithms, so that things I think I want to do and things I actually end up doing do not always align very well. External deadlines (as opposed to self-imposed ones) are some of the only things that consistently motivate me, but they don’t work very well for personal goals.
Using Noom Weight Loss Coach for integrated food logging, workout tracking, and weight loss plan management. I’m more aware of the quality of the food I’m eating and of how calorie content and exercise are contributing to my weight loss goals. Highly recommended.
My experience with similar groups bears this out, although I think I’d loosely construe “obviously useful” as things that make us better/stronger and things that are fun to do.
I’ve thought of this advice to keep identity small as installing a new executive-level program, “Monitor group affiliations with potentially mind-killing emotional attachments”. Since I’ve done that, it seems like all my attachments have become a lot more gooey.
One of the transfiguration safety rules: Never transfigure something into anything that might be eaten or breathed. Is it possible to demonstrate partial transfiguration (on, for example, his father’s rock) while transforming much of its substance very temporarily into a breathable gas?
I only see three options. Deny that anything is actually green; become a dualist; or (supervillain voice) join me, and together, we can make a new ontology.
Sure I’ll join you; what color is the supervillain sidekick’s uniform?
I’m not an expert, but with this in mind it should be a rather simple matter to apply a few strategies so that LW shows up near the top of relevant search results. At the very least we could create wiki pages with titles like “How to Think Better” and “How to Figure Out What’s True” with links to relevant articles or sequences. The fact that rationality has little obvious commercial value should work in our favor by keeping competing content rather sparse.