Hello, I wanted to post something but when reading the guidelines, I am a little confused. The issue of my confusion is “Aim to explain, not persuade”. English is not my native language, but when I googled “persuade” I found that it means “induce (someone) to do something through reasoning or argument. ”. To me, this sounds a little ridiculous on the rationality forum.
PeterL(PeterL)
Karma: 16
My attempt to find the meaning of existence
Hello, lesswrongsters (if I can call you like this),
What do you think about the following statement: “You should be relatively skeptical about each of your past impressions, but you should be absolutely non-skeptical about your most current one at a given moment. Not because it was definitely true, but because there is practically no other option.”
Please, give me your opinions, criticism, etc. about this.
Hello, I would like to ask, whether you think that some ideas can be dangerous to discuss publicly despite you are honest with them and even despite you are doing your best attempt to be logical/rational and even despite you are wishing nothing bad to other people/beings and even despite you are open for its discussion in terms of being prepared for its rejection according to a justified reason.
In this stage, I will just tell you I would like to discuss a specific moral issue, which might be original, and therefore I am skeptical this way and I feel a little insecure about discussing it publicly.
[Question] Generalization of the Solomonoff Induction to Accuracy—Is it possible? Would it be useful?
Wow, thanks very much. Your post boosted my usage of this handbook rapidly from that day, I intensely enjoy doing these exercises, and I find them extremely helpful and effective. Thanks once again.
A riddle (maybe trivial for you, lesswrongsters, but I am still curious of your answers/guesses):
It is neither truth nor lie. What is it?
[Question] Your Preferences
Am I understanding correctly that this idea of wholesomeness is purely definitory/axiomatic (like mathematics) containing no (extraordinary) claims at all, so it doesn’t make sense to ask “Is this true?” but rather “Is it useful?”, and whether “to act wholesomely is good” is just hypothesis you are even actually testing?
Because then I see its great advantage over religious moral systems, that do contain such claims that actually might be false, but people are demanded to believe them.
Wow, thanks for your willingness to test/falsify your statements, and I apologize for my rash judgment. Your idea just sounded to me to be too good to be true, so I wanted to be cautious.
And I would be glad to say I am completely satisfied with your answer. However, that is not the case yet, maybe just because the “mistakes” of the people trying to apply wholesomeness might still need a definition—a criterion according to which something is or is not a mistake.
However, if you provided such a definition, I might be another tester of this style of thinking.
Could someone, please, confirm or disprove my impression that this idea might be not falsifiable at all? And if it is not, could someone, please, explain to me what reasons to apply this idea are still there (I am skeptical and curious, not completely denying)?
However, I appreciate this attempt to offer such an interesting moral idea/hypothesis/theory like this.
Hello, my name is Peter and recently I read Basics of Rationalist Discourse and iteratively checked/updated the current post based on the points stated in those basics:
I (possibly falsely) feel that moral (i.e. “what should be”) theories should be reducible because I see the analogy with the demand of “what is” theories to be reducible due to Occam’s razor. I admit that my feeling might be false (and I know analogy might not be a sufficient reason), and I am ready to admit that it is. However, despite reading the whole Mere Goodness from RAZ I cannot remember any reasons (maybe they are there, and I don’t blame the author (EY), if not), but many interesting statements (e.g. about becoming the pleasure brain center itself). And I remember there was such a long dialog there that might have explained this to me but I didn’t comprehend its bottom line.
This post is not intended to have any conclusion more general than about my state of mind, and if there is such an impact, I don’t mean it.
I find splitting the Great Idea a very useful tool to quantify its relevance (“For how many parts do I feel they are true?”), and this way, to apply falsification (for which I find “If your idea wasn’t true, how would you find out? Because if you don’t ask, it might be not true, but you didn’t find out.” to be the most logical and intuitive description. And so in case of splitting, you can say “I would admit my idea was incorrect, if not all its 12 parts felt correct separately. Easy.”.).
I agree with both “emotion” and “pretend” hypotheses. It is (according to my world view) extremely difficult to pretend emotions you are not possessing. Thus, the easiest way to pretend your beliefs might be to manipulate your own emotions.
“His own stupid”—the idea that if someone is stupid, he deserves all the bad consequences of being stupid.
Disproof:
Let’s assume this is true. Then there would have been at least one voluntary action that turned him from wise to stupid. But why would someone voluntarily choose to be stupid? Only because he wouldn’t have known what being stupid means, so he would be already stupid. Thus there would be no such first action. (Assumtion rejected.)
Very nicely written. A good example of this might be invention of genetic flaw correction, due to which morally controversial abortion could become less desired option.
I am stuck at the prompt no. 1, because I am wondering whether it is possible to name all the wants once forever despite the complexity of human morality.
Thanks in advance for explanation.
What about moral duty to be curious?
For everytime I am curious about “how the things are?”, I would like to be curious also about “what to do?” then. (Curious pragmatism)
My suggestion for alternative explanation is that people somehow assume that for saving more birds, more people will be asked to donate, so after dividing, the amounts per person will be very similar.