pianoforte611

Karma: 1,256

pianoforte611 1 May 2012 15:18 UTC
3 points
on: Do people think Less Wrong rationality is parochial?
Could anyone who is familiar with the modern cogsci literature comment on the current relevance of Bermudez’s Introduction to Cognitive Science? I mean this one: http://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Science-An-Introduction-Mind/dp/0521708370 There was a fascinating mega-post on it at commonsenseatheism.

pianoforte611 17 Aug 2012 12:27 UTC
5 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Expecting Short Inferential Distances
Is reviving dead threads frowned upon here? That was an incredibly insightful comment to me because it explains my deconversion (from Catholicism) and Leah Libresco’s conversion to it (she has a blog on patheos called unequally yoked)*. I wonder how general this is?

*Status is obviously defined by the person whose group affiliation is changing. The high status atheists that changed my desired group affiliation were some atheists on debate.org, who were a lot more like me than any catholics I had met. The high status Catholics that changed Leah’s desired group affiliation were her friends, the people in her debating club and her Catholic boyfriend, whom she went to mass with (willingly) for more than a year.

pianoforte611 30 Aug 2012 1:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?
Interesting example. I’m trying to figure out how it fulfills the second criteria for the WAITW namely “as though it also had those features even though it doesn’t”

pianoforte611 30 Aug 2012 20:12 UTC
0 points
in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: The noncentral fallacy—the worst argument in the world?
Ah I see now, thanks. I don’t its nearly as common as “abortion is murder” though. Actually I’m quite embarrassed that I can’t think of any liberal examples of the worst argument in the world with regard to social issues that people actually use regularly. I don’t like any that I’ve seen so far.

pianoforte611 7 Feb 2013 3:15 UTC
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: What is moral foundation theory good for?
Vlad didn’t reply to my request. I don’t suppose you would mind summarizing one or two of his more salient arguments?

pianoforte611 28 Apr 2013 17:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TitaniumDragon’s comment on: Being Half-Rational About Pascal’s Wager is Even Worse
“what is the likelihood that we care about dead frozen people in the future?”

I wondered that as well when I first heard about cryonics. It is true that society in general won’t care about frozen people in the future. But that isn’t necessary for cryonics to work. Rather its enough that cryonics organizations care about frozen people.

Why would they care? Because the people running the organization have a vested interested in making their clients live. Among other reasons, the people running the organization might one day be clients as well, so they have to care about the success of the project.

pianoforte611 7 Jul 2013 20:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Bad Concepts Repository
I’m afraid that despite reading a fair chunk of Mathemusicality I’ve given up on Westergaard’s “An Introduction to Tonal Theory” in favor of Steven Laitz’s “The Complete Musician”. Steven Laitz is a Schenkerian but his book is fairly standard and uses harmony, voice leading and counterpoint.

Actually I’m beginning to conclude that if you want to compose, then starting off by learning music theory of any sort is totally wrongheaded. It is like trying to learn French by memorizing vocabulary and reading books on grammar (which is disturbingly how people try to learn languages in high school). The real way that people learn French is by starting off with very simple phrases and ideas then gradually expanding their knowledge by communicating with people who speak French. Grammar books and vocabulary books are important but as a supplement only to the actual learning that takes place from trying to communicate. Language and music are subconscious processes

I don’t know what a similar approach to music composition would look like, but I’m reasonably convinced that it would be much better than the current system.

I should admit though that I am monolingual and I can’t compose music—so my thoughts are based only on theory and anecdotes.

pianoforte611 8 Jul 2013 2:04 UTC
4 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Bad Concepts Repository
I don’t have any particular issue with Westergaard, I just couldn’t make it through the book. Perhaps with more more effort I could but I’m lacking motivation due to low expectancy. It was a long time ago that I attempted the book, but If I had to pinpoint why, there are few things I stumbled over:

The biggest problem was that I have poor aural skills. I cannot look at two lines and imagine what they sound like so I have to play them on a piano. Add in more lines and I am quickly overwhelmed.

A second problem was the abstractness of the first half of the book. Working through counterpoint exercises that didn’t really sound like music did not hold my attention for very long.

A third problem was the disconnect between the rules I was learning and my intuition. Even though I could do the exercises by following the rules, too often I felt like I was counting spaces rather than improving my understand of how musical lines are formed.

I think that your comparison is very interesting because I would predict that a phrasebook is much more useful than a grammar text for learning a language. The Pimsleur approach, which seems to be a decent way to start to learning a language, is pretty much a phrase book in audio form with some spaced repetition thrown in for good measure. Of course the next step, where the actual learning takes place, is to start trying to communicate with native speakers, but the whole point of Pimsleur is to get you to that point as soon as possible. This important because most people use grammatical rules implicitly rather than explicitly. Certainly grammar texts can be used to improve your proficiency in a language, but I highly doubt that anyone has actually learned a language using one. Without the critical step of communication, there is no mechanism for internalizing the grammatical rules.

(Sorry for taking such a long tangent into language acquisition, I wasn’t initially planning on stretching the analogy that far.)

pianoforte611 8 Jul 2013 16:03 UTC
0 points
in reply to: komponisto’s comment on: Bad Concepts Repository
I don’t think that we disagree all that much. We both agree that there are some people who are able to learn structural rules implicitly without explicit instruction. We typically call these people “good at languages” or “good at music”. Our main disagreement therefore, is how large that set of people is. I happen to think that it is very large given that everyone learns the grammatical rules of their first language this way, and a fair number of polyglots learn their second language this way as well (Unless you deny the usefulness of Pimsleur like approaches). If I understand you correctly, you think that the group of people who are able to properly learn a language/music this way is smaller, because it often results in bad habits and poor inferences about the structure of the language. I would endorse this as well—grammatical texts are useful for refining your understanding of the structure of a language.

Well in that case, what do you need a phrasebook for? You can, after all, learn a language simply by immersion, with nothing other than the data itself to guide you. If you’re going to have any preliminary or supplementary instruction at all, it surely may as well be in an organized fashion, aimed at increasing the efficiency of the learning process by directing one toward correct theories and away from incorrect ones—which is exactly what grammar books do and phrasebooks don’t do.

Because it is scary to learn to swim without arm floats even if there is someone else helping you (I think that phrase books are analogous to arm floats). Other than that I would agree with most of this. If you want secondary instruction in a language then you should probably use a grammar book and not a phrase book and I may return to Westergaard after I have taken some composition lessons. Also I would go one step further and say that not only is it possible to learn a language via immersion, it is necessary, and any other tools you may use to learn a language should help to support this goal.

pianoforte611 18 Jul 2013 16:54 UTC
12 points
in reply to: gothgirl420666’s comment on: Instrumental rationality/self help resources
Would you recommend it to gay men and women?

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 13:53 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?
No I don’t decide what to do with my time by coming up with arguments ruling out every other activity that I could be doing.

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 13:57 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?

That’s more or less what I intended them to be. Isn’t doing only the most effective activities available to you… a good idea?

However, I’d phrase the argument in terms of degrees: Activities are good to the extent they conduce to your making better decisions for the future, bad to the extent they conduce to your making worse decisions for the future. So doing the dishes might be OK even if it’s not the Single Best Thing You Could Possibly Be Doing Right Now, provided it indirectly helps you do better things than you otherwise would. Some suboptimal things are more suboptimal than others.

Wouldn’t you agree that veganism is less suboptimal than say entertainment? I’m assuming you’re okay with people playing video games, going to the movies etc. even if those activities don’t accomplish any long term altruistic goals. So I don’t know what your issue with veganism is.

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 14:06 UTC
1 point
on: Why Eat Less Meat?
Consider the two groups of animals.

Group A consists of factory farmed animals which suffer a total of X units of pain in their lives. Group B consists of animals in the wild that also suffer a total of X units of pain in their lives*

We could try to reduce suffering by preventing Group A’s existence (your suggestion), or we could try to reduce suffering by preventing Group B’s existence. Ignoring convenience why should we choose your option?

*I used the groups so as to address the fact that the individual animals may suffer different amounts.

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 15:28 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?
I specified ignoring convenience. Is the lack of a clear action for Group B your true rejection? Would you actually try to minimize suffering in wild animals if you knew how to?

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 15:31 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?

Why not choose both as long as this doesn’t lead to unwanted side-effects?

Exactly my question. Why the concern over group A and almost no concern over group B?

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 18:04 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?
Thank you, this is news to me. The page is fairly non-descript though, do you know what sorts of measures they are taking to reduce animal suffering in the wild? Most of what I saw was actually only addressing human caused animal suffering.

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 18:37 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?

For a lot of people, some measure of entertainment helps recharge their batteries and do better work

I suspect that most people engage in much more entertainment than is necessary for recharging their batteries to do more work. I hope you don’t think that entertainment and recreation are justifiable only because they allow us to work.

and nothing better could do the job in either case

This sounds like a fully general counterargument against doing almost anything at all.

pianoforte611 24 Jul 2013 21:26 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?
I’m interested in the intrinsic value of reducing suffering, which is why I posed the question. I wanted to know if you thought that the suffering of animals raised by humans is worse than the suffering of wild animals, all else being equal.

If you truly do care about the suffering of wild animals then I appreciate your consistency. I am not particularly bothered by fish getting eaten by sharks or zebras getting eaten by lions. I’m curious though, if you had sufficient resources, would you attempt to convert carnivorous animals to herbivores as well?

pianoforte611 25 Jul 2013 2:57 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?
Upvoted for specificity. I appreciate that the people in this movement are taking altruistic vegetarianism to its logical conclusion.

pianoforte611 25 Jul 2013 3:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Peter Wildeford’s comment on: Why Eat Less Meat?
I think it is non-obvious that reducing predation is a worthwhile use of resources. I do appreciate your consistency in applying your altruistic principles though.