PlaidX

Karma: 859

PlaidX 28 May 2011 3:25 UTC
6 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: A less wrong way to talk about the arts?
I don’t like contentless discussions of art either, but spewing paragraph after paragraph of awkward, stilted jargon about your hypothetical personal feelings isn’t content, especially when they relate to a movie you haven’t even seen!

If my friend says “That movie sucked”, and I disagree, I ask “why”.

If my friend says “I liked the animation, but the timing is terrible. Everyone telegraphs their reactions”, that’s a discussion of the film that’s actually going somewhere.

If my friend says “Like everyone, I enjoy the physical experience of laughter, but-” and five minutes later they’re still talking, I take a moment to look back at my life and wonder how I possibly thought it would be a good idea to see a movie with this person.

PlaidX 27 May 2011 22:26 UTC
17 points
in reply to: Academian’s comment on: Measuring aversion and habit strength
The latter. Actually, I guess I still consume a lot of unknown things, but now almost exclusively online, where when the thing sucks, you can instantly move on to something else.

Much better to download a movie and watch five minutes of it and delete it than to coordinate going to the theater with someone, buy overpriced popcorn, watch a bunch of ads, then sit through an hour and a half of something you don’t really like.

I can’t really tell whether this is me failing to appreciate some aspect of human experience, or just that the way people tend to do things is stupid.

PlaidX 27 May 2011 22:11 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zetetic’s comment on: The non-painless upload
Yeah, really what I find to be the ugliest thing about lesswrong by far is the sense of self-importance, which contributed to the post deletion quite a bit as well.

Maybe it’s the combination of these factors that’s the problem. When I read mainstream philosophical discourse about pushing a fat man in front of a trolley, it just seems like a goofy hypothetical example.

But lesswrong seems to believe that it carries the world on its shoulders, and that when they talk about deciding between torture and dust specks, or torture and alien invasion, or torture and more torture, i get the impression people are treating this at least in part as though they actually expect to have to make this kind of decision.

If all the situations you think about involve horrible things, regardless of the reason for it, you will find your intuitions gradually drifting into paranoia. There’s a certain logic to “hope for the best, prepare for the worst”, but I get the impression that for a lot of people, thinking about horrible things is simply instinctual and the reasons they give for it are rationalizations.

PlaidX 27 May 2011 21:49 UTC
−5 points
on: A less wrong way to talk about the arts?

The objective is to go from “__ sucked/was awesome” to “__ caused me to have internal experiences A, B, C, H, and R. Did you have different experiences? If so, why?”

This article caused me to have internal experiences of “oh jesus”, “what is he thinking”, and “how can people claim lesswrong isn’t autistic with a straight face?”

Here are some factors that may have contributed to these experiences: I ate a slice of cheese pizza today, I want to signal my superiority in the domain of art criticism, and the way you write (and apparently talk) makes me want to bang my head against the wall.

PlaidX 27 May 2011 3:38 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Zetetic’s comment on: The non-painless upload
Considering this style of thinking has lead lesswrong to redact whole sets of posts out of (arguably quite delusional) cosmic horror, I think there’s plenty of neurosis to go around, and that it runs all the way to the top.

I can certainly believe not everybody here is part of it, but even then, it seems in poor taste. The moral problems you link to don’t strike me as philosophically illuminating, they just seem like something to talk about at a bad party.

PlaidX 27 May 2011 3:28 UTC
21 points
on: Measuring aversion and habit strength
I’ve found that I have the opposite problem. When given the opportunity to try something new, I take it, thinking “maybe this time”, and invariably regret doing so.

Now I order the same food every time in restaurants, never go to shows, and am a happier person for it.

PlaidX 23 May 2011 22:24 UTC
5 points
in reply to: XiXiDu’s comment on: What makes Less Wrong awesome?
Someone even more cynical might say that lesswrong only departs from mainstream skeptical scientific consensus in ways that coincidentally line up exactly with the views of eliezer yudkowsky, and that it’s basically an echo chamber.

That said, rational thinking is a great ideal, and I think it’s awesome that lesswrong even TRIES to live up to it.

PlaidX 19 May 2011 21:52 UTC
6 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: What bothers you about Less Wrong?
I haven’t read TOO much mainstream philosophy, but in what I have, I don’t recall even a single instance of torture being used to illustrate a point.

Maybe that’s what’s holding them back from being truly rational?

PlaidX 19 May 2011 21:29 UTC
17 points
in reply to: Dreaded_Anomaly’s comment on: What bothers you about Less Wrong?
I’ve heard that before, and I grant that there’s some validity to it, but that’s not all that’s going on here. 90% of the time, torture isn’t even relevant to the question the what-if is designed to answer.

The use of torture in these hypotheticals generally seems to have less to do with ANALYZING cognitive algorithms, and more to do with “getting tough” on cognitive algorithms. Grinding an axe or just wallowing in self-destructive paranoia.

If the point you’re making really only applies to torture, fine. But otherwise, it tends to read like “Maybe people will understand my point better if I CRANK MY RHETORIC UP TO 11 AND UNCOIL THE FIREHOSE AND HALHLTRRLGEBFBLE”

There’s a number of things that make me not want to self-identify as a lesswrong user, and not bring up lesswrong with people who might otherwise be interested in it, and this is one of the big ones.
What links here?
- Zack_M_Davis's comment on Torture Simulated with Flipbooks by Amanojack (26 May 2011 1:21 UTC; 20 points)

PlaidX 19 May 2011 18:16 UTC
18 points
on: What bothers you about Less Wrong?
Creepily heavy reliance on torture-based what-if scenarios.

PlaidX 14 May 2011 15:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: DavidM’s comment on: Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
Ok, I’m back online. I basically flaked out partway through day two, I think I overextended myself.

However, the twitching or convulsing is still here, whenever I meditate, and after conferring with a medical professional, I’m pretty sure it’s a meditation related thing, and not due to hyperventilation or somesuch. In fact, he explicitly said “yeah, that’s from meditation. don’t even try looking for a medical explanation.”

SO, not exactly PLEASANT or ILLUMINATING results, but results nonetheless. I’m going to try going back to an hour or so of daily meditation and see how things develop for a while.

PlaidX 6 May 2011 16:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: DavidM’s comment on: Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
It seems like an awful LOT of twitching, though. Like, so much so that I ended up hyperventilating to compensate for it. Is this really typical?

I should note that my concentration still isn’t that great, and I haven’t really experienced anything unusual on a mental level.

PlaidX 6 May 2011 16:01 UTC
0 points
in reply to: DavidM’s comment on: Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
No, go ahead and say what you think, I’m a bit flummoxed at this point. Too much twitching.

PlaidX 6 May 2011 16:00 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
Aha, I had a nagging feeling there might be something like that going on.

Any idea what the involuntary spasms are about? I did another hour of sitting, and while I didn’t have the tingling and such this time, the spasm came back as strong as ever. In fact, I’m inclined to discontinue things until I can figure out what the deal is with them.

Even laying down, breathing calmly, I’m just twitchy as hell. It stops as soon as I stop meditating.

EDIT: Here’s something from wikipedia.

Cortical reflex myoclonus is thought to be a type of epilepsy that originates in the cerebral cortex—the outer layer, or “gray matter,” of the brain, responsible for much of the information processing that takes place in the brain. In this type of myoclonus, jerks usually involve only a few muscles in one part of the body, but jerks involving many muscles also may occur. Cortical reflex myoclonus can be intensified when patients attempt to move in a certain way or perceive a particular sensation. [italics mine]

This seems like a pretty bizarre explanation, but I have yet to uncover anything better. Wait, that’s probably intended to be read “when patients perceive”, not “when patients attempt to perceive”.

PlaidX 6 May 2011 14:29 UTC
5 points
on: Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)
WOAH, holy crap. Ok, I’m doing a retreat (in my own house, by myself) and i’m only four and a half hours in, but i’m breaking retreat protocol and going on the computer because I have to tell you guys how unexpected what’s happened so far is. Woo, ok, sensations subsiding, getting feeling back in my fingers.

I’ve been meditating for about six months now, starting at 20 minutes a day and gradually moving up to an hour and a half, with no discernible effect other than my butt getting sore. When daniel posted these articles, I was getting so demoralized with my complete lack of results that I was looking into maybe kickstarting things with LSD or something.

Since he really sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and presents the information in a manner that’s refreshingly candid and sassy, I decided to at least TRY doing a retreat, however painful it was. I expected maybe kinda sorta to get palpable results if I could stick with it for a few days.

Instead, here’s what’s happened so far. I actually started last night, but immediately went to bed, and just tried to be mindful in the moments I was awake, haphazardly. Got up, sat for fifteen minutes, nothing, walked for an hour, still absolutely nothing, sat for an hour, and here something at least worth writing down happened, which is that near the end I started getting a bit twitchy.

I’m prone to the occasional twitch or spasm in my daily life, but no more than a few per day. But I was starting to get them a couple of times a minute. I noted them, and eventually time was up, and I felt a little smoother or more clearheaded as I (slowly, mindfully) went downstairs and made myself a protein shake for breakfast, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary.

Then, more walking, still nothing, more sitting, and soon the twitching came back. Then it subsided for a while. Then it came back. Then it got worse. Then it kept getting worse and worse, more and more twitching, jerking, spasming. It seemed to be related to the noting process, if I let my mind wander or concentrated on the breath without noting “in in in in in out out out out out”, the jerking subsided.

Eventually it started to get kind of painful, some of the random unpredictable jerks hurt my neck and whatnot, so experimenting I found that if I breathed faster (and consequently noted faster, “ininininin outoutoutoutout”), the twitching would come even faster, but in smaller, tighter, more controlled jerks, and in fact I was tensing up like crazy. I noticed a kind of buzzy vibration in my teeth and considered “Is that the vibrations he’s talking about? No, i think that’s just something irrelevant. That happens to people now and then”. In retrospect, I’m not sure it does. It wasn’t a REMARKABLE sensation, but I don’t really recall having my teeth buzz normally.

But, the buzzing sensation did not stop in my teeth. Soon I was feeling it in my hands as well, and then spreading from my neck to my face, and eventually all over. Meanwhile my breath had become quite labored and audible and irregular and I’m sure had anyone else been trying to meditate in the same room they would’ve been greatly irritated.

My body felt very much the way your foot does when it falls asleep, though without any accompanying loss of sensation. Also I was getting a headache. And most weirdly of all, my fingers were bending back of their own accord. I found that regardless of how hard I tried, I could not hold my hands in the proper posture, they were all screwed up. Similarly my shoulders were hunched and my face was somewhat puckered, I think.

The vibrating / tingling / asleep body part feeling was mildly unpleasant. I’ve smoked salvia once or twice (actually it’s the only drug i’ve done),and gives a certain prickly sensation all over. This somewhat resembled that as well.

When I had started out this retreat, my feeling was “if i can just get my foot in the door, i’m sure I can make it to the end”, but not really expecting to get my foot in the door. Now that I have, I can see it’s going to be just as difficult taking the next step as well. This was not an easy thing to sit with for even part of an hour, and in fact I gave up and broke my meditation a few seconds before the bell.

The world looked considerably… brighter? More detailed but in its normal textures? definitely different, in a positive way. The same way it looked after the first hour, which I dismissed, except much more so.

I’m surprised this happened so fast, and I’m surprised at how physical it was. What I’ve experienced so far did not feel in any way enlightening, but nor was it my imagination playing tricks on me. This is serious business.

Anyway, I’d better get back to my schedule. After typing all this, I’ll probably have to start all over.

PlaidX 5 May 2011 5:56 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Manfred’s comment on: Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3)

Sorry, I read the first sentence first, and so experienced a minor full-body orgasm.

You’re either the greatest imagineer I’ve ever met, or a big fat liar.

PlaidX 5 May 2011 5:41 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Consequentialism FAQ
I know where you’re coming from, but “they” is already the world’s gender-neutral third person pronoun of choice, so why pick a different one? Even if it wasn’t, you’ve got to pick your battles.

PlaidX 5 May 2011 5:37 UTC
13 points
on: Hollow Adjectives

the fact that God cannot do something that cannot be done does not limit His omnipotence.

The point is that “omnipotent” is itself a “hollow adjective”, as you put it. Omnipotent doesn’t mean “you can do anything that can be done”, it means you can do anything, full stop.

PlaidX 29 Apr 2011 6:00 UTC
6 points
on: Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 1 of 3)
Wow, I often curse the world for not dropping the information I need into my lap, but here it seems to be on a silver platter. When I got around to reading this post, I had literally 23 tabs open, all of them about research into meditation.

I’ve been meditating for about six months and in the last week or so, getting disenchanted with the mainstream (within theravada buddhism) model of the path, and looking into alternate sources of information.

It’s excellent to see that there’s people already succeeding in the independent investigation I was wearily beginning to attempt!

PlaidX 26 Apr 2011 2:40 UTC
48 points
on: Consequentialism FAQ
I like it, but stop using “ey”. For god’s sake, just use “they”.