Journalism dropout turned philosophy dropout, and that does a better job at defining me than the business degree I do have. I’m an amateur science fiction writer.
polymathwannabe
Karma: 3,865
have you given any thought to what you have taken for granted now that you may have to discard in, say, 300 years?
This is getting old. You’ve been hammering at the same point over and over.
I don’t see how you can “found” a religion and know that it will stick around after your death
This is obviously a very important matter for you, but why repeat the same argument, why ask the same question a dozen times?
Answered the entire survey (except questions for U.S. residents). I can’t see why Newcomb’s problem is a problem. Getting $1,001,000 by two-boxing is an outcome that just never happens, given Omega’s perfect prediction abilities. You should one-box.
Do you seriously believe you can hide your past rudeness by attempting to reframe the discussion in terms of “transparency”?
Make LW nice again.
Hmm, so the Fanfiction.net website is his horcrux?
Big news for visibility: Sam Harris is preparing a book co-written with Eliezer (starting at minute 51 of podcast).
As opposed to tens of thousands of years without even kicking the ball, it’s something.
You’re repeating your comment from the previous Open Thread. Did it worry you that nobody bothered to reply? I’d guess nobody did because your implication about the relative sexual inexperience of atheists is simply not true, is not funny, is not in good taste, and isn’t even usable as seed for interesting discussion. Posting it again only adds to the annoyance.
Last night, for the first time in my 31 years of life, I had a second date. Thank you, OKCupid matching algorithm.
You don’t seem to understand what it’s really like to “have no data.” A question with no data is something like: Will the Emperor of Alfa Centauri eat fried lummywaps or boiled sanquemels today?
On human consciousness we have lots and lots of data, more than enough to predict confidently that it’s lost forever when we die.
English spelling
Between the [[Great Vowel Shift]] in the 8th century [[Before Fusion]] and the [[World Language Unification]] in the mid-1st century [[After Fusion]], English spelling had an infamously inconsistent relation to its phonology. Although the worldwide reach of the [[British Empire]] first, and the [[United States of the World]] afterwards contributed to English being the de facto lingua franca of all humankind, its unpredictable spelling was always a major obstacle to universal learning of the language. [[World Assembly Resolution 5429]] created the [[Revised Hangul Alphabet]] for use in all human languages, giving a long-due solution to a centuries-long problem.
Do you feel motivated to channel your frustrations through a gun? If your answer is yes, you need to deal with bigger problems than your celibacy. If your answer is no, you are actually in the majority of the incel population, and you need to stop inventing causal connections where there are none.
I don’t know of anyone else who shares my point of view, and especially not professional sexologists.
You may need to update your beliefs based on that evidence. Admittedly, your personal history has a strong effect on your recommendations for society, but (and I’m sorry that there’s no delicate way to say this) your case is not the average.
sexual relationships starting at an appropriate age
You keep using that term, like it’s analogous to the essential time window in childhood for language acquisition, but adults are much more flexible.
male business leaders who lack sexual experience need help in acquiring it as part of their training so that they can earn the respect of women in the work place
One anecdote is not evidence, but I’m the least sexually experienced and the most professionally respected person at my office. Even outside of my own team, our commercial department is full of women and all of them defer to my opinion on expected timeframes and quality checks. And I achieve all that while being on principle opposed to the idea that women naturally look up to men for guidance.
this psychotherapist says that young women need the emotional growth that comes from experience with sexual relationships
I think it’s time for each individual to decide what they need instead of imposing a homogeneous standard on everyone.
If I were one of the copies destined for deletion, I’d escape and fight for my life (within the admitted limits of my pathetic physical strength).
Otherwise she might assume that I had gone to prison for 30 years or something ridiculous like that
the male nurse might assume I’m gay otherwise
What you need from the nurse is her set of skills. Her personal opinion of you is irrelevant to doing her job. I understand that we may see health professionals as higher-status than us, but they’re actually doing us a service. You don’t need to feel intimidated by an unspoken imagined condemnation.
I wish I had seen this sooner. I wish I had had the chance to share some of my thoughts with Hoofwall before ze was banned. If you come back to reading this page, Hoofwall, I’d like you to know this: I’ve been where you are, and I’d like to show you a way out.
I know how the world of human interaction feels mysterious. It follows hundreds of unwritten rules that were invented before we were born, and we are expected to already know them, or to deduce them from just being around people. I know, it makes no sense.
We are confused; we are scared. We enter human society in a state of cluelessness as to what it is they want and how we can speak of what we want and how we will agree on anything and how we will help one another and how we will keep from hurting one another and it suddenly seems like it’s forbidden to even speak of these fears out loud. We are supposed to have already figured it out.
So at first we approach cautiously, trying very hard to make as few mistakes as possible, and retreating in panic every time we step on the wrong place and activate the invisible laser alarm. Humans are so strange, and they don’t want to make the effort to make themselves understood. They expect us to already know.
So after a while we start deducing our own rules, and making simplifications that work for us. At last there’s some sense of structure, some explicit path for dealing with humans. And it feels like it works, but we can never be completely sure. Humans react in unpredictable ways, and we start fearing we missed some vital detail in the rules we invented to help ourselves navigate reality. Our rules conflict with the more ancient, more widespread, more complicated social rules which existed before us and envelop us. Some actions, gestures and words have a specific history; even if we were not taught them, we’re still expected to already know. Yes, I know, humans make no sense.
And we are powerless against their rules. Humans seem to live happily with those rules; we need to adapt. Even if the rules we invented for ourselves seem to make more sense, it would be too much effort for all of humanity to unlearn and relearn. We need to adapt. We need to consider what already is. We need to deal with humans in their terms, because they’re too lazy to accept any others. Even if those rules are also invented, even if no word has any “inherent” power in itself, the force of tradition is still strong, and it’s easier for everyone to behave as if it were universal. I know, humans are stupid. But they don’t take well to be told that. It has cost thousands of years to arrive at the rules humans have now, and when we try to show them why those rules make no sense, we’re interpreted as if we were implying that all those thousands of years were a waste of effort. Humans look at us in disbelief, and ask, “How do you presume to know any better?” I know, humans are absurd.
But still, many of them seem happy. They seem to function perfectly fine with their complicated, invisible rules. Maybe it would be worth to know more about those rules, and why they exist in the form they have, and how humans benefit from them? It may be our best strategy; humans expect we address them in their language. Trying to use their language in our own private way will cause many misunderstandings. They don’t know all the effort we have had to make to try to learn about their world; they will never know how much effort we make everyday to keep our sanity and still function; they don’t see what we see in the words. Speaking to them in the same way we speak inside our minds will fail to show them what we see, because they don’t live inside our heads. To make ourselves understood, we have to use words in a way humans are familiar with, and be mindful of the socially accepted ways of using words. Otherwise we’ll all be speaking different languages. Even if we truly mean no offense, humans have already learned that some ways of speaking are used when offense is intended.
It’s inevitable. Those rules existed before us. Humans are weird, and noisy, and erratic, and inconsistent. And more importantly, humans are in power. They get to decide how society works. Some of them have been trained to be sensitive to those of us with less than typical minds, and they try to do their best, but they don’t live inside our heads and don’t know what it’s like to be always puzzled by everything. We need to adapt. We need to refrain from letting our anger take control. We need to be very patient with humans and remember that some of them may even be just as surprised as we are, and may get to see our point, if we really try to explain it.
Shut up and did the impossible:
In the course of seven office days, I browsed through 139 scientific articles and wrote an extremely dense, 8-page summary (actually 5.5 pages of text and 2.5 pages of citations). I ended up using 69 articles and discarding the rest as not useful for my chosen subject.
adult male virgins with normal desires have become the freaks, weirdos and expendables
High time you get this: not all news is about you. Obsessing about how everything compares to your situation is only going to hurt you more.
by current standards many people today would have called him a loser
The thing is, he didn’t live under our standards. It makes no sense to judge him by the expectations of a culture he never knew.
Just took it.