i typed my age then hit return which submitted the form with only one answer. so then i filled it in again. you’ll want to ignore that first entry. dinner arrived as i did that so that was a couple of hours ago now. age is 39 if that helps.
pre
Anyone got any other examples of things just about everyone here has seen the folly of, even though they’re widespread among otherwise-smart people
The idiocy of the drug war tends to be my own favourite example.
The so-called terrorism threat? I did a count the other day on how many civil liberties had been removed by the terrorists vs those removed by the government.
Nationalism in general?
I guess you’d claim that things like forwarding chain letters, belief in homoeopathy or healing crystals or orgone guns, the ‘nature is good’ fallacy and whatnot aren’t common enough.
In the Free Software movement the typical response to these kinds of demands is pretty simple, “There’s the code, please do feel free to go fix it!”
Likewise in the hippy anarchist movements if you suggest something like a rally or a sit-in the usual answer is “Sounds good, when are you going to organise it?”
Which I tend to think is pretty much the right answer. If someone can’t be bothered to do the things they suggest themselves then I can’t really understand why they think they should be able to convince others to do it for them.
The key is to make the cost for getting in there and starting to do those things really low, making the source available to everyone with a simple download, making it simple to contact the whole group and start organizing.
Personally I’ve helped with and joined loads of different cults and projects, even started one, and found that the key to getting me to do stuff to help at least is to make it both simple to do and obvious how, to ensure that I realize I don’t need permission to go do something.
You’ve said yourself that you were surprised how much of a barrier even having to send an email to OB was compared to having a big “submit your article here” button on Lesswrong,
I have vague plans to take a look at the source code for less-wrong and fix a couple of things that are annoying me, but it won’t be till after the Subgenius show I’m organizing at least, when I have a bit more time.
- 4 Apr 2009 5:38 UTC; 0 points) 's comment on Another Call to End Aid to Africa by (
I Changed My Mind Today—Canned Laughter
Yes! Community matters. The support and friendship my folks get from their church is so intense, so useful to them, that I stopped trying to talk ’em out of their religion when I understood it. Unless you can replace that, give them that support and encouragement they got when my brother went schizophrenic say, you may well do them a disservice by talking them out of their religion even it if were possible.
Personally I get mine from a few places. The subgenii thing doesn’t really work well enough, there’s maybe two dozen of us active here in the whole continent. We can do about two get-togethers a year and have to fly in cross continental airplanes to do it. Lucky if half of us turn up at one one event. If you don’t also happen to be a heavy drinker you’re probably not going to fit in all that well either. The fact it’s so focused against something rather than for something can also be tricky. It’s deliberately exclusive.
More useful to me is the art community. The four nine one gallery even have a building. Squatted, of course. Nobody involved there has enough money to buy or even rent a building. The entire ethos of the folks who originally squatted that building was to use that previously unused space to encourage community projects. They use it for parties and for yoga classes and for drawing classes and there’s a cafe. There’s always people moving through, using the space. We’ll be using it for this years subgenius party come X-Day. They’re some of the most accepting friendly people I know. Having accepting, friendly leaders is surely important.
Another friend is in the process, this week even, of arranging a peppercorn rent with a landlord to move into and renovate a dilapidated building over five years, using it as a community center in the mean time. I expect I’ll do what I can to help, but I’m busy and it’s quite far from where I live.
Planet Angel aim to have a building, and to use it for similar purposes. We run monthly clubbing events to try and build that community and raise the cash to get a building through official channels rather than squatting. Well over half my friendship circle have come to me though PA over the last seven or eight years. The key to that being anything other than just another night club is the lack of any advertising. Spreading through word of mouth means ‘like minded’ people are the only people that come. You don’t get so much of the idiot trendy clubbing crowd that could destroy the friendly atmosphere. We try to organize bring-the-whole-family events a few times a year too, the night-clubbing thing is pretty restrictive if you really want to build a community.
The thing all these projects (except the subgenii one) have in common, the thing that drives whatever amount of success we’re getting, is acceptance though. None of them would work at all if we tried to include only rationalists, only the smart, only the top 5% intellectually. Indeed, they all (including the subgenii thing) include people with weird ideas about reality, people who aren’t all that smart, people who’d be bored reading lesswrong in about two minutes flat.
I think this is a good thing too. It’s pointless to be a lone rationalist, or an exclusive group. You gotta find some way to preach to the masses, and that’s only going to happen if you accept the masses, and give them that community they’re after, fill the community hole in their brains that people seem to find particularly hard to fill in big cities.
Yet you also can’t afford to grow so quickly that the group-norms are washed away, flooded with the wider society’s norms.
It’s a tricky problem
The difference between Scientific Awe and LSD hallucinations?
Um okay. Lots of subjectivity here of course.
Scientific Awe is a pleasure of epiphany, of real understanding, of seeing how things fit, while LSD’s awe is (for me at least) combined with a whole bunch of confusion and strangeness. It feels more intense, that yes! I grok it! is greater, and yet I’m never quite sure what it is that I grok. Explaining it into a Dictaphone just produces lots of rambling nonsense about unity and the connection of all things, including ideas, to each other.
The LSD thing will give you more ooomph, more intensity and certainty, as opposed to actual genuine scientific understanding which is of course always tempered by the other questions that understanding tends to bring up. You understand X but then that leads to the question “but why does X work that way?”
LSD is more emotional, more intense, and probably gives the “oh my god” response more, it’s more surprising, more sudden, more physical. It isn’t so tempered with new questions, perhaps because it doesn’t actually explain anything, so the feeling that it’s complete is perhaps the advantage. It leaves you feeling sated rather than curious.
Or did you mean the difference between LSD hallucinations and DMT hallucinations?
DMT is much sorter, minutes rather than hours, the bending of time and space in the visual field less intense, but the subjective feeling of understanding (I think false understanding, but it’s hard to remember that at the time) is much larger.
Probably LSD has made me say “oh my god” more often than DMT, if only coz I’ve done LSD so many more times and it lasts so much longer. Though DMT has thrown more friends off of the path, and onto that sated pan-theism they seem to indulge in.
Sex probably makes me actually say “oh my god” most, but there’s certain amounts of communication required during sex that isn’t needed when you’re tripping ;)
(EDIT: I wrote a bit about what LSD taught me a few years ago elsewhere FWIW. Most of it I still agree with, though I hope I’d write it better now.)
So if you find you ARE that friend, presumably you’d have no fear of stepping in front of that gun barrel yourself for a few million flips right afterwards. I mean it’s pretty convincing proof. Then you get to see the confusion in each other’s face!
Though you’re both more likely to end up mopping your friend’s blood of the floor.
On the whole, I think a good friend probably doesn’t let a friend test the Quantum Theory of Immortality.
Heh, this is pretty much how I live my life really. Coins go in the obvious coin place coz if I put ‘em anywhere else I’ll never remember where I put ’em.
See also: Proper Pocket Discipline. Everything that goes in pockets has an assigned pocket. No more searching for lighters! No more worry about keys scratching phone screens.
My books are in alphabetical order these days.
I suspect having a system for these things will also leave you better off if/when you go senile. If you’ve always looked in the same place for your coins for 60 years it’ll be more ingraned.
Quantum cat-stencil interference projection? What is this?
If you take a person and remove their emotion, you don’t get Spock off of Star-Trek, you get someone completely unable to make decisions in their life, someone who can think of no rational reason to chose one flavour of crisps over another and dithers for hours.
Inappropriate emotion can certainly cloud judgement, but removing the emotions all together won’t help make you more rational I don’t think.
And he’s right I suppose, though of course most religious people don’t have that “full blown religious experience” either. They just turn up and do the singing and the readings and the praying every week.
I guess it’s ironic that I, an atheist, have indeed had that LSD ‘religious’ experience while my folks, who are Christian, almost certainly never have.
I tend to just call the LSD/DMT thing ‘hallucination’ though, much to the chagrin of my more cosmicly inclined friends who insist the DMT thing proves we’re all one and that god loves us.
[Link] “Upload”, a video-conference between a girl and her dead grandfather
Bell curves may be the general case, but for the non-car-owning public-transport-using among us the situation is quite different. If a train runs every 20 minutes then being 1 minute late for the train means being 20 minutes late at the destination. Being 1 minute early has no effect on the time arriving at the destination.
It makes the prep-time discontinuous I guess.
Course, in London everyone expects everyone to often be 20 minutes late coz of the damned trains, so maybe it matter less then, heh.
Oh, so we’re just using techniques which win without being sneaky? Isn’t ‘sneaky’ a good, winning strategy?
Rationality’s enemies are certainly using these techniques. Should we not study them, if only with a view to finding an antidote?
That’s almost exactly the phrase I used when I pointed this place out to my friends. I added one word though: “I’ve joined another cult.” I said.
I find that if I talk as though all my groups of friends are cults of various kinds that it takes the “You’re in a cult” wind out of their sails.
“Yes, I’m in lots of cults, including this one here with you in it too.”
Don’t think any of the members of my other cults have wondered in this direction yet though.
Do people feel awe at the Internet?
Totally. The communications network is the biggest machine ever built, it’s parts are all replaceable without damaging the whole. Maybe you’re too young to remember a time before it, but I found it at university nearly two decades ago and I was certainly awestruck.
Toilets?
Not so much. But then I did see a documentry about the building of the London sewerage system, the way the rivers were all paved over and turned into underground tunnels, connected by miles upon miles of underground canals. Which has lasted for a couple of hundred years!
A toilet might not be a massive engineering feat, but the sewer system in a whole city sure is.
My AI-risk cartoon
Request For Article: Many-Worlds Quantum Computing
Heh. What’s the odds of you having that winning lottery ticket?
50/50! Either I win, or I don’t.
Seems like you’re mostly saying that price-like things tend to return to an average price, then presenting a lot of evidence on why the price is low and likely to continue to be low, then claiming that it’s therefore got to go up, because things return to their average price.
I have some bit-coin. It’s still worth more than when I brought it. My best guess, as it was then, is that it’ll be worth exactly zero in a decade or two.
Sounded like a lottery-ticket with expected-payout marginally better than the actual betting-odds offered.
Still does.
Lottery tickets don’t generally win though, even if the pay out is better than the betting-odds. It’s certainly not 50⁄50.
I took the survey.
The answer to how many minutes I spend here is a bit lower than you might expect, in that my robots scan the RSS feeds and send me interesting stuff so basically it’s almost zero, unless you count my robots time somehow.