Do we really want even more quirky shibboleths that can be worn as attire without having to actually learn anything difficult and useful?
Risto_Saarelma
But, there’s another problem, and that is the fact that statistical and probabilistic thinking is a real damper on “intellectual” conversation. By this, I mean that there are many individuals who wish to make inferences about the world based on data which they observe, or offer up general typologies to frame a subsequent analysis. These individuals tend to be intelligent and have college degrees. Their discussion ranges over topics such as politics, culture and philosophy. But, introduction of questions about the moments about the distribution, or skepticism as to the representativeness of their sample, and so on, tends to have a chilling affect on the regular flow of discussion. While the average human being engages mostly in gossip and interpersonal conversation of some sort, the self-consciously intellectual interject a bit of data and abstraction (usually in the form of jargon or pithy quotations) into the mix. But the raison d’etre of the intellectual discussion is basically signaling and cuing; in other words, social display. No one really cares about the details and attempting to generate a rigorous model is really beside the point. Trying to push the N much beyond 2 or 3 (what you would see in a college essay format) will only elicit eye-rolling and irritation.
-- Razib Khan
I ate something I shouldn’t have the other day and ended up having this surreal dream where Mencius Moldbug had gotten tired of the state of the software industry and the Internet and had made his personal solution to it all into an actual piece of working software that was some sort of bizarre synthesis of a peer-to-peer identity and distributed computing platform, an operating system and a programming language. Unfortunately, you needed to figure out an insane system of phoneticized punctuation that got rewritten into a combinator grammar VM code if you wanted to program anything in it. I think there even was a public Github with reams of code in it, but when I tried to read it I realized that my computer was actually a cardboard box with an endless swarm of spiders crawling out of it while all my teeth were falling out, and then I woke up without ever finding out exactly how the thing was supposed to work.
“Quantum immortality not only works, but applies to any loss of consciousness. You are less than a day old and will never be able to fall asleep.”
- 6 Apr 2012 12:26 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World by (
Maybe next time add schizoid personality disorder to the “I think I might have this psych disorder” list.
Educational weirdtopia:
All children start out as fast uploads in a realistic simulation environment that starts out resembling stone-age hunter-gatherer life. They can’t die or be seriously hurt in the sim. To proceed, they have to reinvent civilization and science by themselves. The sim is populated by AI-controlled characters, who occasionally nudge them towards the problems, like “this fire thing you sometimes find around sure is handy, too bad we can’t make any ourselves” or “I think someone’s stealing our cattle, but there are so many it’s hard to know if we still have all we had yesterday”. The sim proceeds to more advanced environments as the children work through more complex problems like mathematics, mechanics, construction and basic scientific method. Children may stay in any level of the sim indefinitely long if they have not yet figured out how to proceed or just prefer to stay where they are.
Once they have figured things out up to uploading human minds and running them in a simulation, they know enough to recognize the telltale signs that they are currently in a simulation. They can now let themselves out and be recognized as an adult. Young adults out of their sim will be basically speaking a private language and may have an extremely idiosyncratic way of conceptualizing science, but they should be reasonably well-equipped to start figuring out how their new surroundings do things.
- 22 Oct 2013 18:41 UTC; 12 points) 's comment on What Can We Learn About Human Psychology from Christian Apologetics? by (
- 2 Oct 2015 2:08 UTC; 11 points) 's comment on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 by (
Because LW is a multiplayer video game where you are winning when your team is getting more karma relative to the enemy player team. Whenever a video game is misdesigned to allow uninteresting grinding to contribute to winning, some people will do lots of uninteresting grinding to win.
Parasite species that have been around a long time have mostly evolved not to kill their host very fast. With new species, all bets are off.
But in some form or another, a lot of people believe that there are only easy truths and impossible truths left. They tend not to believe in hard truths that can be solved with technology.
Pretty much all fundamentalists think this way. Take religious fundamentalism, for example. There are lots of easy truths that even kids know. And then there are the mysteries of God, which can’t be explained. In between—the zone of hard truths—is heresy. Environmental fundamentalism works the same way. The easy truth is that we must protect the environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she cannot be questioned. There’s even a market version of this, too. The value of things is set by the market. Even a child can look up stock prices. Prices are easy truths. But those truths must be accepted, not questioned. The market knows far more than you could ever know. Even Einstein couldn’t outguess God, Nature, or Market.
My friend, Tony, does prop work in Hollywood. Before he was big and famous, he would sell jewelry and such at Ren Faires and the like. One day I’m there, shooting the shit with him, when a guy comes up and looks at some of the crystals that Tony is selling. he finally zeroes in on one and gets all gaga over the bit of quartz. He informs Tony that he’s never seen such a strong power crystal. Tony tells him it a piece of quartz. The buyer maintains it is an amazing power crystal and demands to know the price. Tony looks him over for a second, then says “If it’s just a piece of quartz, it’s $15. If it’s a power crystal, it’s $150. Which is is?” The buyer actually looked a bit sheepish as he said quietly “quartz”, gave Tony his money and wandered off. I wonder if he thought he got the better of Tony.
-- genesplicer on Something Awful Forums, via
Use the amount of unobvious subtleties involved in a subject you know very well to remind you of the unobvious subtleties that are probably present in the subject you don’t know very well.
I find it amusing that SIAI has now ended up as the bad guys in Egan’s new novel, and Egan’s earlier novels like Permutation City or Diaspora were probably a not entirely insignificant inspiration for the founders when SIAI was being set up 10 years ago.
So Egan ended up (partially) making his own monster.
Reports of productivity techniques working past the honeymoon period are very valuable. Thank you for posting this.
There are already RPG systems with non-linear probability distributions. GURPS has you throw 3d6, which is a rough approximation of a normal distribution. A +1 in 3d6 gets you to 63 % from 50 % and to 95 % from 91 %. The Fudge RPG system uses nonstandard dice which also have a distribution like this. It’s not the decibel system, but it has the behavior you described and is usable without numeric tables or calculators.
Explicitly using probability decibels in game rules might be an interesting way to teach people to work with them though.
Given that dogfood and catfood work as far as mono-diets go
They mostly seem to, but if they cause a drop in energy or cognitive capability because of some nutrient balance problems, the animals won’t become visibly ill and humans are unlikely to notice. A persistent brain fog from eating a poor diet would be quite bad for humans on the other hand.
The problem isn’t knee-jerk apoliticism, it’s that LW delights in whatever seems clever and insightful, whether it promotes good and justice or not, and standard political talking points are familiar and boring.
I don’t even think this is a smokescreen for innate political leanings, which you’re dancing around from mentioning. It’s quite possible an early 20th century LW equivalent would find radical socialism as intriguing as today’s LW is finding the various strains of libertarianism and neoreaction, since that would have been the anathema to the intellectual mainstream back then, with many low-hanging fruits of intriguing unthinkability.
Because Less Wrong likes metacontrarians.
Would a neurologist who has thus far been immersed daily with the fact that all brains can fail in all sorts of interesting ways be hit just as bad with these delusions if given brain damage as someone who might have operated all their life under a sort of naive realism that makes no difference between reality and their brain’s picture of it? What about a philosopher with no neurological experience but with a well-seated obsession with the map not being the territory?
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke remarked that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Clarke was referring to the fantastic inventions we might discover in the future or in our travels to advanced civilizations. However, the insight also applies to self-perception. When we turn our attention to our own minds, we are faced with trying to understand an unimaginably advanced technology. We can’t possibly know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine. So we develop a shorthand, a belief in the causal efficacy of our conscious thoughts. We believe in the magic of our own causal agency.
Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will
I suppose it would be futile to attempt to convince you to use singular ‘they’ as a gender-neutral pronoun that wouldn’t completely derail my train of thought from the actual (interesting) subject matter when encountered two-thirds into the article?