Rubix

• Rubix 22 Sep 2011 1:43 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 9

  The fic often takes ‘joke’ aspects of magic and explores their less harmless uses. It leads the reader to be unwilling to take any reference as simply a joke—this as opposed to the original text, where the fact that it was meant to be a children’s book led to a lot of bite-sized humorous references with enormous, unexplored potential.

• Rubix 5 Oct 2011 4:02 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Alexei’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Les­sons Learned from Ir­ra­tional Ad­ven­tures in Romance

  Luke was working from the perspective of a man trying to improve his social skills in order to be contributing more equally to a potential relationship. The implication was not that women do not also need social skills, rather, for him to attract the attention of a woman (who has already caught his attention, presumably, with her social skills, body language, pheromones etc.,) he must have better social skills.

  From personal experience, I feel that most of the pronouns in that paragraph could easily be reversed. There are women with poor body language and poor social skills; if anything, this essay proves that, because he’s not thinking about how to attract those women.

Life is Good, More Life is Better

• Rubix 15 Oct 2011 1:19 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: zaph’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  I would disagree with the proposition that people are in any way actually OK with death. I don’t think the problem is that people are at peace with death too much; instead, it’s an issue that people are so afraid of death that they don’t talk or even think realistically about it at all.

  It would be pleasant to me if this were true, but the talk I hear from some sources is actively pro-death. (Specifically, the “But fading into darkness will be so nice” and “I look forward to the Next Thing” camps of thought.) That is to say, when I bring up cryonics, the thought is actively abhorrent to these people. They profess quite strongly to prefer dying to cryonic preservation because having a frozen, inactive brain will stop their Soul from Departing. So… I can’t tell if this is just really, really powerful belief in self-deception. The sentiment feels believed to me, which is what’s so concerning.

  I agree strongly with your last point, and am having trouble with how to express that agreement, so we’ll leave it there. (Augh, words!)

• Rubix 15 Oct 2011 1:22 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: lessdazed’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  If someone uses the “i-word” when you simply talk about living longer than a hundred or so, I recommend rolling up a newspaper, swatting them on the nose once with it, and repeating “No” several times, clearly and firmly.

  The fault is all mine on that point—sloppy vocabulary. Let it be noted that I repent of the imprecise usage.

  And, in fact, that may be part of the fallacious argument bits of my mind have against living; “Aaaah, it could be forever and that will be awful!” Bad brains.

• Rubix 15 Oct 2011 1:25 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: amcknight’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  No, it didn’t. It feels related to me in that I can’t scan 155,000 deaths in the same way I can’t scan 3^^^3 people. (As directly demonstrated by me feeling that the numbers are in any way alike, good grief.)

• Rubix 15 Oct 2011 1:26 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: beriukay’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  Thank you for catching that!

• Rubix 15 Oct 2011 1:33 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  This statement helped a lot, thank you very much.

• Rubix 19 Oct 2011 4:36 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  I’ve perceived that. Let it be noted that throughout one conversation about what it would be like to stop death by old age, the person with whom I was speaking used five of the arguments I’ve listed.

• Rubix 19 Oct 2011 5:18 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: Don’t call your­self a ra­tio­nal­ist.

  See Why Real Men Wear Pink.

• Rubix 19 Oct 2011 11:03 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Life is Good, More Life is Better

  I haven’t had a correct social situation in which to test for that value. The content of their arguments doesn’t seem to lead anywhere because they’re a matter of belief in belief—they desperately want the iron that’s going to strike them within this century to be at least cold. So, I can’t say what the value is until I’ve got down a list of possible values and found ways of testing for them.

• Rubix 21 Oct 2011 19:07 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: thomblake’s comment on: In­sulin Sig­nal­ing and Autism

  I have a little bit of mental frustration over “This thing is Linked to Autism” articles, for several reasons:

  -Autism is controversial. It has a disproportionate amount of pop science’s attention for totally invalid reasons (e.g. “Mercury in vaccines Linked to Autism! Chelation Cures Autism! ABA Cures Autism!)

  -From what I understand, the most likely cause in the increase of autism diagnoses is an increase in autism diagnoses. A person may remember that less than ten years ago, the male/​female ratio of autism diagnoses was 10 to 1. Now it’s 4 to 1. That gap closes because more diagnosticians are perceiving female people with autism spectrum traits, probably not because Mercury Toxins are Targeting Our Girls.

  -As an autistic person I have this (possibly false) mental connotation between “This thing is possibly, we think, linked to autism?” and “Now that we can cure this thing, we can Cure Autism!” Curing autism is my Killer Gandhi Pill. I don’t want to be cured.

  On the last point, let me clarify, I totally don’t think that play_therapist (who I infer has a professional interest in autism) is trying to suggest that at all. I think the former two points still stand, though.

  I actually hope to write a discussion article on the problem with diagnosing certain ID/​DDs (Intellectual Disorders and Developmental Disabilities,) in a scientific climate which has no objective means of diagnosis—and what an objective means would mean, given that eugenic attitudes towards disability are definitely not dead. This ties in.

  EDIT: Having re-read the article, I’m not so willing to say that it isn’t leading into “How we can use this data to Cure Autism?” I will do talk, if I write a diagnosis article, about how the struggles involved with parenting autistics and being autistic are real, and I accept them, but also that I still cannot validate Curing something which is an intrinsic part of a person. A babyeater is a babyeater, not a human-typical entity hidden underneath the mean, bad babyeating instinct.

• Rubix 22 Oct 2011 1:14 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Prismattic’s comment on: In­sulin Sig­nal­ing and Autism

  Abstract: It’s a catch-22 to say that only people with autism who can communicate a desire to not be cured want not to be cured, and that people who cannot communicate must want to be cured. Also: None of this is related to the article, any more.

  It seems a bit… errant, for one thing, to argue that it’s right to change something because it’s very different. I mean, a friend of mine is a girl who can’t live independently, has banged her head against walls to the point of needing glasses because of brain damage, often cannot use spoken words to talk to people. I can describe those traits and say that they Need To Be Cured without mentioning that she’s my best friend, we talk about politics and fandom and remind each other that we’re people. I can talk about her friend, who used to eat out of garbage, doesn’t talk, had everyone convinced he couldn’t read for a very long time. He speed reads; he uses vivid metaphor in writing.

  It’s because of that that I feel frightened when people say that only the “low functioning” autistics need to be cured, that it would be a mercy. It’s possible that in the days before keyboard technology, my friend could not be perceived as anyone’s friend. I’m sure people would say, then, that were she capable of communication she’d want to be fixed, made right. (She doesn’t.) Lack of communication really, really does not unequivocally imply lack of higher cognitive function, and actually receptive language skills are often a lot higher than spoken language skills in autistic people.

  I know that if my friend could choose to not be afraid of people to the point of self-harm, she would. She says the reason for her fear is having been taught to have quiet hands, and I have no reason to doubt that. I am not yet willing to accept that it is intrinsically a bad feeling to be autistic, to any degree of functionality. Analogous events suggest heavily that the problem is that the modern world is not advanced enough to understand autistic thought, to any degree of functionality, whether that understanding requires peering through blunt syntax or a neurally implanted Augmented/​Alternative Communications device.

  My diagnosis, as an aside, is not high-functioning Asperger syndrome. It was PDD-NOS complicated by hyperlexia, and while I am not absolutely positive if the former diagnosis is still valid (I was six, and I think perhaps that the behaviors they were using to diagnose PDD-NOS had to do with me being extraordinarily literal and having auditory processing trouble,) I am sure that the latter is. (“Autistic” is a lot easier than all of that, I apologize for the imprecision.)

• Rubix 22 Oct 2011 20:18 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MixedNuts’s comment on: In­sulin Sig­nal­ing and Autism

  Hi, also! I thought it was all right because the information had all been provided elsewhere, and I am not doing names in the first place. However, it comes to my attention that I should’ve asked Friend to review this stuff and see if it was too recognizable and… argh, I’ve made the exact same mistake as my high school’s Journalistic Writing Class, this is embarassing. (The learning-to-read part is so relevant to me because, you know, talk about evidence for the word-shape model of word recognition!)

  I do not have a blog because I’m learning how to do recreational writing again, starting here.

• Rubix 22 Oct 2011 20:27 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Prismattic’s comment on: In­sulin Sig­nal­ing and Autism

  I agree, that would be a lovely thing. Actually, this interchange alerts me to the possibility that NT parents of autistic children might often be taking this stance, which is muddled sometimes by certain factors such as Autism Speaks being the largest autism-related not for profit in the US; them having huge frustration over parenthood which is hard in the first place; technology like AAC being a Scary Outside Thing and teaching your child how to be nice and say I Love You being well-approved parenting tactics, as well as heartwarming.

  Sometimes, the world is so frightening that my inductive reasoning is obscured. I’m sorry for not giving you more credit, and I’ll mull over what I’ve learned here. I really should have seen it before. The fact that often, parents of autistic children who are nonverbal or not typically emotive say things like “I just want to hear my son say he loves me” or “I just want to hug him” makes it hard to see that those words do profess a desire to communicate, just in nonstandard-to-me ways.

Dis­abil­ity Cul­ture Meets the Tran­shu­man­ist Condition

• Rubix 28 Oct 2011 21:33 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Lapsed_Lurker’s comment on: Dis­abil­ity Cul­ture Meets the Tran­shu­man­ist Condition

  I think it’s… more complicated than that? The issue of audio quality is present; right now, there’s no implant that can cause a Deaf person to hear things without significant distortion. It makes sense to me that some Deaf people would want a shot at communicating face-to-face with a broader spectrum of people, and others would feel that the lack of sound quality wasn’t worth an invasive, expensive surgery which is only sporadically covered by insurance. The factors of choice involved are what make doing implant surgeries on babies a bit problematic.

  It’s relevant that non-disabled people rate the probable quality of life of the disabled as significantly lower than do the disabled people themselves.

• Rubix 31 Oct 2011 6:23 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: TwistingFingers’s comment on: Less Wrong Couch­sur­fing Network

  Example of the kind of thinking which necessitates “individual of good character” references.

  I don’t suggest that such relationships couldn’t emerge from a couch-surfing network, but, um… “Compensation?” Ew.

• Rubix 31 Oct 2011 7:17 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: TwistingFingers’s comment on: Less Wrong Couch­sur­fing Network

  As it turns out, you’re right on this count; I do have an ‘Ugh field’ surrounding the exchange-of-favors take on relationships. Clearly, this isn’t even a step up from “You like being hit? Ew!”

  I think a Less Wrong dating service would be really, really awesome, for reasons which probably don’t need enumeration. On the other hand, unless there are very clear rules about what two people meeting for a date would look like, it could be dangerous. Someone experiencing the halo effect (e.g. “This person is a rationalist like me, I can trust them more than I could trust most people!”) might employ less judgement in deciding whether or not to go to someone’s house. Expanded dating opportunities are great. Sexual assault is not. Thus, why “Just put your tastes under ‘compensation’” is worrying to me.

  If it sounds like I’m just rationalizing my “Ewww, relationships are magical and emergent, not practical arrangements!” silliness, please say so.

• Rubix 31 Oct 2011 21:02 UTC

  1 point

  on: Less Wrong Couch­sur­fing Network

  Thank you, Xachariah. I didn’t know that the gender disparity was so vast! My response would have varied somewhat, otherwise.

  Back to the actual topic of couch surfing. Does anyone have a strong feeling that a couchsurfing.org subgroup would be better than a Google map? It’s really easy to make a map; one can do it here.

  Is the goal to get a map widget on the front page similar to the Meetup one, or to get a link to the map on the front page?