I have had a couple of experiences in which intense study of math and physics led me to some pretty dark psychological places
Why do I feel the irrational urge to beg you to do a post on this? What could possibly go wrong? :-)
scav
Karma: 711
getting to the “state of the art”/minimum level of knowledge required to speak intelligently, avoid “solved problems”, and not run into “already well refuted ideas” is a very expensive process.
So is spending time and effort on solved problems and already well refuted ideas.
I honestly don’t know. Let’s see what happens.
-- Hans. The Troll Hunter
Fun as always. Looking back at my answers, I think I’m profoundly irrational, but getting more aware of it. Oh well.
EDMUND
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star!Wm. Shakspere King Lear
It was a fairly audacious prediction, that turns out to have been true. I think it’s fair to allow Babbage to describe as an analytical engine what we would nowadays call a “computer”.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.Tim Minchin, Storm
Dammit, how do you get line-breaks? It’s a poem, but the stanzas get flowed into paragraphs.
I confess, for my part, that I have been taken in, over and over again. I have been taken in by acquaintances, and I have been taken in (of course) by friends; far oftener by friends than by any other class of persons. How came I to be so deceived? Had I quite misread their faces? No. Believe me, my first impression of those people, founded on face and manner alone, was invariably true. My mistake was in suffering them to come nearer to me and explain themselves away.
--Hunted Down: the detective stories of Charles Dickens (Charles Dickens)
For me it was the least plausible part. I think if the major obstacle to living where you want is the hassle of carting all your stuff around, the most efficient answer surely isn’t living in a shipping crate with special content-bracing furniture.
Makes more sense to me to just not bother with “owning” a lot of matter. If every kind of material object you need is available anywhere, all you need to bring with you when you move house is your information (books, music, family pictures, decor configuration for your living space). There’s no particular reason for that to exist in a physical form.
And if you are serious about making a long-term sustainably growing economy, you have to have most of that growth be information (knowledge, art) rather than ever-growing consumption of hard-limited resources.
Still trying to decide whether it would be more painful to learn macroeconomics than experiment with BDSM.
But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
-- Randall Munroe
Took the survey, did most of the extra questions. IQ 122 apparently. I’m sceptical of what that actually means but it sounds quite good so next time someone asks me, that’s what I’ll say :)
Didn’t do Myers-Briggs because I’m pretty sure it’s bullshit.
Not too surprised to find that my political views are measurably left libertarian. Wasn’t happy with a lot of the political policy questions though—most of them were phrased in a way that I wanted to answer “it depends” or “yes, BUT...”, or even “mu”.
Most of the commenters here refrain from being antisocial dicks. There’s no reason to believe anonymous polling will change that.
Anyone actually making life-or-death decisions on the basis of an internet forum poll has a non-trivial chance of being selected out of the gene pool for related reasons.
Sometimes you want or can accept brutal answers.
Individual responsibility. You can’t legislate for or even concern-troll people into having common sense, even assuming common sense is a well-defined and useful property.
There are not books enough on earth to contain the record of the prophecies Indians and other unauthorized parties have made; but one may carry in his overcoat pockets the record of all the prophecies that have been fulfilled.
-- Mark Twain
I expect a lot of actually relevant stuff doesn’t seem relevant until you’ve studied it in connection with the problem for a few years. But maybe you don’t get that far, because it didn’t seem relevant :(
Friendly AI is a monster problem partly because nearly everything any human experiences, believes, wants to believe or has any opinion at all on, is potentially relevant. You could be forgiven for thinking maybe there isn’t a well-defined problem buried under all that mess after all. But there may be some useful sub-problems around the edges.
Personally, even if AI-that-goes-FOOM-catastrophically isn’t very likely, I think we shouldn’t even need that reason to study what sort of life and environment would be optimal for humans. It doesn’t have to be about asking dangerous wishes of some technological genie-in-a-bottle. We already have supra-human entities such as governments and corporations making decisions with non-zero existential risk attached, and we probably want them to be a bit friendlier if possible.
To me, a bad argument for something I disagree with feels like frustrating rudeness or obstruction, even if I have no reason to believe the misargumentation is intentional. I suppose, in a way, it is: the perpetrator has an intention to persuade someone of their (wrong) view, and they are at least negligent in their poor reasoning if not actively dishonest. Physically, it’s like the symptoms of mild anxiety with a hint of anger.
A bad argument for something I do agree with feels similar, like unhelpful interference, but with a dash of embarrassment thrown in. I suppose it’s likely I don’t notice as many bad arguments for things I believe as for things I don’t.
“The trouble with trying to be more stupid than you really are is that you very often succeed”—C.S.Lewis The Magician’s Nephew
Clearly, Bem’s psychic could bankrupt all casinos on the planet before anybody realized what was going on. This analysis leaves us with two possibilities. The first possibility is that, for whatever reason, the psi effects are not operative in casinos, but they are operative in psychological experiments on erotic pictures. The second possibility is that the psi effects are either nonexistent, or else so small that they cannot overcome the house advantage. Note that in the latter case, all of Bem’s experiments overestimate the effect.
Returning to Laplace’s Principle, we feel that the above reasons motivate us to assign our prior belief in precognition a number very close to zero.
Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi
Eric–Jan Wagenmakers, Ruud Wetzels, Denny Borsboom, & Han van der Maas
As usual, my viewpoint on this changed multiple times as I read through the posting, and then the comments. That, for me, makes for a good posting—lots to think about.
My guess is that this Charlie character and others like him are not using a “no criticism” rule to maliciously promulgate their crazy memes, knowing that they are false and wouldn’t stand up to criticism. The social motivation of keeping a discussion between newly-met strangers non-threatening is more plausible. Partly because these people probably don’t give much thought to whether their beliefs are true or not—i.e. they are bullshitters rather than liars.
There are a bunch of reasons why you might want to temporarily suspend criticism. For example, brainstorming ideas to solve a scientific or engineering problem. But when it comes time to make a decision about what to do, then critical thought has to come into play. Often when confronted with all kinds of irrationality (religious, political, pseudo-scientific, inter-personal), I have to ask “am I expected to do anything about this?”. If the answer is no, I can shrug and get back to my reading.
The fact that society gives religion a special exemption from having to be supported by evidence is probably one of the best reasons to keep religion out of politics. We have a word for governments that wield the “no criticism” rule!
Don’t worry. I promise only to destroy the world if I didn’t expect it to happen.
-- Randall, XKCD #971