I’m about 1⁄2 way through. I am finding the chapters to be much more interesting than the dialogues. The style the dialogues are written in seems to be rather stilted/forced and grates somewhat. They do seem to be useful metaphors for understanding some of the trickier chapters, so I can see the merit in them.
scotherns
I’m aiming for:
Some things are real, some are pretend
It can be hard to tell them apart, and even adults will disagree
Learning how to investigate and make up your own mind is more important than specific examples in either category
Agreed. I was very surprised to find Zen was discussed so much in GEB. Although in context it did serve to (slightly) illustrate some points being discussed, it seemed rather out of place, and I found it very tiresome to read.
It looks like there is no chance of enlightenment for me, but as there is no consistent definition of it, I find it hard to care :-)
I find this type of nitpicking really annoying. Surely everyone (no matter their gender / sex / preferences) understands the sentence ‘Women will be alluring’ to be a generalised example and can easily convert this to include their own specific preferences without the author having to jump through hoops to provide examples that apply to everyone.
“The touch of another person’s skin will still be wonderfully sensuous”—you can’t say that—you are discriminating against those without a sense of touch!
“sunsets”—you can’t say that, what about blind and/or extreme photo-sensitives
and so on.
If he had written ‘Football games will still be exciting’ I would have got the intended meaning and moved on, despite the fact that I have zero interest in football.
Sorry, the rather harsh ‘nitpicking’ should really have been addressed to the top comment in the chain that started this line of discussion. I placed it as a comment after your contribution because I wanted to point out that even your attempts to give a more generic and widely applicable example will be doomed to failure, because you will always end up making some assumptions about the audience.
This certainly works for me. I find I can get a significant increase in performance at the gym when I use the machines that are facing towards the posters of attractive women, compared to the otherwise identical machines facing the windows. I know its a trick, and I know why it works, but that doesn’t stop it from working :-)
But are “Women who would be annoyed by the statement ‘Women are alluring’” a large potential audience?
I would think that the audience for this specific sentence would break down into (roughly):
a) Those it directly applies to (hetro males, bi females, etc.), who immediately agree ‘Yes, women sure are alluring!’ b) Those it does not apply to , but who regard it as complimentary (e.g. hetro females), ‘Yes, I sure am alluring!’ c) Those it does not apply to, but who understand its intention without feeling that it marginalises them. ‘I don’t get what the big deal about women is, but I know LOTS of people who find women alluring’ d) Those it does not apply to, who feel actively excluded. ’I don’t find women alluring, the author is trying to exclude me—he really should change the text to something that I like.”
I would have thought that category d) is tiny.
Note to Emily: I am really not trying to exclude you or pick on you! I just find it really surprising you would feel excluded by a (positive, and relatively uncontroversial!) comment about women from a male author.
Is this an expression of your prior about the size of the category, or your posterior? Have you updated your prior on learning (to your surprise) that people apparently do feel excluded/get distracted by this sort of thing?
Prior. I have updated very slightly towards Emily’s position, but this is balanced by the responses from every female I have personally asked about this, all of whom fell into the a) or b) response. Of course, we all know that comparing two very small samples is far from ideal :-)
As an aside, would it surprise you if people felt excluded by your telling them that you find their concerns “really annoying”?
No, but excluding people is certainly not the intent. Every time I write something I assume that someone, somewhere will find it really annoying.
Wow, you certainly got a lot from “Women are alluring”! Thanks for clarifying, this is very interesting.
I would be very interested to hear what was your reaction to the phrase “Michaelangelo’s David will still be beautiful”. Was it anything similar?
How about if he had said that ” The Venus De Milo will still be beautiful”? Or “Jesssica Alba will still be beautiful”?
I personally would have put David fairly low on my list of things that I find beautiful, but I immediately got the intended meaning.
Thanks for the thorough reply. Sorry if I appear to be missing the point here, but I am genuinely trying to understand your point of view.
Re. 4), yes, I worded that badly and it’s obvious that you get it!
You think that there are people who read evolutionary psychology and were pleasantly surprised?
I was VERY pleasantly surprised. Suddenly an enormous set of previously baffling data (i.e. the behaviour of most of humanity) began to make sense :-)
It’s hard to fix the root cause of a problem without understanding it.
I thought it was hopeless before I discovered Evo Psych. Now it’s just very difficult.
Quickly debiasing the human race seems a bit optimistic :-) Knowing Evo Psych at least makes it possible to make better predictions, and take more effective action. How can this be a bad thing?
A bird is a warm-blooded organism with circulatory lungs.” How close did I come?
So if I removed the lungs of chicken, you would no longer consider it a bird? Or if I surgically modified some other creature (e.g. a pig) to have circulatory lungs, you would consider this to be a bird?
This kind of argument is why it is pretty difficult to come up with a comprehensive set of features for a broad category like ‘bird’. Often the best you can do is produce a set of examples demonstrating the category. Humans are pretty good at such pattern recognition from a set of data.
Like a lot of things, it is hard to define, but you know it when you see it :-)
I don’t take the test. There are likely to be a LOT of rare diseases with similar cost/benefits, possibly enough so that you could spend every waking moment being tested for something.
I don’t consider this decision to be equivalent to my ‘inflicting’ death on those that happen to get the disease(s).
I work out regularly, eat healthy, and I am signed up for Cryonics. One data point for you :-)
Do it anyway. Lead by example. Over time, you might find they become more used to the idea, particularly if they have someone who can help them with the paperwork and organisational side of things. If you can help them financially, so much the better.
If you are successfully revived, you will have plenty of time to make new friends, and start a new family. I’m not meaning to sound callous, but its not unheard of for people to lose their families and eventually recover. I’m doing everything I can to persuade my family to sign up, but its up to them to make the final decision.
I’d give my life to save my family, but I wouldn’t kill myself if I found myself alone.
Did you become vegetarian, despite the fact that you couldn’t persuade anyone else? Did your decision at least make some people at least consider the option seriously?
Well, the future will certainly be full of mostly strangers. If you can’t convince any of your current friends/family to sign up, you might be better of making friends with those that have already signed up. There are bound to some you would get along with (I’ve read OOTS since it started :-) )
If I ever have any success in convincing anyone else to sign up for cryonics, I’ll let you know how I did it (in the unlikely event that this will help!).
My oldest child is six. She has always been taught to distinguish ‘real’ from ‘pretend’, and encouraged to decide which is which herself.
She seems to have no problem discovering that something she previously believed is false—at this age there is still so much to learn, and her world view is updating pretty constantly.
What does seem to be distressing for her is finding out that some adults believe things which she has placed solidly in the ‘pretend’ category. Her teacher’s belief in god is particularly perplexing for her.