I stand corrected, thank you.
Silver_Swift
Karma: 157
I prefer the English translation, it’s more direct, though it does lack the bit about avoiding your own mistakes.
A more literal translation for those that don’t speak German:
Those that attempt to learn from their mistakes are idiots. I always try to learn from the mistakes of others and avoid making any myself.
Note: I’m not a German speaker, what I know of the language is from three years of high school classes taken over a decade ago, but I think this translation is more or less correct.
Moreover (according to a five minute wikipedia search), not all doctors swear the same oath, but the modern version of the Hippocratic oath does not have an explicit “Thou shalt not kill” provision and in fact, it doesn’t even include the commonly quoted “First, cause no harm”.
Obviously taking a person life, even with his/her consent, may violate the personal ethics of some people, but if that is the problem the obvious solution is to find a different doctor.
Thanks!
Is this the place to ask technical questions about how the site works? If so, then I’m wondering why I can’t find any of the rationality quote threads on the main discussion page anymore (I thought we’d just stopped doing those, until I saw it pop up in the side bar just now). If not, then I think I just asked anyway. :P
“You say that every man thinks himself to be on the good side, that every man who opposed you was deluding himself. Did you ever stop to consider that maybe you were the one on the wrong side?”
-- Vasher (from Warbreaker) explaining how that particular algorithm looks from the inside.
To add my own highly anecdotal evidence: my experience is that most people with a background in computer science or physics have no active model of how consciousness maps to brains, but when prodded they indeed usually come up with some form of functionalism*.
My own position is that I’m highly confused by consciousness in general, but I’m leaning slightly towards substance dualism, I have a background in computer science.
*: Though note that quite a few of these people simultaneously believe that it is fundamentally impossible to do accurate natural language parsing with a turing machine, so their position might not be completely thought through.
And conversely, some of the unusual-ness that can be attributed to IQ is only very indirectly caused by it. For instance, being able to work around some of the more common failure modes of the brain probably makes a significant portion of LessWrong more unusual than the average person and understanding most of the advice on this site requires at least some minimum level of mental processing power and ability to abstract.
I’m still sad that there isn’t a dictionary of numbers for Firefox, it sounds amazing but it isn’t enough to make me switch to Chrome just for that.