20 bucks says that the surreality quote ends up in the book lol. The transcript makes it sound like he perked up immediately there; he seemed waaaay more interested in that than your attempts to explain epistemology.
skolemizer
Karma: 41
What I’m getting from this comment is your goal in relationships is to have as much sex as possible as fast as possible with as many women as possible? IMO, when you’re writing advice articles, you should probably state explicitly that that’s your goal, and you don’t care for romance and such. Most men aren’t in your target audience, after all.
My biggest update was… five hours!?!?
I mean… sorry for stating the obvious, but have you considered finding women that you really like spending time with? (The sex is way hotter that way too!) Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like from your perspective, going on dates and spending time together is a painful cost you pay, to get the benefit of sex. Surely there are women for whom the time spent together is a benefit, not a cost? (Speaking from personal experience—I’ve been in love once, in a many year relationship; it was the kind of relatiomship that made me understand where all those silly romantic cliches romantic about love came from, you know? And spending time with her was always the most fun and pleasant and enjoyable option any given day, putting sex entirely aside.)
But yeah if that doesn’t apply to you, I think you should label your advice columns “Relationship advice for aromantic men” or something.
I can see how this could be confusing, but in mathematics, the phrase “representation theorem” is not specifically about “representation theory”. Wikipedia’s definition is quite broad:
In mathematics, a representation theorem is a theorem that states that every abstract structure with certain properties is isomorphic to another (abstract or concrete) structure.
The list of examples it gives is probably more useful.
(Adding to the confusion: a famous example of a representation theorem is a corollary of Cayley’s Theorem: for every group there is a vector space such that there is an injective homomorphism . Ie, the theorem is that every group has a “faithful representation” in the sense of representation theory. So representation theory is built off of a famous example of a representation theorem. But as you can see from the above link, most things labelled “representation theorems” have nothing to do with “representation theory”.)
Our Values are (roughly) the yumminess or yearning we feel when imagining something.
Goodness is (roughly) whatever stuff the memes say one should value.
I do not think this matches my usage of the words “Human Values” or (especially) “Goodness” (nor of the usage of the rare intelligent people whose ethical judgement I trust). The concept of yumminess/yearning is relevant; the concept of popular assertions of what one oughts to yearn for is relevant. But I object to both of these rough definitions on the grounds that they miss many central aspects.
Concretely: consider a heroin addict, in a memetic environment that strongly disapproves of heroin usage. Because of their addiction, by far the greatest yumminess they feel when imagining things is more heroin (and things which may have brought their past-self feelings of yumminess no longer have that feeling, because it cannot compete). In your framework, getting more heroin is part of their Values, but not part of their culture’s Goodness.
So far so good — but now compare to your example of a gay man in a memetic environment that strongly disapproves of gay romance and sex. As far as I can tell, your analytic framework treats these cases exactly identically: it’s a conflict between Values and Goodness, maybe with the man repeatedly tying himself up in knots to try and fail to crush his Values in the name of Goodness. But I claim this is wrong: an accurate account of Values and Goodness should be able to distinguish these two scenarios. (Lest you think I’m letting my own biases slip in: replace “gay romance and sex” with one of the sexual fetishes I personally disapprove of and think should be socially stigmatized. The distinction I’m getting at here is different.)
I challenge you to articulate the relevant difference between those two scenarios in your analytical framework. I claim any framework which can’t is flinching away from a hard part of describing the type signatures and natures of Values and Goodness. This is the sense in which I meant that your rough definitions miss central concepts.
(Unless you assert that the two cases aren’t different, in which case we might just have a more object-level disagreement, as opposed to you being wrong about your word usage.)
As for what central concepts your framework is missing — this deserves a longer response, but in lieu of that I will briefly gesture at one concept. There is the curious but well-known phenomenon whereby there is a difference between what a human wants (in the sense of revealed preference) and what he or she wants to want (in a particular complicated sense I’m only gesturing at). As you understand well, a man can have false beliefs about what he wants. For the same reason, he can have false beliefs about what he wants-to-want. (In particular, verbal description of what one wants-to-want are not identical to what one actually wants-to-want.)
I claim the self-hating socially-stigmatized heroin-addict has correct beliefs about what he wants-to-want, whereas the self-hating socially-stigmatized sexual-deviant has false beliefs thereof. This distinction is not one of yumminess-upon-imagining (each feels yummy upon imagining using heroin and having deviant sex), and it is not one of memetic pressure (each’s behavior is disapproved of by society, and by me personally). But the distinction is central to understanding Human Values and Goodness.
I don’t know what to say lmao. He is not thinking clearly. This is triggering my “I can fix him” reflex. (I think I’d back up and explain how one can know that playing the lottery is usually a bad idea, and how to recognize the rare cases where it isn’t. He’s not thinking in a quantitative way about uncertainty. Which is understandable, because it is a rather twisty idea — the idea that uncertainty, the absence of knowledge itself, can be quantified and measured out in precise increments. Maybe I’d tell the story of Leibniz thinking rolling an 11 and rolling a 12 are equally likely when rolling a pair of dice; maybe I’d challenge him to think how that mistake could be rather significant if you made decisions on that basis, by analogy to the lottery. Then I’d proffer the notion that phrasing things in terms of gambling and betting is a metaphor; the real idea is broader, about trying to make the best decisions you can under conditions of uncertainty. And he’d object, so I’d tell the Tragedy of the Austrian Economists and their dogmatic commitment to frequentism; and how it’s good the modern-day experts have moved past that sort of thing.) I guess this sort of thing is what compelled Yudkowsky to write the Sequences.
Also, this is my first time reading anything at length from Michael Vassar, after reading lots of people say wildly varying things about him. My main impression is to wonder, why does he talk like that? Does he believe he is communicating clearly, or does he know he isn’t and doesn’t care? He is rather quick on his feet. My guess is that he enjoys the disarming effect that has on people, and he’s making a mistake in letting that enjoyment limit how much he effectively communicates, to the detriment of his other goals.