I think you, perhaps, miss the ideal target audience of this post. What Yvain presents here is in effect a counterargument against people who argue that religion isn’t all that bad, even if it’s false, because of the other benefits it gives people. Anyone who is reduced to defending religion on these grounds is likely not a typical theist.
This isn’t an argument against theism, it’s “opiate of the masses” vs. “just say no to drugs”.
Please note that being a jerk in off-topic comments is not the same thing as taking a noble stand against the oppressive groupthink.
Personally, the symbol “Douglas Hofstadter” in my mind stands for “the symbol “Douglas Hofstadter” in my mind”.
I tried to start a Hofstadter cult once. The first commandment was “Thou shalt follow the first commandment.” The second commandment was “Thou shalt follow only those even-numbered commandments that do not exhort thee to follow themselves.” I forget the other eight. Needless to say it didn’t catch on.
You just didn’t give it enough time. Remember, it always takes longer than you expect!
You’ve overlooked another way to “win” an argument: To persuade otherwise uninvolved third parties.
Typically, two people arguing are already thoroughly fortified in their opinions. Few people find argument for its own sake enjoyable and thus are unlikely to be lured into a debate they have no emotional stake in; as well, upon rising to the occasion to defend their side, their resistance to acknowledging their opponent’s valid arguments will be stronger than ever.
Less-involved bystanders, however, can view the argument with a more impartial eye, and are much more likely to be persuaded. Of course, this is typically the justification made for the style of debating you argue against in this post—especially on the internet, where bystanders are plentiful and social dynamics are strongly subject to John Gabriel’s G.I.F. Theory—but it’s not at all clear that such an approach is actually effective for this purpose, any more than it is for persuading the opposing party.
As an aside, I can think of at least two other reasons to engage in debate; but neither derives value from actually winning the argument, and thus are irrelevant in this context.
It occurs to me that there may be a critical difference between voicing sympathy for a weak faction, vs. actually joining it and sharing its misfortunes.
That is to say, a near-optimal strategy in Zug vs. Urk, assuming one is currently unaffiliated and not required to join either side, is to do as much as possible to support Urk without angering Zug and incurring penalties. As a latecomer you’d get little benefit from joining Zug anyways, but in the chance of a surprise upset, when Urk comes to power you will be more likely to benefit than uninvolved parties or active Zug supporters.
While I appreciate and share your brash disregard for social pressures, I don’t think it’s inappropriate to expect a modicum of politeness and tact in how people present ideas. Not everyone is immune to such pressure and I don’t think saying what amounts to “HTFU, noobcake” is a reasonable way to improve the level of discourse.
If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.
-- Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, circa 370 BCE, bemoaning the deleterious effects of the new technology of “writing”.
With all due credit to MBlume for raising the topic, I wish Yvain’s comment here had been a top-level post. This is an excellent demonstration of the progression of the mind-killer effect.
is this the popular opinion here that we are brains?
“You Are A Brain” is not strictly accurate, to my mind, but it’s catchy and sufficiently less wrong to be useful as a hook for the concepts.
My preferred clarification is “I’m not my brain, I’m something my brain is doing.”
If you could take ALL the advice from productivity blogs and have it ALL work for you, wouldn’t it require less than a month to ascend to godhood?
Unless many of them are multiple ways to accomplish the same thing and therefore not cumulative even if they do work.
The more significant issue is the lack of respect for autonomy and the other individual’s goals. It is, shall we say, “unFriendly”.
It’s perfectly possible to have excellent models of other people’s psyches but no respect for their autonomy; in fact it’s a useful skill in sales and marketing. In the pathological extreme, it’s popularly called “sociopathy”.
It actually strikes me that a series of posts on “What can we usefully learn from X tradition” would be interesting. Most persistent cultural institutions have at least some kind of social or psychological benefit, and while we’ve considered some (cf. the martial arts metaphors, earlier posts on community building, &c.) there are probably others that could be mined for ideas as well.
My usual metric of whether I’m wasting my time (I’m not the first to suggest this, to be sure), has long been to value my time at some amount of money, and consciously think either “am I saving more money by doing this than the value of my time” or “am I enjoying this enough that I would spend the value of my time for this entertainment”.
For instance, I don’t really bother with most amusement parks because the sum cost of admission, plus the time “cost” of waiting in lines, is more value than I want to spend on the limited enjoyment of the rides.
If anything, I tend to be more stingy with time than money, because it’s harder to convert money back into time than the other way around.
In fact, Newcomb-like problems fall naturally out of any ability to simulate and predict the actions of other agents. Omega as described is essentially the limit as predictive power goes to infinity.
What they do is make the legs look longer, as well as forcing changes in posture, tilting the pelvis forward and increasing lumbar curvature, which generally has the effect of making the female hip structure look more pronounced (forces a gait that involves more hip movement, &c.).
They also tend to result in back problems if worn too often; excessive lordosis of the lumbar spine isn’t good for you.
I vaguely recall reading an anecdote about a similar testing scheme where you had to give an actual numerical confidence value for each answer. Saying you were 100% confident of an answer that was wrong would give you minus infinity points.
I bet that would be even less popular with students.
Out of curiousity, on the specific subject of this diet: did you try blocking your sense of smell, preferably for the entire duration of the “no flavors” period?
As an enthusiastic home cook, the first thing that came to mind for me is that the vast majority of what we interpret as “flavor” is actually an interplay of taste and smell (hence why almost everything tastes like crap when you have nasal congestion). I recall that research has shown smell as having partiularly strong associative powers for memory, so it would not surprise me to find that it’s actually a smell-calorie association at work, totally independent of what you actually put in your mouth.
Ergo, I would predict that experiencing strong smells around the same time as taking the flavorless calories would sabotage the effect catastrophically. Unfortunately for the pursuit of science, I have a naturally and stubbornly low bodyweight set point, so I can’t test this personally.
At the Princeton graduate school, the physics department and the math department shared a common lounge, and every day at four o’clock we would have tea. It was a way of relaxing in the afternoon, in addition to imitating an English college. People would sit around playing Go, or discussing theorems. In those days topology was the big thing.
I still remember a guy sitting on the couch, thinking very hard, and another guy standing in front of him, saying, “And therefore such-and-such is true.”
“Why is that?” the guy on the couch asks.
“It’s trivial! It’s trivial!” the standing guy says, and he rapidly reels off a series of logical steps: “First you assume thus-and-so, then we have Kerchoff’s this-and-that; then there’s Waffenstoffer’s Theorem, and we substitute this and construct that. Now you put the vector which goes around here and then thus-and-so...” The guy on the couch is struggling to understand all this stuff, which goes on at high speed for about fifteen minutes!
Finally the standing guy comes out the other end, and the guy on the couch says, “Yeah, yeah. It’s trivial.”
We physicists were laughing, trying to figure them out. We decided that “trivial” means “proved.” So we joked with the mathematicians: “We have a new theorem—that mathematicians can prove only trivial theorems, because every theorem that’s proved is trivial.”
The mathematicians didn’t like that theorem, and I teased them about it. I said there are never any surprises -- that the mathematicians only prove things that are obvious.
And the first action of any Friendly AI will be to create a nonprofit institute to develop a rigorous theory of Eliezer Yudkowsky. Unfortunately, it will turn out to be an intractable problem.