SRStarin

Karma: 270

SRStarin 19 Aug 2011 19:43 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Friendly-HI’s comment on: Reasons for being rational
I agree, it seems we’re pretty similar in this arena. I think maybe I just feel more negative emotion about, as you put it, hedonistic procrastination than you do. Those are the times I feel the most unpleasant conflict. I should just stop procrastinating, I guess. I’m working on that, getting better about it. Anyway, I don’t need to go into too much detail on this side topic. Thanks for the reply.

SRStarin 1 Jul 2011 22:54 UTC
2 points
on: Reasons for being rational
Part of me wants to write: “You’re a brave and forthright person, and I admire you for it.”

Another part of me, which I think is motivated by your honesty, reads that and says I should write: “I just wrote that because I want you to like me, and it reads like it might get an upvote (after LW acceptance subprocess runs consciously), proving someone else likes me, too.”

When I’m alone, alert and unoccupied, those two parts (there may be more, I don’t know) are always bickering. Thing 1 decides some feeling or idea is good, or correct, or sincere, and Thing 2 almost always has to come back and say why my conclusion is based entirely in bias or rationalization. I think this is why I try not to be alone, alert and unoccupied very often.

When I’m around other people, Thing 2 mostly shuts up, only butting in if Thing 1 is getting carried away with pleasing people, or bragging, or lying (i.e. making the truth sound more exciting), etc. I like Thing 2 quite a lot at those times.

When I’m tired or have a drink, Thing 1 and Thing 2 both go to sleep before the rest of my cognition does.

When I’m occupied, there is sometimes some bickering if I’m occupied at a game, or a blog, or something that’s not useful, but it’s not too bad. It sometimes gets to be enough that I’ll do something useful to stop the conflict.

So, that’s my Usual Live Life subroutine. It’s kind of bleak because Thing 2 insisted I write it this way, but I do manage to be happy, entertained, challenged, or deeply thoughtful most of the time.

So, why write this in response to the OP? Because my first internal response to the OP was “That’s a lot like me!” And then I read Friendly-HI’s response and I thought “That’s a lot like me!” And this bugged me. So, I thought I’d try to describe from an internal, process-oriented perspective how my days go by, and see whether that clicks more with one of you than the other (or anyone else who wants to chime in).

SRStarin 28 Apr 2011 1:05 UTC
1 point
on: DC Meetup: Sunday May 1st, 1 PM
Been waiting for this! But I have a funeral to attend in North Carolina the day before and can’t get back in time. Blech!

SRStarin 19 Apr 2011 15:00 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: mstevens’s comment on: Learned Blankness
The people I know who think of themselves as “bad with computers” are generally worried that they are going to destroy hardware, software, or data files if they make a mistake. They know enough to know that, in the abstract, they really can do severe damage with a few button pushes, but they don’t know precisely where the danger areas lie. It’s an area in which people have a strong incentive to pretend to know very little so they can more easily convince knowledgeable friends and relatives to help them.

My mother is one such person, and one thing that has helped her a lot was for me to set up an admin account on her laptop and to explain how she should always use her non-admin account, but the admin account would pop up when she needs those privileges. It’s a flag for her that, if she doesn’t get asked for her admin password, the most harm she can do is delete files, and even those might be recoverable.

SRStarin 19 Apr 2011 14:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Johnicholas’s comment on: Learned Blankness
It’s a reasonable question to ask. Division of labor is certainly a major way a society improves both individual and societal efficiency. This can work all the way down to one-on-one relationships. A married couple often finds ways that each member of the partnership can most efficiently contribute to running a household.

But I think there is a conceptual distance between knowing you’re not as good at something as a person with whom you have a good relationship and thinking you can’t approach the knowledge that the other person possesses. my husband does almost all the cooking in our house, largely because he enjoys it and I do not. But sometimes I need to cook, so it pays for me to learn some of what he does in his cooking for those unforeseen times when I need to cook a family meal.

SRStarin 11 Apr 2011 13:02 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Risto_Saarelma’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: April 2011
Meh. Tony ruined that guy’s role-playing fun at a Ren Faire. People pretend to believe all kinds of silly stuff at a Ren Faire.

Last year my husband and I went to Ren Faire dressed as monks, pushing our daughter, dressed as a baby dragon, around in a stroller. (We got lots of comments about vows of celibacy.) We bought our daughter a little flower-shaped hair pin when we were there, after asking what would look best on a dragon. What Tony did would have been like the salesperson saying “That’s not a dragon.”

SRStarin 1 Apr 2011 18:57 UTC
9 points
in reply to: rwallace’s comment on: Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants
Maybe this is a big reason why recidivism of imprisoned people is so high. After committing a crime, they get removed from the society in which they’d experience guilt and placed in with people who’ve done similar things. Or worse things.

So the guy who’s in prison for selling a kilo of cannabis hears the stories of a hardened home robber, and absorbs the robber’s ability to rob guilt-free.

Hmm, so, considering the way guilt really plays out with modern adults, I don’t think guilt is much more than a conditioned response of submission learned in childhood. It feels bad to be forced to be submissive, and we internalize that bad feeling as a conditioned response to doing something we know is bad.

SRStarin 16 Mar 2011 0:06 UTC
2 points
in reply to: anon895’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: March 2011
I have. I’ve was a member of a Bible club at work for a year. I wasn’t Christian, but I chose to participate in the club.

Some folks in that club said they had no problem at all with the person who is attracted to the same sex. The problem lay in the conceit that the homosexual’s purpose and burden in life was to either overcome their sexual proclivities or to forgo sex altogether, giving their life to God in some other way than marriage and procreation.

So, the anti-gay stance was that it’s a sin to act homosexually.

To be inside a homosexual brain is to feel trapped and even somewhat absent from reality until one acts on, or at least admits and attempts to embrace, this cognitive process that values the sexes in a way fundamentally different from the norm for one’s gender. I admit that “being homosexual” is, for me, a facet of my mind that I can’t change, and those fundamentalists I talked to admitted to understanding that state of mind, but that the sin lies only in seducing another man (being seduced by another man is seducing him, just to clear that up), and that is what makes a person homosexual.

SRStarin 7 Mar 2011 15:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: Positive Thinking
One potential end for rationality is “I want to be able to hold myself accountable for being a better person.” I’m not currently able to do that entirely, but I think I’m getting better, in part through participating in the LW community.

I go to church to help me be accountable to my daughter. The church we attend is gay-friendly and supports a family of two men and a baby. Some churches are filled with bitter people always looking to criticize each other, usually behind their backs. You’re lucky to be part of a positive church community. I am, too.

SRStarin 7 Mar 2011 1:39 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: A Transhumanist Poem
No, not sad. I had to google IMHO the first time I saw it. It’s just too useful an acronym not to use, though, now that I know it. (I do think it’s sad that spell-checks still fail to recognize “google.”)

SRStarin 6 Mar 2011 2:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: A Transhumanist Poem
I think I grok you, wedrifid. I agree on the content valence.

I respond now only to say that the poem may be appreciable in ways other than my feeling like it’s sort of like hip-hop. I find myself the first totally positive critic here, but seriously, Swimmer, you have something there, if you want to do something with it. I’m just trying to offer my point of view.

SRStarin 6 Mar 2011 2:15 UTC
3 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: A Transhumanist Poem
The abrupt interruption of lyrical flow is part of hip-hop. BBut, in exchange for that break, you get a rhyme structure that is far more complex than any usual lyrical poetry can deliver. To use my example, lyrical poetry could never present the LINE RHYME TIMing WHY FINE subLIME rhyming pattern with an offbeat. Instead of rhyming along a ruler, they rhyme along a parabola. I’m not trying to convince you to like hip-hop. I’m trying to point out the aesthetic that is there, that I like. Hip-hop artists do it way better than my silly off-the-cuff example, but I think I got the Fibonacci-vs-Cartesian feel close enough to hear.

SRStarin 6 Mar 2011 1:00 UTC
1 point
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: A Transhumanist Poem
I like hip-hop. I look at this after what I wrote and think “This may be like hip-hop.” Maybe that’s where our tastes part ways.

Hip-hop savors the sudden surprise stress, the in-line rhyme, the timing that makes you think “Why did that series of stressed S’es sound so fine?” Sublime.

SRStarin 5 Mar 2011 19:47 UTC
4 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: A Transhumanist Poem
If everything were iambic tetrameter, as you suggest, poetry would be really, really boring. The first stanza has excellent rhythm, placing emphasis on important words, and causing you to place emphasis on words where in normal spoken prose you might not otherwise, enhancing the imagery. imAGine the FIRST MAN who HELD a STICK in ROUGH HANDS and DREW LINES on a COLD STONE WALL imAGine when the OTHers LOOKED when they SAID i see the ANtelope i SEE it

Swimmer963, I think the first stanza makes an excellent poem, whether or not you agree with the way I would read it. The rest could use some work, IMHO, but there’s good imagery throughout. My best poems have always been the ones where I don’t try to make a point on the first go round, but let the point come out upon rereading.

SRStarin 4 Mar 2011 1:47 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Tyrrell_McAllister’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: March 2011
The Italian word for “hell” is “inferno.” (I don’t know Italian, but I knew that word.) That’s also the Italian word for “inferno,” and that was the choice of the translator in 1974. I suspect that was prudishness about the word “hell” for an American audience, but I don’t know. Anyway, the passage is otherwise very much in keeping with the tradition of the French Existentialists. For example, Sartre famously wrote “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” which translates as “Hell is other people.” The book has other existentialist themes in some of its fables, so I conclude that Calvino was thinking about the existentialists that wrote before he, and that he meant “hell” when he wrote “inferno” in Italian. I could be wrong, but that’s why I pointed it out.

SRStarin 3 Mar 2011 17:47 UTC
9 points
on: Rationality Quotes: March 2011
“The hell of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the hell where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the hell and become such a part of it that you can never see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

This is the last paragraph of the book. I should note that I changed the translation here from the Harcourt & Brace translation I have, substituting “hell” for “inferno.” I recommend the book to any rationalist with a taste for fables.

SRStarin 3 Mar 2011 13:44 UTC
21 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Rationality Quotes: March 2011
As I read this quote, I was reminded of what it felt like to be (repressed) homosexual in a strongly heteronormative culture. The act of claiming my sexuality could only happen outside of that culture (in Europe, for me), and when I came back home, I became profoundly depressed, convinced I would never amount to anything.

Gay people are often surprised at how their internal turmoil, which seems so particular and special, turns out to be the usual result of growing up queer in a straight society. We’re surprised because our experience is so different from what most people around us seem to be feeling.

So, I would say Rich was not generalizing from one example, but was talking about the generality of the experience of the ignored minority, and trying to convey that experience to an audience who would be largely ignorant of that feeling of psychic non-existence. They have been affirmed by whatever presumptions are prevalent in their society, be they heteronormative, ethnic, racial, religious or whatever.

So, this is a great rationality quote, because it reminds us all (gay people included) to challenge ourselves constantly to recognize the lenses through which we understand reality, and to try to sort out what is real from what is cultural. People, especially young people, kill themselves because of this. Challenging our cultural assumptions can save lives.

SRStarin 1 Mar 2011 16:48 UTC
0 points
in reply to: JGWeissman’s comment on: Ability to react
For activities like competitive sports or extemporaneous acting, I could see what you’re saying. But, I don’t think that the quality of different performances of a given show, in which the actions are the same each performance, would be scattered in a Gaussian or other randomized way. A performer generally expects only to improve on a particular show, as long as one applies oneself, as will have been happening during the rehearsal period leading up to the performances. If there is a reduction in performance quality on a given show, either the performers are not applying themselves with the same intensity (as I suggested), or there is some other explanation.

Now, if you compared performance quality across different shows and different seasons, you might see something more like a random scattering around a mean.

SRStarin 28 Feb 2011 19:09 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheOtherDave’s comment on: Ability to react
Hmm, I have certainly seen really excellent dress rehearsals followed by shabby opening nights. And if we do fantastically on the opening night, we often do a little less well (though still usually a good show) the next night. People get lax and allow themselves to be distracted by other things.

All that said, your experience is different, and I acknowledge that. I may be suffering from confirmation bias, but I don’t think so for the group I sing with. It may also be that, in theater, you are far more likely to be noticed if you make a mistake, whereas in choral music you can often be covered by the rest of your section.

SRStarin 27 Feb 2011 17:39 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: Ability to react
In amateur choral singing and musicals, we often say that a smooth dress rehearsal is bad news, because you get a sense of complacent confidence. It makes it harder to focus, because you have to do so consciously. We prefer for things to be rough the night before the performance, because we all go to sleep a little nervous, our bodies and unconscious thoughts focusing our conscious minds on the things we need to get right that weren’t automatic in the rough rehearsal.

I imagine professionals have less of a problem with this, since they perform much more often, but I don’t know.

Our cognitive processes use energy and biochemicals that must be replenished with food and sleep. So, there’s no way the brain can be at 100% all the time. Anxiety, epitomized in the fight-or-flight response, allow us to call up full faculties for a short period of time whenever it’s needed.