Wow. I’m in theoretical physics and that quote is like a slap in the face. Not saying it is wrong though.
Stabilizer
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I dunno, thinking about it in terms of “spiritual system” applying in general, and “spiritual” applying to a specific case does not seem like a conflation, in the same way that “set” and “element of set” are distinct.
Not all things referred to in a spiritual system need be spiritual. For example, a spiritual system could say that drinking is not spiritual—which is what Islam explicitly says. Indeed, associating the tag “spiritual” or “not spiritual” to different activities is one of the main goals of religions.
You nailed it.
therefore drinking is spiritual.
This is the kind of bullshit logic many religions adopt to get from A to B; where A is something innocuous sounding and B is something that sounds profound. It works because thinking is contaminative. In the above example, there was a simple conflation of the concepts behind the words “spiritual system” and “spiritual.” Most people won’t pick up on that because the two words sound very similar.
Thus, in getting from A to B via a sequence, C,D,E..., all you have to do is slightly change the meanings of the words (or use similar sounding words) in each step of the argument. By the time you reach B, you can could’ve proved whatever you wanted.
That one’s a misquote. The original is:
Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that, ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness’ — then you should enter & remain in them.
Not exactly a rationality quote, is it? Here is another famous misquote of the same passage.
While I find Venkatesh Rao to be insightful, his writing can be quite frustrating. He seems to be allergic towards speaking plainly. Here is a possible re-write of the above quote:
Slytherin-adepts use human ideals—like justice, fairness, equality, talent—to deceive people. They employ these ideals in rhetoric, often to turn attention away from conflicting evidence.
Well...
Just as eating only what one likes is injurious to health, so studying only what one likes spoils the memory, and what is retained isn’t very useful.
-Not Da Vinci
Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.
-Daniel Willingham, Why Don’t Students Like School. The point is that, quite often the reason we’re doing something is that that’s what we’re used to doing in that situation.
Note: He attributes the quote to some other psychologists.
Surgeons finally did upgrade their antiseptic standards at the end of the nineteenth century. But, as is often the case with new ideas, the effort required deeper changes than anyone had anticipated. In their blood-slick, viscera-encrusted black coats, surgeons had seen themselves as warriors doing hemorrhagic battle with little more than their bare hands. A few pioneering Germans, however, seized on the idea of the surgeon as scientist. They traded in their black coats for pristine laboratory whites, refashioned their operating rooms to achieve the exacting sterility of a bacteriological lab, and embraced anatomic precision over speed.
The key message to teach surgeons, it turned out, was not how to stop germs but how to think like a laboratory scientist. Young physicians from America and elsewhere who went to Germany to study with its surgical luminaries became fervent converts to their thinking and their standards. They returned as apostles not only for the use of antiseptic practice (to kill germs) but also for the much more exacting demands of aseptic practice (to prevent germs), such as wearing sterile gloves, gowns, hats, and masks. Proselytizing through their own students and colleagues, they finally spread the ideas worldwide.
So I did read that line. I understood that you need to make it interact with Facebook in order to get 1000 STR back after donating it to MIRI. What I didn’t understand was that you also need to make it interact with Facebook in order to get the free 6000 STR that you get for signing up—as claimed on MIRI’s Facebook page.
What confuses me is that cryptocurrencies are supposed to support anonymity. Facebook is the anti-thesis of anonymity.
In order to receive the free Stellar, you need to have a Facebook account. That sucks, because I don’t. And I don’t want to join Facebook.
A lot of people are pointing out that perhaps it wasn’t very wise for you to engage with such commenters. I mostly agree. But I also partially disagree. The negative effects of you commenting there, of course, are very clear. But, there are positive effects as well.
The outside world—i.e. outside the rationalist community and academia—shouldn’t get too isolated from us. While many people made stupid comments, I’m sure that there were many more people who looked at your argument and went, “Huh. Guess I didn’t think of that,” or at least registered some discomfort with their currently held worldview. Of course, none of them would’ve commented.
Also, I’m sure your way of argumentation appealed to many people, and they’ll be on the lookout for this kind of argumentation in the future. Maybe one of them will eventually stumble upon LW. By looking at the quality of argumentation was also how I selected which blogs to follow. I tried (and often failed) to avoid those blogs that employed rhetoric and emotional manipulation. One of the good blogs eventually linked to LW.
Thus, while the cost to you was probably great and perhaps wasn’t worth the effort, I don’t think it was entirely fruitless.
What pragmatist said.
Basically the approach of Sebens and Carroll is to show that if observers are present, then they will see outcomes following the Born rule.
In that sense it seems that observers here are no more problematic than the observers of special relativity, where there are claims like if you use clocks to measure time in a moving frame, then you will see time slowing down relative to mine.
If someone from MIRI is reading this: Having the upper-limit of the donation progress-bar truncate in the middle of the blue box is confusing. It makes one feel that you’ve reached $200K, and that you have to go the rest of the distance of the blue box to actually reach your goal.
I suggest moving <# of Donors> to below the progress-bar (as opposed to where it currently is, which is to the right of the progress bar) and scaling the progress-bar to fit the width of box.
In other words, use the emotional power of doubt to counteract the bias induced by the emotional power of your desire for that theory to be true.
Well, I find the attempt to save a falsely accused man to be much more morally admirable than the attempt to save a justly accused man. Indeed, the fact that child molestation is considered very morally repugnant and carries huge legal and social costs is part of the reason why I feel that any attempt to protect a man from false accusations of child molestation to be very admirable.
To answer your question, I didn’t expect (at least, not till now) people’s judgement of guilt to be distorted so much by the moral repugnance of the alleged crime. If indeed people do distort this much, I should carefully rethink my understanding of moral intuitions.
While Nietzsche writes it beautifully, perhaps the simplified, layman version would be:
“If you insist on refusing social obligations and violating social norms, then life becomes very hard: you will be lonely and your conscience will bother you a lot. If you fail—i.e. the pain of being outcast exceeds the benefits of independence—then no one will give a damn.”
(The last part is almost tautological; if you’re lonely, then most people don’t care about you. The exception might be when one writes one’s experiences down, as Nietzsche probably did.)
Notation is like an unruly child. If it’s to be any real help at all, you kind of can’t help but abuse it.
The distinction between precision and accuracy is one of the most useful distinctions I’ve learnt.
If your goal is to get at the truth, then accuracy is always the primary goal, and precision secondary. Indeed, it is quite dangerous to aim for precision first. This was also captured by Knuth, “premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
Unfortunately, most people are convinced more easily by precision than by accuracy. Politicians and false prophets often employ this trick. Precision reflects confidence. Also, it is trivial to very whether a statement is precise; but incredibly difficult to verify if it is accurate.
Nobel Prizes, especially in physiology/medicine and economics, are probably more indicative of social impact (which is what I think Bostrom’s colleague meant when he used the word “important”).