“There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.”
-- Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
“There is no point in using the word ‘impossible’ to describe something that has clearly happened.”
-- Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
Took survey. Reminded me that I’ve never had an IQ test; is it worthwhile?
I accept all the argument for why one should be an effective altruist, and yet I am not, personally, an EA. This post gives a pretty good avenue for explaining how and why. I’m in Daniel’s position up through chunk 4, and reach the state of mind where
everything is his problem. The only reason he’s not dropping everything to work on ALS is because there are far too many things to do first.
and find it literally unbearable. All of a sudden, it’s clear that to be a good person is to accept the weight of the world on your shoulders. This is where my path diverges; EA says “OK, then, that’s what I’ll do, as best I can”; from my perspective, it’s swallowing the bullet. At this point, your modus ponens is my modus tollens; I can’t deal with what the argument would require of me, so I reject the premise. I concluded that I am not a good person and won’t be for the foreseeable future, and limited myself to the weight of my chosen community and narrowly-defined ingroup.
I don’t think you’re wrong to try to convert people to EA. It does bear remembering, though, that not everyone is equipped to deal with this outlook, and some people will find that trying to shut up and multiply is lastingly unpleasant, such that an altruistic outlook becomes significantly aversive.
As was first proposed on /r/rational (and EY has confirmed that he got the idea from that proposal)
There already is a better Turing test, which is the Turing test as originally described.
To run the test as originally described, you need an active control; a human conversing with the judges at the same time in the same manner, where their decision is “Which is the human?”, not “Is this a human?” If the incompetent judges had been also talking simultaneously with a real 13-year-old from Ukraine, I have no doubt that Eugene Goostman would have bombed horribly.
If Plato and Aristotle anticipated today’s Neoreactionaries, well, you can’t exactly call Neoreaction an unhistorical, ungrounded, fringe view, can you?
I’m not sure what “unhistorical” is supposed to mean, here, but you can definitely call it ungrounded and fringe. Fringe is obvious; look around at political philosophers of all stripes, and find as many Neoreactionaries as you can; it will be at most a tiny fraction of the population. Which is exactly what is meant by ‘fringe view’.
In terms of claiming ancient views as demonstrating solid grounding for a belief: people long ago believed many things which we know now to be wrong and baseless (given adequate data). Plato and Aristotle themselves inherited from predecessors like Zeno, Thales, and Anaximenes, who all believed things we now know are indisputably wrong. (The paradoxes of impossibility of motion, everything being composed of forms of water, and everything being composed of air, respectively.)
The grounds that Plato and Aristotle had to believe those positions were that their society looked approximately like that, and, to their (probably biased) eyes, looked like it was doing much better than anyone else around. If we look around now, we don’t see any society that has that form, and those historical societies that did didn’t do well in the long term. The grounding has been lost, and claiming ‘this used to be well-grounded’ as grounding now doesn’t obtain.
From Funereal-disease on tumblr, in a previous discussion: It is usually better to talk about “spiritual abuse” rather than “being a cult”. It emphasizes that the techniques of successful cults are techniques of successful abusers, and is better at being something that happens to a greater or lesser degree; cult is more binary.
I might prefer “social abuse” or “community abuse” to make clear that non-religious forms are possible.
I agree with Christian. Did Arbital ever even come out of closed beta? My impression was that it did not, and you still needed to be whitelisted to have the chance to contribute.
I always feel a bit bad for Vizzini. His plan is very well thought-out and sensible; he’s just in the entirely wrong genre for those qualities to be remotely relevant to its success.
It doesn’t help that up to that point, the genre looks like one where it should work. Obviously the character’s timeline could make it more obvious, but from ours it isn’t.
Lampshading mysterious answers:
The door was the way to… to… The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.
-- Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
So you’ll exclude yourself from the sample, artificially biasing the census against you?
One of the things that is impressive about the Constitution is that it was designed to last a few decades and then reset in a new Constitutional Convention when it got too far from optimal. It’s gone far beyond spec at this point, and works.. relatively well.
That’s a good point but I’m going to argue against it anyway.
Unlike a lucky stock, Bitcoin wasn’t accounted for by mainstream markets at the time. An index fund amortizes the chances of lucky success and catastrophic failure across all the stocks into a single number, giving roughly the same expected value but with much lower variance. Bitcoin wasn’t something that could be indexed at that point, so there was no way you could have hedged your bet in the same way that an index fund would let you hedge.
It seems disingenuous to call this new project Arbital.
I don’t see the Ledger Joker as irrational, merely insane. It’s just his morality and ethics that are horrible. As far as reaching his goals, he is extremely (unrealistically) competent. You don’t flawlessly account for every move your opponents make, in advance, for 98% of your visible career, by being totally irrational.
I don’t think I would drink cider that had been in my ear. Maybe you have cleaner ears.
People uncomfortable with that term can either replace it with a preferred one or do a search for previous discussions here of the etymology.
There are numerous ways you could have said the same thing (including the same connotations) without alienating parts of your audience. You clearly were aware you were going to alienate part of your audience, so why didn’t you use an alternate phrasing?
It’s a classic pair of Lazy Bad Planner and Shining Example of Humanity, which has been used in the children’s magazine Highlights to put morals on display for decades.
I might have gone with Simplicio and Salviati, but that would go over many people’s heads for no real benefit.
Nice to see someone taking the lead! I’ve been looking for something to work on, and I’d be proud to help rebuild LW. I’ll send you a message.
Is Anti-Agathics a strict superset of Cryonics? That is to say, would someone becoming cryonically frozen and then restored, and then living for 1000 years from that date, count as a success for the anti-agathics question?