Vive-ut-Vivas

Karma: 428

Vive-ut-Vivas 19 Nov 2010 5:39 UTC
50 points
0
on: Yes, a blog.

Don’t forget: Wikipedia happened.

And this is precisely why I haven’t lost all hope for the future. (That, and we’ve got some really bright people working furiously on reducing x-risk.) On rare occasions, humanity impresses me. I could write sonnets about Wikipedia. And I hate when so-called educators try to imply Wikipedia is low status or somehow making us dumber. It’s the kind of conclusion that the Gatekeepers of Knowledge wish was accurate. How can you possibly get access to that kind of information without paying your dues? It’s just immoral.

I pose this question: if you had to pick just one essay to introduce someone to LW, which one would you pick and why? I’d like to spread access to the information in the sequences so that it can benefit others as it did me, but I’m at a loss as to where specifically to start. Just tossing a link to the list of sequences is.....overwhelming, to say the least. And I’ve been perusing them for so long that I can’t remember what it’s like to read with fresh eyes, and the essays that have the most impact on me now were incomprehensible to me a year ago, I think.

Vive-ut-Vivas 27 Aug 2011 3:31 UTC
23 points
on: Polyhacking
I find this very interesting. Polyamory is something that I’ve toyed with intellectually for a while, but I have several ugh fields around it. Namely, and this one has been borne out by this very post, that “going polyamorous” seems like the kind of thing monogamous females do in order to acquire polyamorous males. Perhaps if one was a sufficiently status-y female, one would be able to convert the polyamorous male to being monogamous. Of course, this comes with all sorts of issues (namely, making the polyamorous partner unhappy). I just haven’t been sufficiently convinced that being polyamorous would make me happy for any reasons other than using that polyamory to attract a high-status mate that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to attract. I, like you Alicorn, have been too long seduced by the monogamy aesthetic.

Now, I will try to imagine the conditions sufficient in order for me to hack myself into being polyamorous. I imagine that they would be thus:
- I would have to decide, for myself, that I wanted to be polyamorous before meeting some polyamorous male that I desired. That is the only way that I can reasonably trust myself to make a decision in my own best interest.
- I would have to be convinced that there was no asymmetry. I believe this is my primary repulsion to polyamory. I envision myself in a situation where I want primary access to a partner who does not similarly wish primary access to me. I also envision lots of emotions and stress involved in deciding what “primary” even means.
- I need to be convinced, for myself, that becoming polyamorous is not a status-lowering move.
- I’m concerned about the exponential increase in exposure to STI’s as well. Of course, I’ve had partners cheat on me in so-called monogamous relationships, so I’m aware that this is not something that a monogamous relationship necessarily shields me from.
As it stands, I haven’t been in a monogamous relationship wherein I desired within that relationship that it was open so that I could date others. I also haven’t yet desired someone who was (to my knowledge) polyamorous. I have already decided that I do not want the latter condition to be the catalyst for changing my worldview, so right now, I consider myself open to the possibility in the future, should I find myself in a situation where I wanted to date multiple partners. So thanks Alicorn, I am now significantly more luminous!

Vive-ut-Vivas 19 Nov 2010 0:56 UTC
20 points
on: “Target audience” size for the Less Wrong sequences
So, I was directed toward this post, in no small part because I am, demographically, a bit unusual for LW. At times, I’m quite optimistic about LW and rationality-in-general’s prospects, but then I remember that my being here, and participating, is the product of happenstance. But then again, I actually have been pointed to LW from three different sources, so perhaps it was inevitable.

Ah, but here comes my embarrassing admission:

Most people who are already awesome enough to have passed through all these filters are winning so hard at life (by American standards of success) that they are wayyy too busy to do boring, anti-social & low-prestige tasks like reading online forums in their spare time (which they don’t have much of).

The above is a much more influential factor in my considering how much to participate than I feel happy admitting. I’ll openly admit that being rational is not my default mode; I wasn’t even targeted as “bright” as a kid. No out-of-ordinary test scores came from me. I have had to really work to get my thoughts to avoid being immediately processed through a Is this the kind of belief that will get me social status? filter. So, I do have this massive fear that being rational is just not natural for me. Nor is my IQ, I suspect, anywhere near the high end of the spectrum here....though that filter for social status has been, I think, obscuring my intelligence for most of my life.

Does socializing on the internet feel low-status to me? Yeah, it does....and had I not basically grown up on the internet, I doubt I’d ever give a community like this a second glance. It’s been really tough divorcing society’s ideal of what is status-y from what I actually want to do. I love the internet, and I spend a vast amount of time on it, but it still feels low status to me, and so it’s not something I advertise. Despite my ability to find more interesting conversation here than I can possibly hope to find in real life!

So, even though I was pointed to LW multiple times independently, I probably would never have actually become an active participant (insofar as I am one) had I not had the personal endorsement of my brother, who is an active member, that this was a very intelligent place. Honestly, I wasn’t properly calibrated to identify this place as, well, what it actually is. I don’t know what to suggest to get this to be more appealing to people that are like me—that is, smart enough to benefit from the sequences, but not likely to seek it out on their own. The rationality book is probably the best bet.

Vive-ut-Vivas 15 Jun 2010 18:51 UTC
16 points
in reply to: SilasBarta’s comment on: How to always have interesting conversations
I understand your frustration. I should have made it clear that I wasn’t attempting to help people who are trying to get to the barrier of making small talk in the first place; I was directing my advice to those who are interested in making the transition from small talk to interesting conversation. You’re right that I haven’t been particularly helpful in addressing that first point. I think that with some reflection I might be able to give decent advice on that topic, but that will require more introspection.

Vive-ut-Vivas 15 Jun 2010 17:40 UTC
15 points
0
on: How to always have interesting conversations
This is actually great advice. Not to scare anyone away (since I know the point is to have interesting conversation....), but the techniques discussed are essentially identical to what they teach during sorority recruitment practice. (I assume it’s the same for fraternities, not that anyone cares). During recruitment, each girl will talk to hundreds of potential recruits in a short amount of time and has to be a very skilled conversationalist in order to assess the personality and interests of the other person. You’re taught to steer very basic small talk (“What’s your major?” “Where are you from?”) into directions to find something unique and interesting about the person, and you only have a couple minutes to do it. They practice this for many, many hours a day leading up to recruitment. After a few weeks of this, you really can talk to anybody about anything.

The point of the post is to make conversations interesting, so you need to be able to steer the talk from mundane to something better, without making the other person feel like they’re being pulled to one of your pet topics. Best way to do this is practice. Improv comedy is actually a related (and equally practicable) skill, interestingly enough...
What links here?
- Vive-ut-Vivas's comment on How to always have interesting conversations by Kaj_Sotala (16 Jun 2010 18:40 UTC; 1 point)

Vive-ut-Vivas 18 Feb 2013 0:51 UTC
13 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: LW Women: LW Online
I do feel like LW is cold, and I’d rather not say “unfriendly”, which to me sounds explicitly hostile, but it’s non-friendly. Commenting here feels like Coming to Work, not like hanging out with friends. You know, where I need to remember to mind all of my manners. Seeing the orange envelope fills me with panic, as I am sure there is someone there just waiting to chew me out for violating some community norm or just being Wrong.

Truthfully, I think it is the lack of “small talk” that makes it feel unfriendly to me. It has the air of, “we’re not interested in you personally, we’re here to get things done”. I want things to be personal. I want to make friends.

Vive-ut-Vivas 17 Jan 2010 6:04 UTC
13 points
on: The Wannabe Rational
I have a question for you: do you expect that you will still be a theist after having read all the sequences?

Vive-ut-Vivas 20 Nov 2010 13:34 UTC
12 points
on: What I’ve learned from Less Wrong
And many of the people in this community rub me the wrong way.

Yes, like you, for stealing my post idea! Kidding, obviously.

At the risk of contributing to this community becoming a bit too self-congratulatory, here are some of the more significant concepts that I’ve grokked from reading LW:
- No Universally Compelling Arguments and Ghosts in the Machine. Shamefully, it never even occurred to me to de-anthropomorphize the idea of a mind.
- You Provably Can’t Trust Yourself and No License To Be Human, along that same theme.
- The Luminosity sequence is a bit under-celebrated, I think, with relation to its value. I’ve found that to be one of the most important things I’ve read here, and applying those concepts has aided me in improving my life in not-insignificant ways.
- Affective Death Spirals! I cannot praise this enough for giving me the skills to recognize this phenomenon and keep myself from engaging in this at the negative end.
Most of all, LW has taught me that being the person that I want to be takes work. To actually effect any amount of change in the world requires understanding the way it really is, whether you’re doing science or trying to understand your own personality flaws. Refusing to recognize said flaws doesn’t make them go away, reality doesn’t care about your ego, etc.

And apparently there was this Bayes guy who had a pretty useful theorem...

Vive-ut-Vivas 6 Apr 2015 16:35 UTC
11 points
in reply to: cleonid’s comment on: Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015
Slate Star Codex fulfills this niche for me.

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds

Vive-ut-Vivas8 Nov 2010 21:42 UTC

10 points

17 comments1 min readLW link

Vive-ut-Vivas 11 Jul 2011 13:21 UTC
10 points
on: Community norm question: brief text ad signatures
I vote “ad signatures are okay on posts but not on comments”.

Vive-ut-Vivas 17 Nov 2010 17:49 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Anti-Akrasia Reprise

It seems to me that rationality is not superego strengthening, but ego strengthening- and the best way to do that is to elevate whoever isn’t present at the moment. If your superego wants you to embark on some plan, consult your id before committing (and making negative consequences immediate is a great way to do that); if your id wants you to avoid some work, consult your superego before not doing it.

Thing is, I don’t think this actually happens. When I’m being productive and not procrastinating, and I try to sit back and analyze why I’m “on” that day, I might attribute it to something like “hmm, long-term desires seem to be overriding short-term desires today, clearly this is the key”. As if, for whatever reason, my short-term self was on vacation that day. My belief is that what’s happening is something much more fundamental, and something that we actually have much less control over than we think; the conditions for not-procrastinating were already in place, and I later added on justifications like, “man, I really need to listen to far mode!”. This is why, when I’m having a day where I am procrastinating, those same thoughts just don’t move me. It’s not the thought that’s actually determining your actions (“My desire to make an A in this class SHOULD BE stronger than my desire to comment on Less Wrong, so therefore I am going to override my desire to play on the internet to do work instead”), but the conditions that allow for the generation of those thoughts. I think that’s why telling myself “I don’t want to do this problem set, but I know I need to” doesn’t actually move me....until it does.

YMMV, of course. Others might be able to induce mental states of productivity by thinking really hard that they want to be productive, but I sure can’t. It’s either there or it isn’t. I can’t explain why it’s there sometimes, but if you ask me in a productive mode why I’m able to get so much more done, well, it’s just obvious that far mode is more important.

Vive-ut-Vivas 28 May 2010 19:09 UTC
10 points
on: On Enjoying Disagreeable Company
I don’t have much to add, but in the spirit of Why Our Kind Can’t Cooperate, I want to state that I’ve found this post very insightful and very useful. Thanks for posting!

Being able to pick out positive traits in people that you might otherwise not be able to stand will help you win in several ways: 1) You’ll enjoy life more; 2) You’ll get more people on your side; 3) You’ll have more access to different modes of thought which, while they may be wrong, can help strengthen the foundations of your own ideas.

This actually does work. I tested it out in my day job, which requires regular interaction with people whose company I do not usually like, and found myself almost enjoying it! We shouldn’t be afraid to like people, and to enjoy ourselves, for fear of actually becoming like them. If you make the effort to be friendly to that disagreeable person and find something pleasant about them, you’re not making their disagreeable qualities pleasant (and thereby running the risk of adopting them yourself). So, don’t be afraid to be nice, and by extension, to tolerate tolerance. This is a lesson I’m still struggling to learn.

Vive-ut-Vivas 2 Feb 2010 7:06 UTC
10 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long)

I haven’t followed the Amanda Knox case at all, or even its discussion on LW, but I’m interested now in the outcome because it bears on how much we can trust priors over court rooms, and on how good the LW community’s previous judgment was.

In that case, I highly recommend going through the posts and comments already devoted to this topic. The original survey post and the follow-up Amanda Knox test go into great detail about this case. Of particular interest should be the comments in the survey post, where members stated their estimates of the defendants’ guilt.

Vive-ut-Vivas 21 Oct 2011 14:25 UTC
9 points
in reply to: brazil84’s comment on: Amanda Knox: post mortem

I’m not sure that’s the way to put it, but let me ask you this: How much stock do you put in the unsupported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet?

How much stock do you put in the supported assertion of an anonymous person on the internet? I think that’s a more relevant question here. To what degree does a poster’s anonymity detract from his argument?

Vive-ut-Vivas 27 May 2010 1:42 UTC
9 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread
The idea of promoting Less Wrong (and rationality in general) via Harry Potter fanfiction is so outside the box that I really shouldn’t be surprised that it exists! What a great way to tap into a particular group of people that may not have necessarily found their way here otherwise. I wonder if we’ll get any users to come out of the woodwork and say they’ve found LW through the fanfic?

I hope we see more projects like this (from anybody here) in the future!

Vive-ut-Vivas 2 Feb 2010 18:21 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome
I strongly agree with this.

From his own website repeatedly linked here:

The Rational Model of Complex Mechanisms asserts that the universe exists within God. The Model asserts the Theory of relativity is wrong, and that nature of the universe encapsulated by E=MC2 is found not in plastic time but instead in the frequency of GodSong—The Speed Of Light Squared—C2 .

This is not the kind of “nugget of gold” that we want to see on here, I would think.

Vive-ut-Vivas 8 Nov 2010 22:01 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Paul Crowley’s comment on: Have no heroes, and no villains
And on an equally depressing note, I’ve run into this with significant others. Sadly, I’ve found that my inability to subscribe to the Good Guy/Bad Guy narrative hasn’t resulted in optimizing relationships.

Vive-ut-Vivas 2 Feb 2010 6:58 UTC
8 points
on: Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long)
This post is intellectually dishonest. You yourself state that you have no interest in establishing Amanda Knox’s guilt, but instead intend to “debunk komponisto’s post”—what is the purpose of that? - and then proceed to list a bunch of cherry-picked details about the case, half of which you have not even sourced!

My belief is that komponisto merely accepted propaganda from the Friends of Amanda (FoA) at face value, even though most of their claims are incorrect. Unlike komponisto and FoA, I shall cite reliable sources for my claims.

Like TrueJustice.org? Which is more reliable than Friends of Amanda because..… you say it is?

Did you read the original survey post? As far as I can tell, there is no intent to mislead there, as the OP doesn’t even state his position. Yet—somehow! - most members seemed to conclude that she had a low probability of being guilty. If you want to establish Amanda Knox’s guilt, I suggest you read through those comments and see what factors influenced their opinions. I don’t see that you addressed any of those factors in your post.

This should help you understand that DNA does not voluminously and constantly spew forth from humans in the way komponisto believes it does.

This statement, in particular, comes off as more “misleading” than anything komponisto claimed in his post.

If this post is not the result of a vendetta against a particular member, then the OP could have done a much better job of arguing this case. But frankly, this whole case has been discussed on this website at great length already, and in great detail. I would suggest examining the arguments that have already been made in the 3(?) or so other posts that have been devoted to this topic.
What links here?
- wedrifid's comment on Debunking komponisto on Amanda Knox (long) by rolf_nelson (2 Feb 2010 7:01 UTC; 3 points)

Vive-ut-Vivas 1 Feb 2010 21:52 UTC
8 points
in reply to: rolf_nelson’s comment on: Open Thread: February 2010

My intent here is merely to repair some of the Bayesian damage caused by komponisto’s original post.

I hardly think komponisto inflicted “Bayesian damage” on the members of Less Wrong, seeing as they had already overwhelmingly come to the conclusion that Amanda Knox was not guilty before he had even presented his own arguments.

Vive-ut-Vivas

Twinkie diet helps nu­tri­tion pro­fes­sor lose 27 pounds

Twinkie diet helps nutrition professor lose 27 pounds