Also individual versus household. I went with individual.
Zubon
Karma: 1,399
Oh golly, now I feel bad for using my OCEAN score from a recent test rather than re-taking it. This one was atypical? Sorry for adding noise to the data.
That is about the excluded middle I was thinking of on those questions. Reference Dan Savage’s term “monogamish.” This community seems more likely than average to have unusual degrees of relationships.
I was also wondering about “preferred” relationship style. I know several who would prefer polyamory in theory but in practice have never had it work out well in practice. Granted, I know several who have never had monogamy work out well in practice and more who have discovered that they were not in fact in strictly monogamous relationships.
The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and this would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
-- American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Girl Genius has visited that border between magic and science. Note also the first two frames, in which the spark rational mind is put to use in pursuit of spark emotional needs. “Look. I’m a girl with needs. Okay?”
Raymond Smullyan is a gold mine for different cached thoughts. Maybe I should start finding quotes on random pages for these threads.
all arguments online seem to follow that format. It’s like a giant straw man ate a radioactive non sequitor and began rampaging through downtown Tokyo.
-- jman3030
That seems like an easy case to test, provided you have some way to re-light the candle.
Would it be correct to say you mean “should” in the wishful thinking sense of “we really want this outcome,” rather than something normative or probabilistic?
Almost all relationships end in unhappiness or death. Or unhappiness leading to death.
I could be wrong, but I’d like to see some evidence.
--- Mark Liberman
Example of teachers not getting past Guessing the Teacher’s Password: debating teachers on the value of pi. Via Gelman.
Is “a supreme force” the kind of thing you can add up like troop movements? A main point of the original argument is that the supreme forces claimed are mutually exclusive, whereas troop counts are not.
If the counter-claim is to be as vague as, “There is something real about spirituality,” we can all agree on some level. Some people will go with the level of common problems in human psychology that lead to the delusion of spirituality. Others will go with the existence of a supreme being. Taking these points together and adding them up to “something real” is not solid conceptualization. (Similar problems with adding together the belief in a supreme being and those who explicitly believe in a non-personal supreme force.)
Alternate approach: taking the Simulation Hypothesis seriously means having a significant prior for the existence of some kind of creator. I doubt that theists or people accepting the Simulation Hypothesis would say that their beliefs mostly overlap on the important points.
Given yesterday’s xkcd, I note that Google has no hits for “strip catpennies.”
I’m concerned about the moral implications of creating intelligent beings with the intent of destroying them after they have served our needs, particularly if those needs come down to a single bit (or some other small purpose). I can understand retaining that option against the risk of hostile AI, but from the AI’s perspective, it has a hostile creator.
I’m ponder it from the perspective that there is some chance we ourselves are part of a simulation, or that such an AI might attempt to simulate its creators to see how they might treat it. This plan sounds like unprovoked defection. If we are the kind of people who would delete lots of AIs, I don’t see why AIs would not see it as similarly ethical to delete lots of us.
Was there some particular bright line at which cryonics flipped from “impossible given current technology” to “failure to have universal cryonics is a sign of an insane society”? That is a sign change, not just a change in magnitude.
If we go back 50 or 100 years, we should be at a point where then-present preservation techniques were clearly inadequate. Maybe vitrification was the bright line, I do not pretend that preserving brains is a specialty of mine. I just empathize with those who still doubt that the technology is good enough to fulfill its claims prior to seeing a brain revived. We have a bold history of technological claims that turned out to be not all that, but we promise that it will work fine in twenty years.
That seems like a perfectly sane outside view: every (?) previous human preservation technique was found inadequate over a span of a few years or decades, so we assume against the latest one until proven otherwise.
We must still have large areas of the planet where it is still sane not to sign up your kids, notably where the per capita income is below $300/year.
To give a concrete example of non-theistically coming to “suffering requires attachment,” see Epicurus’ ethics. I don’t know if you would describe the ancient Greeks as untheists, but their view was certainly something other than modern monotheism. Epicurus was an atheist against a pantheon; I presume that monotheists were occasionally killed as ~atheists in that kind of environment.
On the marginal effects of 1%: Median US personal income is around $30,000. How many offers do you think you can successfully complete of the form, “I will give you $300 if you...”? People will take moderate risks of humiliation, injury, and arrest for far less. Your problem might be offering too much and making people suspicious.
Zimbabwe’s GDP is $2 billion. Even assuming 90% waste in claiming your 1% share, that is $2 million per year. I am suddenly surprised that we see so few atrocities; perhaps the potential despots are killing each other first.
On “having” children: should we be counting that as birth, raising, what you think of as “yours,” something else? I am thinking of sperm donors, surrogate mothers, children given up for adoption, and adoptive parents. If I am the biological parent of X offspring and raise Y of them, should I be reporting X or X-Y? And if I have step/adopted/foster children, +Z? “Raise” might be bad too, as there are people who have (biological or not) children they think of as “theirs” without custody or visitation.
The count might be fuzzier than intended. I would expect upward bias.