= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on How can we get more and better LW contrarians? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (328)
He can still be found on the SingInst about us page.
You do your name justice.
(In case it's not obvious the description is not at all currently accurate. I am currently in the process of doing nothing. At some point I firmly decided that doing things is evil, so I try not to do things anymore, at least as a stopgap solution till I better understand the relevant motivational dynamics and moral philosophy. I still talk to people sometimes though, obviously, but to some extent I feel guilty about that too.)
Would it help you behave more morally by your lights if nobody replied to you?
Good question. I don't think so.
I still act socially as a Christian in much of my social life so in a certain (not epistemically literal) sense hearing this from 'another believer' strikes me as sacrilege. The Parable of the Talents has a clear point to make on this subject! You are defying His will and teachings.
If only it were so easy to tell righteous exploration from liberal folly. But anyway, it's just a stopgap solution. Likely preparation for a sojourn in the desert, and after that, God knows.
40 days and 40 nights?
I don't yet understand the (Kabbalistic?) significance of the number 40. Haven't looked into it. Maybe if I figured it out then I'd find 40 days, 40 nights uniquely appealing.
Worked for Elijah, Moses and Jesus. (I'd recommend eating food though - or at least drink gatorade.)
Many languages, especially in antiquity, have colloquial ways of phrasing "forever" or "a long time" with a superficially-specific count. In Japanese, "ten thousand years" can be used to indicate an indefinitely long period; in Ancient Hebrew, "40 days and 40 nights" does that job.
But is there any known reason for picking 40 specifically? I wouldn't expect the Jews to choose their numbers arbitrarily.
Given the number of such numerically-precise-but-pragmatically-vague sayings in many languages, and the apparent failure of them to converge beyond shared cultural contact (Classical Arabic has the same use pattern for "40", as do many Middle Eastern languages from antiquity, though I'll admit that my linguistic knowledge doesn't do more than touch on this region superficially, other'n a few years of Modern Hebrew), I don't think "arbitrary" quite captures it -- they simply adopted a use pattern that was widespread in the time and place where they were.
What do you think about Kabbalah?
40 is sometimes used, in the Torah, to indicate a general large quantity - according to Google. It also has associations with purification and/or wisdom, according to my interpretation of the various places it appears in the Bible as a whole. (There are a lot of them.)
After a long hiatus from deep involvement in comment threads here -- I actually can't tell if this is serious, or a brilliant mockery of Eliezer's decisions around creating AGI [*]