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James_Miller comments on Rationality Quotes September 2014 - Less Wrong
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The View from Hell from an article recommended by asd.
The easy way to make a convincing simulation is to disable the inner critic.
The inner critic that is disabled during regular dreaming turns back on during lucid dreaming. People who have them seem to be quite impressed by lucid dreams.
You still can't focus on stable details.
You can with training. It is a lot like training visualization: In the beginning, the easiest things to visualize are complex moving shapes (say a tree with wind going through it), but if you try for a couple of hours, you can get all the way down to simple geometric shapes.
Contrast:
-- Feynman
One might even FTFY the first quote as:
"We see what we see for adaptive reasons, because it is the truth."
This part:
is contradicted by the context of the whole article. The article is in praise of insight porn (the writer's own words for it) as the cognitive experience of choice for nerds (the writer's word for them, in whom he includes himself and for whom he is writing) while explicitly considering its actual truth to be of little importance. He praises the experience of reading Julian Jaynes and in the same breath dismisses Jaynes' actual claims as "batshit insane and obviously wrong".
In other words, "Nerds ... want to see what's really going on" is, like the whole article, a statement of insight porn, uttered for the feeling of truthy insight it gives, "not because it is the truth".
How useful is this to someone who actually wants "to see what's really going on"?
It's a useful sketch of a type of experience. The experience is given a name. Armed with that name, you can choose to avoid it or not.
Insight porn, in other words?
I downvoted this and another comment further up for not being about anything but nerd pandering, which I feel is just ego-boosting noise. Not the type of content I want to see on here.
Well, if you think the quote doesn't say significantly more than "nerds are great" you are right to downvote it.
I think the comment in this thread would have been equally relevant and possibly better without the last sentence, but don't see how the Cryptonomicon quote (which I assume to be the one you meant?) as nerd-pandering, since it doesn't imply value judgments from it about being or identifying as a nerd.
The Cryptonomicron quote was great, I was talking about its child comment.
That or the extent of the human capacity for pareidolia on waking.