Viliam comments on Open Thread, Aug 29. - Sept 5. 2016 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Elo 29 August 2016 02:28AM

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Comment author: reguru 08 September 2016 01:30:46AM 0 points [-]

I feel we have a deep communicational barrier here. You probably didn't read "Rationality A-Z" (the canonical LW text).

I have not read that.

On the other hand, I have no idea what you mean by "matrix"

Virtual reality, as in the movie Matrix.

"context"

This is a bit harder to explain, imagine everything said is out of context from the subjective experience. Context can only be found within the subjective experience.

"awareness" and other stuff, and you don't bother to explain. (By "no idea" I actually mean I could imagine hundred different things under each of these labels, and I don't know which one of them is close to the one you mean. That makes the communication difficult.)

Awareness is the separation of thoughts from awareness. You can be aware of thoughts, that's awareness, and aware of thoughts which you think is you.

From my point of view, it seems like you are "in love" with some words; you associate strong positive emotions with certain nebulous concepts. These are all typical mistakes people make while reasoning; even very highly intelligent people! A part of the mission of this website is to help people overcome making this mistakes.

It would be better if I could reason for my point without making a mistake, but unfortunately, that's very hard to do. It's also up to the rationalist to consider opening up to the possibility everything they think is true, is wrong. By this I mean, being able to reason properly will spread more truth, meanwhile it might be futile depending how close-minded rationalists can be. But that's on my current data.

Maybe I am wrong about you here, but you don't provide enough information for me to judge otherwise. You posted a video of a smug person accusing everyone else, especially "scientists" and "rationalists" of being stupid and having lesser awareness. That's all there is, as far as I see. Color me unimpressed.

The only way to know you have lesser awareness is by having higher awareness. Then, it repeats itself.

There are some things that... uhm, are you familiar with the "motte and bailey" concept? Essentially: there are some statements which taken literally are true but trivial, but they can be interpreted more generally, which makes them interesting but false. I suspect this is one of the traps you fell into.

I don't understand, you don't have to be afraid of criticising properly.

This is nothing trivial, this is the truth, and if you are serious about it can see for yourself.

So, here we are... each side convinced that the other side is missing something important, relatively simple, but kinda tricky. Saying "dude, you are just confused!" is obviously not going to help, when the other side is thinking the same thing. Any other idea? From my side, I recommend reading "Rationality A-Z", there is free download.

How many pages is it, how do you use the information and how, what, should you remember?

Comment author: Viliam 11 September 2016 08:54:09PM *  0 points [-]

How many pages is it

About a thousand, depends on formatting.

Yeah, that's a lot, and many people complain about it. On the other hand, it provides great insights which can also be found in other books, but reading those other books together would be even more pages. Also, people who read online debates regularly, probably read such amount of text every few weeks, they are just not aware of it, because "following 15 facebook links every day, each on average two pages of text" doesn't feel like "reading 1000 pages of random text every month", even if in reality it actually means that.

I believe reading the book is a time well spent (I wish I had a time machine to send me the book back when I was a teenager; would probably be my favorite one), but that of course is a personal opinion.