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ialdabaoth comments on Rationality, Transhumanism, and Mental Health - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: ialdabaoth 14 October 2012 09:11AM

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Comment author: RolfAndreassen 15 October 2012 03:35:36PM 2 points [-]

This may be a stupid question: How old are you? From the pattern of your posts I seem to detect a vague hint of an American high school. Please observe: American schools are severely broken. (1) Inability to function in such a place is not necessarily a sign of insanity. Consider whether, perhaps, you may simply be surrounded by hormonal teenagers with nothing better to do than assert idiotic status hierarchies. If you're not already familiar with it, Paul Graham's essay on nerds may be relevant to your interests.

That aside: Are you sure you are really trying to be rational, as opposed to performing some ritual of cognition? It's hard to use oneself as a control group, you certainly cannot do so double-blindly, but what happens if you drop your attempts at rationality and act without thought, or with less thought than you are currently using? For all you know, that may give even worse results; but at any rate it seems to me that your problem is desperately in need of a control, or baseline. When you debug, it's no use saying that the error must be somewhere in module X. Comment out module X and see if the crash still happens.

Footnote 1: I read this on the Internet, so it must be true.

Comment author: ialdabaoth 17 October 2012 01:20:16AM 1 point [-]

I am 38 years old. And I agree - American schools are severely broken; regrettably, so are most American corporations. All of my social experience has either been from American schools or American corporate jobs, which often seem like more a vicious extension of the American school social environment.