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Comments (319)
Once Clippy creates enough paperclips, they become the new atoms, eventually giving rise to clip-life and cliptelligence.
/r/ShowerThoughts
See also: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/13/growing-children-for-bostroms-disneyland/
I've been suspecting as much, but was afraid of saying it because it could be misinterpreted as pro-clippism.
How does one get editing privs on the Less Wrong wiki? I think it was discussed here but I can't now find the article. Once I have the answer I'll update the wiki with more info on itself!
(Was asked here)
Wait 24 hours after account creation for page creation privs.
or at the very least: how does a new user create his/her own User / About / Talk page?
~~~~
Are you able to create it now per Douglas_Knight's comment above?
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00266-3?cc=y
Given sufficient biotech, I'd like to try being an octopus. What would it mean to be the same person with a different brain architecture?
Note-- you'll need to cut and paste the url. LW doesn't play nicely with urls that contain parenthesis.
Thomas Nagel touches on this question and its implications for physical reductionism of consciousness, the mind/body problem, and of objective discussions of subjective mental experiences in his 1974 essay What is it like to be a bat?.
You have the escape the parentheses:
This link should work.
You can do URLs with parentheses you need when you have the closing paren to have a \ before it. So:
This is your link
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(15)00266-3?cc=y
Given sufficient biotech, I would definitely want to try being an octopus for a while. Does this seem possible? If so, how much about being an octopus could I remember when (if?) I went back to being human?
It seems badly defined. It's not clear in what sense you could be an octopus.
What does seem to be possible is adding extra arms and limbs. Our brains seem to be capable of integrating new things. But even if you would be given 8 tentacles that wouldn't make you an octopus.
I think being an octopus might be something like having an octopus' motor and sensory systems while still having my memories. A really Friendly AI should be able to figure out how to do that. Harder or easier than CEV?
That assumes that memories are separated from the motor and sensory system. I don't think it works that way.
In keeping with the "puzzle" theme:
You are given a rectangular piece of paper (such as the placemat at a fast-food restaurant). Without using any measuring tools (such as a ruler, a tape measure, some clever length-measuring app on your smartphone, etc.), divide the paper into five equal parts.
I believe I have it. rot13:
Sbyq naq hasbyq gur cncre ubevmbagnyyl, gura qb gur fnzr iregvpnyyl, gb znex gur zvqcbvag bs rnpu fvqr. Arkg, sbyq naq hasbyq gb znex sbhe yvarf: vs gur pbearef bs n cncre ner N, O, P, Q va beqre nebhaq gur crevzrgre, gura gur yvarf tb sebz N gb gur zvqcbvag bs O naq P, sebz O gb gur zvqcbvag bs P naq Q, sebz P gb gur zvqcbvag bs N naq Q, naq sebz Q gb gur zvqcbvag bs N naq O.
Gurfr cnegvgvba gur erpgnatyr vagb avar cvrprf: sbhe gevnatyrf, sbhe gencrmbvqf, naq bar cnenyyrybtenz. Yrg gur cnenyyrybtenz or bar cneg, naq tebhc rnpu gencrmbvq jvgu vgf bja nqwnprag gevnatyr gb znxr gur sbhe bgure cnegf.
Obahf: vs jr phg bhg nyy avar cvrprf, n gencrmbvq naq n gevnatyr pna or chg onpx gbtrgure va gur rknpg funcr bs gur cnenyyrybtenz.
First, recruit five paper-maximizing ideal economic agents, and give them a picking order one through five. Let the last-picking agent divide up the rectangular piece of paper into five parts. Downsides: will cost you the piece of paper.
Could you confirm or correct some guesses about exactly what problem is intended?
Folding is allowed, yes.
Parts can have different shapes (if you want), but must have the same area.
You cannot use compasses, but you can use an unmarked straightedge if you want to make precise creases, or to avoid ripping the paper in an untidy fashion. You are not allowed to mark the straightedge, of course.
If the procedure were carried out with infinite precision, then it would indeed produce exact fifths.
No bending the paper?
Bending is allowed; see above.
Will romance novelists in the 24th Century write novels featuring virile, "real men" characters in the 21st Century who show up the inadequacies of 24th Century guys?
"Real" is in the 24th century likely to mean something like nonaugemented. I would average 24th century men expect to have the testosterone level and thus sex drive that they want to have.
Bruce Sterling's Distraction includes a nice social conflicts about how some humans want to have a paleo gut flora while others want higher gene-engineered microbes in their gut.
From a 24th century perspective 21st century people might have an innocence worth writing about because they are so optimized.
We may have the ability to control our glands consciously before too long:
Human thoughts used to switch on genes
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26538-human-thoughts-used-to-switch-on-genes.html#.VTGwLSHBzGc
Come to think of it, the plot of Brave New World has an element of injecting a retro-model man into an advanced futuristic society, and how a woman in that society reacts to him. Huxley didn't write it as a romance novel, however, because Lenina Crowne's conditioning and promiscuity have impaired her ability to bond with men emotionally (a common topic of discussion in Manosphere blogs); she just obsesses over the Savage's physical attributes, and Huxley cuts off the possibility of her development towards emotional maturity by just ending the novel arbitrarily, with a lot of loose ends.
I'm not sure about "who show up the inadequacies of 24th century guys", but romanticising history is present in any society that has history, and androsexual people who prefer manly men are sure to romanticise whatever manly archetypes existed in or can be invented for that age, so at least the first half of that seems inevitable as long as "romance novelist " is still a concept that exists in C24, and they know that gangster rap culture was a thing.
Why do you ask? It seems like just gender-issue-baiting.
Start with history. How did the romance novels of 1800, 1900, and 2000 compare?
As opposed to all the other hundred godzillion subjects they could be writing about? Not impossible, but terribly unlikely.
To follow up the Albert, Bernard, Cheryl puzzle, I saw the following puzzle today, which I found much harder.
Please rot13 any solutions.
In an alternate universe, Peter and Sarah could have had the following conversation instead:
But I'm worried that my version of the puzzle can no longer be solved without brute force.
Crgre qbrfa'g xabj gur ahzoref, juvpu zrnaf gur cebqhpg unf ng yrnfg guerr cevzr snpgbef.
Fnenu xabjf gur cebqhpg unf ng yrnfg gjb cevzr snpgbef, juvpu zrnaf gur fhz pnaabg or rkcerffrq nf gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf. Fb gur fhz vfa'g rira (Tbyqonpu pbawrpgher), naq vg'f abg n cevzr cyhf gjb. Gung ehyrf bhg rirelguvat orybj ryrira, sbe rknzcyr.
Fb yrg'f rknzvar ryrira. Gur ahzoref zvtug or gjb naq avar, cebqhpg rvtugrra rdhnyf gjb-guerr-guerr. Be guerr naq rvtug, cebqhpg gjragl sbhe rdhnyf gjb-gjb-gjb-guerr. Be sbhe naq frira, cebqhpg gjragl rvtug rdhnyf gjb-gjb-frira. Be svir naq fvk, cebqhpg guvegl rdhnyf gjb-guerr-svir.
Vs Crgre vf tvira rvtugrra, vg pbhyq bayl or gjb avarf be guerr fvkrf. Guerr fvkrf jbhyq unir fhz avar, juvpu Fnenu ehyrq bhg, fb Crgre jbhyq xabj gung vg jnf gjb avarf.
Gjragl sbhe pbhyq or rvtug guerrf be sbhe fvkrf be gjb gjryirf, naq bayl rvtug guerrf vf crezvffvoyr, fb Crgre jbhyq xabj rvtug guerrf.
Naq gjragl rvtug pbhyq or gjb sbhegrraf be sbhe friraf, naq gjb sbhegrraf vf vzcrezvffvoyr, fb Crgre jbhyq xabj sbhe friraf.
(Guvegl pbhyq or svir fvkrf be gjb svsgrraf. Rvgure bs gubfr vf crezvffvoyr, fb Crgre qrsvavgryl jnfa'g gbyq guvegl.)
Fb vs gur fhz jnf ryrira, jr pbhyq trg gur svefg guerr fgrcf. Ohg jura Crgre fnlf gung ur xabjf gur ahzoref, Fnenu pna'g qvfgvathvfu orgjrra gjb cyhf avar, guerr cyhf rvtug, be sbhe cyhf frira, fb jr jbhyqa'g trg fgrc sbhe. Guvf ehyrf bhg ryrira.
V nffhzr gurer'f n jnl gb cebprrq gung vfa'g oehgr sbepr, ohg gung'f nf sne nf V'ir tbggra.
V oryvrir n = sbhe, o = guvegrra jbexf va guvf pnfr. Fvapr vg pna or snpgberq gjb jnlf, Crgre qbrfa'g xabj gur ahzoref. Fnenu xabjf ur qbrfa'g xabj, orpnhfr gurve fhz vf abg gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf. Gur bgure snpgbevat, (gjb, gjragl fvk), unf n fhz bs gjragl rvtug juvpu vf gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf, fb Fnenu'f fgngrzrag zrnaf gung ur pna ryvzvangr gung bar. Fb, Crgre xabjf jung vg vf. V ybbxrq ng bgure jnlf bs jevgvat friragrra nf gur fhz bs gjb vagrtref sebz gjb gb avargl avar, naq guvf jnf gur bayl bar gung ranoyrq Crgre gb havdhryl qrgrezvar uvf snpgbevat tvira Fnenu'f vasbezngvba.
Very well done, although it seems you guessed the answer and then proved that that answer worked. How did you come up with that solution?
V svtherq guhf:
Obgu n naq o pnaabg or cevzr. Vs gurl jrer, Crgre jbhyq vzzrqvngryl xabj gur nafjre. Vs nal bar jnf n cevzr terngre guna 50, gura Crgre jbhyq or noyr gb fbyir vg nf jryy, hfvat gur snpg gung n naq o yvr orgjrra 2 naq 99.
Fnenu xabjf Crgre pnaabg havdhryl qrgrezvar n naq o. Fb, n + o pnaabg or gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf, abe pna vg or gur fhz bs bs n cevzr terngre guna 50 naq nabgure ahzore orgjrra 2 naq 99. Gur fznyyrfg cevzr terngre guna 50 vf 53, naq 53+2 = 55. Fb vs n + o >= 55, gura gurer jbhyq or n cbffvoyr cnve jubfr cebqhpg unf n havdhr snpgbevmngvba va bhe enatr. Guvf erznvaf gehr sbe n naq o > 97, fvapr nyy gubfr cbffvoyr cnvef unir qvfgvapg cebqhpgf.
Fb, gur cbffvoyr inyhrf bs n + o ner ahzoref sebz 4 gb 54, juvpu pnaabg or rkcerffrq nf gur fhz bs cevzrf. Guvf ryvzvangrf gur rira ahzoref nf jryy nf frireny bqqf. Vg fgvyy yrnirf frireny pnfrf gb rknzvar.
Fvapr Crgre xabjf gur ahzoref bapr Fnenu erirnyf ur pbhyqa'g unir qrqhprq vg sebz gur cebqhpg nybar, gung zrnaf gung bs nyy gur cbffvoyr jnlf bs snpgbevat vg vagb gjb ahzoref, bayl bar erfhygf va n cnve jubfr fhz vfa'g gur fhz bs cevzrf.
Fvapr Fnenu xabjf gur fbyhgvba nsgre Crgre naabhaprf ur sbhaq vg, gurer pna bayl or bar cnve nzbat gubfr gung fhz gb n + o jvgu gur nobir cebcregl, v.r. jurer nal qvssrerag snpgbevmngvba yrnqf gb gur fhz orvat gur fhz bs gjb cevzrf.
Sebz urer V cebprrqrq gb rknzvar gur qvssrerag pnfrf. V gbbx npprcgnoyr inyhrf sbe n + o naq purpxrq jurgure gur nobir pevgrevn jrer fngvfsvrq. Gurer znl or n zber ryrtnag nccebnpu gung shegure fvzcyvsvrf guvatf, ohg V pbhyqa'g guvax bs vg.
A new study suggests that people are overly optimistic about how technologies can succeed in ways that substantially impact decision making. Summary article of the work is here, while article behind paywall is here. This seems very interesting, and if anyone has a non-paywalled copy I'd be very interested in reading it. It looks like this may be to some extent a culturally driven rather than innate bias but for most purposes the effects will probably be similar.
Here
Excellent. Thank you.
Weird: more gender equality correlating with not less, but more psychological gender differences:
"high gender egalitarian nations also exhibit larger sex differences in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[51]. If the sociopolitical gender egalitarianism found in Scandinavian nations is supposed to produce smaller psychological sex differences, it’s not doing a very good job of it."
My tentative hypothesis: the less difference there is, the more important it becomes to signal it. More weird stuff in the article.
https://evolution-institute.org/article/on-common-criticisms-of-evolutionary-psychology/
Here is the cited paper.
Me too.
I noticed that at least here in Germany childrens toys are presented much more gender specifically than they used to - think pink ponys and armed space rangers. But also boys books and girls books. I think this is more than just improved marketing. The entire domains of boys toys and girls toys diverge. Previously often one set of toys was sold for and used by boys and girls alike. The play differentiated along roles but still overlapped. But ot any longer. I wondered: Why is that?
TLDR: When roles do no more work to match expectations of the other gender the need to do so is satisfied by choosing other aspects of interests and behavior that pattern-match against these expectations.
My reasoning was as follows:
Assume that there are optimum male and female stereotypes with respect to preferrability and that these are known to both genders. Stereotypes mean combinations of observable properties or behaviors that pattern-match against the optimum stereotype.
This is plausible: At least for body attractiveness preferences are closely modelled by the other gender according to this study so I'd guess that basically the same holds for other aspects of preferrability (and status in case status being gender-specfic).
Traditionally many properties did align with (gender-specific) roles - roles actually being kind of stereotypes - or more precise: The optimum stereotypes projected down to the properties captured by the roles. So matching a role automatically netted you a fair match on the optimum stereotype.
But if roles do no longer work as a vehicle for this pattern-match because the roles are stripped of their differentiation potential via societies changed perception of roles - by precisely taking gender out of the roles the remaining pattern-match is weak. But the need to learn and aquire a match of the optimum stereotype doesn't go away. The pressure just goes to other areas - interests, preferrences - that pattern-match against the stereotype (which presuably also slowly changes).
Side-note: In the toy-case whether this pattern-matching was done by children or by their parents doesn't matter much for this discussion.
I think I'm seeing the opposite (in Brazil). I see a lot of for-girls versions of toys that used to be made for boys when I was a child. Like RC Barbie racing cars, or pink Nerf guns with matching fashion accessories. Traditional girl toys also look more varied than they used to be (e.g. horror-themed dolls).
Interesting. I wonder what is the pattern behind this. And how successful this kind of marketing is. It looks suspiciously like marketeer trying to push successful brands into the other gender.
Not sure if (a) kids prefer more gendered toys... and parents learn the preference, or (b) parents prefer to buy their kids more gendered toys... and kids learn to identify with that.
If I had to make a guess (without any real data), I would guess that many children would object to strongly genered toy for the opposite sex, but most children would be okay with a non-gendered toy. That is, a boy would probably refuse a pink barbie, but would be okay with a puzzle; and a girl would refuse a mechanical fighting warrior, but would be okay with a puzzle. (Okay, maybe puzzle is not the best example.)
I've seen complaints about toys being much more strongly gendered than they were a few decades ago.
Well, we would need data on how many parents complain vs how many parents buy a strongly gendered toy when an less gendered alternative is available.
Because, you know, anytime something politically incorrect happens, someone will complain, and maybe even write a clickbait article. But how do people vote with their wallets?
I admit I don't know. Situations like this often seem to me like chicked-and-egg problems, where producers say "we have to make what people buy, and people buy X", while consumers say "if it isn't in the shop, I can't buy it, and the shops usually only have X".
Producers make more complicated decisions. They also care about marketing and branding.
I agree with your last paragraph.
Puzzle used to be a good example. But nowadays you have puzzles with pink ponys and puzzles with fighting warriors...
These cannot be shared any more.
My Little Pony says you're wrong.
Oh sure they can be shared. If the child overcomes the patterns impetus. Can be creativity, counter signalling or a lot of other reasons. But that is not the default.
I don't know the percentages. I do not know a single person or child playing with my little pony.
Google up "Bronies" :-)
That doesn't give percentages. Looks more like a fringe thing.
I have some darker interpretations. If you look at pictures on childrens school bags, workbooks etc. the boy version is a spiderman sending the message to hang on net ropes like some idiot tarzan and the girl version is some little magic fairy princess sending the message just be there, be pretty, don't do much. So both are very, very detached from what they are supposed to do at school or in adult life. It is a "be useless!" kind of message. Is it perhaps an anticipation of a world where 80% will be unemployed?
Without this hypothetical anticipation of a world of 80% unemployment, would you expect children's bags, books, etc., to be decorated with pictures of people sat at office desks working on spreadsheets, or plumbers fitting pipes together, or something? Were children's bags, books, etc., ever decorated that way before?
I think the explanation is much simpler. Children enjoy imagining themselves as superheroes, princesses, etc.; movies, television shows, books, etc., featuring such characters become popular; children buy (or get their parents to buy) products with their favoured characters on. No conspiracy needed. And why are the superheroes and princesses and suchlike not shown doing anything interesting? Because extra clutter in the imagery would make the presence of the characters less obvious and so reduce the immediate appeal of the products to their target market.
My view on economics: businesses exist to serve customers, where the customer is defined as the person who pays, not the person who uses. For example we are mere users of Google, not its customers, those are the advertisers. And in this case it is the parent. The rational vendor caters to parents, not children. He thinks: what kind of message do parents want to send to children? And while of course it is not something boring or dull, Dexter the cartoon scientist beats the Spiderman and the fairy-princess in the cater-to-parents domain. BTW before, as far as I can remember, they were pretty plain items, not too decorated, in my childhood, that is not ideal either.
Right, probably not a conspiracy, it just happens to send wrong messages...
It's not clear to me that
because the things parents want include (1) happy children and (2) children who aren't complaining about not having the stuff they want. Accordingly, if children prefer Spiderman and fairy princesses, they will often get them.
Sounds like too many parents being a bit undisciplined and giving in too easily. I can empathize with that, having a 14 month old, but still I wish we could be as adamant as our parents, whose "no" was really a 99% no, and not like our "no, well, unless you yell a lot, in which case yes, as my nerves aren't made of steel and avoiding pain for me is not always less important than principles".
No, it sounds like a lot of parents prefer to have happy kids without a message rather than unhappy ones with one.
Happiness is not simply getting what one wants, often it is closer to learning to be content with what one can have. Seriously, simply fulfilling childrens wishes, hoping this will make them happy would be seriously bad parenting, they would quickly become spoiled and basically want everything right now, the difficult yet necessary trick is figuring out how to make them happy while not getting everything they want to.
To me signal doesn't account well for factors such as height. I do accept that psychological factors can influence height. It still seems a stretch to think that stronger pressure on male signaling that they are tall because of egalitarianism leads to taller males.
In a world with 1.80m female models a lot of woman also want to be taller than they are. I doubt that there psychological pressure on women to be small.
I think there's been a shift, with tall women being much more valued than they used to be some decades ago, but I've heard that tall teen-aged girls still get harassed for their height.
Anyone have more solid information?
The OkCupid date indicates that men are more likely to write messages to shorter woman.
At the same time the gay dominated fashion industry values tall women and a lot of woman define "being beautiful" as looking like a model and that means being tall. On a runway being tall is very useful.
As far as harrassment goes I would expect teen-aged girls on both sides of the bell curve to get harassed.
Thanks. The OkCupid data is relevant, but what I was thinking of is that I think there's been a shift in movies, with romantic pairings where the woman is taller than the man.
Yes, Hollywood leading men are shorter than they used to be, but I don't think that the characters are any different. There are films portraying romantic pairings where the actress is taller than actor, but very, very few that let the audience see that.
The question about what values happen to be popular in Hollywood and what values happen to be popular in normal social interaction aren't the same thing.
Quick googling finds:
I can't find exact data on romantic pairings but I would expect that in liberal hollywood some directors purposefully do make choices about romantic pairings where the woman is taller than the man.
I think there's been a shift, with tall women being much more valued than they used to be some decades ago, but I've heard that tall teen-aged girls still get harassed for their height.
Anyone have more solid information?
Just in case you're not aware, this is a double-comment. I've seen this with another comment of yours recently. Probably happens when one double-clicks the comment button.
What happened is that I had a couple of days of very erratic internet connection, so that it was hard to tell whether my efforts to post had worked out. My connection is good now.
Wealth seems like the best explanation, since it empowers self-expression in a general sense. One of the main comparisons I saw focused on comparing Scandinavia and India / China, and asking the women why they went into whatever career they went into. Indian or Chinese women go into STEM fields not because they like them more than alternatives, but because they represent a stable, high-status job or a path to America or so on.* Scandinavian women are happy being nurses because the job is more enjoyable and they're wealthy enough to want a larger share of their compensation in job satisfaction instead of money.
*It's not the thing I read on gender differences, but Peter Chang's story seems interesting and relevant. The government decided that he would go to culinary school, and he wasn't interested, since he wanted to be a scholar, not a chef. His dying grandmother gave him advice to learn any skill at all:
And then he goes on to become a master chef and gets to America and is now running a chain of restaurants. But the advice seems very un-Scandinavian.
Very Confucian, family first, no individualism. I respect that, actually, my own culture suffers from being in the middle, longing for the idea of an extended family tribe / gang, but yet too focused on individual desires to actually make that happen.
Funny thing is, it is not immediately obvious, but both red-stater American, and social democratic Scandinavian cultures are individualists. They just differ in the opinion of what kind of economic setup brings the most individual freedom. One is more about focusing on not letting anything taken away from you, the other focusing on having everything given to you that you may need to live according to your individual desires.
A properly non-individualist culture is not actually socialist or social democratic in the modern sense. It is more tribal. Share, but only with people I am closely tied to. Sharing with millions of strangers can only be justified by a form of individualism: they did not earn by being part of your tribe, they earned by being individuals who need it and repay it.
I am just saying it because I am kinda tired about debates about individualism vs. socialism. This is a non-issue. The issue is individualist socialism vs. individualist non-socialism vs. communal tribalism.
I don't think this is true about Scandinavia. Not sure about the Finns, but both Norwegian and Swedish culture have been described as enforcing a LOT of conformism.
Sounds like an oxymoron to me.
I am fairly astonished - this is a fairly obvious definition of modern social democracy / social liberalism?
Old, collectivist socialism was about common social goals of basically the pyramid-building type. Enter liberal individualism. Everybody lives for their own goals. At some point people realize that the current distribution of wealth does not lead to the maximization of individual goal achievement. Some people want to be artists, but it is hard to make a living that way unless you are really good. Some people want to play the business mogul, but they own five businesss and they could still play it if they owned only one. So four (or their profits) can be redistributed to the artists. Of course it is a highly theoretical unreal example, but just making a point. Socialist, because the wealth belongs to the society, not the individual, can be spread around. Individualist, because the goal is not pyramid-building but enabling individuals to get the resources to live as they want to.
Sort of look at like this: individualism is people living for hobbies, personal goals, not socially determined duties. Socialist wealth redistribution is about enabling more people to live for a hobby instead of doing what it takes to make a living.
Disclaimer: not an endorsement, but a description of other people's goals
It seems to me that this rests on a bad model of motivations. Not bad because inaccurate, though; it's a simplified model but it's about as accurate as any equivalently simple one. Bad because it creates bad incentives.
I've met a ton of people that want to be artists, i.e. to fill the social role of "artist", and I've also met a ton of people that want to be entrepreneurs, i.e. to fill the social role of Tony Stark. (You can't swing a dead cat in California without hitting one or the other.) Most of them stop at wanting, but the ones that don't universally produce bad art and bad companies. Good art comes from the people that want to produce good art, which is hard, takes a lot of directed effort, and doesn't actually have much to do with the social role.
One could argue, of course, that that implies extrinsic policy goals and you're rather concerned with intrinsics. I don't live in these people's heads, so I don't know how intrinsically satisfied they are, and I haven't seen any research covering that ground either; but even if we're concerned only with pure hedonics, I can't help but wonder how good an idea it is to set people up to be frustrated in their ambitions.
Nope, not to me.
Not in any "modern social democracy" that I know.
I feel you're confusing feel-good propaganda with how things actually work in real life.
This calls for a quote usually attributed to Maggie Thatcher: "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." To redistribute wealth you first need to create it and "people living for hobbies" tend not to create much.
Again: I am reporting it, not endorsing it.
Rawls is the most used philosopher in these circles and he basically re-implemented socialism from am collectivist to an individualist philosophy in A Theory Of Justice.
I think this is more of a central idea than just propaganda. I think it began as people trying to live as individualists first, living for their hobbies, then figured the market does not support it. So basically hoped to increase freedom by less reliance on the market, figuring if take money form rich people they still have enough to live for their own hobbies and thus you increased the total social sum of hobby-living. True, probably the whole thing does not work economically because it is a "how to spend money on xmas presents to make the most people happy" kind of philosophy and not a "how to make money" kind. I am just saying the basis of it is individualistic. No common goal, but individual pleasure. No pyramids.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that he's right or that his theory makes much sense. I have a fairly low opinion of "these circles".
First of all, I don't think that "living for a hobby" has anything at all to do with being an individualist. The markets are individualistic, a fact much lamented by a variety of authors (e.g. Karl Marx), and hobbies can perfectly well be communal.
This is basically "if someone gives me resources for free (gratis) I'll be more free (libre) in the sense that more options will be available to me". That is trivially true, but still has nothing to do with individualism -- the principle works in the same way for tribes, governments, AIs, etc. etc.
I used to, too, but lately I figured I should not really write off ideas so easily that are basically shared by the majority of professors more or less. I did not sign up them either but learned to put them into a "gray zone", neither affirm nor deny, but more like watch where they lead neutrally. One thing is clear, I suck at empathy, lately I am even thinking I may be schizoid a bit, and it would not be safe (in the sense of my calibration) to scoff too much on bleeding-heart stuff, as it can be my inner indifference speaking instead of my rational judgement.
Markets are individualistic because there is no such thing as fads, bandwagons, fandom, network effect and stuff like that? :) Sorry, I must say with a high probability that this 19th century idea is falsified. Just look at "Apple fanboys". Basically a religion, attire and all that. The 21st century market does not even resemble individuals looking like the buying the best things for their individual goals. More like people buying things that signal membership in a community...
Hobbies can be communal, but I guess what makes them individualistic is the lack of commitment. Stop when no longer fun.
No offense, but do you too have a similar empathy deficiency problem I am struggling with? It is trivially easy to imagine people having all kinds of individual aspirations but the sheer necessity of needing to pay rent, bills, support a family etc. overrides it and basically they have to accept any job they can.
Again I don't endorse socialism, but it deserves more empathic understanding than you seem to give to it. Imagine four men, each having to support a family and each wanting to be a not too good violinist, not too good means not expecting to get paid for it. A has no money, B has €5M, C has €20M and D has €100M. B, C, and D will all be able to live for their hobby as they don't need a wage to live. A will have to work as an accountant. Redistributing from D to A enables all four to live as a violinist. Yes, the model is not complete, as it lacks the model to generate wealth, yes, there are economic arguments against it, but can't we give some empathic understanding how A feels coerced, forced, unfree, due to the lack of money, to follow his impulse and B, C, D not? Can't we at least empathically understand that there is at least a freedom advantage gained from this, even if other disadvantages created, by D saving A from "wage slavery" ?
Hard to say -- I do not struggle with such a problem and in my experience people who proclaim that I should have more empathy towards X just want my money.
Some. Very very small empathetic understanding. Certainly not enough to base economic systems of societies on.
But if you think you should feel so much empathy for the poor bloke who can't be a violinist, let me ask you something. Have you ever been to a very poor third world country? Say, India, or something in Tropical Africa. I recommend you go, and not in a tour bus either. I suspect this will recalibrate your empathy a lot.
We should probably not confuse preference and necessity. Some people enjoy being in a tribe. Other people don't enjoy being in a tribe, but it is their only (or most likely) way to survive in their situation.
Just because you miss not being in a tribe is not a proof that if you were a member of an actual tribe, you would enjoy it. Actual tribe might differ from your idea of a tribe; it could be full of people you would hate, and in some kind of society you could have no reasonable way to escape.
I don't think there are some people who enjoy every kind of tribe and others who hate every kind of tribe. It largely depends on the other people in the tribe and your relationships with them.
Sure, there are different tribes, and different personalities. Let's assume that an "average tribe" is... well, average; not very abusive, but also not perfect.
I think some people, if given realistic free choice, would prefer to live in that tribe, and some people would prefer to live in an individualist society. So let's say the former are "voluntary tribesmen", although they may have bad luck and end up in an abusive tribe. The latter, if they live in a culture that does not give them a choice, are "involuntary tribesmen".
From the outside, the "voluntary" and "involuntary" tribesmen may look the same for an observer from our culture. Both stick with their tribe. But one of them enjoys it, and the other one only does it to prevent starvation of themselves or their relatives. Just because we sometimes feel that we would enjoy living in a tribe, we should not believe that all people living in tribes are of the "voluntary" type.
John Adams, one of America's Founding Fathers, reportedly wrote in one of his letters:
May be interesting for people on the spectrum:
http://wrongplanet.net/interview-henry-and-kamila-markram-about-the-intense-world-theory-for-autism/
"Kamila carried out behavioral studies on the animal model and found that the autistic animals developed excessive fear memories, that these fears lasted much longer and where difficult to undo. She also found that they generalized these memories too easily to associated stimuli (i.e. once afraid of a sound with a certain pitch, they become afraid of all sounds regardless of the pitch). Kamila realized that this could lead to autistic children quickly to becoming fearful of parts of the world for no apparent reason and it would make rehabilitation very difficult. This also suggested that one would need to be extremely careful when exposing an autistic child to the world and especially when punishing an autistic child. They will never forget the punishment and generalize it quickly to a point where they will fear so many things that they not be able to function normally."
I've heard the theory before, but from this interview it sounds a bit... woo-ey. I skimmed it, and their response to the savant question has a particular flavour of optimism that makes them seem unbelievable. If they said "hypothetically, yes, but it's hard to unlock it", it'd be fine, but "severely autistic people that cannot speak or interact at all have locked up abilities even greater than savants", that rings alarm bells and make me distrust them more generally.
Although, the fear thing makes sense, explains my social anxieties - I thought it was just spergy poor social skills made me screw up more, but in retrospect definitely I've been hurt more than a normal person should be by various minor embarrassments through my childhood that still give me flashbacks and that's a better explanation.
How to be polite, and why
I've been playing a lot of Diplomacy in the past year or so. I sometimes pitch the game as a "seven player chess" - really simple rules, no luck factor*. You negotiate with other players, form alliances, and then stab them at the opportune moment. The goal is to win, at all costs, using any cheats/technique you can think of.
There is plenty of opportunities to apply LW training in the game, which I'll likely cover at a later time. However, I've never played with anyone from here, which limits my own press options (e.g. it isn't easy to express "I'll cooperate if and only if Germany will cooperate if and only if I cooperate" to non-LW people), and I'd like to change that. I know that a couple of people from webDiplomacy hang around LW, and a few people from LWSH expressed interest, so here I am trying to gather six people.
You would need to commit to about 15 minutes per day on average, and check in at least once every 3 days. Total duration should be 2-3 months. Pauses are possible in case of unforeseen events or vacations or anything really. Rules can be learned in 10 minutes, and we can do a couple of turns trial just to get a hang of it if needed. You'd also need to commit to keep any hostility strictly within the game. You will get lied to and stabbed in the back, and it will hurt. Retribution is fine, but don't hold it against the player in real life.
If you are interested, or have questions, let me know - either here, via PM or at [myusername]@gmail.com. This is just for gauging interest, you are not committing to anything yet.
* Initial countries are assigned randomly, and they are not exactly equal.
Diplomacy has come up before. (The first game was here.) I tried to arrange games on WebDiplomacy (like here) but I don't recall all that much coming from it--I remember at least one game failing to start because we had seven people sign up but only six actually made the transition to WebDiplomacy, and so on.
Especially if you're doing a slow game where time zones are less important, I suspect it may be better to just start a LW game with a password posted here, so that there's only one sign-up.
While it is possible to play Diplomacy this way, I'm not sure this is what I would present it as. I've typically found myself spending much more time thinking about games.
(I may be interested if I'm needed to make a game happen, but I probably should be spending my time on other things.)
Interested.
I'm interested.
Not sure if this was mentioned before:
I was reading a paper (here) which mentioned several studies saying that humans are only horrible at probabilities and statistics related to individual events or beliefs (e.g., Bayesian belief revision), but they're actually quite excellent at intuitive Frequentist-type statistics.
For example, the author quotes the famous studies involving mammogram assessments, where most physicians vastly overestimated the probability of the patient having cancer. However, when the same question was presented using frequencies, scores went up dramatically.
This suggests an obvious and useful intuitive probability hack: Every time you come across a probability, try reframing it in explicit population / frequency terms. It's not a 10% false-positive rate, it's that out of a population of 1000 women where 990 of them don't have cancer, there will still be 99 of those 990 who test positive anyway.
A new study looking for signs of advanced civilizations finds that of a sample of 100,000 galaxies, there are no signs of a K-3 civilization. Study summarized here. The text of the actual study seems to be not yet available (at least I couldn't find it online). This is additional strong evidence for a Great Filter at a very worrying scale.
In case you didn't encounter it on Facebook, here is an excellent logic puzzle from Singapore:
Albert and Bernard just became friends with Cheryl, and they want to know when her birthday is. Cheryl gives them a list of 10 possible dates.
May 15, May 16, May 19
June 17, June 18
July 14, July 16
August 14, August 15, August 17
Cheryl then tells Albert and Bernard separately the month and the day of her birthday respectively, so Albert knows the month while Bernard knows the day.
Albert: I don't know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know that Bernard does not know too.
Bernard: At first I didn’t know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know now.
Albert: Then I also know when Cheryl's birthday is.
When is Cheryl's birthday?
(Posted without looking at the replies.)
For Bernard to be unable to determine Cheryl's birthday upon being told the day, the day must be insufficient to specify the month. In other words, the day has to be one of the numbers that appears more than once in the list. This immediately rules out 18 and 19, which both only appear once. Moreover, for Albert to know that Bernard doesn't know Cheryl's birthday, the month he was given must not contain either 18 or 19 as a possible day; otherwise, it would have been possible for Bernard to figure out the month from the date, and Albert could not know that Bernard did not know Cheryl's birthday. This rules out May (which contains 19) and June (which contains 18).
Upon hearing that Albert knew he did not know Cheryl's birthday, Bernard would gain the above information, and know that Cheryl's birthday falls in either July or August. This means that the information he was given must be sufficient to discriminate between these two months, i.e. whatever the day Cheryl gave him, it cannot appear in both months. This rules out 14. The remaining possibilities are July 16, August 15, and August 17.
This is where I got stuck. There doesn't seem to be any more information in the problem that would allow further discrimination between these three possibilities. Moreover, this makes Albert's assertion that he now knows Cheryl's birthday after hearing Bernard absurd; how could he possibly know which month it is?
I'm still unsure how to proceed right now. I'll give it ten or so more minutes of thought, and if I fail to come up with anything after that, I'll look at the answer.
EDIT: Man, I feel stupid. The answer came to me right after I commented, and it turns that my mistake was that I had unconsciously conflated Albert with the reader. The reader doesn't know the month, and therefore without further information, it's impossible to determine which of the three possibilities Cheryl's birthday actually falls on. However, Albert does know the month, and whichever one it is, it cannot contain more than a single possible day for Cheryl's birthday (because if it did, Albert wouldn't be able to tell which day it was). Of the set of possibilities I had originally {July 16, August 15, August 17}, the month of August contains two possible days--so if Cheryl's birthday were in August, Albert would not know whether it was August 15 or August 17. Therefore, Cheryl's birthday must fall in July, and so the answer is:
July 16
(META: That was pretty fun! We should do this more often.)
Perhaps a monthly puzzle thread.
SPOILER ALERT:
Here is the solution I just came up with.
1) Albert says "I don't know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know that Bernard does not know too."
If the birthday had been May 19 or June 18, then Bernard would have known it immediately after being told the day, because those days only appear once. In order for Albert to know this about Bernard's knowledge, he must know that the month is not May or June. (Becuase if the month was either may or June, Bernard might know the birthday right away). Therefore the birthday is not in May or June.
2) Bernard says: "At first I didn’t know when Cheryl's birthday is, but I know now."
After Albert gives Bernard the information that it is either July or August, Bernard learns the exact date. This indicates that the day is not the 14th, because the 14th is present in both July and August. In order for Bernard's information to not remain ambiguous, it must be one of July 16, August 15, or August 17, because those three have a unique day value out of the remaining possibilities.
3) Albert says: "Then I also know when Cheryl's birthday is." This indicates that for our three remaining possibilities, the month is not ambiguous, and therefore it must be July. (Because August had two possibilities left, while July had one). Therefore the birthday is on July 16.
I found it fairly easy, but I am experienced with logic puzzles, including those where characters in the puzzle use their knowledge about the knowledge of others in the puzzle in order to solve it. If someone wasn't experienced with these kinds of logic puzzles it would probably seem very hard. (The first time I encountered one of these I think I agonized over it for many hours).
Instead of writing spoiler alert using rot13 is better.
This is known as a "common knowledge" puzzle. For an example of a much more difficult (IMO) puzzle involving common knowledge, take a look at this one. (Although my admission here that the puzzle involves common knowledge might actually make it significantly easier.)
Can it be solved using probabilities? I mean, if, for example, the Guru says 'I see nobody on this island who has blue eyes', then the whole 100 brown-eyed people can pack and leave at once. If the Guru says 'I see at least one blue-eyed person' AND thereare two BE present, neither of them leaves that night and so next morning they both know they are BE and can leave the following night, and so on?
The approach you describe is sensible, but I don't see what it has to do with probabilities; all the probabilities involved are either 0 or 1.
I mean, the 'perfect logicians' part put me into thinking like '...and if there are 3 BlE and 100 BrE, and the Guru says 'I see at least 1 BlE', then at that moment each one of the three BlE thinks there's 2/3 chances she means either of the other two, so next time just before noon, when they converge again, one of the three BlE finds the other two and goes away without saying anything. Then if next morning the two others are found to have left, he knows he's chance of being the only BlE left has gone up and presents himself for inspection. When he is confirmed as BlE, next time it automatically releases all BrE. Now let's consider the case of four BlE present...' etc. I doubt it can be done easily for large groups of people, though, unless they cooperate. The easiest way to do it is to appear before the Guru in pairs:)
Another one that seems of similar difficulty to Cheryl's birthday is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_Three_Children_puzzle (the article contains spoilers):
What are the ages of the children?
I actually remember finding blue eyes easier than three children, but I don't remember my relative ages when I first heard them, and I discussed both with my family at the time. But blue eyes had an "obvious" approach which worked after routine application, and three children/Cheryl require you to extract a different insight from every step of the puzzle.
I found it easy enough to solve (the same way you did), and I'm not very experienced with logic puzzles. Solving it instead of giving up and looking up the answer made me feel good!
Raymond Smullyan calls these sorts of puzzles (where characters' ability to solve the puzzle is used by the reader to solve the puzzle) "metapuzzles". There are some more examples in his books.
August 17?
Edit: I made the mistake of discarding June but not May.
SPOILER: here is why it's not Aug 17.
Is there a knockdown general argument against "blind" AI boxing as a general strategy?
For example, what is wrong with the following strategy:
The (probable) uFAI is instantiated inside a sandboxed virtual environment. The uFAI is tasked with optimizing for the revealed preferences of a species of complex but nonsentient artificial life form that lives inside the virtual environment.
As a Boxing technique we have the following:
Assume the AI is smart enough to figure out it's in a box; explicitly penalize its objective function for any changes it makes to the outside world.
Give the artificial life forms an explicit preference that the external world (if one exists) remain causally pristine.
Provide at least one layer of virtual sandboxing. In other words, the simulation is itself running on a software simulation of a computer embedded in some simple artificial physics. If the behavior of the simulated computer deviates in any statistically detectable way from the behavior of a control, the box is terminated.
The AI is given a specific, relatively short time window in which to complete its task. (This can be built directly into the objective function.) After that time, the simulation is ended and the scientists look only at what the AI did inside the box in order to optimize for the values of the artificial agents.
If the uFAI has not done something horrific inside the box, run the experiment again with slightly more earth-like simulated physics and slightly more human-like artificial agents. Gradually observe what kinds of solutions it comes up with. If it has done something horrific, modify its source and start over.
Problems I notice immediately: I've committed the sin of trying to specify AI behavior with English sentences. I've also exposed the scientists to Basilisks, etc., but if the time-preference is implemented right, the AI should have no motive to leave cognitive bombs. Also the AI should have no clue what humans are like unless the layered boxing strategy has already failed. Finally, I'm leaving the implementation of advanced uFAI generated solutions in the hands of the human operators.
All that said - again, is there a general reason why boxing can't work as a path to experimenting on uFAI?
These two things seem to contradict each other. How should AI both complete a task for you and not influence you causally?
Exactly. Any observations you make on the AI, essentially give it a communications channel to the outside world. The original AI Box experiment chooses a simple text interface as the lowest bandwidth method of making those observations, as it is the least likely to be exploitable by the AI.
Maybe it is worth repeating here:
I think the reason it took so long to discover "the map is not the territory" is that it is applied atheism. To a theist, the map in god's mind caused the territory to happen, so that map is even more real than the territory. And every human map is as accurate as it approaches the primordial divine map (or Platonic Forms), the fact that it also happens to predict the terrain merely being a nice bonus. Even Einstein seems to have believed something like this.
To invent "the map is not the territory" you not only need to be an atheist, you need to be an experienced, confident atheist who can figure out what follows from it, and have balls/ovaries of steel to challenge about one and half millenia of quasi-Platonic intellectual tradition of philosophy and science which was about looking for the primordial map.
This becomes intuitively obvious if you think about something artificial, like a house. I make a design of a living room 4m by 5m accross and draw a blueprint. Based on this blueprint, a hundred houses are built, but as bricklayers are not surgically precise and kinda drunk, one house will have a 3.99m x 5.01m living room, another one 4.02m x 4.99m and so on. A century later the town crumbles and a thousand year after that archeologists try to dig it out. What are they going to do? Just measure every room and leave it at that, or rather consider these variously sized rooms are actually 4m x 5m rooms, just inaccurately built? Will they try to figure out the idea, the blueprint behind it, the primordial map that created the terrain? The 4m x 5m map they themselves draw will not be accurate to the terrain, but it is the terrain that they will consider inaccurately implemented, not the map, they will think they have found the primordial map, blueprint, that was inaccurately followed (correctly). And that is largely how theistic science worked. We assumed there is a primordial map. We assumed reality has a blueprint, and we tried to find the blueprint, not simply figuring out reality. Saying the map is not the terrain is another way of saying there is no primordial blueprint, no creator god.
This is why it took so long IMHO.
I think you'd like Why We Keep Asking “Was Machiavelli an Atheist?”, about how really hard and slow the path to atheism was.
However, I don't think it took atheism to get to "the map is not the territory". I think it's just difficult for people to realize that their thoughts are a very incomplete description of the world-- the stuff in your head feels so plausible.
Why do you think it was not necessary for it? To me it is the discovery vs. invention problem. With theism truths are made by discovery, truth is the information that is closest to the priomordial information of the thoughts of the creator, the primordial blueprint. Without theism, truths are simply models, tools, handy little gadgets used for prediction and invented, not discovered.
There's a tradition which focuses on God being unknowable, so I think people who believed that could think that human maps are not the territory.
Even if such a map would exist we could only have a map of that map in our head.
Even today a lot of physicist use "natural law" in a way where they aren't clear about map/territory distinctions.
But maps of maps are supposed to be potentially 100% accurate i.e. being copies of each other? Are you saying lossless copying is not possible through the senses?
If I read text and as a result neurons in my brain fire those two maps of ideas aren't identical copies of each other. Translating from one medium into another isn't loseless.
More fundamentally the point is that consciousness of abstraction isn't only important when you go from x to m(x) but also when you go from m(x) to n(m(x)). "consciousness of abstraction" is a term from Alfred Korzybski Science and Sanity which coined "the map is not the territory". An important part of sanity is to be conscious about the abstraction on which one operates.
As a computer programmer you might have a lot of levels:
Specification for the software, Scala code, Java Code, Assembler Code, Machine Code, the actual execution of the code.
If you ask a question such as "did autism increase in the last three decades" it's important to be conscious of what abstraction of autisms you are thinking about. There the number of autism diagnosis done by doctors. There an official definition of what autism happens to be. There's also a physical state of brains that corresponds to autism.
Consciousness of abstraction is also important when talking about things like inflation or unemployement. Official inflation numbers is a map of a more abstract inflation concept. Different countries measure their inflation slightly differently.
It's not only about god. Humans have direct immediate access to the contents of their own maps, while all information about the territory is suspect because it comes through the unreliable senses. This can easily lead a wannabe philosopher to stop trusting their senses and treat their own mind as a trustworthy separate magisterium (because they have a separate access to its contents).
Attributing the same thing to god is merely a patch to the problem of "my mind (but not yours) is special to me, your mind (but not mine) is special to you, but speaking objectively, maybe minds really are not special at all". You can avoid this conclusion by making a logical jump to "well, it's the God's mind that is really really special!"
But this does not actually address the essence of the problem, which is that my (human) mind is not special, and... well, the whole chain of thought was started by the assumption that it was. So when we know the original idea was wrong, why follow the chain at all?
(Funny thing is, living things are built from DNA blueprints like you described, so that means that ironically evolution is the only place where the idealistic approach is kinda correct. The only problem is that the blueprints themselves are also subject to change.)
If I remember correctly, it was Dawkins who argued that DNA is not a blueprint in a strict sense, but rather a recipe, in the sense that just by looking at the genes you can predict which phenotypes they will produce, but the process requires specific sequences of steps and on/off switching of genes, with the result that just by looking at the phenotype you cannot deduce what the genes looked like.
Yes. That was an oversimplification. In reality, what exactly will the DNA produce depends on... many things, probably even including small changes in temperature.
In the previous Open Thread, the following claim was made:
This kind of attitude seems to be widespread, but it doesn't ring true to me. Most obviously, I have a transactional attitude towards my relationship with Tesco; this doesn't cause me anxiety that Tesco feels the same, or worry that I'm not getting a better deal. If Sainsbury's offers me a sufficiently better deal, I won't worry, I'll just switch my weekly shop.
But more deeply, I have a transactional attitude towards my relationship with my fiancee. I'm with her because she makes me happy, and because I enjoy spending time with her, and because she seems like a good investment. And I do the same for her. It's a transaction. Now, there is a difference between my attitude to her and my attitude to Tesco, in that I have created a lot of relationship capital with her, so I wouldn't leave her just because of a seemingly slightly better option elsewhere, as I would with Tesco. But that just means it's a long-term transaction. Similarly, I wouldn't change my job as easily as my supermarket, but my relationship with my employer (not even a human being!) is definitely transactional.
It seems to me that every relationship, whether romantic, friendly, business, or whatever else, is, at bottom, transactional; the question is always "What do I get out of it?" It doesn't have to be money, and it doesn't have to be an immediate pay-off, but if it's not there then why are you wasting your time?
Am I missing the point here? Is anyone able to defend the idea that you shouldn't look at relationships in a transactional way?
Well, I would say that I find the dichotomy (transactional vs. non-transactional) to be... maybe not outright wrong, but not useful.
From my point of view a healthy, successful relationship has both aspects. On the one hand, if one of you is getting nothing (or not enough) out of that relationship, that's not good news. It can be overcome in the short term, but is likely to lead to bad outcomes in the long term. On the other hand, I think good relationships are ones where you genuinely like your partner and are willing to do things just to make them happy. As a terminal goal and not just because you expect to get something for yourself out of it.
A purely transactional relationship is too fragile, it does not develop enough trust and so enough resilience to survive challenges and stormy patches.
This is not to say that transactional relationships (e.g. "trophy wives") cannot be successful. They certainly can, but I don't think they are optimal for both parties.
That's fair enough.
It's funny. My stereotypical image of a transactional relationship is one where both parties love spending time with the other. And because they are both getting so much out of the relationship it will be an incredibly secure one. My stereotypical image of a "trophy wife" situation is much closer to a non-transactional one - some wealthy man is infatuated with a woman for no reason, he doesn't really get anything out of it, dislikes many of the things she does and having to give her money etc, but goes along with it for reasons he can't quite articulate.
We probably have somewhat different frameworks in mind and use the terms in slightly different meanings here. I don't think it's worth the time to get very precise, but there is a whiff of a definitions debate in this subthread.
I don't think so, but you're already discussing it with gjm.
"Infatuated with no reason" is just romantic love, often defined as "temporary insanity" :-D I think of trophy wives as a very clear transaction: the guy gets a pretty face and body, energetic sex, a symbol of high status. The girl gets lifestyle which she wouldn't be able to have on her own (or with a man of her class) and hopes for lots of money -- either as inheritance or as alimony. Personal likeability doesn't matter much as long as they don't annoy each other :-/
It will be secure as long as they are both getting so much out of the relationship.
Now suppose their circumstances change so that this is no longer true, in some asymmetrical way; e.g., one partner is seriously injured in a car crash and (e.g.) requires care that's burdensome to the other, or suffers brain damage that changes their personality, or is disfigured and loses the physical attractiveness that was important to the other partner, or something.
At this point, it is no longer true that both partners are getting a lot out of the relationship. The still-healthy partner would (aside from any feelings of obligation they may have developed, which if I'm understanding the usage in this thread correctly should not be considered part of a truly "transactional" relationship) be happier without the maimed partner. In a purely transactional relationship, the maimed partner gets thrown out at this point.
That may indeed be better for the still-healthy partner. It's clearly worse for the maimed partner. And it's at least plausible that on the whole it's better for us all if the usual practice in such situations is not for the person who just got maimed in a car crash to be discarded and left to fend for themselves somehow. And I would guess that most of us who are in long-term relationships hope that our partner wouldn't do that if we suffered some such disaster.
No relationship is secure against any and all changes. That's absurd. If the universe undergoes heat death, marriages will suffer. But see above for why transactional ones are more stable than non-transactional ones. Which is more common, permanent brain damage to one party in the relationship, or one party in the relationship having a passing fancy for someone else?
I think the intuition that you're getting at with your car crash example, as Caue says above, is that I shouldn't want to leave her in that situation. And that there's something bad/unromantic/unacceptable if I do. But if I still want to stay, we haven't left a transactional relationship at all. The response "Yeah, in those circumstances, the time I spent with my partner would be nightmarish, but I'd stay with them anyway just to make them happy" is equally bad/unromantic/unacceptable. So I don't think non-transactional wins over transactional here.
You also bias the question by the type of change. I think it's no coincidence that you and knb both choose the example of a vehicular accident, where the injured party is presumably innocent. How about if one of the partners is unfaithful, or takes to drugs, or violence, or whatever. If you truly cared about your partner "as an end in herself" you still wouldn't leave. Care to bite that bullet?
Incidentally, I disagree fundamentally about obligation - that's not outside transactional relationships. Indeed, binding your future self is the key to most transactions. If you exchanged vows to stay with the other party in sickness and in health, and then the other party gets sick, you should have to stay (or pay damages) if they get sick. You made a transaction, and you should have to stick to it. Obligation, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any place in a non-transactional relationship; as everyone was acting purely for their own ends to begin with, there can't be any debts or obligations. So if people change their minds, they can just waft out of the relationship and abandon their partner. Yet another reason why a transactional view of relationships promotes stability.
You could make the argument that someone in a relationship in which serious changes have happened should precommit to keep in the relationship even if it changes. The precommitment is bad in the case of some changes, but makes the relationship more stable and reduces the chance of there being such changes in marginal cases (such as one partner becoming incrementally less attractive and the other partner having an incrementally greater chance of cheating on the first partner).
Doing things out of obligation, even though they don't benefit us, is just our way of describing precommitment. And you don't need a transaction to have a precommitment.
Of course, this isn't necessarily correct, because whether this precommitment is overall good or bad depends on the balance between different kinds of cases, which can't be deduced from first principles.
You're right that you don't need a transaction to have precommitment (and precommitment may be good or bad, depending on the circumstances). But transactions make mutually beneficial precommitments more likely. Why should A precommit to stay with B? What's in it for A? But if A precommits to stay with B in exchange for B precommitting to stay with A, now we're cooking with gas.
For the avoidance of doubt: I agree, and I was not in any way making the argument "I can imagine a situation in which a transactional relationship would be imperfectly secure, therefore transactional relationships are bad". Rather, it was: "It seems like in many quite common situations a purely transactional relationship might be less secure than we would like our relationships to be, where a not-so-purely-transactional one would be stronger in a way that's probably better overall".
The latter, obviously. But (1) it's by no means only permanent brain damage that leads to the kind of situation I described and (2) I don't see any reason to think that a purely transactional relationship is more secure against passing fancies than a not-so-purely transactional one.
Bad, yes (in the sense that the policy of abandoning your partner in such situations generally produces net harm and that we'd all be better off if it weren't generally adopted). Unromantic has nothing to do with it (except that if "romantic" is one opposite of "transactional" then the unromantic-ness of abandoning your partner might make less-transactional relationships more secure in such situations). Unacceptable, meh, I dunno; I don't see any reason why you should care whether I accept what you would hypothetically do in that situation or not.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. Perhaps the following questions will help: Do you agree that, other things being equal, a relationship in which neither partner would abandon the other in such a situation is probably a better one overall? What sort of qualities would make a relationship have that property? Are they more or less likely in a purely transactional relationship?
I'm not sure exactly what position you're arguing with and why you think it's my position, but: if my wife (I do, as it happens, have a wife) were unfaithful or became addicted to drugs, I would not necessarily want to end our marriage on that account. I would much prefer to salvage if it possible. (Violence? Not sure. We have a child and keeping the child safe would be important.)
OK, then maybe what I've been understanding by your use of the term "transactional" is different from what you've been meaning to say. I've been assuming it means roughly what knb seems to have meant in the earlier thread (this comment and its grandparent), though actually I'm not sure that that's enough to pin down the relationship between transactionality and obligation.
This
does definitely seem to indicate a difference in meaning, though; I don't see how "non-transactional" implies "everyone was acting purely for their own ends" any more than "transactional" does.
I agree such a relationship is likely better (although not everyone may want such). The most important qualities for such a relationship seems to me to be depth of commitment, and a sense of duty in each partner (to take those commitments seriously). They seem to me to be much more likely in a transactional relationship, where each party commits in return for the other party doing so too, than in a non-transactional relationship, where each party commits by an independent decision, whether or not the other party also commits.
I'm not saying you'd necessarily want to end your marriage on that account. I'm just saying that you might (depending on how you feel about drugs, whether it was salvageable in a manner you considered acceptable, etc). Is there really nothing she could do that would make you say "I've had enough"? Because if you truly cared about her as "an end in itself" then it wouldn't matter what she did. Indeed, even if she ended her relationship with you and took up with someone else, you'd be equally keen to make her happy. Which, frankly, I don't believe. At the very least, if it's true for you, you're an exceptional person. The transactional analysis says that you try to make her happy in exchange for her making you happy. Which is why when one person quits the relationship, the other person finds someone else to have a relationship with. Isn't it miraculous how people change what is their "end in itself" to precisely coincide with their mutual advantage like that!
In a transactional relationship, I promise to do X in exchange for your promise to do Y. So if I do X, and you don't do Y, you owe me. But in a non-transactional relationship as defined above, I don't do X in exchange for Y, I just do X because it makes you happy, which is my "end in itself." You don't owe me anything in return. Maybe you'll do Y because it makes me happy, which is your "end in itself." Maybe not.
This non-transactional model of relationships implies that it's a mere coincidence that couples happen to have each others' happiness as their arational "end in itself." It's not a good model of most relationships, and while it may apply to some relationships, those are clearly unhealthy.
This simply isn't true. I can value X "as an end in itself" and still give up X, if I value other things as well and the situation changes so that I can get more of the other things I value. Something being intrinsically motivating doesn't mean it's the only motivating thing.
If you mean logically implies, this also simply isn't true.
It might instead, for example, be a result of being in a relationship... perhaps once I become part of a couple (for whatever reasons), my value system alters so that I value my partner's happiness as an "arational "end in itself." " It might instead be a cause of being in a relationship... I only engage in a relationship with someone after I come to value their happiness in this way. There might be a noncoincidental common cause whereby I both form relationships with, and to come to value in this way, the same people.
More generally... I tend to agree with your conclusion that most real-world relationships are transactional in the sense you mean here, but I think you're being very sloppy with your arguments for it.
You may want to take a breath and rethink how much of what you're saying you actually believe, and how much you're simply saying in order to win an argument.
Good thing I never said that. The question is not "Is there anything a partner can do to make you end the relationship," it's "is there anything a partner can do to affect your desire for their happiness." If your desire for their happiness really is intrinsically motivated, then the answer to (2) is "no." But no-one believes that's healthy.
"Logical implication" is emphatically not the ordinary use of the word implies. And you know that.
I'm not as smart as you to understand which of my positions are so flawed that I deserve to be belittled like that for advancing them. Fool that I am, I believe them all.
OK. My apologies. As you were.
Suppose she gets hit by a bus and is now disabled. You calculate that she is no longer a good investment. Do you shrug and write her off as degraded capital? A healthy attitude to a relationship makes the other person an end in herself.
Perhaps it is worth noting that many people associated with the PUA/redpill/manosphere subculture are hostile to the notion that people can ever have a non-transactional relationship. But I put very little stock in their opinions.
If circumstances changed sufficiently such that she was no longer a good investment, of course I would end the relationship. Being hit by a bus wouldn't do it, but I can imagine other things that might.
I agree with Caue below; that seems to be the opposite of a healthy relationship.
And not just an unhealthy relationship, but a meaningless and unstable one too. If I really did view my fiancee as an "end in herself", that would mean I wanted to make my fiancee happy for no reason. Why isn't my terminal goal making some other girl happy? Indeed, why isn't my terminal goal making her sad? Or polishing rocks? No reason? This is absurd. And if making her happy is my goal for no reason, who's to say that goal won't switch tomorrow? Our relationship would be as fragile as my fatuous goals. Frankly, I am horrified at the thought of being in a relationship with someone so psychologically imbalanced as to want me to be happy for no reason.
I don't think people really do have "ends in themselves," we aren't like paperclip-maximisers. All our ends are explicable in terms of our other ends, in a complicated tangle. Yes, I want to make my fiancee happy. But I want to make her happy because it deepens our relationship, and makes her better disposed to me, and provides insurance against some time when I screw up in future, and so on.
What does it mean for a person to be an end? In the example, is the end the continuity of the relationship, her happiness, or what?
If the end is the continuity of the relationship regardless of quality, or her happiness regardless of his, it doesn't look very "healthy". But if it's conditional on quality or on his own satisfaction, it doesn't look like the "end".
It means that this person's happiness/wellbeing is your terminal goal.
I was wondering more about the happiness/wellbeing part than the my terminal goal part.
But about that: it would mean it's one of my terminal goals. I'm also not seeing how it would be incompatible with a "transactional relationship".
I feel there's an intended connotation that it should rank high among his terminal goals (in the example, high enough that he shouldn't end the relationship), but this doesn't necessarily follow from "seeing her as an end in herself".
(I think the "intended correct answer" in the scenario is that he shouldn't want to leave her in that situation. This is compatible with him wanting to stay for her sake, but also with him wanting to stay because he would still enjoy being with her. This latter possibility has a better claim to being a healthy relationship than the former, and it's also entirely compatible with a "transactional attitude" as described by Salemicus)
When this topic was raised I tried googling it, and all I found was transactional vs. relation attitudes of businesses to their customers, as a marketing strategy. Basically the major difference seemed to be that a transaction is over once both parties delivered, they try to make that quick to happen, an ideal vendor delivers fast, an ideal customer pays fast, and from that point on they owe each other nothing, not even another transaction. They can do 1000 transactions and still have no loyalty to each other, still willing to do the next transaction with someone else. A relational attitude is more ongoing, has a sense of loyalty, and debts are not necessarily quickly cleared, and even when they are cleared they still feel they mutually owe loyalty. Again, I am talking about how these terms are applied in marketing. E.g. http://www.wizardofads.com.au/transactional-vs-relational-shoppers/
It seems to me that the central idea of the transaction is for both parties to deliver quickly and close the transaction, to get what they want quickly and explicitly not owe anything to each other in order to keep their complete freedom. While a relation can be a long series of I-owe-you, you-owe-me with mutual loyalty, you get what you want, but in many cases you are owed a bit more or you owe a bit more, so more of a dynamic balance.
It seems to me that the essence is that transactional atttitudes aim at freedom, non-attachment, they aim at closing the transaction clearly and clearing all debts, so that both are free to choose without any obligations to each other. This necessarily implies a short-termist attitude. So the rule seems to be "minimize the time transactions stay open", for transactional attitudes. Relations are more okay with open transactions, and probably will not compartmentalize much the mutual services delivered into individual transactions.
I don't fully understand how it works in relationships and sex. Clearly, in prostitution the customer pays either shortly before or shortly after sex was done, in order to minimize the time the transaction stays open. A couple could for example work so that the man wants sex more than the woman, and the woman wants attention and talking more than sex, so they exchange this, and my hunch is that a transactional couple would pay quickly so that they can always break up without obligations, while a relational couple wound not mind ongoing debts, and would not probably account for debts as such, they would probably not say "we are having more sex than I want so now you must talk to me more than you want" but more likey they would understand the situation as both, in an ongoing way, trying to provide what the other wants, and no accounting or clearing of debts happen.
For a transaction to be a transaction, the things exchanged need to be split up into commensurable packages, €2 for a beer or a favor for a favor or fifty minutes of attention for a blowjob or something like that. So they know how much payment closes the transaction. I think in relations the whole splitting up does not happen.
For example, if you own a business and hire a manager to run a subsidiary, the general idea is that you are paying enough for him to make a comfortable living and he is working as much as necessary to make the subsidiary run okay, overtime is not specifically accounted or paid for for managers, and there is no specific job description, just do everything to succeed. So the idea is to have the kind of relation where you both provide what the other needs in a general, broad way. While things like paying factory workers per piece or miners per ton or sharecroppers as a share of harvest is more transactional.
It depends on how broadly you view "transactional". I highly doubt the original poster intended it to mean any relationship where both parties derive some benefit. The context was the question of whether to buy the services of a prostitute, and the poster appeared to be distinguishing sex for money from each party having sex for pleasure.
In light of that, suppose we begin with a narrower view and say that a transaction requires each party to exchange some kind of valuable commodity or render a service, then much friendly interaction ceases to be transactional. In general, allotting a certain time period for fun activities is a trade-off you make with yourself. If that time happens to be spent with friends who are all there to have a good time, then no one is really engaging in this kind of transaction with anyone else. Everyone benefits, but there's no real exchange of valuables.
Under this view, a transactional approach to a relationship would be one where every interaction is viewed as an exchange. Consider the gold-digger approach, for example.
I think this approach gives a context where the original statement makes a lot more sense. I'm sure one can find other interpretations of "transactional" that also work.
What specifically is considered a transaction. Let's assume that I am already giving something to the other person. Does it only count as a "transaction" when the other person actively gives something back to me... or is it enough if I for example derive pleasure from helping this specific person, even if the other person does not actively give me anything, even if maybe they are not even aware that I did something for them?
In other words "receiving something in return" does not necessarily imply "the other person paid back somehow". (I could be rewarded by a third party, or by a part of my own mind.) Which one are we talking about?
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/m1p/open_thread_apr_13_apr_19_2015/c9eo
I agree that the "something in return" doesn't have to be from the other person in the relationship. For example, a doctor attending a patient is employed by the hospital, not the patient; she gets nothing from him. Still, it makes sense to view the way they relate to each other as transactional. The patient wants to get well, the doctor wants to get paid.
I agree that people can derive pleasure from helping a specific person. But it's not normally the whole story. What they also want is expressions of gratitude, that person's company, etc. For example, your parents may want to help you, but if you never say thank you, call them or see them, they won't be inclined to help you nearly so much. Human beings are social animals. The "helping" is not the whole, or even the majority, of the story.
What about parent-child relationships? How are (or aren't) they transactional?
ETA: Being with your fiancee makes you happy, so you are with her. Dedication to someone makes others happy, so they stay in relationships regardless of seemingly better deals.
Can you imagine what it could mean to look at relationships in a way that isn't transactional?
My impression of the alternative view is that relationships should be viewed as unconditional expressions of solidarity. Rather like a TV show where no matter the situation, friendship always hangs together. But this seems strange and arbitrary. Why should I show unconditional solidarity with A as opposed to B? I certainly can't do it with both, because A and B hate each other! And even in the most idealistic TV show, transactional analysis is never far away - I'll be there for you, 'cos you're there for me too. In the real world, maintaining relationships is costly, and we need to protect ourselves from freeloaders and PD-defection.
My mental model says that the anti-transactional side is a mixture of:
But all of this posits no rational opposition to my own viewpoint, which is very convenient for me, and not very charitable! So that's why I am asking, to educate myself, and to get a better idea of what other people mean when they say that you shouldn't view relationships as transactional.
Close, but not fully there. The point of a transaction is that the debt is to be paid fairly quickly and it is desired that a state is reached quickly where debts are cleared and thus both are "free", free of obligations, and the parties do not owe each other anything, and thus can decide without obligations whether they want to go on or not. This makes it fairly obviously short-term transactions.
Relationalism is where there is no desire to be free from obligations, no desire to be able to choose any time to end it. Thus debts are not accounted for, just both do what the other wants and it takes as long as they are both happy with what they get and give.
The most tangible difference is in the accounting. In a restaurant you pay for every meal and every time you hand over money it is perfectly which meal you paid for (the recent one, although you could in theory agree in a weekly billing or something), there is a clear accounting what meal is paid and thus the transaction is closed and what is still open because unpaid (or if pre-paid, then undelivered).
A relational version would be constantly supporting someone with money where and if the person needs it, and and the person cooks for you when and if you both feel like, but you do not account for which money is earmarked for which meal. It is more like you continue the relationship as long you feel like the SUM(money out) compares well to the SUM (meals in).
Many relationships involve relationship-specific investments - in which case, the kind of "insurance" you're talking about actually makes a lot of sense. You don't want the other party to break the relationship off on a whim, so you expect them to make some implied pre-commitment or you wouldn't even get involved in the first place. This is a kind of cooperation, in that you're solving a coordination problem, but in practice it works more like a Stag Hunt than a PD. Because as long as the relationship works and the stakes are reasonably equal, there's no reason to deviate.
Do you think that the view that the person who made the statement you quote holds? Do you think that's how they see relationships?
On meditation, also partially replying to this: I think it only works with extremely good posture.
I went to various Buddhist gompas where people just sat down on various sized pillows, teachers told people to have straight backs which is something everybody interprets differently (usually, most people tend to make arched back backs, as it feels like the opposite of slouching) and frankly, not a lot happened.
The place that worked best was a fairly strict mokusho Zen center, where all pillows were stuffed to be high and hard, and it was explained to not just sit on them but actually sit on the ground and use only the edge of the pillow to push our lower hip / pelvis forward, effectively making a posterior pelvic tilt or at least fixing our usual anterior one, shoulders back but not raised (during the session the master pushed my shoulders down several times), mind focused on breathing out while breathing in was automatic, and another neat trick was that instead of using closed eyes, they made us keep the eyes half open looking 45 degree down, which is something actually you can see on old Buddha statues, however, usually it just means looking at things on the ground which is not meditation, and they fixed it by making us sit facing a white wall. That worked, that made me feel "spaced out" fairly fast.
But this was the only one that worked.
I discovered, today, a letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in which he claims that the sun revolves around the Earth:
Does anyone understand what this is trying to argue? I suspect he's saying something analogous to, you know, the universe shifting around the Earth in sync with the sun, which technically makes the sun revolve around the Earth (in a semantical sense). But I'm not confident of that.
Under special relativity, the laws of physics are conserved under translation and Lorentz transformations. There is no privileged position, orientation, or velocity. You could argue that we can't prove that there isn't a specific reference frame that's fundamentally true and that it doesn't just happen to be a specific one you think is cool, but that's almost certainly false.
Under general relativity, the laws of physics are conserved under continuously differentiable functions so long as the spacetime metric is altered accordingly. You can't stick cartesian coordinates in space in a sensible way no matter what, so there's no niceness to preserve. You could pick a reference frame (or whatever they call the general relativity version) where the Earth is in the center and not rotating, and you can't prove that that reference frame isn't fundamental. If you built a computer model of the universe, you could set that as the reference frame and you wouldn't need to add code to make sure it works like you'd have to with special relativity. But even if there really is some fundamentally true point of reference, which isn't necessarily true, it's not going to happen to be that one.
It is funny that he invokes relativity because Galileo invented it specifically to argue that the Earth goes around the Sun.
That the Bible was always right and even science doesn't really contradict it. Yay, Bible!
The steelman version is that (ignoring all other bodies in our solar system), both Sun and Earth actually revolve around their common center of gravity. Saying "Earth revolves around Sun" brings the connotation that the Sun is not influenced by the gravity of Earth, which is not true.
Except that this is unrelated to the theory of relativity (you could get the same conclusion using Newtonian mechanics), and I believe the common center of gravity still happens to be inside the Sun (please correct me if I am wrong).
The common center of gravity is inside the sun. However, the Earth-Sun system also revolves around the center of the galaxy. From that perspective, the main trajectory of the Earth is around the center of the galaxy, but the sun's gravity is deflecting it this way and that. If you plotted the Earth's motion, it would look something like a sine wave wrapped around a giant ellipse around the center of the galaxy. Saying the Earth went around the Sun wouldn't make much sense from this perspective.
The argument being made is that the theory of relativity doesn't give a preferred coordinate system for the Earth-Sun system, so saying "The sun goes around the Earth" is an accurate statement for an observer located on Earth.
In fact, the theory of relativity would say that the question of whether the Earth goes around the Sun or the Sun goes around the Earth is meaningless unless you specify a reference frame ahead of time. There has to be some observer who is observing the motion from a certain reference frame, and if we know the reference frame then we can decide whether the observer sees the Sun going around the Earth, the Earth going around the Sun, both of them going around Mars, etc.
That too.
The laws of physics work in any reference frame (Principle of Relativity). You will make the exact same predictions in a geocentric system as you would in a heliocentric system. The change of coordinates may introduce certain inertial forces and will likely complicate any calculations you wish to perform, but it's perfectly valid.
Not actually valid. You can only shift non-accelerating reference frames without introducing extra gravity sources or fictitious forces. The reference frame of Earth falling around the Sun, and the Sun falling around the Earth, are not equivalent in the way that a frame moving 1000 km/s relative to another is.
If you're dealing with general relativity, there's no way to avoid gravity. You can pick a reference frame where you're not accelerating at the origin, but if you look at a path epsilon away then it will be accelerating against the tidal forces.
What does the research say about the psychosomatic therapies of e.g. Dr. John Sarno? My wife and I both have a lot of stomach issues (my wife's can be quite severe at times) and many friends have suggested psychosomatic therapies. But the therapists are pretty expensive. Is it still worth it?
Perhaps multiple choice tests in schools make people extra susceptible to privileging hypotheses. As a simplified example, if a student’s probability distribution to the answer of a question on a multiple choice test before seeing the choices is uniformly distributed amongst all integers from 1 to n, simply seeing an arbitrary integer as one of the, say, four options in a multiple choice test justifiably increases its probability of being correct to 0.25, a tremendous increase when n is large. Thus, on multiple choice tests, privileging a possible answer being “suggested” by being one of the answers the student can pick is a useful strategy on multiple choice tests, so we need to remember that privileging the hypothesis is not a viable strategy in other contexts. Maybe multiple choice tests aren’t so good after all...
The following are Christian religious teachings which strike me as more rational/empirical than most. Do you detect any reasoning flaws in them?
Q. Is the knowledge of the existence of God a matter of mere tradition, founded upon human testimony alone, until a person receives a manifestation of God to themselves? A. It is.
No one can truly say he knows God until he has handled something.
The beauty of the teachings of the Lord is that they are true and that you can confirm them for yourself.
If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery about it, it would be all reasonable and plain, for there is no mystery except to the ignorant. This we know by what we have learned naturally since we have had a being on the earth.
Their not being able to prevail against it does not prove it to be the Kingdom of God, for there are many theories and systems on the earth, incontrovertible by the wisdom of the world, which are nevertheless false.
What does it mean? What do I need to handle to know God?
It would be beautiful if you could, but alas, either the teachings are not testable, or the test fails, or there is a simpler explanation.
This is true as far as it goes, but note that astrophysicists admire the night sky at least as much as lay folks, despite being able to describe in some detail how the stars shine and galaxies form. So "reasonable" doesn't mean "plain".
I don't understand what this sentence means.
Does this say that one cannot tell the difference between many models giving the same predictions? Then yes, it is pretty reasonable.
Quite the opposite, since the astrophysicists can enjoy the night sky on many more levels than someone who believes that stars are just little holes in the celestial dome, or something. Some of these things we call "stars" are suns (much like our own Sol), but others are galaxies or globular clusters. What sounds more grand and wonderful: "a tiny little light in the sky", or "a gravitationally bound system consisting of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas and dust, and dark matter" ?
Going through in order:
1 is a confession of bad epistemology,
2 is an assertion with no bad epistemology but a wrong premise,
3 is a generic wrong assertion with a "and that's beautiful" tacked on the front,
4 is a true statement largely independent of religious questions,
5 is good epistemology applied to wrong premises.
Does that engage with what you were asking, or have I misparsed you completely?
Mmm, that might be about right, I'm not clear on a few points.
1 - Is the bad epistemology from an assumption that the teacher here advocates believing in what he calls a mere human tradition (until this manifestation, anyway)?
2 - Do you mean here that the form of the teaching is sound, but that you believe it could never practically apply, because there is not God that you could hold off on "truly knowing" until you met and felt him?
3 - Ah, here, I do believe we have a misunderstanding. My question is if you detect anything wrong with the form of the assertion. If the way of thinking is irrational, rather than the implied belief it's being applied to.
4 - I think your answer here was good, thanks :)
5 - I think you're good here. Just to confirm I'm understanding, you mean that the form of the assertion is rational, but that the specific implied belief accompanying it is false, yes?
Thanks much, I appreciate your brevity.
This should belong to the stupid questions thread but anyway... why don't bars, inns, taverns, pubs, whatevers work in reality the same way they do in fiction, or, better question, under what conditions, when and where do or would they work like that?
You travel to another city on a business trip, say, to visit a trade show the next day. Same country or different doesn't matter but let's assume you speak the language. You check in your hotel. You have a free evening and go exploring. You go to the hotels bar or another bars, inns, taverns, pubs. What will happen? Exactly nothing. You will probably a have a drink or three alone, or if you don't drink alcohol it will be even more boring, have some dinner, perhaps sight-see as long as it is not dark then retire to your room early because you are bored. The point is, nobody will socialize with you, nor give you the signs that you are welcome to socialize with them. You will get to know exactly zero locals. You will not participate in their lives. You will be an outsider, it will feel like staring at an aquarium. You sit in a bar in a corner, nursing a beer, while you watch the locals come and go, greet each other, chat with each other, while they ignore your existence. A pretty sad thing actually. They seem to have zero interest in getting to know a non-local. You may even get suspicious glances, as they are used to knowing all the faces in their bar, or because simply you radiate those I-don't-belong-here signals. A pretty sad thing overall.
In fiction this is so different... not only the lively taverns in Tolkienesque fiction where travellers immediate come together and entertain each other with stories, but even in modern, James Bondesque fiction there are things happening in hotel bars after the elegant secret agent checks in, friends and enemies made, pick-ups attempted and so on. There is a social life going on.
Why is it so, or what conditions would make it different? I have exactly one experience when it was not so. We were in a classic outback, behind the beyond farmer town, and we were 10 people canooing down the river. Apparently people in more boring, small-town places are more interested about outsiders, and larger groups mix easier than one lone traveller with a whole bar. If I remember right, we were largely discussing amongst each other and basically the locals overheard us and pitched in. Perhaps such conversation-starter signals are necessary.
As of now it feels like the precondition for getting to know people is to be with people I already know. This also means sticking to cities where acquaintances live in. This sounds too limiting.
I don't know anything about bars, but I have pretty bad social anxiety and that describes my situation everywhere. On the other hand my dad will often start conversations with random strangers wherever he goes. Not at bars, just random people going about their day. He has zero fear of rejection and I never understood how.
There are efforts to make it easier for interested locals to socialize with tourists and foreigners. I joined the Couchsurfing group in our city and they host weekly drinks at local pubs/bars to get exactly this type of socializing to happen, and it seems to be very successful. When you explicitly set the mood to 'meet new people from around the world', you get a lot of interaction, as opposed to the usual mood in pubs, which is 'getting drinks with friends after work.'
Interesting, it sounds like Couchsurfing became sort of a big thing? In my mind it was always fringe, because I assumed not so many people would be willing to endure the awkwardness of accepting a favor from complete strangers when a hostel bed is not expensive at all, for people who can afford plane tickets, I mean. I mean accepting a favor of getting a bed for free instead of renting one in a hostel sounded to me always very much like panhandling, beggaring, and thus shameful and awkward, but maybe I am seeing it differently, at 37 it is getting harder to understand the mentality of people much younger. I think 15 years ago my generation would have seen this as beggaring...
There are various reasons people do it, not all of them have to do with cost. However, many of the participants in the 'socializing' sessions don't actually participate in the actual couchsurfing bit, and that's fine.
I think there is a growing trend toward social atomization/social withdrawal that makes these kinds of interactions less likely than they were in the past.
As a kid, I remember biking around with friends to different neighborhoods, meeting different groups of kids of varying ages, playing elaborate, adventurous games we had invented, going to their houses, going to different shops and arcades, deciding on fun activities to do together, etc. Visiting the old neighborhoods near where I grew up, I almost never see kids. It's not that there are zero kids in the neighborhood anymore(though there are fewer, certainly), but they're either cooped up at home or being chauffeured to their scheduled playdates by "helicopter parents."
I wonder how parents have time for that. Since I rarely get home from work before 18:30, we ended up finding a kindergarten near where my wife works and we are very lucky that we live in Austria and there is a law that mothers can choose their own hours of working freely until their children are 6. She will choose 5 hours a day and that will be compatible with a kindergarten schedule. But if different legislation or financial needs required us to work 8 hours both, I have no idea how would be manage. I know in the US a lot of women simply stay at home but I guess you need to be significantly rich for that like making 3 or 4 times the minimum wage and it is pretty rare here, even in engineering etc. jobs. The pay difference between a burger flipper and accountant here is about 2x. Besides, our experience is that it made my mother hugely depressed to have nobody to talk to half day and then the child only the other half, and the first year of staying at home before kindergarten is making my wife similarly depressed, the utter lack of communication and socialization and basically feeling like locked into an apartment like locked into a monastery is taking a huge psychological toll. It can be incredibly lonely. For this reason I think helicopter parenting will not be an issue for us because we will be at work, even if we could financially afford not to, the simple truth is you can talk to people at work and talking people at home in the neighborhood is almost impossible.
Random ideas:
No, the problem of moms staying at home is the same as the problem of unemployed people: their friends or relatives are all at work.
Any friends in different time zones? Oops, USA probably wouldn't work because 12:00 in Vienna = 3 AM in San Francisco. You would probably need someone in India or China. Okay, this is probably not a good idea. On the other hand, maybe you could pay someone in India to talk with you.
Other friends who are also moms at home? Former classmates?
This happens? I guess then we must not be very social people. Friend is a matter of definition, there is one non-relative who relatively frequently calls her the phone, for me that is zero but OK as never pick up the phone anyway, and she has about two, I have about three non-relatives who reply to emails or facebook messages although rarely initiate the exchange themselves. I guess these people can be considered friends, but the definition may vary. In my experience, socializing with people at work does not carry over into socializing after work, I think people guard their privacy rather jealously and we too, I remember two occasions in five years non-relatives entering our apartment and it felt awkward for both. For this reason, as socializing with coworkers does not carry over into evenings, and not really having hobbies or meeting people after work, the people mentioned above who can be defined as friends are former classmates, and as we approach 40 that kind of number naturally reduces.
This is why it is very important to not stay home from work. BTW my mothers case was exactly the same in the 1980's, staying at home and occasionally talking on the phone with 1-2 ex-classmates, so she welcomed when she was offered to open a fast food stand and talk to customers. Socializing at work and being home with the family in the evening and weekends can be a tolerable combination. No idea what would be more than tolerable, I always figured it is more natural to hang with relatives, perhaps kinship based tribes should be reinvented. (Not necessarily about "blood", but more about having shared role models and so on.)
I've seen occasional suggestions that extended families are having a renaissance in the UK & US, if that counts.
What? Having friends, or having friends in different time zones?
a) Yes, it does.
b) In general population, I would guess it doesn't; unless there are specific circumstances, e.g. your relatives moved to a different part of the planet. But here on LessWrong we have an international community, and some people visit meetups in different countries. There are probably only a few who have travelled to a sufficiently distant time zone. But you don't have to be one of those; only to be a friend with one of those.
Sure; if we taboo "friends" it means something like "people whom you trust enough to do together X". For different values of X you get different sets of people. (X = "have fun together" or X = "start a conspiracy to overthrow the government")
Similar for me, 2 exceptions in 20 years.
I usually socialize with my neighbors, with people I have or had some hobby in common (such as LessWrong), and sometimes I meet friends of my friends and they become my friends.
Of course with my neighbors the expectations are low: generally just being nice to each other in case someone will need a little help from the other, and to keep communication lines ready in case there will be a shared problem to solve. Saying hello to each other, bringing cookies, sharing a glass of wine once in a few months. With people I found through my hobby I expect to talk about the hobby, and later about other topics; and if the relations are good, maybe even spend some vacation together.
I was thinking along similar lines once, but almost everyone from my family lives in a different city than me, so it's not an option. But generally, "relatives" and "friends" are two different categories; I cannot realistically expect my relatives to have similar hobies as I do. With them, it is a different way of spending time; just being together, being a tribe. With friends, it is talking about hobbies, making hobby-related plans, and later also being a kind of a tribe -- though this part is more difficult because "clicking together as friends" is less transitive relation than "being related by blood". There are many situations where I am friends with X and Y, but X and Y do not like each other. (So I cannot convert "having 2 friends" into "having a tribe with 3 members".)
I think the business-travel milieu is the main obstacle here, though I can't rule out quirks of your psychology.
When I go to another city for pleasure rather than business, I find myself far more willing to approach people and the people I approach far more receptive. I don't know exactly why, and I don't know how well it generalizes, but I suspect it has something to do with mostly-subconscious differences in attitude driven by contextual explore/exploit wiring in my head. Big city vs. small town doesn't seem to make much of a difference, although some towns are friendlier than others. (For context, I'm neither particularly extroverted nor particularly introverted.)
Business travel is another story. Hotel bars for business travelers aren't geared toward random socialization in the first place, but more importantly I don't think they set off the same unfamiliarity signals, likely because cube farms and airports and midrange contemporary hotel bars look the same from Manila to Milan; it's less like conventional travel and more like a trip into the Business Class Dimension.
My advice: get out of the hotel, get out of the hotel district, and go looking on Yelp or the local equivalent for a popular night spot that suits your goals and personality. (I've had good luck near local universities; YMMV.) You won't be as hammered with unfamiliarity as you would be if you were traveling on your own time, but the locals won't be expecting interchangeable business travelers and you'll probably get a little further out of that headspace yourself.
Less serious answer: If you walk into a bar wearing ringmail under a travel-stained cloak and loudly ask the bartender, "What news from the North?" you may actually entice people to approach you. Likewise if you're wearing a tuxedo for no apparent reason. But nobody cares about some tired-looking guy in wrinkled khakis.
More serious answer: I've known two or three individuals in my life who were so shameless in engaging with strangers that they could legitimately go into any random bar and in short order they were the life of the party. This requires a rare type of extreme extroversion that I've often envied.
Addressing the actual question: Currently most bars are implicitly meant to be either gathering places for small groups of friends or places for opposite-sex courtship stuff. Structural changes that would motivate a more fictionesque milieu would be providing long trestle tables and a corresponding lack of private booths, more open-form, quick games to play (less billiards, more darts), "group rate" alcohol (pitchers of beer rather than individual mugs always promote sharing), and I daresay marketing the tavern as a place specifically for open socialization could help.
In my experience hostels are a lot more like the fictional bars you describe.
I can confirm this. I stayed in a hostel in London for a week last month, and got way more social interaction than I was expecting and about as much as my introverted self could stand. Including one invitation to dinner that may or may not have been a date.
At science fiction conventions.
At Esperanto meetings.