Hey guys, I'm fairly new to the rationality community (only at page 350 of the book), but I think I might have experienced a belief in belief in belief. I'm trying not to spend too much time online and this story is a bit embarrassing, but I remember that Eliezer wondered about it so I figured I might as well share.
I have a pretty bad relationship with my father, and I don't think very highly of him. But one thing I notice is that whenever he does something that hurt me/I consider selfish, I'm always scandalized. I tried to figure out why I keep reacting that way, because if you asked me to predict my father's behavior I'll probably come up with something pretty negative. So even if a part of me still hope for a better relationship, It makes no sense for me to be surprised by his behavior.
Then I thought, what if I keep that surprise and anger because a thought of me not being surprised by it, of me being so indifferent to my own father, is monstrous to me? Thinking that I might not be sad at his funeral (not that it's close or anything like that) actually scares me. I don't know how I could live with myself if I truly one hundred percent gave up on my father.
So, it's not that I be...
TL;DR: What are some movements you would put in the same reference class as the Rationality movement? Did they also spend significant effort trying not to be wrong?
Context: I've been thinking about SSC's Yes, We have noticed the skulls. They point out that aspiring Rationalists are well aware of the flaws in straw Vulcans, and actively try to avoid making such mistakes. More generally, most movements are well aware of the criticisms of at least the last similar movement, since those are the criticisms they are constantly defending against.
However, searchin...
The SSC article about omega-6 surplus causing criminality brought to my attention the physiological aspect of mental health, and health in general. Up until now, I prioritized mind over body. I've been ignoring the whole "eat well" thing because 1) it's hard, 2) I didn't know how important it was and 3) there's a LOT of bullshit literature. But since I want to live a long life and I don't want my stomach screwing with my head, the reasonable thing to do would be to read up. I need book (or any other format, really) recommendations on nutrition 1...
A new birth control method for men
"Guha’s technique for impairing male fertility relies on a polymer gel that’s injected into the sperm-carrying tubes in the scrotum."
This looks like a great database conversion tool.
https://flowheater.net/en/about
"The aim of FlowHeater is to offer a simple and uniform way to transfer data from one place to another, providing a simple graphical user interface to define the modifications specific to each data target. No programming knowledge is required to use FlowHeater.."
The Fitter automatically undertakes many necessary modifications according to changes of data environment and there is no need to worry about such conversions, this is especially useful when the data source a...
Just a note for future reference. I am reading an anatomy textbook for students specializing in physical training (future coach's and highschool teachers) and loving it. It is simple, has great imagery without that many images (the section on the muscles that ordinarily tug the thigh inwards but can also help rotate it inwards or outwards makes such a vivid picture, and the one on changes in athletes' diaphragms being more developed and better at keeping their abdominal organs from sliding and putting a load onto the chest cavity when the body is upside do...
Do you know about the excercise "If you could send only one sentence to your former self in the past, what would it be?"
I think I've finally found mine: "there are only two super-power in real life: courage and hard-work."
That is because upon reflection, I've come to the conclusion that I've spent the majority of my teen years feeling inadequate and day-dreaming about super-power, or becoming a secret agent, etc. Only to discover many years later that almost everybody feels inadequate, that I was quite adequate if only I would try, and that if instead of day-dreaming I would have acted, now I would be in a much happier position.
What's Chesterton's Fence for "Don't play with your food"?
I did some thinking and googling and found that...
What reasons am I missing? If you're eating food that doesn't go cold on your own, is playing with your food bad?
Have you recently changed your estimate about the nearest x-risk?
I ended up to believe that now nuclear war > runaway biotech > UFAI, where > means nearer / more probable than.
Possibly, a global nuclear war would not be existential to the point of obliterating humanity, but setting it back a couple of millennia seems to be negative enough to be classified as existential.
As much as the media likes to call North Korea crazy, they're not suicidal. But given their self-inflicted weak position, they're more willing to take extreme risks to survive.
To make a good analysis of what North Korea is likely to do it's helpful to think about it being made of a leadership of humans instead of being an abstract country that makes decisions.
North Korea is very much driven by different North Korean actors having to signal to each other who stronlgy patriotic they are.
At that point, can we trust Russia and China to stay out of it?
Why would we want China to stay out of North Korea in the case of a war? If they put their troops into North Korea to take control of it, that would be a nice outcome. Neither Russia nor China would be interested in having WWIII.
If crushing sanctions don't work, or don't work fast enough, our only option is a preemptive strike.
What exactly do you try to argue here? That you don't know how an effective North Korea policy that uses other tools than military strikes or sanctions looks like?
Q. How hard is it to smuggle a nuke into the country? A. Easy, you hide it in the next bale of marijuana.
Ports do scan for radioactivity. Uranian is also very heavy which provides further ways to detect that a transport of a nuclear weapon.
I'm also not sure about whether North Korea has the capability of making a decision to deploy a nuclear weapon without US and Chinese intelligence agencies getting to know about it.
It's also not the kind of action that's good for signaling purposes. If agency A in North Korea smuggled the nuke and they want to get adminiration from agency B, they have to share information about it. There's also the risk that information about the location of the nuke leakes and the person responsible for the placement of the nuke get's into problems as a result.
Apart from that the fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons is no recent event that warrants any change.
To make a good analysis of what North Korea is likely to do it's helpful to think about it being made of a leadership of humans instead of being an abstract country that makes decisions.
Indeed, when I say "North Korea" I mean the Kim Family Regime. That's the self-inflicted weak position I mentioned. They have to terrorize and indoctrinate the population to stay in power. Any meaningful reforms are poison to the regime, since they prove its illegitimacy. They've painted themselves in a corner. They have to be evil. That's why we can't just hav...
This is the (late) weekly open thread. See the tag. You'd think we could automate this. The traditional boilerplate follows.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "