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Most if not all of the great X are notable for being extremely intelligent. For any X to arrive at the very top you probably also need to be smart.
Rappers are much more cerebral than football players, as a class, as a profession, as an endeavor. There's no rationalizing around this.
The thing that "average" people need isn't so much a textbook as a recognition that maybe intelligent people are better role models than the latest football star or rapper.
If you don't have the status the advice that you are giving won't be heard.
Rappers are probably a bad example. Most if not all of the great rappers are notable for being extremely intelligent, especially in the sense that IQ measures.
In response to
Tell Culture
I'm, 'gratified' I guess, to see other comments here about autism. As I read through the post, I immediately began having the impression that "rationalist community" was being used like a euphemism for "community with high rate of autism". I know it isn't, literally, but there are aspects of rationalism and this type of explicit communication that I have always thought of as 'gifts' that people on the autism spectrum bring to humanity.
In response to
I attempted the AI Box Experiment again! (And won - Twice!)
At the risk of sounding naive, I'll come right out and say it. It completely baffles me that so many people speak of this game as having an emotional toll. How is it possible for words, in a chat window, in the context of a fictional role-play, to have this kind of effect on people? What in god's name are you people saying to each other in there? I consider myself to be emotionally normal, a fairly empathetic person, etc. I can imagine experiencing disgust at, say, very graphic textual descriptions. There was that one post a few years back that scared some people - I wasn't viscerally worried by it, but I did understand how some people could be. That's literally the full extent of strings of text that I can remotely imagine causing distress (barring, say, real world emails about real-world tragedies). How is it possible that some of you are able to be so shocking / shocked in private chat sessions? Do you just have more vivid imaginations than I do?
I don't think describing the experience itself is very helpful to answering the question.. The comment seems as close to an answer of "yes, it's likely you would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual or some other nonsense" as someone would actually give, but because of the vagueness that seems to be intrinsic to descriptions of the experience of a trip, I'm not even sure if you're espousing such things or not.
In my experience, it is possible to bring parts of the experience back and subject it to analytical and critical thinking, but it is very challenging. The trip does tend to defy comprehension by the normal mode of consciousness, which is why descriptions have the quality you call "vagueness". In short, distilling more than "irreducibly spiritual nonsense" from the trip takes work, not unlike the work of organizing thoughts into a term paper. It can be done, and the more analytical your habits of thought to begin with, the more success I think you could expect.
In response to
Yet more "stupid" questions
Is LSD like a thing?
Most of my views on drugs and substances are formed, unfortunately, due to history and invalid perceptions of their users and those who appear to support their legality most visibly. I was surprised to find the truth about acid at least a little further to the side of "safe and useful" than my longtime estimation. This opens up a possibility for an attempt at recreational and introspectively therapeutic use, if only as an experiment.
My greatest concern would be that I would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual, or some other nonsense. That I would end up sacrificing a lot of epistemic rationality for some of the instrumental variety, or perhaps a loss of both in favor of living off of some big, new, and imaginary life changing experience.
In short, I'm comfortable with recent life changes and recent introspection, and I wonder whether I should expect a trip to reinforce and categorize those positive experiences, or else replace them with something farce.
Also I should ask about any other health dangers, or even other non-obvious benefits.
I won't be able to do it justice in words, but I like to try.
If you value your current makeup as a "rationalist" - LSD will not necessarily help with that. Whatever your current worldview, it is not "the truth", it is constructed, and it will not be the same after you come down.
You can't expect a trip to do anything in particular, except maybe blow your mind. A trip is like finding out you were adopted. It's discovering a secret hidden in plain sight. It's waking up to realize you've never been awake before - you were only dreaming you were awake. It's finding out that everything familiar, everything you took for granted, was something else all along, and you had no idea.
No matter how much you've invested in the identity of "rationalist", no matter how much science you've read... Even if you know how many stars there are in the visible universe, and how many atoms. Even if you've cultivated a sense for numbers like that, real reality is so much bigger than whatever your perception of it is. I don't know how acid works, but it seems to open you in a way that lets more of everything in. More light. More information. Reality is not what you think it is. Reality is reality. Acid may not be able to show you reality, but it can viscerally drive home that difference. It can show you that you've been living in your mind all your life, and mistaking it for reality.
It will also change your sense of self. You may find that your self-concept is like a mirage. You may experience ego-loss, which is like becoming nobody and nothing in particular, only immediate sensory awareness and thought, unconnected to what you think of as you, the person.
I don't know about health dangers. I never experienced any. Tripping does permanently change the way you view the world. It's a special case of seeing something you can't un-see. Whether it's a "benefit" ... depends a lot on what you want.
In response to
Reply to Holden on 'Tool AI'
Folks seem to habitually misrepresent the nature of modern software by focusing on a narrow slice of it. Google Maps is so much more than the pictures and text we touch and read on a screen.
Google Maps is the software. It is also the infrastructure running and delivering the software. It is the traffic sensors and cameras feeding it real-world input. Google Maps is also the continually shifting organization of brilliant human beings within Google focusing their own minds and each other's minds on refining the software to better meet users' needs and designers' intentions. It is the click data collected and aggregated to inform changes based on usage patterns. It is the GIS data and the collective efforts and intentions of everybody who collects GIS data or plans the collection thereof. It is the user-generated locale content and the collective efforts of everyone contributing that data.
To think of modern distributed software as merely a tool is to compartmentalize in the extreme. It is more like a many-way continuously evolving conversation among those creating it, between those creating it and those using it, and among those using it - plus the "conversation" from all the sensors, cameras, robots, cars, drivers, planes, pilots, computers, programmers, and everything else feeding the system data, both real-time and slow-changing. Whether the total system is "an agent" seems like a meaningless distinction to me. The system is already a continually evolving sum of the collective, purposeful action of everybody and everything who creates and interacts with Google Maps.
And that's just one web service among thousands in a world where the web services interact with each other, the companies and individuals behind them interact with each other, and so on. Arguing about the nature of the thingy on the phone or the monitor does not make any sense to me in light of the 100,000' view of the whole system.
I'm pretty sure this is the most joke-theoretically perfect joke I've ever encountered. Not only did I laugh, but 3 minutes later I was still laughing again for new reasons.
This conclusion is a requirement of actual materialism, since if you're truly materialist, you know that knowledge can't exist apart from a representation. Our applying the same label to two different representations is our own confusion, not one that exists in reality.
It really doesn't have to be a confusion though. We apply the label 'fruit' to both apples and oranges - that doesn't mean we're confused just because apples are different from oranges.
Then he is quite simply wrong. Knowledge can never be fully separated from its representation, just as one can never quite untangle a mind from the body it wears. ;-)
I don't think either I or Dennett made that claim. You don't need it for the premise of the thought experiment. You just need to understand that any mental state is going to be represented using some configuration of brain-stuff...
According to the thought experiment, Mary "knows" everything physical about the color red, and that will include any relevant sense of the word "knows". And so if the only way to "know" what experiencing the color red feels like is to have the neurons fire that actually fire when seeing red, then she's had those neurons fire. It could be by surgery, or hallucination, or divine intervention - it doesn't matter, it was given as a premise in the thought experiment that she knows what that's like.
One way to make such a Mary would be to determine what the configuration of neurons in Mary's brain would be after experiencing red, then surgically alter her brain to have that configuration. The premise of the thought experiment is that she has this information, and so if that's the only way she could have gotten it, then that's what happened.
And so if the only way to "know" what experiencing the color red feels like is to have the neurons fire that actually fire when seeing red, then she's had those neurons fire.
This is going way beyond what I'd consider to be a reasonable reading of the intent of the thought experiment. If you're allowed to expand the meaning of the non-specific phrase "knows everything physical" to include an exact analogue of subjective experience, then the original meaning of the thought experiment goes right out the window.
My reading of this entire exchange has thomblake and JamesAndrix repeatedly begging the question in every comment, taking great license with the intent of the thought experiment, while pjeby keeps trying to ground the discussion in reality by pinning down what brain states are being compared. So the exchange as a whole is mildly illuminating, but only because the former are acting as foils for the latter.
You can't keep arguing this on the verbal/definitional level. The meat is in the bit about brain states.
Call the set of brain states that enable Mary to recall the subjective experience of red, Set R. If seeing red for the first time imparts an ability to recall redness that was not there before, then as far as I'm concerned that's what's meant by "surprise".
We know that seeing something red with her eyes puts her brain into a state that is in Set R. The question is whether there is a body of knowledge, this irritatingly ill-defined concept of "all 'physical' knowledge about red", that places her brain into a state in Set R. It is a useless mental exercise to divorce this from how human brains and eyes actually work. Either a brain can be put into Set R without experiencing red, or it can't. It seems very unlikely that descriptive knowledge could accomplish this. If you're just going to toss direct neuronal manipulation in there with descriptive knowledge, then the whole thought experiment becomes a farce.
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This mucking around with surface connotation has a feel-good quality that I find drastically unappealing and to be avoided like cancer.