Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2011 07:37:56AM 3 points [-]

Yeah I realized that myself shortly after writing it, mostly the 'blind monkey' bit.

What do you mean here? You're not the one who wrote that comment.

Comment author: DBreneman 25 November 2011 07:48:37AM 1 point [-]

I mean that I shouldn't have snarked back like that using that language, it was immature. Sorry about that.

... Wow I seem to be getting a lot of downvotes.

Comment author: magfrump 25 November 2011 07:16:04AM 2 points [-]

If I recall correctly I saw a facebook update from Louie Helm stating that he was going to be at Occupy UC Berkeley.

I would suggest that, yes, following the whole occupy movement is important for LessWrongians, and, yes, there is a giant community organization experiment occurring with vital lessons to be learned, and that, yes, summarizing the lessons of these things would make a great sequence of posts and that for that to happen at least someone has to get involved, and that getting involved has the potential to be of great instrumental value.

On the other hand, it is somewhat accepted that talking politics here is likely to bring down the level of the discussion, bring in folk who aren't interested in rationality, and generally is a good way to make Less Wrong more wrong.

I think this would be an excellent topic for meetups, it might be a good idea to try to bring a large LW contingent to another forum for discussing the issues, but I do think divorcing that from the main content of this site is still a good idea.

Comment author: DBreneman 25 November 2011 07:37:36AM 0 points [-]

I joined the BayAreaLessWrong group, but had to move out of the bay area shortly after, and right now I'm way out in the rurals, a long way from any of the meetups. I also imagine that there are a lot of LW readers in similar situations, or who can't regularly attend their local meetup for some reason. Therefore I think if we move the discussion out of LW, it should be to an online forum (easier to do international comparison and organization that way too.)

At the same time, we want to make sure that the LW community at large knows that conversation is happening, so we'd have to advertise the link to that thread/forum pretty well. And extend it to other rationalist communities if we can.

Comment author: magfrump 25 November 2011 07:18:35AM *  3 points [-]

I downvoted this comment because I feel it dives too far into the specific politics of the situation, without being constructive in specific ways. That makes me think it is likely to increase the amount of mind-killing, without really raising the level of the discussion.

EDIT: I am curious why this was downvoted. I was trying to be more polite than offering a simple downvote by offering information which could be used to create more productive comments. If I haven't done that well I'd appreciate a response in kind rather than simple downvotes.

Comment author: DBreneman 25 November 2011 07:25:41AM 0 points [-]

Yeah I realized that myself shortly after writing it, mostly the 'blind monkey' bit.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 25 November 2011 06:45:20AM 1 point [-]

In the sense at least that the Occupy movements' goal is lasting societal change ...

Change is anything different than now; it isn't much of a goal.

A blind monkey could see that something was wrong with trillions of dollars of bailouts and debt assumption. If you're not really identifying what that something is, I don't think you're adding much to the discussion. As it is, the one sided attack on corporate culpability for the mess, while ignoring government's hand in it, leaves me to conclude that any diagnosis they come up with will miss the mark.

The movements I think are worth looking at are the ones that create value, routing around current institutions. Basically all the open source efforts to actually make things by harnessing the cognitive surplus of an increasingly educated and connected world.

Doing is more important than squawking, as long as the regime isn't completely oppressive. The increasing maker culture, bringing technology and design to solve problems, is more transformative than politics as performance self entertainment.

Comment author: DBreneman 25 November 2011 06:52:39AM -2 points [-]

Actually, a lot of the movements have addressed the political source of the problems. Some of them locally (A lot of Occupy Oakland's rhetoric has been against the decisions of the city trade council and its mayor) some of them more universally (occupyDC has drafted a deficit/jobs bill in rough, and is currently petitioning and protesting to get it through, http://october2011.org/99 )

And the squawking itself also serves a purpose. Because a blind monkey sees a lot better than the legislative bodies of most modern nations, if the rhetoric and bills and such are any indication. Sometimes you do have to create a lot of noise to draw attention to a problem.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 25 November 2011 06:35:47AM 8 points [-]

And I'm not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences (I keep getting lost somewhere halfway into the QM sequence,

Skip it. It's the least important of all the sequences.

Comment author: DBreneman 25 November 2011 06:38:35AM 3 points [-]

Oh I've already gone past and read Metaethics and the stuff past it. I just keep coming back to QM because I don't understand it, and I'd very much like to. Partially because I'm interested in how the world works, partially because I just don't like that I don't understand it.

Should LessWrong be Interested in the Occupy Movements?

-7 DBreneman 25 November 2011 06:06AM

Since early October, I've been closely following Occupy Wall Street, and the other protests it spawned.  At first I was interested in it as a sort of social experiment, I've never heard of long-term camping as a means of protest, and I was curious to see how it would work out.  As it's grown though, I've been thinking that there might be a couple of things happening in the movements that might be of interest to rationalist communities.  I've not seen much discussion of Occupy and its tactics on LessWrong, and I think that if nothing else, they're at least interesting, so I thought I'd open it up here.

 

Each Occupy movement is a hotbed of community experimentation.  Things like General Assemblies (horizontally democratic voting discussions to make policy decisions) and ad-hoc sanitation, fire, and security committees of all shapes and sizes are popping up all over.  What's more, as the events grow in size, and as police pressure on the events rises, these constructs are going to be tested more and more.  We have a wildly varied gene pool, strong environmental constraints, and a fast mutation rate.  It's a big evolutionary experiment in community formation.  And I think if we look closely, we can find a whole lot of useful hacks to make stronger communities.

 

The whole thing's a great big ethical, emotional, and legal mess.  There are issues with how private/public property laws intersect with freedom of speech, there are matters of what level of force is justifiable for police to keep peace in certain situations, there're issues of whether health and safety trump rights of protest, on and on and on.  If nothing else, there's an interesting discussion there, about what a truly rational set of laws would look like, and whether or not the protesters or the police are justified in their actions.  

 

And at the risk of sounding like a James Bond villain, there are some serious options for us to take over the world here.  In the sense at least that the Occupy movements' goal is lasting societal change, and they have a good deal of momentum already.  If members of the rationalist community moved to help them, they might have a fair deal more.  And if we introduce them to rational ways of thinking, if we inject those memes into the discussion, there's some serious opportunity here to help stop the world being so insane.

 

At least that's my take on the whole thing.  And I'm not exactly strong in the ways of rationality yet, still reading and re-reading the Sequences (I keep getting lost somewhere halfway into the QM sequence, I think I need to practice mathematics more to understand it on a more instinctive level) and I'd certainly appreciate the view of those Stronger than me.

Comment author: DBreneman 03 June 2011 11:13:31PM 5 points [-]

It's not exactly a textbook series, but I've found the videos at khan academy http://www.khanacademy.org/#browse to be really helpful with getting the basics of a lot of things. The most advanced math it covers is calculus, which will get you a long way, and the language of the videos is always simple and straightforward.

... Guess I need to recommend it against other video series, to keep to the rules here.

I do recommend watching the stanford lecture videos http://www.youtube.com/user/StanfordUniversity?blend=1&ob=5 , but I recommend Khan over them for simplicity's sake on getting the basics. (Then watch stanford for a more complex understanding)

And though it just covers abiogenesis and evolution, cdk007 http://www.youtube.com/user/cdk007?blend=1&ob=5#p/a does have quite a bit of overlap with khan's biology section. But it's a lot more narrow than what khan covers, and pretty much is just there to counter creationists. While that's a pretty good goal, and the videos are good, it's not as good for learning in my opinion.

In response to Church vs. Taskforce
Comment author: DBreneman 11 May 2011 09:37:42PM *  2 points [-]

I think the community that I grew up in might have something that can be looked into as a sort of semi-example. I grew up in a rural town, and it had no shortage of religiosity, but most community events didn't happen at the churches. There were weekly sermons sure, but marriages, town hall meetings, debates, just about any big event would happen at our Grange hall .

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Grange_of_the_Order_of_Patrons_of_Husbandry , it's basically freemasonry for farmers)

The grange serves as sort of a meta-communal arranger of all the sub-communities of the town's religions; we have a dozen flavors of christian including catholic and jehova's witnesses, mormons, quite a few jewish people, a very few muslims, and even less atheists. But all of those groups have sub-populations belonging to the Grange, and they all get along at grange meetings fairly well. It's like it was a neutral ground, where they could all go to get things done.

Probably not a perfect example, but it's the cached thought that came to my mind as an example when i was reading this.

Comment author: Emile 26 April 2011 12:29:15PM 1 point [-]

Welcome! 'nother Programmer here, and game maker too (I think there are a few of us here). D'you have any nice games to show?

Comment author: DBreneman 26 April 2011 12:34:48PM 1 point [-]

Just a (very primitive) version of Space Hulk I made in school and a metroid-vania style platformer that never reached completion before the team split. I'm still building up a website for myself and a couple of my fellow designers (www.selfemployedheroes.com) that I'll post them to as soon as I can.

Not much I know, but I literally just graduated at the end of February. Still hunting for that first job where I can really make a name for myself.

Comment author: DBreneman 26 April 2011 12:03:49PM 12 points [-]

Hi there everyone, I'm a programmer by trade and a video game maker by inclination. I first ran across Less Wrong while random-walking through tvtropes. I read a little of it, found it daunting but fascinating, and it... sat in my bookmarks for about a year after that.

Later, I random-walked upon Harry Potter atMoR, and it rekindled my interest. I'd read a chapter, get on lesswrong, and try and find all the tricks that harry (or other characters) used for that chapter. It was still slow going, because I wanted not just to read the material, but to absorb it and become stronger (Tsuyoku Naritai!)

I... pretty desperately needed it. I grew up in a rural community with an absolutely abhorrent school system, even by the standards of the american school system. I had a middle-school understanding of math and logic going into college, and am still recovering from the effects of a bad start (Bayesian theory and the QM sequence are on the very edge of what's possible for me, but stronger, stronger, I will learn)

I 'came out' as an atheist two years ago to my parents, and began rearranging my life insurance to go to an Alcor membership two weeks ago. All in all, I'm not terribly new to 'critical' thinking in terms of not taking a claim at face value, but still learning how to truly deeply analyze claims as a rationalist.

So um.. hi

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