Comment author: lukeprog 10 October 2014 05:23:27PM 6 points [-]

My own recommendations are here. I haven't updated that list for a while, but I've been listing the books I've read each month over here instead, nearly all of which are audiobooks.

Comment author: Delta 13 October 2014 09:52:14AM 1 point [-]

Blimey that's extensive, thanks a lot, I'll take a look.

Comment author: [deleted] 10 October 2014 05:13:14PM *  4 points [-]

Librivox has a very large assortment of free audio books. The catch is they are all in public domain, so they are mostly older works and they are all recorded by volunteers. However, I can say that I've found them an extremely excellent resource (I'm listening through Hobbes' Leviathan now).

So, if you'd like some older thinkers or scientists (Kant, Hume, Locke, Newton, Faraday, Mills, etc), they're a great resource.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Please recommend some audiobooks
Comment author: Delta 13 October 2014 09:33:43AM 1 point [-]

Interesting, thanks for the recommendation. I've been thinking I should look what other services are available and come across some streaming and rental services too, though as I like listening while walking out and about streaming may not be as great an option.

Comment author: Kaninchen 10 October 2014 01:47:35PM 1 point [-]

I listened to the audiobook of Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics" over the summer and would recommend it. (That said, I got it while it was on offer and it appears to be rather more expensive now).

I don't know if you are also interested in podcasts, but in case you are I would recommend The Sequences (via Castify) in general, and possibly other things depending upon your personal interests.

Comment author: Delta 10 October 2014 02:05:49PM 1 point [-]

Interesting, I'll have a look at that one and maybe add it to the wishlist if it's a bit pricey.

Yeah, it would be good to go over some of the sequences again, it's been a while since I read them and I know I missed a few.

I listen to the odd podcast if an interesting-sounding one pops up in the Dawkins foundation facebook feed but I don't listen to any on a regular basis. Should probably look into them.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Comment author: James_Miller 10 October 2014 01:46:37PM 6 points [-]
Comment author: Delta 10 October 2014 02:04:19PM 2 points [-]

Ah, I've already read HPMOR but might think about the spoken version. Might help clarify some of the examples I never quite understood to hear someone else speaking them. It's kind of odd how different the same work can feel when you read it the first time compare to when you read it again or hear it read by someone else.

Speaking of re-reading I really must re-read Worm one of these days, that was great, and maybe try Wildbow's new Pact story.

In response to Mere Messiahs
Comment author: Delta 22 November 2012 11:33:46AM 2 points [-]

I'd say the same applies to Catholics' aggrandisement of the Virgin Mary. Catholics are supposed to try to emulate someone whose virtue was so great before she was even conceived that she was born free from original sin (something no-one else can claim according to the appaling original sin doctrine). She then receives messages from god, bears his child (becoming both virgin and mother, a combination of virtuous states no-one else can achieve) and is bodily claimed into heaven. Isn't a human being who actually struggles with temptation, someone who overcomes actual weaknesses and flaws a better and more useful role model and example than this super-powered, divine intervention-fuelled juggernaut of unmatchable virtue? What can those seeking how to be good learn from someone to whom the mere notion of being bad is completely alien?

Comment author: p4wnc6 22 November 2012 05:23:38AM 0 points [-]

There's lots to say, but I'll reserve it for a full discussion post soon, and I'll come back here and post a link.

Comment author: Delta 22 November 2012 11:03:11AM 0 points [-]

Sounds good, I'll look forward to it.

Comment author: pragmatist 05 October 2012 02:03:38PM *  2 points [-]

I only have a layperson's knowledge of evolutionary biology, so my criticisms might miss some important subtlety, but it seems to that your analogy is significantly misleading in a couple of ways. It does convey the idea that random guesses with incremental feedback is a better search strategy than if the feedback were holistic (e.g. if you were guessing whole words and the only feedback were whether the guess is correct or not). In so far as someone's worry about natural selection is that they're mistaking it for the latter sort of search, the analogy may be helpful. But if you want to convey something more specific about how natural selection works, then I'm afraid the analogy isn't all that great.

One drawback of the analogy is in the nature of the environmental feedback. In Hangman, a letter gets fixed if (and only if) it is part of the correct answer. In genuine natural selection, though, a mutation doesn't get fixed because it is part of a complex set of mutations that collectively confer some phenotypic benefit. The environment isn't forward-looking like that; it doesn't say "This mutation is part of what is needed for optimality, so I'm going to hold onto it for that reason." Each individual mutation, in order to get fixed in the population, must confer some immediate reproductive benefit. Merely being one element of some complex group of mutations that is collectively beneficial is insufficient. The hangman analogy doesn't capture this aspect of natural selection.

This actually leads the analogy to kind of play into the hands of "irreducible complexity" critiques of natural selection. The proponents of such critiques presume that the individual parts of some complex adaptation only benefit the organism to the extent that they are part of that complex adaptation, and hence one cannot explain their selection without supposing that there is some forward-looking element to selection which holds onto those individual changes just because they will eventually contribute to a complex adaptation. This forward-looking aspect is then offered as evidence of intelligent design.

Another big drawback is that the analogy doesn't capture the competitive nature of natural selection. Natural selection occurs in populations, and requires both variation in traits among individuals in the population and competition for resources among those individuals. The Hangman analogy suggests that the environment already has a fixed template for the ideal phenotype and that it punishes organisms (or genes) individually for failing to approach this ideal and rewards them for getting closer to the ideal. If you have a population, and things worked in the Hangman way, there would be no correlation between rewards and punishments. But that's not how natural selection works. Genes are rewarded for contributing to their vehicles (organisms) being more reproductively successful than other organisms in the population. A reward just consists in reproducing more than your competitors, and a punishment just consists in reproducing less, so rewards and punishments are correlated. One allele can't get rewarded without another one getting punished.

Comment author: Delta 05 October 2012 02:36:25PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the feedback. I think you're right that a key omission here is failing to note that each step must be useful in itself, and provide a non-negligable boost to chances of survival on its own. It also implies a greater sense of purpose than exists in nature (there's no mind aiming for things, just more resilient creatures surviving).

I realise the model has many flaws and omits wider context such as competition, but I'm still tempted by the appeal of using such a common situation as the analogy. Talk of guessing passwords or rolling dice does make excellent analogies, but if you want to engage someone it helps to talk about something closer to their personal experience, and I imagine most people played hangman on a board or margin at some point at school.

Comment author: Delta 05 October 2012 12:13:19PM 2 points [-]

On a similar subject, the boardgame Guess Who is a perfect illustration of the point in Burdensome Details. Each additional claim about Person X (do they wear glasses? are they blond?) leads you to knock down some possibilities.

Comment author: Delta 14 September 2012 12:09:54PM 10 points [-]

Very interesting article, and a real "ouch" moment for me when I realised that all my escapism growing up had exactly this effect. By becoming engaged with fictional worlds through films, books and games you can start to disengage with the world, finding nothing so interesting and vibrant in it (this is a particular risk if you are young and haven't found activities and people you value in reality yet). The scary thing was when I was realised the characters in my books felt more real than people in reality. If you have trouble connecting with people books offer ready-made connections that can distract you from getting the social skills you need to form meaningful relationships in real life.

To an extent I think I am still prey to this, so does anyone have advice on ways to balance your escapist pleasures so you can still enjoy them without losing the vibrancy of real life?

Comment author: p4wnc6 03 July 2011 05:53:11AM *  4 points [-]

Are there any useful summaries of strategies to rearrange priorities and manage time to deal with the implications of this post? I get the existential terror part. We're minds in constant peril, basically floating on a tattered raft in the middle of the worst hurricane ever imagined. I'm sure only few of the contributors here think that saying, "this sucks but oh well" is a good idea. So what do we do?

Since I've started reading LW, I have started to devote way more of my life to reading. I read for hours each day now, mostly science literature, philosophy, economics, lots of links to external things from LW. But it hardly feels like enough and every choice I make about what to read feels like a precious one indeed. I am a grad student, and I think often about the rapidly changing landscape of PhD jobs. Should I be content going to an industrial job and paying for cryonics and hoping to nudge people in my social circles to adopt more rational hygiene in their beliefs (while working on doing so myself as well)? I know no one can really answer that kind of question for me, but other people can simulate that predicament and offer advice. Is there any?

If an intelligence explosion does happen in the next few decades, why am I even spending precious minutes worrying about what skill set to train into myself for such-and-such an industry or such-and-such a career? Those types of tasks might even be the very first tasks to be subsumed by advanced technology (much the way that technology displaces legal research assistants faster than janitors). The world isn't fair. I could study advanced math and engineering and hit my career at just the moment in history when those stop being people-tasks. I could be like the Reeks and Recs from Vonnegut's Player Piano. This is serious beeswax here. I want to make a Bayesian decision about how to spend my time and what skill set to train into myself. It would seem like this site is among the best places to pose the question and ask for direction to sweet updatable evidence. But where is some?

Comment author: Delta 12 September 2012 09:34:58AM 1 point [-]

I realise it is over a year later but can I ask how it went, or whether anyone has advice for someone in a similar position? I felt similar existential terror when reading The Selfish Gene and realising on one level I'm just a machine that will someday break down, leaving nothing behind. How do you respond to something like that? I get that you need to strike a balance between being sufficiently aware of your fragility and mortality to drive yourself to do things that matter (ideally supporting measures that will reduce said human fragility) but not so much you obsess over it and become depressed, but it can seem a pretty tricky balance to strike, especially if you are temperamentally inclined towards obsessiveness, negativity and akrasia.

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