He has a long history of asserting that people believe their dogma. While he has managed to say interesting things about religion despite this terrible handicap, I think one must be careful when reading him.
Well, many people in the Taliban certainly do appear to act as though they believe their dogma.
That is the awful thing about the interaction of humans and dogma.
What can start out primarily as a means of advertising allegiance can easily, particularly in stressed circumstances , become a trap.
To me, someone who undertakes a suicide bombing mission would appear to be someone who believes in the stuff about heaven et al very seriously indeed. However, journalists who have taken care to look into the real circumstances of these people have suggested that some at least of them are not particularly fervent believers, and have diverse reasons for participating. [http://www.newsweek.com/2008/07/29/dressed-to-kill.html] Perhaps this is an extreme case of the argument set out in this post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2r0/dont_judge_a_skill_by_its_specialists/
This is interesting.
I'd read all of Egan before finding LW/encountering serious singularity/AI thinkers. (I'm a generalist). I read Zendegi recently but didn't immediately connect it with here - I may go and re-read it now.
For the record, I would have to say, though, the Egan's characterisations of all protagonists is weak - a tendency that is, I find, widespread among hard SF writers. Not surprisingly; they are interested in the interactions of imaginably real science with the history and future of humanity. Significant emphasis on the characteristics of particular individuals (making them seem real by letting us understood their particular identity as distinctive) is likely to undermine their purpose in examining these interactions. It takes a great artist to unite disparate angles one a topic into a whole (I hesitate to use my usual word for this achievement here - I call this achievement 'transcendent')
This post has generated so much more controversy than I expected.
I meant exactly exercise and healthy eating! I thought people would assume I meant that. Not gastric bypass surgery, not liposuction, not starvation, not amputating limbs.
Whenever I see someone with one of those badges that says; 'Lose weight now, ask me how!", I check that they have all their limbs.
As:
formal complexity [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity#Specific_meanings_of_complexity] is inherent in may real-world systems that are apparently significantly simpler than the human brain,
and the human brain is perhaps the third most complex phenomena yet encountered by humans [ brain is a subset of ecosystem is a subset of universe]
and a characteristic of complexity is that prediction of outcomes requires greater computational resource than is required to simply let the system provide its own answer,
any attempt to predict the outcome of a successful AI implementation is speculative. 80% confident
Human activity is responsible for a significant proportion of observable climate change. 90% confidence
Nicely written and useful post. In the context of LW, the singular take on Alice behaviour as arising from aversion to non-optimal situations seems less strange than it might in a more general arena.
However (without having data to hand), I would suggest that a significant proportion of people in the world whose activity patterns (and even internal reasoning patterns) match Alice', would in fact be behaving that way as a result of fear, rather than even-handed assessment of experience.
In which case the prescription might be naive.
One thing I have advocated, without much success, is that children be taught social rules (when they are ready) in exactly the same way they are taught and teach each other games. The point is not whether the rules are right or wrong. Are the rules of 5-card stud poker or hopscotch right or wrong? It's that we're playing a certain game here, and there are rules to this game just as in any other game. If you want to be in the game, then you have to learn how to play it. Different groups of people play different games (different rules = different game), so if you want to play in different groups, you have to learn the games they play. When you develop the levels of understanding above the rule level, you'll be able to understand all games, and be able to join in anywhere. You won't be stuck knowing how to play only one game.
My problem with selling this idea is that people tend to think that their game is the only right one. In fact, being told that they are playing a game with arbitrary rules is insulting or frightening. They want to believe that the rules they know are the ones that everyone ought to play by; they even set up systems of punishment and reward to make sure that nobody tries to play a different game. They turn the game into something that is deadly serious, and so my idea simply seems frivolous instead of liberating.
William T. Powers
I think that this quote misses an important point - and am in agreement with Academician.
Although the particular social etiquette habits of different cultures vary widely, many of them serve similar, underlying purposes.
Kurt Vonnegut makes my case beautifully, and as gently as always in 'Cat's Cradle'. Without going into the plot, there is a 'holy man' (actually, a rationalist in an impossible situation, IMHO); followers of this holy man, when they meet each other, undertake a ritual called "the meeting of souls" (or similar) :- they remove their shoes and socks, and sit down, legs extended, foot to foot.
Abstract: Ritual forms of social etiquette are human and beneficial (if not essential): the form that they take is non-essential.
There is a higher order of information in this than in the assumption that all rituals are simply arbitrary game-playing.
"Everything has been said, yet few have taken notice of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not"
Raoul Vaneigem
Has anyone encountered a formal version of this? I.e. a site for the creation of formal logical arguments. Users can create axioms, assign their confidence to them and structure arguments using them. Users can then see the logical consequences of their beliefs. I think it would make a very interesting format for turning debate into a competitive game, whose results are rigorous, machine readable, arguments.
While I am certainly not against the idea of a tool that can be used to create formal arguments, the proposal has a subtle but radical difference.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a mathematician, and do not fully understand the concepts I attempt to explain in the following.
In his work published as 'Notes on the Synthesis of Form', Chris. Alexander developed an algorithm for converting a matrix of relationship strengths between analysed sub-elements of a design problem into a 'tree-like' structure. In other words, a hierarchical diagram in which each node can have one connection only, to a higher status node. The number of nodes in each level decreases as one moves upwards, culminating in a single 'master' or 'root' node.
Following the success the publication of 'Notes...' brought, Alexander was employed to work on the development of the metro rail system in San Francisco (the BART), and put his method to work. As a rationalist, he was concerned to find that the results of his work appeared to be failing to fully address the realities of the design problems involved.
His conclusion was that the necessary function of his transformative algorithm which selected the least significant relationship linkages to be broken in order to derive the tree-like diagram was the cause of the problem; some identified real-world relationships were being ignored. And even though these might be ranked lowly, omitting them altogether was destructive.
The essay which captures this understanding is published as 'A City is not a Tree' - read it here: http://www.rudi.net/pages/8755.
In it, Alexander contrasts the tree-like diagram with another; the semi-lattice diagram, which, although still hierarchical, allows for connections across branches, as it were, so that overlapping sets of relationships are legal. Semi-lattices, I believe, are not susceptible to formal logical analysis, but nevertheless can be better mapping tools for complex, real-world systems.
My proposal would deliberately allow for semi-lattice linkages. This would allow, to come up with a quick example, a proposition that called for more cycling to link both to a proposition for less carbon emissions and a proposition for congestion reducing transport initiatives.
Tree diagrams are fairly useless in addressing real-world conditions, as these are usually formally complex, with elements occurring in overlapping sets more often than not. As a result, policy documents are not structured like tree diagrams, and do adduce all sorts of linkages, but do this in a totally unstructured manner, and are often functionally weak, while appearing to address everything. As EY says (everywhere); "A theory that can explain everything, prohibits nothing, and so gives us no advice about what to expect."
My hope for the proposal is that it could bring structured, coherent agreement on sets of principles without the need for total agreement on every aspect of every point.
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The comment is invisible because you haven't adjusted your settings to have comments with a score below -2 visible to you. When I clicked on your overview (your name) it was there, and when I ctrl-f-ed your name it was there with -7 and "comment score below threshhold, no children"
Thank you
EDIT - I've tried altering my prefs and still can't find my post - even though I CAN find ones with scores <-30...