Reading this post triggered one. I'm going to stop thinking about it now.

That last sentence is just ludicrously dense with both important advice and good tips for game design. It's excellent, is what I'm saying, and thanks for writing it. :-)

The levels can be hard to disambiguate so I sympathize. I'll write my opinions out unironically. You can find the full arguments in my comment history (I can dig links to that up too).

• I'm assuming you are familiar with the arguments for efficent charity and optimal employment? If not I can provide citations & links. I don't think Sea Piracy as a means to funding efficient charity is obviously worse from a utilitarian perspective than a combo with many legal professions. It may or may not be justified, I'm leaning towards it being justified on the same utilitarian grounds as government taxation can be. If not cheating on taxes to fund efficient charity is a pretty good idea. Some people's comparative advantage will lay in sea piracy.

• Violating copyright on software or media products in the modern West is in general not a bad thing. But indiscriminately pirating everything may be bad.

In the grandfather comment I was aiming for ambiguity and humour.

imagine a father telling his son "You need to get a good job and learn how to dress well, or else no woman will want to marry you." Is this statement similarly objectionable? If so, why?

Yes, and for very similar reasons.

It currently seems like the best technique I've discovered for increasing focus and productivity, energy levels, and personal happiness has been having a baby (or technically, my wife having a baby.)

At work, I work. I no longer "require" lengthy breaks to go on walks or read LessWrong at my desk. My daughter needs food and diapers, and she needs my attention when I'm at home in the evenings, which means I need to get my work done efficiently and with high quality, and I need to get it done while I'm at work so my mind is free at home.

It's a common belief that having a small baby makes the parents exhausted all the time. This happens some nights, but your body gets used to waking up during the night, and you make small sacrifices like going to be earlier. I generally feel no more exhausted than I did when I was single and staying up way too late watching movies and reading internets every night.

I am a pretty physically lazy person, or I used to be. For example, it was fairly typical that if I was thirsty or needed to use the rest room, I would avoid getting up off the couch until the need became quite uncomfortable. Since having a baby, I have essentially been unable to remain sitting in one position for more than, perhaps, half an hour, so I simply don't have this inertial lethargy anymore. If I'm thirsty, I get a glass of water.

Generally, most things don't bother me anymore. I've had confrontations recently which, in the past, would have ruined my week, but now they don't even effect my mood.

I suppose it's a huge cliche, but I think the fact is that my daughter is my something to protect and thus an unexpected source of personal superpowers. The power of a role to be filled is extremely motivating, and luckily I have a highly positive cached expectation for the role of "father."

(I hesitated to post this because I feel like there is a bias against reproduction on LessWrong. I feel like at least some group of people is going to read "motivated cognition" into my claim that having a baby improved my life. I would respond - even if that's true, so what?)

None of this would be particularly usable in terms of argument or convincing someone else. I saw "coincidences" on a level that made no sense, without there being what could be called "something more" than the ordinary world of cause and effect, operating only locally. Like three events that did not occur to me before or since, that would be rare for anyone, and that all happened, seemingly independently, one after the other, on one day, in about an hour. And that seemed to mean something. Basically, something like "Don't worry, it's covered."

And I also experienced something directly, it would be called "mystical" here, except that it's really quite ordinary. It's a shift in perspective. Suppose that we are seeing all of life through a mirror. We don't realize this, because we don't see the signs that the mirror exists, we don't see the edges. Sometimes we might see that the mirror is dirty, though. I won't go there yet.

However, what does a mirror look like? Suppose that a mirror has a certain characteristic color. Let's call that color "clarity." Suppose that one has a faculty for seeing that color. (I suspect we all do.)

This isn't "scientific." There is no way to show that there is any "clarity" other than the reality of what is reflected. Or directly seen. It's an experience, though, and because of it, the whole elementary level of Zen koans became transparent for me, and when I asked a Zen master about this, he confirmed it. I was something like 22 years old. I didn't have training, I was just lucky, or something.

I don't consider this truly significant, but I could probably write a book about it. It's not the way I think any more, particularly. Again, all this did for me was to connect me with wide religious traditions, which I saw, then, as referring to experience that was not the "ordinary way" of looking at things. I've not fully expressed this at all, I was just describing the gateway that I walked through.

Because I wasn't taught by any individual or within any tradition, I didn't have a method for transmitting this. I was able to confirm some others, though. Landmark Education, however, is teaching "transformation," and a crucial part of that is the concept of "nothing." It can easily sound like total BS, but ... people actually -- and with reasonable reliability -- experience it, can talk about it with each other, it is easily visible, and it has transformative value, people do become more competent, more effective, happier, fully self-expressed, etc. Call it "clearing away the cobwebs," perhaps. Again, clarity itself. No content.

Okay, sorry about confusing you, that's not my goal. You are referring to "bulk behavior," that more or less assumes that Muslims and Jews and Christians "worship the same God." Sort of. But each of those categories covers a huge variety of actual beliefs. Some Christian concepts of God are very different from some Muslim concepts. When I said that there is no "over" I meant that I wasn't rejecting anything by accepting Islam. And when I said that there is no "other" (religion), I meant that "lslam" is a name -- this is standard -- for the natural relationship of the human to Reality.

(That's very standard Islam, only I use the term Reality to refer to God. Color me ecumenical.)

What "other religions," then? Buddhism is actually a whole set of religions, there is a huge variation. Many Buddhists don't accept the "Buddhist mythology," just the actual practice, the psychology, if you will. Buddhism has been considered an "atheist religion," because some forms don't refer to a deity at all. My interest, though, is in what those who actually practice Buddhism experience. Why would I be interested in rejecting this or in thinking my own experience superior?

I'm not sure what "supernatural" means. Out of the ordinary? But isn't deep rationalism out of the ordinary? What are we talking about?

There is something called, loosely, "causeless joy." Call it "existential joy." Is it real? I really don't know, I just know that it's really cool! In the end, whatever I experience is a state of the brain, a pile of patterns, right? Except for one thing. What is this "I" that supposedly is having this experience? There is a pile of patterns, that's a practically universal understanding -- and very Buddhist, the skandhas. But is there anything else? I'd say, sure, but I can't prove it. What else there is, I'll call Reality. I can't prove that Reality exists, but so what?

I don't talk about "belief in God," not for myself. Certainly many people use this language, but, for me, and in my reading of the Qur'an, the issue is a basic relationship with Reality. What you pointed out from EY was a kind of trust in Reality, he called it the Universe.

Is Reality sentient? That would be more of the issue, eh? I don't know. I am simply moved to trust it.

Now, as to the Qur'an, it's pretty simple. It's not that the Qur'an is "untranslatable," per se, it is that each word in Arabic has a huge number of possible meanngs, and to translate it into English requires choosing English meanings, and the English set of meanings for a word is often very different from the Arabic set of meanings. So by translating it, one is "specifying" the meaning more than what was present in the original (and/or possibly adding new meanings). And this is necessarily limited by the understanding of the translator. From what I've seen, the best isn't nearly good enough, and the task is largely impossible, unless one replaces a "translation" with an explanation that covers every possible meaning of a text, and that would be ... huge. And would still doubtless be incomplete.

Two of the followers of the Prophet were arguing about the text. One said it went a certain way, call it A. The other said, no, it was B. So they went to the Prophet. He listened to the first, and said, "Yes." He listened to the second, and said, "Yes." And then he said that the Qur'an was revealed in seven dialects, and that each dialect carried seven levels of meaning.

It might help to understand that "seven" is common Arabic usage for "many." That tradition is a commonly-accepted one. It kind of blows the fundamentalists out of the water.

The Qur'an calls itself a "reminder." I read that as implying that it will only show us what we already know.

I accidentally hit the enter key before I was done and my answers were submitted. I'm dumb.

Did the survey! Also, this is my first comment, as a long-standing lurker!

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