Necro - I know. However, I'd be willing to bet that few current readers have seen it and we're kind of hurting for new content, so it's probably fine to mine the archives a bit.

That being said, I really enjoyed this article. It seems to check with my own experiences reasonably well and shed some new light on the subject (for me at least). I hadn't really looked at the rack and stack of power to this level of detail nor considered closely where the power of voters really lies. It's also one of the few places where there's a good rational argument for why "Blue Team" "Green Team" is destructive (most of the other content on the site - including the fable of Green and Blue - seem to focus more heavily on the fact that it's annoying when people act irrationally rather than discussing a specific situation where that irrationality is actually harming them).

Interesting stuff.

AFAIK, you should confirm email to comment.

I have, indeed, gone camping like this before, though it's been a few years since I've done anything solo. The last few times I've gone camping has been with a relative to campgrounds with showers and such amenities, as opposed to solo in a conservation area or along a trail, which is/was my goal for my next hike. My original motivation for the overnighter was to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything important about soloing, and that all my gear's ready for longer trips.

I'm in the general Niagara area, and the city papers laud the local rescue teams whenever a tourist needs to get pulled out of the Niagara gorge, so as long as I can dial 911, I should be able to get rescued from any situation I get myself in that's actually worth all this worrying about. The particular spot I'm thinking of going to (43.0911426, -79.284342) is roughly an hour's walk from a city bus stop - half an hour's walk from where I could wave to frequently passing cars, if my phone's dead.

My plans for this whole trip have been to make it as simple and easy as possible. Amble down some trails for an hour or two, hang my hammock, cook my dinner, read my ebook, and amble on out the next day, enjoying the peace and quiet and so on. It's the smallest step I can think of beyond camping in a backyard - and since I don't have a backyard, it's pretty much as far within my comfort zone as any camping could be. If /that's/ now outside my comfort zone... then I've got a trunk full of camping gear that's suddenly a lot less useful to me.

After some further mental gymnastics, the plan I've come up with which seems to most greatly reduce the disquiet is to buy a backup cellphone, small enough to turn off, stick in a pocket and forget about until I drop my smartphone in a stream. Something along the lines of taking one of the watchphones from http://www.dx.com/s/850%2b1900?category=529&PriceSort=up and snipping off the wristband, or one of the smaller entries in http://www.dx.com/s/850%2b1900?PriceSort=up&category=531 ; along with the $25/year plan from http://www.speakout7eleven.ca/ . Something on the order of $65 to $85 seems a moderate price for peace of mind.

I am, however, going to take at least a day before placing any such order, to find out if such a plan still seems like it /will/ offer increased peace of mind. Not to mention, whether I can come up with (or get suggestions for) any plans which reveal that my actual disquiet arises from some other cause.

Eliezer was unable to -consider- the hypothetical; it "had" to be fought.

It seems to me that he did consider your hypothetical, and argued that it should be fought. I agree: your hypothetical is just another in the tedious series of hypotheticals on LessWrong of the form, "Suppose P were true? Then P would be true!"

BTW, you never answered his answer. Should I conclude that you are unable to consider his answer?

Eliezer also has Harry Potter in MoR withholding knowledge of the True Patronus from Dumbledore, because he realises that Dumbledore would not be able to cast it, and would no longer be able to cast the ordinary Patronus.

Now, he has a war against the Dark Lord to fight, and cannot take the time and risk of trying to persuade Dumbledore to an inner conviction that death is a great evil in order to enable him to cast the True Patronus. It might be worth pursuing after winning that war, if they both survive.

All this has a parallel with your hypothetical.

After talking it over with some friends recently, I have given serious consideration to crossing over to the Dark Side by seeing a legal prostitute in Nevada this summer to try to have just one successful sexual experience in my life (at the age of 55).

I discovered an interesting spread of experiences in talking to these friends, guys around my age or somewhat older. One of them had a sex-negative upbringing like mine, and he said he had his sexual debut in his early 30’s, but with a woman he knew socially. Another told me that he started to see prostitutes in his teens, and that he has had a lot of experiences with them.

I wish I didn’t have to do this so “late in life,” according to current definitions of human lifespans, and with a prostitute. I couldn’t make this happen organically, in the social environment I grew up in 40 years ago; and I have a lot of empathy for the younger men who have had faced similar problems which have interfered with forming sexual relationships starting at appropriate ages. (I know this sounds out of character for me, because I don’t feel much empathy in general.)

What about She Who Must Not Be Named? You might happen to know her. She provided the opportunity for my first and so far only sexual experience in 1994, but I couldn’t get an erection with her in that situation to save my life, just from the lack of conditioned responses for doing so for the first time in my 30’s. (I talked to a sex therapist a few years afterwards who explained this to me. Basically young men’s first sexual experiences, assuming they can get them, help to calibrate the equipment; and I didn’t have that calibration. Nothing wrong with me medically, though.) Because this woman insists currently on slandering me in public in my absence at inappropriate times and places for reasons which don’t make much sense, I have an additional incentive just to hit the “reset” button with a prostitute and pretend that the 1994 incident with her never happened.

As for my Dark Side comment, sex involves the irrational. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about my parents, because I had a happy childhood in general. My parents just conveyed to me a negative view of sex, and they had inadvertently damaged my sexual development by making me ashamed of sexual expression. But then my father died six months ago, and lately I’ve had the thought that I don’t have to live up to his standards of a “good boy” any more. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of my seeing a prostitute. But with his permanent absence, I don’t have to worry about his opinion of me from now on. And I admit the irrationality of my former way of thinking about this while my father lived.

I have some additional reasons for doing this – why not have more than one reason for a major change in your life? Not just to resolve finally the sex matter, but also:

To improve my position in the male hierarchy. Hey, advancedatheist has become a regular guy now. He has shown strength of character by overcoming a difficult personal challenge. Welcome to the men’s club, and better late than never.

To add the experience to my “Lazarus Long résumé.” Cryonicists want to stay alive so that we can continue to have experiences. Well, what would you call seeing a prostitute, especially if you have never done that before?

To start the process of developing better social skills for dealing with women in general. My current inexperience and discomfort with women mean that I give off weird “tells,” as Texas Hold’em players say in their context, that women can pick up on that apparently make them feel uneasy about me. If I can gain some basic level of sexual confidence by having some sexual experiences with other women after a successful experience with a prostitute, I should start to give off a better variety of tells when I encounter women socially that might make them more receptive towards me.

Farther down the line, I have aspirations of writing at least one novel, so I would like to develop the experience base for writing about sexual relationships in a novel that wouldn’t sound implausible or ridiculous. I can sometimes tell when I read a story that the author tries to depict a feasible action that he clearly hasn’t done in real life, like shooting a firearm. Sex scenes in stories have the same requirements.

I probably have more to say about this, and I may address them in your replies.

Compassion is giving barefeet people shoes. But this is more about people refusing to wear shoes and instead demanding that the road should not contain any object that can hurt their feet.

Upvoted just for this.

I can enjoy fantasy sure. But it was easier when I was younger. Nowadays I can't stand magic that has insufficient structure ("you the reader haven't studied magic so I have to explain it in laymans terms" doesn't cut it for me). I liked Rothfuss' Name of the Wind as there is logic and depth in it and clearly understood limitations - and not just a deus-ex-machina if needed by the author.

As for weight, try getting her on aikido as it is a very "spiritual" form of exercise (not bad for self defense either) and veganism, probably she is open to the idea (not eating stuff with souls etc.) and while it is not the best diet out there it tends to keep the calorie count low. Another idea is to explain how refined sugar is an industrial product and not natural. This does not actually matter, but it may matter for her, and it is a good idea. I.e. to get her sugar from natural or dried fruits only, it can make her feel more close-to-nature at eating and actually gives a better satiety / sugar ratio and an overall calorie reduction probably.

At some point, the answer may become "we cannot know". For example, in quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle tells us that there is a limit to the accuracy of our measurements, and once we hit that limit, attaining more accuracy is impossible. The big bang is similar -- if time makes no sense in a singularity, perhaps we can't know what happens before that point. Maybe at some point we will find a way around these limitations, in which case it was just another instance of hitting Explain and letting science grind along, but it could be that we have already reached the ultimate limit, and no more explanations will ever come.