When your desires contradict each other, so you can't satisfy all of them anyway.
For example, I want to eat as much chocolate as possible and move at little as possible, but I also want to have a long healthy life. Until the Friendly AI can satisfy all my desires via uploading or nanotechnology, I must sacrifice some of them for the sake of other ones.
I'll agree with that from a different angle. Due to the map≠territory lemma, We never have to accept absolute inability to meet our goals. When faced with seemingly inescapable all-dimensional doom, there is no value at all in resigning oneself to it, the only value left in the universe is in that little vanishingly not-going-to-happen-unlikely possible world where, for example, the heat death can be prevented or escaped. Sure, what we know of thermodynamics tells us it can't, well, I'm going to assume that there's a loophole in our thermodynamic laws that we're yet to notice. Pick me for damned, pick me for insane, these two groups are the same.
Now, if I'd based my goals on something even less ambiguous than physics, and it was mathematical certainty that I was not going to be able to meet any of them, I wouldn't be able to justify denying my damnation, I'd collapse into actual debilitating madness if I tried that. So I don't know what I would do in that case.
When is self denial useful in altering your desires, vs satisfying them so you can devote time to other things?
In a previous story, EY posted the penultimate chapter along with an ultimatum: You will earn a Bad Ending by doing nothing, and a Good Ending by guessing, following the internal logic of the story, what the correct solution to this problem is.
The problem could be solved by combining a revelation in the latest chapter with information from an infodump in the first chapter, explaining how space travel worked in universe.
It was in fact solved, and he posted both endings.
This is the danger, that he may do the same thing here, and we must be ready to solve the problem.
I doubt it will be much of an issue however, the raw processing power we have to work with here is much higher, since HPMOR is much more popular than Three Worlds Collide.
I think he's never going to do that here. He did that in TWC because if we were able to come up with the winning strategy when pressed, that would indicate that one of the crew members in the story definitely would have, too, proving it would have been unreasonable to write an ending where they did not. In this case our ability to solve the puzzle doesn't really say anything about the plausibility of the work's characters' solving it. Our success would not necessitate theirs, as we're more populous, experienced, and have access to a huge written record. Nor would our failure necessitate theirs, as Harry has magical insights. The groups' capacities say little about each other.
My stupid questions are these: Why are you not a nihilist? What is the refutation of nihilism, in a universe made of atoms and the void? If there is none, why have the philosophers not all been fired and philosophy abolished?
I'm sorry if my kind ever confused you by saying things like "It is important that I make an impressive display in the lek", what I actually mean is "It is likely my intrinsic goals would be well met if I made an impressive display in the lek". There is an ommitted variable in the original phrasing. Its importance isn't just a function of our situation, it's a function of the situation and of me, and of my value system.
So I think the real difference between nihilists and non-nihilists as we may call them, is that non-nihilists [think they]have a clearer idea of what they want to do with their life. Life's purpose isn't written on the void, it's written within us. Nobody sane will argue otherwise.
Actually... "within".. now I think of it, the only resolute nihilist I've probed has terrible introspection relative to myself, and it took a very long time to determine this, introspective clarity doesn't manifest as you might expect. This might be a lead.
Indeed, Hume, perhaps the most famous compatibilist, denies the existence of free will in his Treatise, only advocating compatibilism later, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It certainly seems to me that he doesn't actually change his mind; his early position seems to be "this thing people call free will is incoherent, so we should talk about things that matter instead," and his later position seems to be "people won't stop talking about free will, so I'll call the things that matter free will and reject the incoherent stuff under some other label (indifference)."
So his opinions kind of did change over that time period, but only from "I reject these words" to "alright, if you insist, I'll try to salvage these words". I'm not sure which policy's best. The second risks arguments with people who don't know your definitions. They will pass through two phases, the first is where the two of you legitimately think you're talking about the same thing but the other is a total idiot who doesn't know what it's like. The second phase is perhaps justifiable umbrage on their discovering that you are using a definition you totally just made up, and how were they even supposed to know.
The former position, however, requires us to leave behind what we already sort of kind of suspect about these maybe-not-actual concepts and depart into untilled, unpopulated lands, with a significant risk of wheel-reinvention.
The post here was specifically talking about status-indicating signals. What a business suit actually signals is more like acceptance of certain social norms about what "serious business" entails. Most clothing is more about ingroup identity than status, per se. To the extent that a suit is expensive, and other people notice this, it will also signal status via wealth, of course, but that's somewhat orthogonal.
Also, smiles are probably hard-wired and are actually difficult to fake.
Could you expound the evidence exposed by the donning of a suit? I'm having trouble fitting myself into these systems. It'd mean a lot to me to get an explanation from someone who knows what a valid argument looks like.
If you treat identity as an equality relation, transitive and symmetric closures will force it into a weird and not very useful concept. If you don't treat identity as an equality relation, "identity" is a very confusing word to use. The first case isn't very illuminating, and the second case should taboo the word "identity".
My reaction to that is we shouldn't be asking "is it me", but "how much of me does it replicate?" Cause, if we make identity a similarity relation, it will have to bridge enough small differentiations that eventually it will connect us to entities which barely resemble us at all.
However, Could you expound the way of this definition of identity under transitivity and symmetry for us? I'm not sure I've got a good handle on what those constraints would permit.
I took a stab at dissolving personal identity, and managed to do so to my own satisfaction. Most people seemed to feel like this made progress but did not actually solve the question, however.
Short version of my personal answer: "personal identity" doesn't actually correspond with anything fundamental in the world, but for whatever reason, our brains seem to include planning machinery that's based on subjective expectation ("if I do this, what do I expect to experience as a result?") and which drives our behavior more strongly than abstract reasoning does. Since you can't have subjective expectation without some definition for a "self", our brains always end up having some (implicit or explicit) model for continuity of self that they use for making decisions. But at least in epistemic terms, there doesn't seem to be any reason to assume that one definition would be better than any other. In instrumental terms, some definitions might work better than others, since different conceptions of personal identity will lead to different kinds of actions.
I think an important part of the rationalist's plight is attempting to understand the design intents behind these built-in unapologetic old mechanisms for recognizing ourselves in the world, which any self-preservation machine capable of rationality must surely have. But I don't know if we can ever really understand them, they wern't designed to be understood, in fact they seem to be designed to permit being misunderstood to a disturbing degree. I find that often when I think "I" have won, finally achieved a some sense of self-comprehension sufficient for total consciousness-subconscious integration, I get nauseous and realize that what has really happened is I have been overrun by a rampantly insolent mental process that is no more "me" than a spreading lie would be, something confused and transient and not welcome in the domain of the selfish gene, and I reset.
I find the roots of this abstraction engine reaching out over my mind again. Tentative and carefully pruned, this time.
The hardest part of the process is that the gene's memetic safety mechanisms seem quite tolerant of delusions long after they're planted, though not once they begin to flower. You don't get a warning. If you bloom in the wrong way you will feel not the light of the sun but the incendiary of your mental immune system.
As cool as that term sounds, I'm not sure I like it. I think it's too strongly reinforcing of ideas like superiority of rationalists over non-rationalists. Even in cases where rationalists are just better at things, it seems like it's encouraging thinking of Us and Them to an unnecessary degree.
Also, assuming there is a good enough reason to convince me that the term should be used, why is transhumanism-and-polyamory the set of powers defining the non-muggles? LessWrong isn't that overwhelmingly poly, is it?
I thought for a while, and I really can't imagine any cases of works which would be unsuitable for all LWers that arn't worth hanging around and arguing about. I agree. We should be calling these people ignorant and criticising their work, not assigning them a permanent class division, shaking our heads, and going back to our camp.
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OK, I just ran some numbers based on wild guesses. Assuming 10% of all men are gay, and 80% of gay men look gay, and 15% of straight men look gay, my napkin calculation gives about 37% chance that a man who looks gay is actually gay.
Doesn't look like any gaydar based on perceived behavior would be too reliable.
Of course, if any of my steps was wrong, please let me know.
A gaydar doesn't have to depend on how gay a person looks superficially. There are plenty of other cues.