I have two opposing beliefs about the title: it means "Don't believe two opposing things at once — you will fool yourself", or "Believe two opposing things at once — you will avoid fooling yourself."
1How deep is your skepticism?
At the moment, "valence" seems to me, in the material I've read, no more than a name reifying a noun phrase of the form "the thing that..." It is like saying that salt tastes salty due to its saltiness, or to use a well-known example, that opium produces sleep through its dormitive principle.
Uttering a noun phrase does not conjure into existence a thing that it refers to. It can conjure an idea of such a thing into your head, and then you can look at various phenomena and "see" it there, just like you can "see" the phlogiston coming out of a burning log, or "see" the demon possessing an epileptic. That is what the whole Valence sequence looks like to me, and the valence literature that I cited.
In the context of consciousness, valence basically means the qualia of value.
My scepticism then extends to the word "value", as applied in this context. Also, I had not got the impression from the material that valences were defined to be conscious experiences, but rather, that they pervade all decision-making in the brain, that comparison of valence is "the thing that" makes decisions. For example, the fourth reference I cited is a purely speculative article asserting the existence of "micro-valences" in low-importance rapid choices like which coffee mug to select from a cupboard. But perhaps the authors would say that these micro-valences are micro-consciously perceived.
Or to put that another way, shouldn't the title be instead "Submission: The Standard Everyday Solution To Akrasia"? As it comes close to saying in the second-last paragraph.
1What is valence, and is there such a thing?
I'm currently studying a paper that talks about the concept of "valence", but I have not been able to discern the reasons for thinking that there is such a thing. I recalled that there was a sequence on Valence on LessWrong a few years ago. I passed it by at the time, but on reading it now, I have not found in it a reason to think that the thing is a thing. Nor am I satisfied by the references cited in the paper I am studying, which include these: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. (Valence is not the subject of the paper, just something it touches on, so I am not expecting it to itself justify the concept beyond citing that literature.)
The hand-waving I see in the Valence sequence and in those references strikes me as similar to saying "phlogiston is the stuff that comes out of things when they burn". [[1]]
What is meant by "valence"? What is the evidence that such an entity exists? How can it be measured in particular cases?
No, retconning phlogiston as nitrogen, carbon, negative oxygen, or electrons does not work. There just isn't anything corresponding to the concept as it was formulated in its time. No-one ever made a phlogistonometer. In fact, it was efforts to measure the things that could be measured in combustion that led to the concept being abandoned. ↩︎
How does the Dom handle their own akrasia? Find a bigger Dom to Sub to, and so ad infinitum?
Doing something with another person or a group is also effective. For example, gym buddies, startup cofounders, artist groups, marriages (if done right), etc. As Alex_Altair says in another comment, it's about accountability.
Have you seen "Two Arms and a Head"?
ETA: For those who haven't, it is not a work of fiction. Also reviewed on Astral Codex Ten.
Is France a third-world country in terms of internet service?
Always has been.
I've never lived there, but I remember that in the 1980s, the speed of email was primarily dependent not on distance but on the amount of government regulation of the telecoms business. Within the US, very little, so email only (!) took minutes. In the UK, not much compared with France, so email between the UK and the US would take no more than a few hours. Email with France, on the other hand, could take days and often would never arrive at all, without even a notification of failure.
Trumped-up process would itself be a process crime.
Isn’t everything dominated by post-ASI futures?