Comment author: Romashka 17 August 2016 07:54:07PM 0 points [-]

If nomads united into large hordes to go to war, shouldn't the change in the number of men living together have had some noticeable psychological effect on the warriors? I mean, the Wikipedia says that "a Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships", and surely they had to co-work with lots more people than during peace?

Comment author: SquirrelInHell 01 August 2016 10:44:30AM 4 points [-]

Let me give some feedback about your writing style, which I find consistently cryptic. You tend to describe your thoughts starting in the middle and giving the context later, or skipping it altogether. E.g. the fist sentence reads

I find myself more and more interested in how the concept of "systematized winning" can be applied to a large group of people who have one thing in common, and that not even time, but - in my own very personal case - ...

Until this point, a context like "biology research" etc. does not appear anywhere, and a "large group of people who have one thing in common" could be all people who like ice cream. It is of course possible to decipher what you mean, but by writing in reverse order you make it unnecessarily hard.

~~~

Possibly, a part of the problems you are describing could be solved by storing all the raw data that is collected during research, not just conclusions. In some cases, the amount of data might pose technological problems, but humanity's capacity to store information cheaply is increasing very quickly. So we can just let the future generations analyse the data by themselves, if they care to do so.

Comment author: Romashka 17 August 2016 07:32:25PM 0 points [-]

Edited a bit. If you could PM me a couple of words on what else to change, I'd be grateful.

Comment author: MrMind 04 August 2016 09:15:49AM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure I understand the model you are proposing, can you elaborate with a concrete example? It might be interesting enough to come up with a short story about it.

Comment author: Romashka 17 August 2016 06:57:47AM 1 point [-]

I can't really imagine information disappearing... Maybe something like, "I will answer if you taboo a certain notion until a certain time in the future, and I will not say more unless you agree. If you agree and defect, the answer will become false as soon as I can make this happen, and there will be no further transactions"?

Comment author: Romashka 31 July 2016 08:03:01PM 0 points [-]

False records of such events? "Nothing has happened if it hasn't been reported".

Clean work gets dirty with time

2 Romashka 31 July 2016 07:59PM
Edited for clarity (hopefully) with thanks to Squirrell_in_Hell.

Lately, I find myself more and more interested in how the concept of "systematized winning" can be applied to large groups of people who have one thing in common, and that not even time, but a hobby or a general interest in a specific discipline. It doesn't seem (to me) to much trouble people working on their own individual qualities - performers, martial artists, managers (who would self-identify as belonging to these sets), but I am basing this on "general impressions" and will be glad to be corrected. It does seem to be a norm for some other sets, like sailors, who keep correcting maps every voyage.

The field in which I have been for some years (botany) does have something similar to what sailors do, which lets us to see how floras change over time, etc. However, different questions arise when novel sub-disciplines branch off the main trunk, and naturally, the people asking these new questions keep reaching back for some kind of pre-existing observations. And often they don't check how much weight can be assigned to these observations, which, I think, is a bad habit that won't lead to "winning".

It is not "industrial rationality" per se, but a distantly related thing, and I think we might have to recognize it somehow. Or at least, recognize that it requires different assumptions... No set victory, for example... Still, it probably matters to more living people than pure "industrial rationality" does, & ignoring it won't make it go away.

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Comment author: Romashka 29 July 2016 06:58:38PM 0 points [-]

…What would that look like?

The immediate answer which I cannot shake off is - Stanislaw Lem:) or, perhaps, the hero of his novel "Runny nose".

Comment author: MrMind 26 July 2016 07:09:24AM 3 points [-]

Yeah, the involuntary (?) creepiness factor of some series shoot up for me too after coming in contact with LW. On the other side, I appreciated Person of Interest so much more...

Comment author: Romashka 27 July 2016 12:59:51PM 0 points [-]

You know, it would be funny to imagine a word with knowledge being passed through some oracle by a so-called antiport, that is, you get a true, nonmalignant, relevant answer to your question about what happens at time X - but everybody forgets one and the same random thing until that moment, of unknown meta-ness:)

Comment author: Strangeattractor 26 July 2016 09:19:46PM 3 points [-]

If he kills himself, he hurts only himself. If he's violent toward other people, he can end up doing a lot more damage than that. He mentioned that one incident, but given his casual attitude toward it, there are probably more. It wouldn't surprise me if he was beating his girlfriend. Domestic assault (I call it domestic because it was against someone he lived with, even though housemate is not as usual a target as partner or child) is a huge huge huge warning flag. He had a bad day, and trouble sleeping, and suddenly someone else has to deal with the consequences of having a broken nose for the rest of their lives. The consequences for each of them are disproportionate, asymmetric. If he has another bad day, what next?

His girlfriend's life might be in danger.

Comment author: Romashka 26 July 2016 10:40:23PM 0 points [-]

Upvoted both you and Dagon, because I agree with what you say.

Still thinking that a housmate whose nose was broken and who, to our knowledge, doesn't have depression, has better chances of survival, though.

Comment author: Strangeattractor 26 July 2016 12:47:41PM 0 points [-]

The most alarming part of that conversation for me was "A few weeks ago I punched a housemate in the face ten times, breaking her nose;"

If I was having the conversation, I would ask him more about this, and talk at least a little bit about how he could stop hurting other people.

I'm not sure what you mean by the bottom of the problem. I will say some things that I think are problems. These are speculations. I don't have enough information to be confident in these answers.

1) I think it is a problem that, as far as I could tell, no one intervened and taught him not to be abusive after the punching incident. This is a problem with society.

2) I think it is likely that he has a brain injury from a head injury of some sort and/or from taking drugs such as meth. He mentioned both a head injury and meth. I would say to get treatment for brain injury, but doctors are still pretty clueless about how to treat brain injuries, though there are experimental possibilities.

3) I think it's possible that he's a sociopath, but there's not enough info to figure that out. The combination of not finding pleasure in life, and feeling no remorse, and not thinking about the effects of his actions on other people is suggestive. (Although there can be other reasons for that.)

4) I think there's likely something else wrong with his health. Maybe bipolar, since the bipolar meds are helping a bit, but I'm not convinced that accounts for everything.

5) I would guess that he did not have opportunities in childhood to be self-directed. His sense of not knowing what he enjoys, or what he wants, or how to make a plan, might be from lack of education and training in those areas, not just from physiological problems affecting his judgement.

Comment author: Romashka 26 July 2016 07:02:00PM 0 points [-]

Is it really the most alarming part? I would think suicide ideation more so.

Comment author: Romashka 26 July 2016 06:52:51PM 0 points [-]

I think to identify The Problem, you have to imagine a world where Z doesn't have it, but doing that, you inevitably assign them some "purpose", generally speaking. Like, "lost 40 pounds" or "began enjoying rock music" or something. Or you can go another way about it and think "in passive voice" - imagine the things happening to Z if The Problem was overcome.

Five minutes by the clock give me: 1) in that other world, there's somebody who depends on Z. Maybe he volunteers in an animal shelter, to avoid having to communicate with people too much. There's some reason why breakfast must be eaten, because otherwise, it's not just that life would feel "expectedly worse", but Z's self-image would be "incompetent idiot" - I am not saying he would deserve it, I'm saying this was what I felt when upbraided for eating too little when breast-feeding. I got the impression Z would not have liked this, but without the part where what you do actually matters, it's not going to do any good. So, The Problem would be - Z doesn't have any reason to effect an impact on the world, even what people would call "a burden" might have helped together with medication, for all I know.

2) "things happened independently and made The Problem vanish" make me think of a sudden, inescapable change of circumstances, but I'm having trouble calling up "positives". There seems to be a general resentment towards all those pieces of environment which make Z stay where he is. In that case, I would suggest employment, which would at least give Z a new baseline of 'human idiocy' and some external order to his life. Yes, the world sucks. But there is no real obligation to like it or be liked.

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