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This may not be the best place to ask, but is Evolutionary Psychology actually falsifiable?
Right, and that's exactly the point. She is your best possible partner---including being sentient, being intelligent, etc. I honestly have trouble seeing what's wrong with that.
The fact that she was designed just for me...that in itself would ruin it for me.
In response to
Special Status Needs Special Support
When I think about the Bible, I feel the links to real life experiences activate, memories of being dragged to church by force, talking to people poisoned by it, thinking about the destruction it wrought and the danger it poses. If you squint really hard you can almost see a dark aura emanating from the pages. Lord of the Rings is by comparison just pleasant PG-13 fun, a bit too long-winded at times and perfectly innocuous.
Really, there is a difference between the Bible and LoTR.
That "difference" comes from the culture surrounding the two books, not any innate property or value of the books themselves.
They were created from tortured elves and mindraped into obedience.
Did you learn this from an unbiased source?
Finally, the rings. Using mind control to turn foreign leaders into your obedient thralls, consoling them with the promise that they will be able to crush others under their heel as you crushed them. Real nice of Sauron.
Suppose you're the prime minister of a parliamentary republic, and the neighboring country is ruled by hereditary nobility that mostly hate each other, and wars between the barons ruin a lot of the land and kill a lot of the peasants. You, being a genius engineer, have figured out a way to control people, but it requires they wear the device for an extended period of time, the effects are obvious, and they can take it off before the process is complete if they feel like it.
This hereditary nobility situation is obviously not going to fix itself- and you figure that the easiest way to fix it is to corrupt all the nobility, playing on their hatred of each other to get them to wear the devices long enough for them to work, and then have them give you power in a bloodless coup. As a bonus, you now have fanatically loyal assassins / spec ops forces, and an eternity of servitude seems like a fitting punishment for their misconduct as rulers.
"Did you learn this from an unbiased source?"
I'm pretty sure it was in Tolkien's notes.
"Suppose you're the prime minister of a parliamentary republic, and the neighboring country is ruled by hereditary nobility that mostly hate each other, and wars between the barons ruin a lot of the land and kill a lot of the peasants. You, being a genius engineer, have figured out a way to control people, but it requires they wear the device for an extended period of time, the effects are obvious, and they can take it off before the process is complete if they feel like it."
Except that's exactly what Sauron DIDN'T do. Mordor was not a parliamentary republic; more like a military dictatorship with semi-mindless orc drones enforcing Sauron's commands over his human subjects. The monarchs who were given the rings - however just or unjust their rule might have been, and however flawed the notion of monarchy as a political system - were lied to about what the rings did, and the rings' effects were very subtle at first.
Its also worth noting that the human kings didn't become any kinder or more democratic in their sensibilities once they fell under Sauron's influence. The Witch King was still a king, and a much more murderous one than he was in life. Unleashing barrow-wrights on a partially civilian population, torturing Gollum for information, and stabbing an innocent (if possibly misguided) hobbit when he didn't have to are all things that the Witch King did in person.
"This hereditary nobility situation is obviously not going to fix itself- and you figure that the easiest way to fix it is to corrupt all the nobility, playing on their hatred of each other to get them to wear the devices long enough for them to work, and then have them give you power in a bloodless coup. As a bonus, you now have fanatically loyal assassins / spec ops forces, and an eternity of servitude seems like a fitting punishment for their misconduct as rulers."
In other words, the only way to improve the world is to become just as bad as the people currently running it? The best solution to dictatorships is to make slaves of your own, and for all eternity no less?
I think you're going out of your way to defend Brin's essay rather than actually using your own moral judgement. You can easily say that the "good guys" in Lord of the Rings weren't all that good, but Sauron was very obviously worse.
In response to
The Sword of Good
I'd like to think I would have noticed the moral problems with what the "good" guys were doing on my own, and without the benefit of knowing who the author was. I think I would have, but I'm not totally confidence in my Milgram Resistance.
The ending did bother me, though. Why was Hirou willing to believe everything Vhazhar told him without trying to verify it? Why did he kill Dolf instead of accepting that Dolf was simply limited by the moral myopia of his own society, which he clearly was? Maybe exceptionally good people like Vhazhar could see the problems with the status quo, but it wouldn't take an exceptionally evil person to NOT see them, so Dolf wasn't necessarily a bad guy. Couldn't Hirou have looked for another wizard who was willing to volunteer for the process? Or, hell, found some other trustworthy person to become the new god, and let Vhazhar prove his virtue by sacrificing his OWN wizardly ass to fuel the spell? He didn't even ask Vhazhar what his new world would look like; he just decided that Vhazhar's ideas were probably good, and that he could be trusted to not become corrupt.
I guess that ending was the best we could expect from someone like Hirou.
In response to
The Sword of Good
I wonder if you might have seen this essay by David Brin...
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, "Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord"?
Or might they instead have thought they were the "good guys," with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?
Picture, for a moment, Sauron the Eternal Rebel, relentlessly maligned by the victors of the War of the Ring -- the royalists who control the bards and scribes (and moviemakers). Sauron, champion of the common Middle Earthling! Vanquished but still revered by the innumerable poor and oppressed who sit in their squalid huts, wary of the royal secret police with their magical spy-eyes, yet continuing to whisper stories, secretly dreaming and hoping that someday he will return ... bringing more rings.
I think Sauron did enough explicitly evil stuff to make himself the bad guy. Tricking the Numenorians into destroying themselves out of spite is pretty hard to justify.
There's also the fact that orcs don't have free will. They were created from tortured elves and mindraped into obedience. The fact that Sauron was willing to use them as canon fodder rather than trying to find a way to reverse what Melkor did to them speaks worlds about his moral virtue.
Finally, the rings. Using mind control to turn foreign leaders into your obedient thralls, consoling them with the promise that they will be able to crush others under their heel as you crushed them. Real nice of Sauron.
Middle Earth was a flawed world filled with the same evils and injustices as our own, but Sauron was almost definitely the worst thing in it. I'll give David Brin some credit, though, as Tolkien did a pretty bad job of explaining the situation in Lord of the Rings. You have to read the Silmarilion (or, as in my case, talk to another guy who has read the Silmarilion, as I lacked the patience to wade through another gazillion pages of archaic English) to understand what's going on, which is a major failing of LotR.
In response to
The Sword of Good
If you meet the buddha on the road, you must kill him.
The koan really strikes me in this situation. The character in the end accepts that he alone gets to make the final moral decisions for himself, regardless of what the labels are and what his teachings were. Many religious ceremonies are about abject submission, but many are also about the idea of "I freely give myself, and accept the consequnces of that submission" and so on.
Although I will add that I completely disagree with the hero. If he really was undecided, the current balance was his best bet. The dark lord's spell would have forced the balance into one that might not be corrected. Kill him, and the war continues, and he can learn which side is truly good by his definition. This seems especially true since the hero kind of accepted the idea of balance early on.
Indeed. His willingness to kill Dolf without asking any questions or making any attempts to verify the Dark Lord's statements just shows that Hirou still hasn't learned anything.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
In Ch 45, Harry thinks:
I comprehend your nature, you symbolize Death, through some law of magic you are a shadow that Death casts into the world.
If this is true, it's possible that as long as death exists (for wizards, anyway), it will continue to cast its shadows, and so the dementors can never be all destroyed. Maybe they'll just respawn or something. In fact, maybe when Harry destroyed that one in Ch 45, a dementor respawned back at Azkaban without anyone noticing. Do the guards keep a count of dementors?
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on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
Dementors don't act like death incarnate, though. Death isn't reactive to human expectations and sensibilities. Death doesn't go out of its way to try to destroy people. Death is just a force of nature (or, rather, the point at which a force of nature terminates). Dementors act like a superstitious anthropomorphization of death.
We also know that there is a dark ritual that summons Death, which Quirrel knows but is afraid to perform.
We know, too, that spells modify reality based on the caster's understanding of the natural world, rather than using the most simple and nature-compliant approach.
I have a very strong suspicion that the first dementors were created by the ritual that Quirrel spoke of. They are a fearful, human-imagined depiction of death, created by the spells of primitive wizards who didn't understand death's impersonal and causal nature. What I wonder, though, is whether casting that ritual is the ONLY way to create new dementors, or if they are also capable of reproducing on their own once summoned. According to the books, dementors can reproduce via a mysterious process that bathes the countryside in fog, but Yudkowsky's dementors are already quite different from Rowling's. It may be that their numbers remain constant unless someone uses that dark ritual to create more of them or a spell like Harry's ubertronus to destroy some.
I'm not sure if anyone has commented on this, but I just noticed it while rereading the Self-Actualization chapters:
Hermione went to tremendous lengths to be her own person rather than just something of Harry's, including becoming a general and fighting bullies. Now she has sworn herself into Harry's service and house forever. That is really sad.
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on
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
That's only a legal formality, though. Harry hates the wizard society and wouldn't use its laws against her, and he'd discourage others from acknowledging it.
Still, Hermione (unlike Harry) cares what others think of her, so being surrounded by people who act as if she belongs to Harry is going to hurt her.
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Corollary: you haven't thought of every last thing.
Conclusion: intelligence explosion might not be a good idea.