= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Who's bankrupt? Peter Thiel or Gawker?
What were Peter Thiel's uncovered misdeeds? Being gay?
In response to
Open Thread, Aug 29. - Sept 5. 2016
Hi, I'm curious what rationalists (you) think of this video if you have time:
Why Rationality Is WRONG! - A Critique Of Rationalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaV6S45AD1w 1 h 22 min 47 s
Personally, I don't know much about all of the different obstacles in figuring out the truth so I can't do this myself. I simply bought it because it made sense to me, but if you can somehow go meta on the already meta, I would appreciate it.
I tried listening to the video on the 1.5× speed. Even so, the density of ideas is horribly low. It's something like:
Science is successful, but that makes scientists overconfident. By 'rationalists' I mean people who believe they already understand everything.
Those fools don't understand that "what they understand" is just a tiny fraction of the universe. Also, they don't realize that the universe is not rational; for example the animals are not rational. Existence itself has nothing to do with rationality or logic. Rationalists believe that the universe is rational, but that's just their projection. Rationality is an emergent property. Existence doesn't need logic, but logic needs existence, therefore existence is primary.
You can't use logic to prove whether the sun is shining or not; you have to look out of the window. You can invent an explanation for empirical facts, but there are hundreds of other equally valid explanations.
That was the first 16 minutes, then I became too bored to continue.
My opinion?
Well, of course if you define a "rationalist" as a strawman, you can easily prove the strawman is foolish. You don't need more than one hour to convince me about that. No one in this community is trying to derive whether the sun is shining from the first principles.
I am not sure whether "universe is rational" is supposed to mean that (a) the universe has a relatively short description which could be understood by a mind, or that (b) the universe itself is a mind, specifically a rational one. Seems like the meaning was switched in the middle of an argument, using a sleight of hand.
In summary, my impression is of muddled thinking, and of feeling superior to the imaginary opponents. Actually, maybe the opponents are not imaginary -- there are many fools of various kinds out there -- it just has nothing to do with the kind of "rationality" that we use here, such as described e.g. by Stanovich.
In response to
Open Thread, Aug. 15. - Aug 21. 2016
Elon Musk almost terminated our simulation.
Simulation is a simulation only if everybody is convinced that they are living real life. Bostrom proved that we are most likely live in a simulation, but not much people know about it. Elon Musk tweeted that we live with probability 1000000 to 1 in simulation. Now everybody knows. I think that it was 1 per cent chance that our simulation will terminate after it. It has not happen this time, but there may be some other threshold after which it will be terminated, like finding more proves that we are in a simulation or creation of an AI.
On the other hand, the more "actions that would get the simulation terminated" we do and survive them, the higher the chance that we are actually not living in a simulation.
I'm not sure that it is so much a cultural thing, as it is a personal deal. Popular dudes who can always get more friends don't need to filter other people's talky-talky for tact. Less cool bros have to put up with a lot more and. "Your daddy loves us and he means well..." kind of stuff. Not just filter but positively translating.
I would say this is about status. People filter what they say to high-status individuals, but don't bother filtering what they say to low-status individuals.
Nerd culture is traditionally low-status in context of the whole society, and meritocratic inside. That means that nerds are used to hearing non-filtered things from outsiders, and don't have strong reasons to learn filtering when speaking with insiders. Also, it is more complicated for aspies to understand when and why exactly should the filters be used, so it is easier to have a norm for not having filters.
(And I suspect that people most complaining about the lack of filters would be often those who want to be treated as high-status by the nerd community, without having the necessary skills and achievements.)
Let's assume that "still doesn't work" for some people means "when I try eating even less, I am so weak that I can barely move my body; yet my weight doesn't decrease".
Let's not. This is equivalent to discussing exercise by starting "let's assume some people collapse from utter exhaustion on their way from the parking lot to the gym, what about them?" You are not saying yours is a central example, are you?
In any case, CICO is not a normative theory. It's primarily a descriptive theory. It says that A (net energy balance) and B (body weight) always go together, A is necessary and sufficient for B and B is conclusive evidence for A.
CICO certainly has implications for attempts to lose weight (e.g.: if you're not in calorie deficit, you are not going to lose weight), but it makes no claims about optimal (in various meanings) ways to lose weight. It says that there is a simple, specific way that always works: eat less. It does NOT say that it will be easy or pleasant or that your average Fatty McFatface will be able to stick with it for more than a day.
Issues with losing weight are usually psychological and often biochemical. These issues can be overpowered by eating less though, again, it's not necessarily the optimal way to go about it. And, by the way, I assume general health -- if you are or should be under medical care (e.g. you are a diabetic), such generic advice no longer applies.
Basically, the advantages of eating less as a way to lose weight are that it's simple and, provided you can execute, it is guaranteed to work. The disadvantage is that it's hard to execute because it's unpleasant and few people can stick with doing unpleasant things for a long while. "Eat less" is good advice for some people and useless advice for others: YMMV as usual.
So... I guess we both agree that eating less and exercising more is a good strategy to lose weight unless there is a health-related reason why this strategy will not work.
(And that for different people, or even for the same person at a different age, the proportions of the food consumed and exercise necessary to lose weight may be quite different?)
And we disagree... about how frequent are these health-related reasons in population, and how often the people with the health-related reasons are given this advice anyway...?
Meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
15:00 - 15:30 arrival and social time 15:30 official start with an introduction round 16:00 defining the topic(s) of the day (might be one big presentation or open microphone which means everyone can offer short talks or topics for discussion) 18:00 cleaning the room and then leaving for dinner https://www.facebook.com/events/525225234355376/ google map shows a wrong place, the meetup is across the street from the train station Wien Stadlau (better instructions are on facebook)
Discussion article for the meetup : Rationality Meetup Vienna
In response to
The ladder of abstraction and giving examples
Biting my tongue to avoid an object-level response.
Seems to me that in real life this is a smaller problem than in online communities. Because real-life interactions allow various kinds of signals that are difficult to translate into comments and votes. For example, in real life people usually stand in a small group and talk; it is obvious who is and who isn't a part of the group, even if some people don't talk at the moment. You know who is listening to what. But in the online debate, I have no idea who is reading what, until they reply.
If there is a person in real life who only offers nitpicking, others may decide, independently, to only discuss important stuff in their absence. The person will simply be not invited to an important debate. This doesn't require any confrontation like "John, go away, we want to discuss stuff we care about, and your contributions are predictably not helpful". It's more like Alice invites Bob, Cathy and Dan to discuss a topic she considers important, and no one invites John. He either will not know what happened, or there will be a socially acceptable excuse "well, you were not there when the topic came up".
Is there an equivalent of this in online debates? I guess on Facebook one can start a conversation and invite a group of people. But on LW, there is no such mechanism.
On the other hand, the cost of invitation-only debates (both on Facebook and in real life) is that many potentially useful contributors are excluded. So there seems to be a trade-off between open debate and private debate.
A possible technical solution: imagine a chat where anyone can start a debate on a new topic, and the person who started the debate automatically becomes a moderator of the thread. If you think the moderator is abusing their powers, you can start a new thread on the same topic. (There can be other safeguards against mod abuse, such as making it possible -- but trivially inconvenient -- to see the censored comments. So the people can decide whether it is worth to continue debating the same stuff somewhere else.)
tl;dr -- I agree that nitpicking can become a serious problem, and that it is more frequent among nerds. However, I also think that this problem is further complicated by the software we use, if it doesn't support solutions similar to those we would naturally choose in real life.
In response to
Non-Fiction Book Reviews
I haven't read "Good and Real" or "Thinking, Fast and Slow" yet, because I think that I won't learn something new as a long term Less Wrong reader. In the case of "Good and Real" part seems to be about physics and I don't think I have the physics background to profit from hat (I feel a refresher on high school physics would be more appropirate for me). In the case of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" I have already read books by Keith Stanovich (What Intelligence Tests Miss and The Robot's Rebellion) and some chapters of academic books edited by Kahneman.
Does anyone think those two books are still worth my time?
It also depends on how fast you read. And whether you only want information for yourself, or possibly to educate other people (because telling other people to read something in Kahneman will seem high-status, while telling them to read the Sequences may feel cultish to them).
By the way, have you read Stanovich before or after LW? Was that worth your time?
In response to
European Soylent alternatives
Meal replacements really are awesome. I've been on Soylent 2.0 for several months. I don't have to cook, wash dishes, or refrigerate my food, it's shipped to my front door, all of my waste is recyclable (to my knowledge), I don't have opportunities to impulse buy any more, it's more nutritious than what I was eating before, I'm a vegetarian (vegan, even?) as a side effect, and it's hard to choke on it. Rosa Labs also just released a caffeinated version with coffee in it, which will replace my energy drink habit. (I should probably drop caffeine altogether, but I love it so much.)
Cons include people looking at me weird, possible nutrition-related black swans, jaw muscle atrophy (which may be a notable pro for any transwomen out there), and lack of fibrous material to chew on to clean out the fissures in my molars, which could increase risk of dental caries. I could pick up a gum habit for the last one; xylitol gum would probably be best as long as I'm trying to improve my oral health.
Chewing gum is generally recommended with this kind of food.
There are already known problems with this kind of food, and I wonder why no one seems to address them. First, the lack of probiotics. Second, some metabolic pathways cannot be done at the same time (sorry, I don't remember the specific examples), so if you eat both X and Y in the same food, X will take priority and get digested, but Y will be ignored. This is not a problem if some of your food contains only X and other contains only Y, but may become a problem when X and Y always come mixed together.
The second problem seems relatively easy to fix: just split the food into two (or more if necessary) variants. For example, make one variant with double X, zero Y, and the usual amount of everything else, and other variant with no X, double Y, and the usual amount of everything else. Not sure what to do about the first problem; I suspect probiotics do not have the same shell life as the usual Soylent ingredients.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Regarding the "Universe is rational"-strawman: I think the mistake which the video is trying to point out, is the mistake that a description of the universe is the universe. When it is only a description, same with anything. It is language and that is the limitation.
So for those that believe the universe is for example physics, instead of our projection, that's the flaw I think. It's simple, ask a person if gravity is real, after they respond "yes" ask them, is this not a human projection (your projection) upon the universe? What is the real universe?
What I wonder is what lesswrongers think of this strawman if it wasn't one, an actual argument towards someone (rationalist in this context) who made the statement gravity is real and not a projection of mind: "G R A V I T Y and everything else which is occurring to me in consciousness"
I'm not sure what you mean with this, because "Universe is a mind" seems more of an argument then stating the opponent believes the "universe is rational" (the strawman) like "What you think is the universe is your mind projection of labels and symbols yet you're not aware of it"
Well. I think usually what we see in others is just a projection of our own mind. "The world is your mirror"
But is there someone who can refute the argument made in the video, if you had the argument which the strawman was?
Otherwise it seems to me "Only fools would make the argument of which the strawman was targeted towards".
I wonder if any rationalist ever heard about "map is not the territory". /s
Ask a person whether a tree is real. Isn't that also just a human projection upon the nature?
We could spend days trying to pinpoint what exactly do we mean by "tree" etc. I am just saying that this is not specific to science or "rationalists", so why use it as an argument against them. There are useful things that could be said about the topic, but the "drive-by shooting" done in the video helps no one.
The LW-style answer would be something like: Yes, I obviously perceive the idea of gravity in my mind (because that's the only organ I have for perceiving ideas), but it is reasonable to assume that there is something "out there" that causes those perceptions in systematic ways. (I might be living in Matrix, but then "gravity" would refer to the specific law of the Matrix.)
That would probably require having that argument in a shorter written form, with footnotes explaining what did the author actually mean by saying this or that.
Otherwise: inferential distances, illusion of transparency, and all the way words can go wrong. :(