byrnema

On reddit today I read 'the-Gandhi-quote' on a post about the Wall Street Occupation Protest: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.." I'm transitioning, possibly, from the laughing stage and am beginning to feel the tiniest bit excited that perhaps some actual change is in order. On the...

Like Yvain's parents, I am planning on moving house. Selling a house and buying a house involve making a lot of decisions based on limited information, which I thought would make a set of good exercises for the application of Bayesian reasoning. I need to decide what price to list...

In this post, I discuss a theoretical strategy for finding a morally optimum world in which -- regardless of my intrinsic moral preferences -- I fold to the preferences of the most moral minority. I don't personally find X to be intrinsically immoral. I know that if some people knew...

In this post I present the first few hypotheses that I can think for why people insist on a metaphysical aspect to consciousness, and develop one in some detail: a "reality is simulated" hypothesis. Please contribute your own hypotheses. Why is there a persistent belief that consciousness is metaphysical? I...

Occasionally, concerns have been expressed from within Less Wrong that the community is too homogeneous. Certainly the observation of homogeneity is true to the extent that the community shares common views that are minority views in the general population. Maintaining a High Signal to Noise Ratio The Less Wrong community...

In response to Marketing rationalism, Bystander Apathy, Step N1 in Extreme Rationality: It Could Be Great, and Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes. The problem that motivates this post is: “Given a controversial question in which there are good and bad arguments on both sides, as well as unreliable and...

In response to Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted It is a theist cliché: you need religion to define morality. The argument doesn't have to be as simplistic as “you need God to impose it”, but at the least it is the belief that your community needs to agree on...