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As jooyous noted, one of the most important skills is to be able to notice when you are offended, or otherwise emotionally hampered. This is not at all trivial, as you can see from the discussion threads here, where people who are clearly emotionally compromised behave as if they were acting rationally. (Yes, I am guilty of this, too.) I am not sure how to develop this skill of noticing being offended while being offended, but surely there is a training for it. Maybe something as simple as a checklist to go through before commenting would be a start. Checklists are generally a good idea.
In response to
Don't Get Offended
The training method is called Taoist meditation.
Do this: be aware of yourself. Once you can do this to some extent, do the next step: be aware of your awareness of yourself.
Keep practicing this forever. That is meditation in a nutshell.
A checklist can help as long as it's used to further the practice of being aware. If you're having trouble being aware of yourself, practice being aware of other things first.
Oh, and another trick is that the fastest way to improve is to never go beyond 70% of your ability. One should only do so to gauge one's ability, to better know what 70% is.
But on a long term basis, if you find yourself constantly on the recieving end of moving fists, you might want to seriously consider learning to dodge better.
That really, really depends though. Two different people may find themselves in that situation for completely different reasons. Some folks really just can't catch a break; others really are ready to see a slight in anything that remotely discomfits them. Some folks need to learn to dodge better, some folks probably won't get far with any advice that tells them to do something different since all these moving fists are not their idea and they're taking pains to avoid as it is, and I daresay many folks will encounter both types of situations because moving fists are not a single class of thing...
At the low end of the mind, you're absolutely right. The options are: take the hit, dodge, hit back, or redirect the punch away, or don't even get near people in the first place. The best of those options is to redirect the punch away, which is very difficult to do.
At the high end of the mind, where extreme layers of subtlety exist, where most people don't even have the ability to be aware of at any time during their life, there is another way: realize that the punch is not directed at you. At that level of depth into the mind, the offendee actually entices people to say offensive things in order to get offended.
One layer deeper than that, the offendee's subtle body language, and overall "air around them" or "feeling they give off", is what entices people to say things that person will find offensive. At this level, the method is to realize that the punch is not only not directed at you, but is actually directed at the puncher.
As offensively blunt as it is to say: the reality is, it's always the fault of the person who gets offended. Of course, most of the time, all people involved are offended, and so it's everyone's fault. In the end, what I'm trying to say is not "don't be offended", but instead: listen to your feeling of being offended. It knows better than you. It's not telling you what's wrong with other people, it's telling you what's wrong with yourself. It's right.
You give up the notion "if <thing I don't prefer is the case in the universe> then <I must make myself sad or anxious or offended>".
Right, so I think what is being missed here is the functional role sadness, anxiety and offense play in motivating human action. Sadness has intensionality - it is about something - and its proper role in a human mind is to motivate various complex responses along the lines of "avoid this" or "prevent this from ever happening again." Lose the sadness and you lose the motivational power it contains. I don't think this motivational power is actually replaceable by a more generic abstract preference. (Or else charity fundraising would just say "we offer 20 utilitons per dollar" and that would be enough.)
Of course, the kind of emotional distancing recommended here might be necessary if the sadness/anxiety/offense actually becomes, in itself, an obstacle to achieving your goals - which can certainly happen. But it is not the general case.
EDIT: Just to be clear, I am talking descriptively about humans, not prescriptively here. It's too bad that we aren't strongly motivated by "20 utilitons per dollar." We should be! But we aren't.
The functional role sadness, fear, suffering, and all such emotions plays is the same role pain plays: It is an indicator, telling the mind where the problem is. There are certainly multiple ways to "fix" the problem. In the end, however, the methods that in any way dampen progress are methods that don't actually fix the problem. (The problem is never external)
Roughly 80% of the time, people are offended by things that they don't know they do themselves. That's why it is very important to listen to the emotional pain: to figure that out.
Roughly 20% of the time, people are offended by things that they do the opposite of on purpose, and take pride in. In this case, it is equally important to listen to the emotional pain: to figure out that they are doing the wrong thing. These two things can overlap.
Roughly 50% of the time, people get offended at their own imaginations; and what they are offended by has no bearing in reality. As in: they put words in people's mouths, or they alter definitions. At these times, there is no reasonable way to avoid offending these people. They alter their understanding of reality so that they can be offended. They're basically addicted to getting offended. Yes, I really mean 50%.
you're not being yourself.
Taboo "being yourself".
"being yourself": A metaphor for a feeling which is so far removed from modern language's ability to describe, that it's a local impossibility for all but a tiny portion of the people in the world to taboo it. It's purpose is to illicit the associated feeling in the listener, and not to be used as a descriptive reference. It is a feeling that is so deeply ingrained in 50% of people, that those people don't realize the other 50% of people don't know what it is; and so had never thought to even begin to try to explain it, much less taboo it.
tabooing the word as if it describes an action is an inadequate representation of the true meaning of the word. The same is true of tabooing the word as if it describes an emotion, a thought, a belief, or an identity.
"being yourself" is a conglomeration of two concepts. The first, "being", requires the assumption that there is such a thing as a "state of being", as an all-encompassing description of something that describes it's non-physical properties as a snapshot of a single moment; and that said description is unlikely to change over time. The second, "oneself", requires the assumption that there is such a thing as a spark of consciousness at the source of any mental processes, or related, of any living creature. This concept is reminiscent of the concept of a "soul".
I personally find the concept of "being oneself" to be of the fallacious origin of the assumption that the spark of consciousness is separate from the current state of being, and that said state and spark do not flux and change continuously.
However, the context of the phrase "being yourself", in this instance, requires not that this phrase be tabooed, but instead that "changing your emotions" be tabooed, along with "useful". The question in regards to "changing your emotions" is if the author meant that truly changing one's emotions would be "not being oneself"; or if the author meant something else, such as putting on a facade of an emotion that one is not experiencing is "not being oneself".
"Useful" is a word that has different definitions for many people, and often changes based on context. The comment in question is likely a misunderstanding of what is meant by the word "useful". This implies the possibility that many people have misunderstood what is meant by the word "useful", perhaps even including the original poster of the quote.
So, the useful thing to do would not be to taboo "being yourself", but to instead taboo "useful".
In my case, I am using "useful" to mean an action which produces a generalized and averaged value for all involved and all observers. In this case, I consider the "value" in question to be an increase in communication ability for all posters, and a general increase in all readers' ability to progress their own mental abilities. I could taboo further, but I don't see any proportionally significant value in doing so.
In response to
Right for the Wrong Reasons
In order to make better predictions, we must cast out those predictions that are right for the wrong reasons. While it may be tempting to award such efforts partial credit, this flies against the spirit of the truth.
Are you going to reward me for being wrong for the right reasons? If not I want to know who is skimming 'credit' off the top.
You're the one skimming credit off the top.
My interpretation of this point is that the person doing the rewarding and punishing is the person doing the predicting.
This hints at the deeper problem, too: that the subconscious reinforcement of these predictions is causing them to continue. the most common reward is that a wrong prediction seems right. For most people, that is a reward in and of itself.
So the real question is: are you going to reward yourself for being wrong for the right reasons? how about being right for the wrong reasons?
In response to
2012 Survey Results
LW is not exactly an easy community to get into.
The lack of a willingness to pursue both different ideas and expanded ideas prevents me from commenting. There's too much of a focus on probability, with a false understanding of what constitutes a "point of evidence", and a general inability to navigate a probability cloud with the understanding that all points inside are possible answers.
When I do comment, I get voted down even if my post is a good point. There seems to be no willingness to communicate to non-insiders. There also isn't a system available which supports non-insiders, something which is necessary to make newcomers feel safe. (bold because it's both important and easy to understand). I can't get positive karma.
The comment system itself only supports a good 100-200 comments. It's too daunting of a task to read every one, and it's impossible to search for useful information. Most of the problem here is a programming problem which cannot be solved by anyone who doesn't have direct access to their subconscious mind, which is the majority of LW.
I think, if you want to expand further, and attract more people, you have to expand your mind further: out into the probability field of the unknown. In the end, after you've figured out what's right and what's wrong, and are in the state of exploring probability fields, focusing on right vs wrong is detrimental to determining what's actually right and what's actually wrong. There is no right vs wrong in a probability field; not until all possibilities have been explored. "more right" and "more wrong" are deceiving impossibilities in a chaotic fractal algorithm.
Exploring the probability field is what people with access to their subconscious mind do. Most people don't even have access to their conscious mind. If you want to uplift people, take into account that they can't even think on purpose. (seriously. It's not that it's impossible for them, they just don't know that it's possible)
Of course, I'm one to talk. I need to figure out how to give people direct access to their karma, which is one big step beyond the subconscious mind. I, many-a-time, made the mistake of assuming people here have access to their subconscious.
In response to
The Nature of Offense
It's not status that's the issue, it's the offendee's conception of reality. Status is just the most common (by far) example of this.
Whenever a person has an "image" (subconscious subtle bias) of how things work, without consciously being aware of it, that person's perception of reality is distorted by the image/bias. Then, whenever some input does not fit with the image; either due to someone else asserting their own conflicting image of reality, or due to someone speaking bluntly about a conflicting observation of reality, the biased person subconsciously rejects the new input. This subconscious rejection produces the offended emotion, as a way to defend against the input and preserve the initial image.
Status is a great blanket term to cover most examples of this. However, if someone is lying to themselves, and they are communicating with someone who is being honest, the first person will always end up being offended. This is true no matter how much effort the second person puts into preserving the first person's status.
In terms of karma, it is not the offender's job to avoid offending people, because that is completely unavoidable. It is instead the offendee's job to realize that being offended means that one has a bias/image, and that the only way to not be offended in the same way again is to remove that bias/image from one's own psyche.
This can get extremely complicated and deep. I, for example, was offended by people being offended by me, which just made people more likely to be offended by me.
In response to
Ask an experimental physicist
Experimental condensed matter postdoc here. Specializing in graphene and carbon nanotubes, and to a lesser extent mechanical/electronic properties of DNA.
This might be out in left field, but:
Can water be pumped through carbon nanotubes? If so, has anyone tried? If they have, has anyone tried running an electric current through a water-filled nanotube? How about a magnetic current? How about light? How about sound?
Can carbon nanotubes be used as an antenna? If they can be filled with water, could they then be used more effectively as an antenna?
I don't think it's going to be practical this century. The difficulty is that the same properties that let you cut the latency are the ones that make the detectors huge: Neutrinos go right through the Earth, and also right through your detector. There's really no way around this short of building the detector from unobtainium, because neutrinos interact only through the weak force, and there's a reason it's called 'weak'. The probability of a neutrino interacting with any given five meters of your detector material is really tiny, so you need a lot of them, or a huge and very dense detector, or both. Then, you can't modulate the beam; it's not an electromagnetic wave, there's no frequency or amplitude. (Well, to be strictly accurate, there is, in that neutrinos are quantum particles and therefore of course are also waves, as it were. But the relevant wavelength is so small that it's not useful; you can't build an antenna for it. For engineering purposes you really cannot model it as anything but a burst of particles, which has intensity but not amplitude.) So you're limited to Morse code or similar. Hence you lose in bandwidth what you gain in latency. Additionally, neutrinos are hard to produce in any numbers at a precise moment. You're relying on muon decays, which of course are a fundamentally random process. So the variables you're actually controlling are the direction and intensity of your muon beam, and at respectable fractions of lightspeed you just can't turn them around on a dime. Plus you get the occasional magnet quench or whatnot, and lose the beam and have to spend five minutes building it up again. So, not only are you limited to dots and dashes, you can't even generate them fast and reliably.
All that said, what application other than finance really needs better latency than you get by going at lightspeed through orbit? And while it's true that people would make money off that, I don't see any particular social return to it. Liquidity is a fine thing, but I cannot fathom that it matters to have it on millisecond scales - seconds should be just fine, and we're already way beyond that just with lightspeed the long way around. As for blackout zones, are you thinking of cellphones? I suggest that this is a bad idea. To get a reliable signal in a man-portable detector you would have to have a very intense neutrino burst indeed; and then you'd also get a reliable signal in the body of the guy holding it. We detect neutrinos by the secondary radiation they cause. I haven't worked the numbers, but even if cancers were rare enough to put up with, think of the lawsuits.
Wait wait wait. A muon beam exists? How does that work? How accurate is it? Does it only shoot out muons, or does it also shoot out other particles?
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Name three?
Hahahahahahaha. I'm going to get negative points for this, but it's worth it to me. I so enjoy pointing out Karma. I love the irony.
I should point out that I obviously have that problem as well, given this response.