Comment author: Eugine_Nier 07 February 2013 03:09:55AM 2 points [-]

you're not being yourself.

Taboo "being yourself".

Comment author: epigeios 07 February 2013 04:16:12AM *  4 points [-]

"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.

Comment author: wedrifid 24 January 2013 09:59:56AM *  4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: epigeios 07 February 2013 03:22:39AM -1 points [-]

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?

Comment author: epigeios 16 July 2012 08:18:28AM *  1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 09 June 2012 11:33:15AM 2 points [-]

Experimental condensed matter postdoc here. Specializing in graphene and carbon nanotubes, and to a lesser extent mechanical/electronic properties of DNA.

Comment author: epigeios 12 June 2012 04:18:37AM 0 points [-]

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?

Comment author: RolfAndreassen 09 June 2012 06:04:12AM 25 points [-]

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.

Comment author: epigeios 12 June 2012 03:56:35AM 1 point [-]

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?

Comment author: epigeios 12 June 2012 03:28:02AM *  0 points [-]

I've got a lot of questions I just thought of today. I am personally hoping to think of a possible alternative model of quantum physics that doesn't need anything more than the generation 1 fermions and photons, and doesn't need the strong interaction.

  • What is the reason for the existence of the theory of the charm quark (or any generation 2-3 quark)? What are some results of experiments that necessitate the existence of a charm quark?
  • Which of the known hadrons can be directly observed in any way, as opposed to theorized as a mathematical in-between or as a trigger for some directly observable decay?
  • Am I right in thinking that the tau lepton is only theorized in order to explain an in-between decay state? If you don't know, do you know of anything related to any other fermions (or hadrons) that only exist as a theoretical in-between?
  • How were the masses of the tau lepton and the top quark determined? If the methods are different for the charm quark, how was the mass of the charm quark determined?
  • Does the weak interaction cause any sort of movement, or hold anything together, or does it only act as a trigger for decay? Why is it considered a field energy?
  • When detecting gamma radiation, how much background is there to extract from? Does the process of extracting from the background require performing hundreds of iterations of the experiment?
  • Since you know quite a lot about it, and since the majority of my knowledge comes from Wikipedia, what does "fitting distributions in multiple dimensions" mean? What is the possibility of error of this process?
  • Oh, and lastly, do you know of any chart or list anywhere that details the known possible decay paths of bosons and fermions?

That's all for now. I SO hope you can answer any of these questions; because Wikipedia can't :'( (as someone who enjoys theory, I find it annoying when Wikipedia can neither confirm nor deny my conjectures, despite the fact that the information is certainly out there somewhere, and someone knows it.)

Comment author: Sean4 07 February 2008 09:12:25AM 6 points [-]

The "errors" in the arguments are not relevant. When surveying people who aren't disease biologists, it doesn't matter if there are specific one-way paths in the cutting edge research, what matters are the processes that inform the decisions. In the absence of any biological information, there's no indication to tilt the scales one way or another. If these people were saying 'well, robins have gene XYZZY which causes etc.', but they aren't, they're functioning on categories as they don't have any real information on cross-species disease. Accidental cancellation is not an example of a lack of bias.

If all gray squirrels hold this "disease" DNA, and are completely unaffected by it, it doesn't seem any more a disease than mitochondria or stomach flora. If there are gray squirrels without it, and they can contract it from red squirrels, then the disease does indeed pass both ways even though gray squirrels are asymptomatic.

Pointing out _why_ an error in an element of the argument matters would be relevant.

Comment author: epigeios 11 May 2012 07:19:53PM *  -1 points [-]

The errors are relevant. So what if the person who mentions an error doesn't have the capacity to deduce the relevancy? It's still possible that someone on here will deduce the relevancy.

Your post, by contrast, as well as Bob3's just above, are making the assumption that the only argument to be found is the one that was stated. Caledonian2 is right, and if you weren't focused on the irrelevancy of his argument, you might have been able to find the relevancy of his point.

Granted, Caledonian2 did his best to find an argument fitting his idea, and the argument he picked isn't necessarily relevant. He probably did this because of the scientific bias of this message board, where I myself have previously succumbed to the fear that I need to have a valid argument to back up my point, lest others attack me for not having one. But none of that diminishes the potential relevancy of his idea

Comment author: epigeios 11 May 2012 07:05:39PM 3 points [-]

It seems to me that diseases would be more likely to spread from robins to ducks than from ducks to robins. The reason I am thinking this is the case is that robins fly around more than ducks, and ducks rest in water. This means that ducks are fairly likely to come in contact with traces of past robins, but robins are unlikely to come in contact with traces of past ducks.

The idea that the spread of disease between species is equally likely not only ignores differences in immunity, as Caledonian2 said; it also assumes direct contact between the species. Indirect contact, but contrast, can be one-way.

Even the concept of Alaska being far and Kansas being close is easily explained by calling into question the wording of the question in the experiment. Kansas is close to Alaska, compared to the average of everywhere else. Alaska however, is far from Kansas, compared to the average of the rest of the US. It's definitely a bias as a result of categorization, but it's not because of the properties of the categories. It instead seems to be a bias in how the question is interpreted: in which category the question refers to. And this, obviously, is a result of contextual inference making. Kansas is in a different context than Alaska.

Comment author: epigeios 23 April 2012 09:32:40PM 0 points [-]

Awesome! This is very useful. I now have a perfect way to describe why Taoist meditation is among the most useful things someone in this community can learn to do. And I have tons of experience to back it up.

Mindfulness meditation is the prerequisite for Taoist meditation. And Wikipedia doesn't explain how to practice Mindfulness meditation.

Comment author: Incorrect 11 April 2012 02:59:08AM 15 points [-]

So if I pay attention to paying attention will I get better at paying attention?

Comment author: epigeios 23 April 2012 09:10:27PM 2 points [-]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/blr/attention_control_is_critical_for/6frz How to learn how to meditate properly

In short: Yes, you will. This is how to accomplish that goal quickly and efficiently.

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