frelkins

@mitchell

"Cynicism is fundamentally about self-defense from future pain"

I find this confusing. Aren't cynics actually Idealists? That is, their fundamental position is that there is Virtue to be found once the falsity of fame, power, wealth, vanity, and pomp are cast aside? They don't seem to be defending themselves from pain, rather the almost seem to seek it - that's why they wandered homeless like wild dogs (cynic, from cyne, Greek for dog) or at best lived unwashed in barrels?

@Tyrell:

"read to me like a self-satisfied expression of condescension towards an audience so naive as to expect some justice in this world"

Tyrell, actually it appears a standard part of the traditional African folktale formula. Remember, most folktales were not told in private settings. African folktales were traditionally told by people with social performance/storyteller roles at public events. African folktales often end with a similar "proverb" and a statement by the story teller that the tale is done, and discussion of the moral ca... (read more)

@daniel

Because we in the West also say "no good deed goes unpunished," we do not mean that one shouldn't do good deeds, or that the failure of others to correctly respect good deeds is a fact of life that should cause us to throw up our hands and collapse gloomily at the unchanging evils of the world. Rather it is an ironic statement in sympathy with the person whose good deed was unrewarded, to show that we recognize ourselves the goodness of good deeds, unlike those other nasty monkeys who aren't "nice."

@Robin

What? Of course it is a r... (read more)

EY I think you completely misinterpret the meaning of this important story:

". . .one of the most pervasive features of [African] tales: the use of them as a discussion of how to act correctly. . . This is the way of the small community worldwide, for the well-being of the group resides in the sharing of this kind of [moral] knowledge, through which family and friendship obligations are woven into the web of community.

This process of engagement, of using moral tales to open rather than close off discussion, is precisely the modus operandi of a group of... (read more)

Some might like to listen to Robin's podcast on signaling.

@billswift

"Nearly all people for thousands of years thought it was perfectly all right to keep slaves"

And many still do today - for example, Shari'a endorses slavery. Our Western values are far from universal and cannot be taken for granted.

@Anon.

"if there is a reason to expect human rightness to be in some sense coherent"

Alas there probably is not. Sir Isaiah Berlin speaks powerfully and beautifully of this so-called values pluralism in his book Liberty.

There are several ironies - if not outright tragedies - of life and this is one: that we don't want what we want to want, and that the things we think we ought to want often conflict with each other as well as our underlying motives. We are not in charge of ourselves and we are mysterious to our own hearts. Men and women are conflicted and, due to evolution, conflict.

@Mike Blume

"On Firefly, Kaylee is beautiful, has an above-female-average sex drive, and falls in love with the introverted, socially awkward intellectual character - isn't she exactly the sort of catgirl most male sci-fi fans would want?"

No. That would certainly freak the nerd out. M. Vassar and I have several times discussed this problem - nerds seem to integrate their low status, so often if any even half-decent skirt shows an interest in them they reject instantly, thinking "wow, I know I'm a loser, so you must be worse to like me." Nerds would do better to uncoil from the defensive crouch of that identity ASAP.

Economic weirdtopia . . .after the Ultimate Crash of 2105, the best ems got together and created a new universal atomic currency, based on not just on gold, but on reserves of quark-gluon plasma made from gold nuclei in deference to mankind's historical preferences.

Sexual weirdtopia. . .since death is over through nanotechology or uploading into perfect android bodies you can get on a 3-year-lease, there's no need for birth. If ems want to create a new being from themselves, they just copy different brain modules from the catalog and create the perfect &qu... (read more)

@Eli "Ben Franklin, say" Franklin is probably the best person to come to the here - it's very well-known he wished to preserve his body in Madeira so he could be revived to see the future, yes? Plus if you've actually read any of his letters and other writing, you see how much more flexible his mind was than just anyone you have ever met. My impression is that he would find today less shocking than probably 75% of those who live now do.

"talking about science in public is socially unacceptable" This is already true in many places around ... (read more)

@Cameron

My understanding of the disagreement appears different than Eli's. My impression is that the core of the disagreement lies in Robin's statement:

"This history of when innovation rates sped up by how much just doesn't seem to support your claim that the strongest speedups are caused by and coincide with new optimization processes, and to a lesser extent protected meta-level innovations"

The fwoom!, god-to-rule-us-all, and issues around models all seem to me to fall out of this contention.

After the discussion around the disagreement, I gave H... (read more)

@Doug S

"stuck"

Stuck!?!? Tiresias is said to have enjoyed his time as a woman: "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only." Ahem.

@adept42

Thank you for such an honest telling of your perspective. It's very moving. I embrace you.

"that gendered behavior is hard-wired into the brain at birth"

Eli I think here is very careful to say "genes on your Y chromosome that tweaked your brain to some extent" - note the some, he avoids speculating as to how much - and uses the term "emotional architecture" as well as correctly in his comments distinguishing between the terms sex and gender. As a cisgendered F, I hope you will accept my word that Eli is scrupulous in hi... (read more)

@Doug S

"Borges"

Gwern is referring to the famous story by Borges, Funes the Memorious, I believe. It's in Ficciones.

@Anon

"ranma"

It's no curse to be a girl, honestly.

@Simon

"If you want to try being female for a while"

I mean, if anyone wants to check it out, just try Second Life. Most guys who try it tho' in my experience scarcely last a day - if you think it's hard to talk to girls as a guy, try to see if you can manage to talk to girls as a girl - they flunk the shoe chatter and reveal themselves quickly.

I know only two who are convincing for more than a couple of hours in regular conversation - and one of them is a filmmaker who writes screenplays for a living, which is how he learned to really "hear" and create feminine dialog.

@Toby Ord

It seems to me that Eli is interested in the known branch of anthropology known as ludology, or game studies. The first ludologist I ever knew of was the eminent philosopher Sir Michael Dummett of Oxford, an amazing, diverse guy. The history of playing cards is one of his specialties, and he has written 2 books on them.

Games can be silly (apparently the only truly universal game is peekaboo - why is that?) or profund (go). They of course are intriguing for what they say about culture, history, innate human ethics, their use of language, their uniq... (read more)

@James

"overclocking"

Forgive me, I don't see how any of your list displays overclocking, or increased speed.

I was speaking just Friday to a shrink acquaintance of mine on the subject of Asbergers. He in fact argues these autism spectrum disorders are due to underclocking and poor brain region synchronization, as based on recent discoveries from brain imaging studies. That is, austism spectrum people may have a lot of stuff up there, and parts of it may seem overconnected, but those links seem weak and underperforming, while other parts of the brai... (read more)

This post has got me thinking about my after-froze/after-upload career path. Hmm. Great! I think I've now found 3. So now when I retire, I know what to pursue to improve my odds of adapting successfully later.

On TV addiction:

"Recent studies have found that 2 to 12 percent of viewers see themselves as addicted to television: they feel unhappy watching as much as they do, yet seem powerless to stop themselves."

-- NY Times

"On average, people have 35 to 40 hours a week of discretionary time and spend about 21 hours near the tube. The [University of Maryland] study found that the happiest people estimated they tuned in to television 18.9 hours a week. For the least happy, it was nearly 25 hours a week.

The study, published in the December issue of the ... (read more)

@Patri

"Instead of winning by being the best female monkey"

Girlworld isn't like that, Patri. Isn't that guyworld you're describing? I don't have be the best skirt monkey at all to "win," if you consider what my chick definition of winning is. "Being the best" is what male monkeys need to be - the gorilla troupe's got only 1 alpha silverback.

Whereas all I need to be is just high enough in the harem hierarchy that the silverback will do me when I solicit him and I have enough social support among my female relatives to raise his ... (read more)