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Wish I had seen this. I announced a Baltimore meetup a few months ago, but the only other attendees came from DC. Let's get our act together. :-)
I'm in upper NW DC, so potentially within driving distance.
Well, I'm interested in doing a meetup if y'all are. I'd be willing to host here in Baltimore. I guess express interest and availability here or in PM?
Gee, I'll bet he has a clever explanation of the 2008 election too.
And I suspect in 2012, no matter what happens he'll have a very good explanation. And 2014, etc. etc. You think he might need to read the sequences just a bit?
In response to
Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory
The game of Diplomacy I won, I won through an enforceable side contract (which lost me a friend and got me some accusations of cheating, but this is par for the course for a good Diplomacy game). I was Britain; my friend H was France... A lot of people made fun of me for this, including H, but in my defense I did end up winning the game.
I strongly agree with this Newbies' Guide:
You must always play each game fairly to give each player an equal opportunity to do well… don't sign up for a game with your best friend and have an unbreakable alliance from turn one... winning in these situations does not say anything about your skills as a Diplomacy player, only that you can win by cheating (well duh).
If contracts using outside resources were legitimate it would also be okay for players to (consistently) offer cash rewards for cooperation. That would break the game pretty badly.
Upvoted, because I think you're only probably right. And you not only stole my thunder, you made it more thunderous :(
Same here. A "pretty sure" confidence level would probably have done it for me.
In response to
The Instrumental Value of Your Own Time
Smoke weed every day?
In response to
Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future
Writing is extremely low-bandwidth. If I recall correctly, Shannon did some experimentation and found that per letter, English was no more than a bit and I've seen other estimates that it's less than a bit, per letter. (In comparison, depending on language and encoding, a character can take up to 32 bits to store uncompressed. Even ASCII requires 8 bits/1 byte per character.) And given the difficulty of producing a megabyte of personal information, and the vast space of potential selves...
If we're going to try to preserve ourselves through recorded information, wouldn't it make much more sense to instead spend a few hundred/thousand dollars on lifelogging? If you really do record your waking hours, then preservation of your writings is automatically included - as well as all the other stuff. Plus, this solves the issue of mundane experiences.
Writing might be inferior to lifelogging as a way of preserving yourself, but it might actually be better than lifelogging as a way of having a specific type of impact on the future. Since neither form of reconstruction is going to provide the same type of experiential immortality as cryonics potentially would, why not attempt to reincarnate your ideal self?
(As far as general anthropological data goes, there's going to be plenty of footage of average schmucks doing random stuff.)
In response to
The Tragedy of the Social Epistemology Commons
Wouldn't rationality help people get things on the two bottom tiers? If so, shouldn't your theory predict that people in more dire circumstances are more rational, when I believe the opposite tends to be the case?
A much, much simpler explanation is that rationality is hard and not-rationality is easy. Just as all good families are quite similar and bad families are often uniquely different, there's basically one correct epistemology and a whole lot of incorrect ones. Because truly terrible, survival-inhibiting epistemologies have been eliminated through natural (and social) selection, we're left with a bunch that, at the very least, do not inhibit reproduction. Extremely high-quality epistemology does not appear to be particularly conducive to Darwinian reproductive success, so it never exactly got selected for. Indeed, extremely high quality epistemology may be contingent on a certain level of scientific progress, and thus may have only been practicable in the past few centuries. Imagine trying to simply exist in the world 20,000 years ago, where the only answer you could give to nearly any question about nature or how the world worked was, "I haven't a clue."
Much like religion, one will generally end up with whatever epistemology one is raised with, with whatever particular modifications your mind makes intuitively. Since very few people have minds that gravitate towards a rational epistemology, and since society doesn't particularly value epistemic hygiene, it's little surprise that rationalists do not abound.
Furthermore, your hypothesis that rationality is not conducive to tiers three and four does not appear to be well-founded. I suspect a lot of people would be significantly benefit from greater marginal rationality. An old acquaintance of mine has a Facebook status that regularly oscillates between, "OMG so good to be in love!!!!!<3" and "Oh no my heart was broken again how could u do this to me?" I would anticipate that just a little bit more rationality would greatly benefit this person.
Just as all good families are quite similar and bad families are often uniquely different, there's basically one correct epistemology and a whole lot of incorrect ones.
That's a pretty risky analogy.
In response to
Cambridge Less Wrong meetup this Sunday, May 16
As a lurker, I may go to that place and eavesdrop.
I was the guy sitting across from you reading "Yoga Time Travel."
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