Comment author: ryleah 12 April 2016 06:33:02AM 0 points [-]

In order to justify discarding the Noble Lie your Third Option needs to be mutually exclusive with the Noble Lie, otherwise you're discarding a utilitarian gain for nothing. If your five minutes of wild thought brings up ideas that only work if you also discard the Noble Lie, that's probably motivated reasoning as well.

Comment author: ryleah 12 April 2016 03:27:37AM *  0 points [-]

I don't see upvote or downvote buttons anywhere. Did LW remove this feature, or is it something that's only happening to me specifically?

Edit: Also, the sort function is static in most but not all comment sections for me. I'm running Chrome.

Comment author: ryleah 09 April 2016 01:48:06PM 0 points [-]

"Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!" means that intelligence didn't happen on purpose, or that intelligence doesn't need to be intentional in order to happen. Emergence as a term doesn't add a reason for a thing, but it does rule some out.

Comment author: ryleah 02 July 2015 03:11:29PM *  -1 points [-]

The benefit of morality comes from the fact that brains are slow to come up with new ideas but quick to recall stored generalizations. If you can make useful rules and accurate generalizations by taking your time and considering possible hypotheticals ahead of time, then your behavior when you don't have time to be thoughtful will be based on what you want it to be based on, instead of television and things you've seen other monkeys doing.

Objective morality is a trick that people who come up with moralities that rely on co-operation play on people who can't be bothered to come up with their own codes. If I learned, suddenly and definitively, that nothing is moral and nothing is right, I wouldn't change anything except to be more secretive about my own morality in order to keep everyone else from finding out that they don't need to follow theirs.

Comment author: SirBacon 26 April 2009 08:03:33PM 9 points [-]

"...then there's the idea that rationalists should be able to (a) solve group coordination problems, (b) care a lot about other people and (c) win..."

Why should rationalists necessarily care a lot about other people? If we are to avoid circular altruism and the nefarious effects of other-optimizing, the best amount of caring might be less than "a lot."

Additionally, caring about other people in the sense of seeking emotional gratification primarily in tribe-like social rituals may be truly inimical to dedicating one's life to theoretical physics, math, or any other far-thinking discipline.

Caring about other people may entail involvement in politics, and local politics can be just as mind-killing as national politics.

Comment author: ryleah 08 October 2014 12:09:00AM *  1 point [-]

Sorry to answer a 5 year old post, but apparently people read these things. You asked "Why should rationalists necessarily care a lot about other people," but all the post said was that they should be able to.

Comment author: mytyde 26 September 2012 04:13:55AM *  7 points [-]

People who grew up in Nazi-occupied countries who were malnourished as children also developed astoundingly high obesity rates as adults. From the evidence I've seen, genetics is over-emphasized as the missing factor in almost every medical theory before enough is known to know better. While income correlates with obesity, it does not explain the physiological mechanism through which poorer people (relative wealth may seem to mean much more than absolute wealth, interestingly) have a much harder time staying healthy.

It seems much more plausible that both semi-adaptable epigenomic variation and multi-generational lifestyle adaptions play bigger roles in generating familial and social trends of obesity. The nutrition, gut health, and overall health of BOTH parents contributes to the making of a child, and the mother's health strongly affects it from then until birth, after which point colostrum and then breast milk will continue to play a direct parent-to-child role in the young one's development.

Though there is no conclusive research that I'm aware of, it is probable that children establish certain growth limitations based on signals about nutrient availability received directly from their parents during conception and then from the mother during pregnancy and breastfeeding (variances of conveyed gut flora could be the mechanism here). Then, lifestyle and its epigenomic effects as normalized during childhood continues to play probably the same-seeming role since parents will tend to feed their children the same things they eat.

Anthropologically, going back a mere few hundred years there were no cultures anywhere in the world suffering obesity epidemics, so it doesn't make sense to attribute variance too strongly to genetics. Historically, humans have survived healthfully on almost any combination of macronutrients while the main variant between healthy civilizations seems to have been micronutrients. Since studies generally don't account in any fashion for idiosyncratic in-utero environment or for epigenetic variations among individuals, it could turn out that a vast amount of nutritional research is entirely worthless. E.g. clinical studies of nutrition among populations could depend entirely on sociological factors about the last generation's diet than about the objective value of macro-nutrients (which, in my opinion, should never be claimed as the object of a study as if removed from the context of the foods they are a part of).

The father's health can play a role after conception as well since beneficial gut bacteria, in the least, can be transferred through saliva & sex. Additionally, since these gut bacteria build up multi-generationally, it could be that antibiotic treatment seriously impairs the functioning of newborns, especially if they don't have probiotic sources in their diet (the best of which is breastmilk from a biotics-rich mother!).

-med student

Comment author: ryleah 13 March 2014 05:00:55PM 0 points [-]

If parental health plays a role in this I would be interested in seeing if there's a correlation between parental vaccination and obesity.

Comment author: ryleah 28 February 2014 09:57:41PM *  4 points [-]

Why aren't "rationalists" surrounded by a visible aura of formidability? Why aren't they found at the top level of every elite selected on any basis that has anything to do with thought? Why do most "rationalists" just seem like ordinary people, perhaps of moderately above-average intelligence, with one more hobbyhorse to ride?

I'm relatively new to rationality, but I've been a nihilist for nearly a decade. Since I've started taking developing my own morality seriously, I've put about 3500 hours of work into developing and strengthening my ethical framework. Looking back at myself when nihilism was just a hobbyhorse, I wasn't noticeably moral, and I certainly wasn't happy. I was a guy who knew things, but the things I knew never got put into practice. 5 years later, I'm a completely different person than I was when I started. I've made a few discoveries, but not nearly enough to account for the radical shifts in my behavior. My behavior is different because I practice.

I know a few other nihilists. They post pictures of Nietzsche on Facebook, come up with clever arguments against religion, and have read "the Anti-Christ." They aren't more moral just because they subscribe to an ethos that requires them to develop their own morality, and from that evidence I can assume that rationalists won't be more rational just because they subscribe to an ethos that demands the think more rationally. Changing your mind requires more than just reading smart things and agreeing with them. It requires practice.

In the spirit put up or shut up, I'm going to make a prediction. My prediction is that if we keep track of how often we use a rationalist technique in the real world, we will find that frequency of use correlates to the frequency at which we visualize and act out using that technique. Once we start quantifying frequency of use, we'll be able to better understand how rationalism impacts our abilities to reach our goals. Until we differentiate between enthusiasts and practitioners, we might as well be tracking whether liking a clever article on Facebook correlates to success.

In response to Belief in Belief
Comment author: ryleah 24 February 2014 11:02:22PM *  4 points [-]

I noticed that I was confused by your dragon analogy. 1) Why did this guy believe in this dragon when there was absolutely no evidence that it exists? 2) Why do I find the analogy so satisfying, when its premise is so absurd.

Observation 1) Religious people have evidence:

The thing about religion is that a given religion's effects on people tend to be predictable. When Christians tell you to accept Jesus into your heart, some of the less effective missionaries talk about heaven, but the better ones talk about positive changes to their emotional states. Often, they will imply that those positive life changes will happen for you if you join, and as a prediction that tends to be a very good one.

As a rationalist, I know the emotional benefits of paying attention when something nice happens, and I recognize that feeling gratitude boosts my altruism. I know I can get high on hypoxia if I ever want to see visions or speak in tongues. I know that spending at least an hour every week building ethical responses into my cached behavior is a good practice for keeping positive people in my life. I recognize the historical edifice of morality that allowed us to build the society we currently live in. This whole suite of tools is built into religion, and the means of achieving the benefits it provides is non-obvious enough that a mystical explanation makes sense. Questioning those beliefs without that additional knowledge means you lose access to the benefits of the beliefs.

Observation 2) We expect people to discard falsifiable parts of their beliefs without discarding all of that belief.

The dragon analogy is nice and uncomplicated. There are no benefits to believing in the dragon, so the person in the analogy can make no predictions with it. I've never seen that happen in the real world. Usually religious people have tested their beliefs, and found that the predictions they've made come true. The fact that those beliefs can't predict things in certain areas doesn't change the fact that they do work in others, and most people don't expect generality from their beliefs. When that guy says that the dragon is permeable to flour, that isn't him making an excuse for the lack of a dragon. That's him indicating a section of reality where he doesn't use the dragon to inform his decisions. Religious people don't apply their belief in their dragon in categories where believing has not provided them with positive results. Disproved hypotheses don't disprove the belief, but rather disprove the belief for that category of experience. And that's pretty normal. The fact that I don't know everything, and the fact that I can be right about some things and wrong about others means that I pretty much have to be categorizing my knowledge.

Thinking about this article has lead me to the conclusion that "belief in belief" is more accurately visualized as compartmentalization of belief, that it's common to everyone, and that it indicates that a belief that I have is providing the right answer for the wrong reasons. I predict that if I train myself to react to predicting that the world will behave strangely in order to not violate my hypothesis by saying out loud "this belief is not fully general" I will find that more often than not that this statement will be correct.

In response to Rationalist Fiction
Comment author: ryleah 24 February 2014 05:18:14PM *  1 point [-]

Check out Erfworld. It starts off as a webcomic, moves to narrative for the parts that are best done in a narrative style, and then jumps back to webcomic format for battles. It hits all of those marks you mention, as well as a standard that I hold personally. I think that rationalist fiction is at its most compelling when it creates a world with new rules, and sends the empiricist out to learn them. It's easier to show how to learn things empirically when there's still low-hanging-fruit to be plucked, and there have to be people in the story who don't know things in order to show the advantages of knowledge.

One of the catchphrases that develops is, "We try things. Sometimes they even work."