= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
I'm just going to say I particularly liked the idea of the house cable transport system.
In response to
My April Fools' Day Confession
For me it was the least plausible part. I think if the major obstacle to living where you want is the hassle of carting all your stuff around, the most efficient answer surely isn't living in a shipping crate with special content-bracing furniture.
Makes more sense to me to just not bother with "owning" a lot of matter. If every kind of material object you need is available anywhere, all you need to bring with you when you move house is your information (books, music, family pictures, decor configuration for your living space). There's no particular reason for that to exist in a physical form.
And if you are serious about making a long-term sustainably growing economy, you have to have most of that growth be information (knowledge, art) rather than ever-growing consumption of hard-limited resources.
Still trying to decide whether it would be more painful to learn macroeconomics than experiment with BDSM.
In response to
Rationality Quotes March 2014
"I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes," said Elinor, "in a total misapprehension of character in some point or other: fancying people so much more gay or grave, or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can hardly tell why or in what the deception originated. Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge."
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Honestly, I'm surprised that there aren't more posts tagged 'longevity' on this site. Cryonics is wildly popular here, as a way to continue one's existence in the future, after one's physical body gives out; however, simply surviving long enough for someone to invent a cure for aging seems to be another way to solve the same problem and, moreover, one which can be worked concurrently with cryonics.
Also, nobody knows whether people currently being cryonically preserved by current methods can ever be thawed and healed or uploaded into an emulator. It would suck to die and get frozen a year before they realise they were doing it all wrong.
'It's like, if you're going to stab me in the back, is it better if it's with a white knife?'
It's not like that at all! 'Deceive' isn't a dirty word - i.e. it doesn't automatically mean something that is bad to do. 'Stabbing in the back', on the other hand, seems to. 'He kindly deceived me' may sound odd, but not at all self-contradictory like 'He kindly stabbed me in the back' (metaphorical meaning intended, of course). It seems perfectly reasonable to me to think that deception is sometimes a very decent, kind, considerate practice to engage in. The idea that it's automatically bad seems childish to me.
It's automatically hazardous to give someone a false map of the world. If you do it knowingly you have the responsibility to make sure no harm comes of it. Even if you take that responsibility seriously, and are competent to do so, taking it secretly without consent is an ethical problem.
My take on this:
- Few people take that responsibility seriously or are competent to do so, or are even aware that it exists.
- Most of the time people's intuitions about minor well-intended deceptions are sufficient to avoid trouble.
- If you call someone a liar, that has a strong negative connotation and social implications for good reason. We didn't evolve the capacity for deception primarily to hold surprise birthday parties for each other.
There are no dirty words, but there are inaccurate ones. Use with care.
To clarify: regardless of whether you'll get something out of someone later, all else equal it's better to do things that satisfy their preferences than things that don't.
Which is why I said it was kind. It's still not necessarily a reasonable expectation.
Anyway, the hypothetical preference to be lied to is a bit suspicious, epistemologically. Let's distinguish it from a preference to never hear of anything you don't like, which is on its face unrealistic.
How would you experience getting your preference to be lied to without thereby knowing the unpleasant truth that you wanted to avoid? You want to know but you want to pretend the other person doesn't know that you know? It's a bit crazy.
How would you safely determine that someone prefers to be lied to, without exposing them to the truth they might not want? This isn't trivial: if you lie to someone who doesn't prefer it, I hope we can agree that's worse than the other way round.
Because she would have preferred to be lied to, I guess.
That's kind. But not all our preferences are reasonable expectations.
Anyway, maybe I weight things differently or it was a very short sucky play, but the downsides are still pretty compelling.
You're mixing metaphors. A stab in the back is better with a smaller knife, deliberately aimed at a non-vital area.
It's a dodgy metaphor at best anyway, but 'point' taken. :)
In response to
White Lies
The breakup was a good thing for other reasons, but I still regret not lying to her about what I thought of the play.
Why? Best case scenario is she keeps taking you to unenjoyable plays until you find you have to end the relationship yourself anyway or finally tell her the truth. Out of all the things in a relationship whose end was "a good thing for other reasons", one argument about whether a play was any good seems like a trivial thing to regret.
I can't favour lies as such. I am however on board with people honestly communicating the connotation that they care how you feel at the expense of the denotational literal meaning of their words.
In lies, the intention is not to soften but to deceive. So I don't even like the phrase "white lie". It's like, if you're going to stab me in the back, is it better if it's with a white knife?
In response to
Rationality Quotes February 2014
“Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Voted down because its connection to rationality is so obscure I have to take it at face value, and at face value it appears to be factually incorrect in several ways. IOW, BS.
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Unfortunately, psychology terms/traits are difficult to quantify, e.g. I can't know someone is "10% narcissistic" in the same way I know a glass of water is "10% full". I agree, different people have different levels of narcissism.
To test my narcissism detection mechanism, I will look at how narcissistic the main characters of a few other popular books are. This is a better test than looking for narcissism in other characters in HPMOR (where the most-frequently-observed character is the most narcissistic). The evidence against narcissism is the opposite of the traits listed: average or low sense of self-importance, primarily interested in others, goals are usually about others, many relationships, etc.
From these negative results I conclude that my narcissism detector is working adequately.
Hmm. Would I be wildly wrong in describing Mrs Bennett (Elizabeth's mother) as a terrible narcissist though? In which case Elizabeth should be more likely to be a narcissist herself, or a people-pleaser? Maybe she got lucky, because she's hardly either. Although her sisters, well...
Good fiction often rings true to real life, but it's no more than a bit of fun to analyse it as though it were a case study of something that actually happened. Still, I'm not against fun. I bet it was fun for Jane Austen to write the character of Mr Collins. Let's see your science explain him ;)