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And since the phrase "is a thing" is acknowledged by many people, we could say that "is a thing" is a thing. Unfortunately, ""is a thing" is a thing" is not yet a thing.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
In response to
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
""is a thing" is a thing" is a thing in sense C.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
"Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line..."
This sounds like an alchemy circle, which has to be drawn "to the fineness of a child's hair." I guess it involves the creation of a philosopher's stone.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
And if Yudkowsky's going to make a Fullmetal Alchemist reference, we know how to make a philosopher's stone, or even crude approximations, but only using human scarifice.
No, it doesn't. Specifically, it fails on words that have accents.
No, it doesn't.
Rather, I meant that it works fine with math mode.
Specifically, it fails on words that have accents.
It doesn't yet understand tex accents, but if you set the encoding using the tex package, you can directly enter è, é, ê, ...
@episodic memories: I don't personally have any like that, but I hear many people do consider the subjective experience of pivotal events in their life as part of who they are.
@relationships: I'm talking the literal membership here, the thing that exists as a function of the entanglement between states in different brains.
To clarify, I'm not talking about "your identity" here as in the information about what you consider your identity, but rather the referent of that identity. To many people, their physical bodies are part of their identity in this sense. Even distant objects, or large organizations like nations, can be in extreme cases. Just because it's a trend here to only have information that resides in your own brain as part of your identity doesn't mean it's necessary, or even especially common in it's pre form in most places.
To clarify, I'm not talking about "your identity" here as in the information about what you consider your identity, but rather the referent of that identity.
Ah, it appears we're talking about different things. I'm referring to ideological identity ("I'm a rationalist" , "I'm a libertarian", "I'm pro-choice", "I'm an activist" ), which I think is distinct from "I'm my mind" identity. In particular, you can be primed psychologically and emotionally by the former more than the latter.
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Open Thread, April 15-30, 2013
A few of you may know I have a blog called Greatplay.net, located at... surprise... http://www.greatplay.net. I’ve heard some people that discovered my site much later than they otherwise would because the name of the site didn’t communicate what it was about well and sounded unprofessional.
Why Greatplay.net in the first place? I picked it when I was 12, because it was (1) short, (2) pronounceable, (3) communicable without any risk of the other person misspelling it, and (4) did not communicate any information about what the site would be about, so I could mold the site as I grew.
Now after >2 years of blogging about basically the same thing, I think my blog will always be about utilitarianism (both practical and philosophical), lifestyle design (my quest to make myself more productive and frugal, mainly so I can be a better utilitarian), political commentary (from a utilitarian perspective), and psychology (of morality and community and that which basically underlies practical utilitarianism).
I probably would want to talk about religion/atheism from time to time, which used to be my biggest interest, but I can already tell it's moderately unpopular with my current readership (yawnnn... we really have to go over why the Bible has errors again?) and I'm already personally getting increasingly bored with it, so I can do away with discussing atheism if I needed to keep to a "topic"-focused blog.
Basically, at this point, I think I stand to gain more by making my blog and domain name more descriptive than I stand to lose by risking my interests shifting away from utilitarianism (or at least the public discussion thereof). But the big question... what should I name my blog?
Option #1: Keep with Greatplay.net: There will be costs with shifting to a new domain name. The monetary cost is mostly insignificant (<$20/yr for a new domain name), but it will take a moderate amount of time to move all the archives over and make sure all the new hyperlinks on the site work. Also, there will be confusion among the readership, and everyone who was linking to my site externally would now be linking to dead stuff. So, if I've misestimated the benefits of moving, I might want to stick with the current name and not incur the costs.
Option #2: Go to PeterHurford.com: I already use this site as an online résumé of sorts, so I wouldn't need to get the domain. This also seems the most descriptive of what the site would be about (a personal blog, about me) and fits in with what the cool kids are doing. However, some of my opinions are controversial relative to the mainstream and I don't know what I'll be doing in my future. Keeping my real name hidden from my website might be an asset (so I don't lose opportunities because of association with unpopular mainstream opinions), though it might also be a drawback (I think I have gotten some recognition and opportunity from those who share my unpopular mainstream opinions).
Option #3: A new name: If Option #1 and #2 don't work, I'd want to just rename the blog to something descriptive of a blog about utilitarianism. Some ideas I've come up with:
- A Shallow Pond
- The Everyday Utilitarian
- Everyday Utilitarianism
- Commonsense Utilitarianism
- A Utilful Mind (credit to palladias)
Though feel free to suggest your own!
Dibs on 'A Utilful Mind' if you don't take it?
This goes well for belief's included in your identity, but I've always been uncertain about it it's supposed to also extend to things like episodic memories (separated from believing the information contained in them), realtionship in neutral groups such as a family or a fandom, precommitments, or mannerisms?
things like episodic memories (separated from believing the information contained in them)
I'm not sure what you're saying here; you think of your memories as part of your identity?
realtionship[sic] in neutral groups such as a family or a fandom, precommitments, or mannerisms?
These memberships are all heuristics for expected interactions with people. Nothing actionable is lost if you bayes-induct for each situation separately, save the effort you're using to compute and the cognitive biases and emotional reactions you get from claiming "membership". Alternately you could still use the membership heuristic, but with a mental footnote that you're only using it because it's convenient, and there are senses in which the membership's representation of you may be misleading.
That would be nice, but the software to do steps two and three doesn't exist yet. Modern spellcheckers more or less fail at parsing math without serious mucking about.
How much of an identity is just right?
Paul Graham suggests keeping your identity as small as sustainable. [1] That is, it's beneficial to keep your identity to just "rationalist" or just "scientist", since they contradict having a large identity. He puts it better than I do:
There may be some things it's a net win to include in your identity. For example, being a scientist. But arguably that is more of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on a form that asks for your middle initial—because it doesn't commit you to believing anything in particular. A scientist isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to rejecting it. All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads.
Considering yourself a scientist is equivalent to putting a sign in a cupboard saying "this cupboard must be kept empty." Yes, strictly speaking, you're putting something in the cupboard, but not in the ordinary sense.
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
The best physicists use the "many weak arguments" approach at least sometimes. See my post on Euler and the Basel Problem for an example of this sort of thing. (Nowadays, physicists fall into the Eulerian tradition more than mathematicians do.)
A close friend who's a general relativity theorist has told me that the best physicists rely primarily on many weak arguments.
Hmm, I think I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "many weak arguments." As in, I don't think it's uncommon for physicists to make multiple arguments in support of a proposition, but even each of those arguments, IME, are strong enough to bet at least a year of one's career on (eg the old arguments for renormalization), by contrast with, say, continental drift, where you probably wouldn't be taken seriously if you'd produced merely one or two lines of evidence. What this shares with the "one strong argument" position is that we're initially looking for a sufficiently convincing argument, discarding lines of though that would lead to insufficiently strong arguments. It's different mostly in that we go back and find more arguments "to be extra sure," but you're still screening your arguments for sufficient strongness as you make them.
Though admittedly, as a student, I may be biased towards finding my professors' arguments more convincing than they ought to be.
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Bear in mind that the official explanation is that Time Turners are used to treat "Spontaneous Duplication". If the map showed multiple copies of a Spontaneous Duplication-sufferer running around, that might be dismissed as a feature, not a bug.
I think "Spontaneous Duplication" is made-up by Minerva or someone as an explaination to wave off anyone who might see mulitple Harrys running around due to the time turner.