I'm just reading this for random reasons either for the first time or for the first time that I have a response. I think what I see differently from you is not happiness but motivation. And that at the time I wrote this, I believe your process of making decisions was more future-oriented than mine was. (I believe I have converged towards you in how my motivation works in the ten years since I wrote this.) When I wrote the above, my past was clinging to me in many ways that were adverse to happiness. (Trauma) What I wasn't quite saying in my previous commen...
I haven't studied this in general, but I have read a decent amount about the history of a couple cities, and based on those examples, can say with confidence that no modern city comes remotely close to the density that people would choose absent regulations keeping density down.
Tokyo today is less densely populated per square meter ground than late medieval Edo was, and late medieval Edo had no plumbing and basically no buildings taller than three stories. (I don't think there are historical examples of cities with no height restrictions and no density res...
If I were designing the experiment, I would have the control group be to play a different game instead of having it be maths instructions.
You generally don't want test subjects to know whether they are in the control condition or not. So if you're going to make it be maths instructions, you probably shouldn't tell them what the experiment is designed to test at all, until you're debriefing at the end. If you tell people you are recruiting that you are testing the effects of playing computer games on statistical reasoning, then the people in the control con...
I find that playing the piano is a particularly useful technique for gauging my emotions, when they are suppressed/muted. This works better when I'm just making stuff up by ear than it does when I'm playing something I know or reading music. (And learning to make stuff up is a lot easier than learning to read music if you don't already play.) Playing the piano does not help me feel the emotions any more strongly, but it does let me hear them -- I can tell that music is sad, happy, or angry regardless of its impact on my affect. Most people can.
Something th...
The person proposing the bet is usually right.
This is a crucial observation if you are trying to use this technique to improve your calibration of your own accuracy! You can't just start making bets when no one else you associate regularly is challenging you to the bets.
Several years ago, I started taking note of all of the times I disagreed with other people and looking it up, but initially, I only counted myself as having "disagreed with other people" if they said something I thought was wrong, and I attempted to correct them. Then I soon ad...
Precisely for this reason, there was a time when I wrote in Elverson pronouns (basically, Spivak pronouns) for gender ambiguous cases. So, if I was writing about Bill Clinton, I would use "he," and if I was writing about Grace Hopper, I would use "she," but if I was writing about somebody/anybody in would use, I would use "ey" instead. This allows one to easily compile the pronouns according to preference without mis-attributing pronouns to actual people... I've always planned on getting around to hosting my own blog running...
More jarring than that is if one set of gender pronouns gets used predominantly in negative examples, and the other set gets used predominantly in positive examples.
I try to deliberately switch based on context. If I wrote an example of someone being wrong and then someone being right. I will stick with the same gender for both cases, and then switch to the other gender when I move to the next example of someone being wrong, right, or indifferent.
Occasionally, something will be so inherently gendered that I cannot use the non-default gender and feel reason...
I changed my mind midway through this post. Hopefully it still makes sense... I started disagreeing with you based on the first two thoughts that come to mind, but I'm now beginning to think you may be right.
So it's hard to see how timeless cooperation could be morally significant, since morality usually deals with terminal values, not instrumental goals.
I.
This statement doesn't really fit with the philosophy of morality. (At least as I read it.)
Consequentialism distinguishes itself from other moral theories by emphasizing terminal values more than oth...
Anti-epistemology is a more general model of what is going on in the world than rationalizations are,
Yes.
so it should all reduce to rationalizations in the end.
Unless there are anti-epistemologies that are not rationalizations.
The general concept of a taboo seems to me to be an example of a forceful anti-epistemology that is common in most moral ideologies and is different from rationalization. When something is tabooed, it is deemed wrong to do, wrong to discuss, and wrong to even think about. The tabooed thing is something that people deem wrong b...
Welcome to LessWrong! I wouldn't comment if I didn't like your post and think it was worth responding to, so please don't interpret my disagreement as negative feedback. I appreciate your post, and it got me thinking. That said. I disagree with you.
The real point I'm making here is that however we categorize personal happiness, goodness belongs in the same category, because in practice, all other goals seem to stem from one or both of these concepts.
Your claims are probably much closer to true for some people than they are for me, but they are far fro...
I have been recently questioning how worthwhile it is to be perceived as smart. Since I have always wanted to be intelligent, having people affirm my intelligence has always made me feel validated, much more so than receiving other forms of compliments. Either in response to that form of approval or else in anticipation of receiving it, I have gone out of my way to present myself primarily as an intelligent person and to consider any other perceptions others may have of me as secondary to that one.
As I've begun to question whether this is a good image to p...
...Contrast this to the notion we have in probability theory, of an exact quantitative rational judgment. If 1% of women presenting for a routine screening have breast cancer, and 80% of women with breast cancer get positive mammographies, and 10% of women without breast cancer get false positives, what is the probability that a routinely screened woman with a positive mammography has breast cancer? 7.5%. You cannot say, "I believe she doesn't have breast cancer, because the experiment isn't definite enough." You cannot say, "I believe she
I don't know to what extent we can hack our own perceptions of scarcity by intentionally directing our thoughts, but it seems like it's something worth trying to do:
"Scientific information is widely available. As a result, people will pay less attention to it than they would if it was hidden. As a result, it's better hidden than if it were kept partially secret. This means that scientific information is very scarce, and almost nobody knows that it is scarce."
Is there a way to phrase the above statement so that it carries the same psychological we...
You're right. My hypothesis is not really distinguishable from the single tier. I'm pretty sure the division I made was a vestigial from the insanely complicated hacked-up version of reality I constructed to believe in back when I devised a version of simulationism that was meant to allow me to accept the findings of modern science without abandoning my religious beliefs (back before I'd ever heard of rationalism or Baye's theorem when I was still asking the question "Does the evidence permit me to believe, and, if not, how can I re-construe it so tha...
That would strongly indicate that something caused the zombies to write a program for generating simulations that was likely to create simulated shadow brains in most of the simulations. (The compiler's built in prover for things like type checking was inefficient and left behind a lot of baggage that produced second tier shadow brains in all but 2% of simulations). It might cause the zombies to conclude that they probably had shadow brains and start talking about the possibility of shadow brains, but it should be equally likely to do that whether the shad...
Still, we don't actually know the Real Rules are like that; and so it seems premature to assign a priori zero probability to hypotheses with multi-tiered causal universes.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. I've always supposed that we do live in a multi-tiered causal universe. It seems to me that the "laws of physics" are a first tier which affect everything in the second tier (the tier with all of the matter including us), but that there's nothing we can do here in the matter tier to affect the laws of physics. I've also always assumed tha...
Given that I spend a lot of time programming computers and that I occasionally brainstorm my programs through flow-charts, I was shocked, upon realizing that flow-charts can easily be formalized as something Turing complete, by how long it took me to realize this. (Generalized: If I am able to regularly use a particular abstraction as a proxy for another abstraction, it makes sense to ask the question, "Are these two ideas equivalent?")
I agree with Xachariah's view of semantics. I think that the first 'I believe' does imply a different meta level of belief (often associated with a different reason for believing). His example does a good job of showing how someone can drill down many levels, but the distinction in the first level might be made more clear by considering a more concretely defined belief:
"We're lost" -- "I'm you're jungle leader, and I don't have a clue where we are any more."
"I believe we're lost" -- "I'm not leading this expedition. I did...
Someone probably does. I believe that the cultural practice of preferring coffee to tea began in the British colonies at the time the United States started to cease to be part of the British Empire as a side effect of boycotting tea to avoid paying a tea tax. (This is a pretty well-known episode of American history within the United States.) I was boycotting the boycott. Refusing to drink tea is a signaling thing in the United States to let people know that you are not in agreement with the government of the United States as to which side constitutes the a... (read more)