LESSWRONG
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All of AFinerGrain_duplicate0.4555006182262571's Comments + Replies

Timeless Identity
AFinerGrain_duplicate0.455500618226257100

I always wonder how I should treat my future self if I reject the continuity of self. Should I think of him like a son? A spouse? A stranger? Should I let him get fat? Not get him a degree? Invest in stock for him? Give him another child?

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0Elo
I think it matters in so far as assisting your present trajectory. Otherwise it might as well be an unfeeling entity.
LW 2.0 Strategic Overview
AFinerGrain_duplicate0.455500618226257120

I've always been half-way interested in LessWrong. SlateStar, Robin Hanson, and Bryan Caplan have been favorite reading for a very long time. But every once in a while I'd have a look at the LessWrong, read something, and forget about it for months at a time.

After the rework I find this place much more appealing. I created a profile and I'm even commenting. I hope one day I can contribute. But honestly, I feel 200% better about just browsing and reading.

Great job.

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A Fable of Science and Politics
AFinerGrain_duplicate0.455500618226257140

People say, "no pun intended" because they don't want to be held responsible for the terrible pain puns cause.

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Your intuitions are not magic
AFinerGrain_duplicate0.455500618226257100

I originally learned about these ideas from Thinking Fast and Slow, but I love hearing them rephrased and repeated again and again. Thinking clearly often means getting in the cognitive habit of questioning every knee-jerk intuition.

On the other hand, coming from a Bryan Caplan / Michael Huemer perspective, aren't we kind of stuck with some set of base intuitions? Intuitions like; I exist, the universe exists, other people exist, effects have causes, I'm not replaced by a new person with memory implants every time I go to sleep...

You might even call these base intuitions, "magic," in the sense that you have to have faith in them in order to do anything like rationality.

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0TheAncientGeek
Well, we don't know if they work magically, because we don't know that they work at all. They are just unavoidable. It's not that philosophers weirdly and unreasonably prefer intuition to empirical facts and mathematical/logical reasoning, it is that they have reasoned that they can't do without them: that (the whole history of) empiricism and maths as foundations themselves rest on no further foundation except their intuitive appeal. That is the essence of the Inconvenient Ineradicability of Intuition. An unfounded foundation is what philosophers mean by "intuition". Philosophers talk about intution a lot because that is where arguments and trains of thought ground out...it is away of cutting to the chase. Most arguers and arguments are able to work out the consequences of basic intutitions correctly, so disagrements are likely to arise form differencs in basic intuitions themselves. Philosophers therefore appeal to intuitions because they can't see how to avoid them...whatever a line of thought grounds out in, is definitiionally an intuition. It is not a case of using inutioins when there are better alternatives, epistemologically speaking. And the critics of their use of intuitions tend to be people who haven't seen the problem of unfounded foundations because they have never thought deeply enough, not people who have solved the problem of finding sub-foundations for your foundational assumptions. Scientists are typically taught that the basic principles maths, logic and empiricism are their foundations, and take that uncritically, without digging deeper. Empircism is presented as a black bx that produces the goods...somehow. Their subculture encourages use of basic principles to move forward, not a turn backwards to critically relflect on the validity of basic principles. That does not mean the foundational principles are not "there". Considering the foundational principles of science is a major part of philosophy of science, and philosophy of science is a ph