Thanks. Agreed, different places works better for different topics and styles.
I have checked and can acknowledge that a lot of downvotes are quite uncomfortable psychologically even if you are fully prepared to them and even without explicit harassment.
That could be bad:
1) to people who would like to write about some controversial topics which could be uncomfortable but finally helpful to the community (I'm not talking about myself here, but about more sensitive persons);
2) to the community as a whole and to members of the community...
Agreed on sequences example.
For me the most valuable were e.g. that Seneca's letters, with which I initially disagreed completely, but after several days or weeks of reflection, came to the conclusion that he was right and I was wrong.
Hey downvoters! Did you read the article at the link? What specifically you do not like? Leave comments with your opinion, don't be shy, I'm interested in your mode of thinking.
About domain of type: I see the reality as infinitely complex system and causal links are as much a part of this system as objects and events and actors and laws of physics and other entities and phenomenons, named and separated from the background by human's attention. The sky is one of these objects, it doesn't exist by itself in reality, except that in the imagination of people (as well as money, states, gods etc.), unlike living objects (subjects?) and phenomenons which do exist independently of our attention to them. While this concept of sky is...
Agreed. "Sky is blue" is quite a good model of reality, useful for some purposes, but it's not the truth.
The problem with the truth is that many most terrific wars in the history of humankind were ignited by different concept of the truth.
And people who think they know the truth are the most intolerant as we can see here.
My principles are not in disbelieving simple statements, but to see and articulate that these statements (especially not scientific ones) are not truth as many of people even here tend to believe.
My position is: I know that I don't know a lot, much more than I know, and the more I live the bigger my knowledge and the bigger my ignorance. And I'm quite sure of my stance here.
This position of me is not preventing you from having your own, different position, as we can see by your comments.
And you, at the other hand, just told me to stop pretending to be wise.
No, I'm not suggesting this, it would be strange. These are things of different domains. Science is the only domain where the knowledge can be verified by some means. E.g. by predictions.
I'm not the expert in general theory of relativity neither I am the one in theoretical physics, so I cannot speak of these fields with any confidence - how close to reality they are in their current state of development.
I'm suggesting consider all the information coming to you (except info in the scientific domain which you can and should verify by some means, including personal experiments and network/tree of trusted sources) as generally fictional, and update your beliefs correspondingly.
Exactly. "Fiction" means not real. But this doesn't mean that you shouldn't update your beliefs on some ideas from it. The problem is that what mainstream considers "non-fiction" has de-facto the same relation to reality as "fiction" but many people quite ready to update their beliefs on it, considering it to being the source of some facts, because this is called "non-fiction", right?
I trust my senses if I can reasonably be sure that I'm not in the altered state of consciousness. So what?
Beliefs are important because without them you cannot act in this world.
My point was that you should not dismiss the thoughts of knowledgeable author what he put into the mouth of some character in the story just because it's "logical fallacy" or "not real" while taking into consideration what your neighbour says on the similar matter. Of course if you are interested in being less wrong.
By excluding from the pool of knowledge of reality on ...
Agreed with all said. Maybe I wrote it not clearly enough. But where is a fundamental error? I agreed with multidimensionality of any book or for that matter event, and don't think of it as one-dimensional.
A lot of currently available "non-fiction" gives not more updates of reality than some fiction.
By the way Mathematics is one of the few fields where you can and have to check everything by yourself from the first principles. In Physics it is harder.
Kung-fu example is interesting. Let's continue. If you speak about "actual fights" as "actual kung-fu fights" or "actual fights where one of fighters use kung-fu" then how many people saw any of that in real life or know how they are working or participated personally in one of them? And if the number of such people is really low and you do not have one of them as your instructor, then how do you know that your kung-fu class is closer to real fights than those kung-fu movies?
I do not state that kung-fu movies or Sherlock Holmes cites are correct representa...
In my opinion, the problem of creating a safe AGI has no mathematical solution, because it is impossible to describe mathematically such a function that:
This impossibility stems, among other things, from the impossibility of accurately reflecting infi...
I am curious what the author is thinking releasing this in the public Internet discourse if he really thinks this is kind of plausible scenario. Why add this to the training materials of the future LLMs? Are you still hoping that "humanity wakes up and close OpenAI"?
Even more questions to the moderators of LW promoting this. How many steps ahead you are thinking?
(No, I'm not curious, I'm quite sure the author/moderator are the same as the engineers in OpenAI etc. - young, bright and inexperienced or mid-aged and stupid, and that all of them would end better doing nothing than do what they are doing now, if we are considering the future of humanity)