All of DataPacRat's Comments + Replies

Just published the first chapter of a month-long novel-writing experiment, which contains enough LW-compatible tropes that it might be of interest: Hustling Through the Dark

On April 9th, I blogged at https://sfw.furaffinity.net/journal/9460996/ :

Four Hundred Eighteen RSS feeds

I've taken my full list of feeds in RSSOwlnix ( https://github.com/Xyrio/RSSOwlnix ), trimmed out any that are particularly personal or that I can think of some other reason not to post, and stuffed the resulting list at https://www.datapacrat.com/temp/rssowl-trimmed-2020-04-08.opml , for anyone to download and make use of. You should be able to simply import the whole thing in one gulp into RSSOwlnix, if you're trying that program out; if... (read more)

My vision has already degraded a bit from when I got my latest eyeglass prescription (sph -3.75, cyl -2.50, a different axis for each eye); I have to squint more at, say, the menus at my local cafe than I used to. Getting the best out of my glasses every hour I'm awake seems more than worth rubbing them with my shirt for a few seconds per day.

(Sure, I could get my eyes re-measured for free by an optician who hopes to sell me glasses, and then get a cheap pair online at Zenni Optical, but my government provides me a free pair every three years.)

Mind yo... (read more)

Answer by DataPacRat120

I picked CI, and have stuck with it, partly due to the cost, and partly because its board is elected by the membership; while Alcor's board selects its own successors, which seems to me to be much less democratic and to be more likely to have something go terribly wrong organizationally before revival becomes possible. (You may have different theories about long-term organizational survival, but given the scarcity of evidence to work with, it's all-too-easy to rapidly run into 'politics is the mind-killer' level arguments.)


Skimming the ... (read more)

I'm on a fixed income, and have already used up my discretionary spending for the month on a Raspberry Pi kit (goal: Pi-Hole). The odds are that by the time I could afford one of the masks, I'll need the money for higher priorities anyway (eg, my 9-year-old computer is starting to show its age), so I might as well wait for a bit of spare cash before I try digging much harder.

(I can think of a few other reasons, but they're mostly rationalizations to lend support to the main reason that feel less low-status-y than "not enough money".)

Coveting

I'm still struggling to escape the black dog of long-term depression, and as dormant parts of my psyche are gradually reviving, some odd results arise.

For the first time in a very long time, today I found myself /wanting/ a thing. Usually, I'm quite content with what I have, and classically stoic about what I can't; after all, my life is much better than, say, a 16th-century French peasant's. But my browsing has just brought me to the two rodent Venetian masks shown at https://www.flickr.com/photos/flatworldsedge/5255475917/size... (read more)

4gwern
Is there a reason to not just email & ask (other than depression)?
5cousin_it
Yeah, Venetian masks are amazing, very hard to resist buying. We bought several when visiting Venice, gave some of them away as gifts, painted them, etc. If you can't buy one, the next best thing is to make one yourself. No 3D printing, just learn papier mache, it's easy enough that 4 year olds can do it. Painting it is harder, but I'm sure you have acquaintances who would love to paint a Venetian mask or two. It's also a fun thing to do at parties.

A Flash of Colour in the Mind:

Some say to remember that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. And some say that every time you call up a memory, you change it. But here's the best I can express what remains of a split-second of thought earlier today:

I was enjoying reading a classic SF novel for the first time, and as my thoughts went over expanding on an idea from one line, I had a combination of seeing that expansion in the form of some Avatar-like glowing blue text, combined with an odd sensation. It took me some time to nail it down, whi... (read more)

3Elo
Try not to cling to the past. Instead appreciate what was, and find what is new.

Hah! Score one more point for the shower stall as an indispensable writer's tool.

For the last three days, I've known a few vague outlines of some ideas I want to write a story about, but couldn't come up with anything better than those blurry notions. Today, while I was thinking about them while shampooing my head, I finally identified what I wanted out of them, and in enough focus to combine them into a three-word premise. (Or, come to think of it, a different three words, if I'm allowed to use published authours' last names.) And... (read more)

I think the protagonist here should have looked at earth.

That's certainly one plan that could have been tried, given a certain amount of outside-view, objective, rational analysis. Of course, one could also say that "Mark Watney should have avoided zapping Pathfinder" or "The comic character Cathy should just stick to her diet"; just because it's a good plan doesn't necessarily mean it's one that an inside-view, subjective, emotional person is capable of thinking up, let alone following-through on.

Can you think of an... (read more)

My SAD light seems to be doing some good; I've just finished a first draft of a quickie 6k-word story. Is anyone here willing to give me some private feedback on it before I make it public? If so, let me know and I'll try to send a private message with a link to the GDoc. (Genres: hard-SF, at least in the general direction of rational, and abstract horror.)

If you want to learn more about the interplanetary and interstellar scale of this sort of colony-ship design, you could do a lot worse than to pick up the 3rd edition of the boardgame "High Frontier" by Phil Eklund. Its reference guide (PDF here) includes a couple of dozen pages of descriptions of how the game's various reactors, radiators, drives, and other pieces work, with references to the original design papers. For a wider overview of related ideas, the indispensable resource is the Atomic Rockets site.

2Diffractor
Yeah, Atomic Rockets was an incredibly helpful resource for me, I definitely endorse it for others.

Good news: As of a couple weeks ago, I have a new CPAP machine, and my blood oxygen isn't dropping to 80% overnight. I have improved mood, drive, and all that mental-functioning stuff.

My new plan: Take one of my year-old story outline drafts, and use my new drive, and the things I've learned in the past year, to hammer out the unsatisfactory parts, until I have an outline worth turning into actual narrative. The outside view says that, given past experience, I'll manage to write around 90% of a novel before pooping out. My hope is that the C... (read more)

The obvious way is usually enough: check through the addon's settings to see if there's an option to disable it. Eg, under Ghostery's hamburger-menu is a 'Support Ghostery' setting section, with three different boxes for enabling or disabling phone-home behaviour. Besides that, you can glance at the user reviews on the Mozilla add-on download page, on Reddit, the top few Google results, and so on. It also helps to be careful about where you look for privacy addon suggestions in the first place.

The leaky extensions in question, like "Web of Trust", phone home with browsing data, and say that they do. The extensions I use either just plain don't do that, or have an option to turn off such feedback. It's just one more detail that an eye has to be kept on.

2ChristianKl
How do you know whether an extension such as Adblock Plus or uBlock phones back?

Start paying twenty bucks a year for a VPN. Use Linux instead of Windows (even if just through a bootable flashdrive). Download the Tor Browser Bundle and start getting the hang of it. For everyday surfing, use Firefox as your browser, with the extensions Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus Pop-Up Addon, AdNauseum, BetterPrivacy, Decentraleyes, Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus, Flashblock, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Random Agent Spoofer, RequestPolicy Continued, Self-Destructing Cookies, TrackMeNot, U2F Support Add-on, uBlock Origin... (read more)

2ChristianKl
The article suggests "The pair found that 95% of the data they obtained came from 10 popular browser extensions." Given that the prime leakage of data seems to be browser extensions, why do you think the solution is to install more browser extensions? Do you have strong reason to believe that the ones you listed (especially adblockers) don't leak any data?

I think that before I invest myself too heavily in any particular hardware, I should try to find out more about what sorts of software exist for such passive wall displays. For example, I wouldn't mind something like the custom channel used at my local coffee shop, with my own pick of RSS feeds, weather sources, GCalender items, and the like; but I don't know offhand any piece of software, either for Android or Linux, that does that.

1Elo
I wouldn't computer in bed, used to, but it generally leads to bad habits around distraction and sleep

After a quick Google - a 'to-do/doing/done' list made of sticky-notes seems like it'd be simple, inexpensive, and helpful. Unless someone comes up with a better suggestion by tomorrow, I expect I'm going to start giving this a try as soon as I hit the nearby dollar store. :)

2Elo
Ideally slots for: several - to-do 1-2 - doing 1 - next A few - waiting (for a reply email or something) Done - several.

An interesting thought.

The current setup is that the back of a dresser is facing my bed, with the corkboard on the back; do you know of any such screens that would be feasible to attach, in whatever manner? Or are you thinking more along the lines of grabbing an El Cheapo tablet, supported by a pile of pushpins?

0Lumifer
The issue is size. A tablet might be too small for the purpose, though it has the big advantage of being "complete" out of the box. A computer monitor is going to be lager but it's just a display, you will still need an actual computer for it. You might be able to use your smartphone as that computer, but depending on the particulars you could still need additional hardware. The simplest way of attaching the screen would be plain-vanilla velcro. It's not going to be that heavy.

Due to Life, I now have a 2x3-foot corkboard just above the foot of my bed. What should I pin to it?

2Elo
Kanban board
2Lumifer
A computer screen.

Printing several pages onto one piece of paper?

Embarrassingly silly and small question that I can't seem to find an answer through Google on, and there don't seem any good subreddits for:

I've compiled some notes I want to have handy to refer to into a 16-page PDF. I want to shrink and rearrange those pages, to print 8 per side onto a standard sheet of paper, so that I can cut, staple, and fold it into a pocket-sized booklet. My last-ditch solution would be to hope a photocopy/print shop wouldn't charge much to accomplish that... But does anyone here know h... (read more)

2garabik
psbook is what I'd use - you might need pdftops to get postscript out of the pdf, or perhaps print to a generic postscript printer directly.
0ChristianKl
StackExchange makes more sense then Reddit for this kind of question. When you are on linux, https://askubuntu.com/ or https://unix.stackexchange.com/ is likely to give you a good answer/

Over the Hump, and Starting a Return to Normality

There are some downsides to being a data pack-rat, as well as the obvious up-sides.

I'm in the process of moving to a new house, and the last month has pretty much been dedicated to that project - everything from a new set of floorboards being laid down to finding the best stores near the new place to buy my favourite beverage (grapefruit Perrier). The process is still ongoing, and I'm still going to be paying rent at the old place for some months to come; for example, even after getting rid of nearly all my ... (read more)

an obvious solution

I've been skimming some of my setting-idea notes, such as 'algorithms replacing middle-managers' and have realized that, for a certain point of the planned setting, you've highlighted an approach that is likely to be common among many other people. However, one of the main reasons for my protagonist's choice to try relying on himselves is that AIs which optimize for various easy-to-check metrics, such as profitability, tend not to take into account that human values are complex.

So there are likely going to be all manner of hyper-effic... (read more)

Because I am actually reasonably capable of creating some sort of actual charter that actually exists, and apply it to a scenario based on minor extrapolations of existing technologies that don't require particularly fundamental breakthroughs (ie: increased computer power; increased understanding of how neural cells work, such as is being fiddled with in the OpenWorm project; and increased resolution of certain scanning technology). I wouldn't know where to begin in even vaguely describing "an AI that can react to change and update itself on new information", and if such a thing /could/ be written, it would nigh-certainly completely derail the entire scenario and make the multi-self charter completely irrelevant.

0MrMind
I'm just saying that a coordinating AI seems an obvious evolution, I was told just yesterday by one of my coworker that machine learning systems for the automatic checking of complex regulations are already used profitably. Anyway, if the charter itself is the focal point of the story, by all mean delve into organizational science. Just don't forget that, when writing science fiction, it's very easy to descend into info-dumping.

It's an interesting solution, but the ability to edit the AIs to reliably feel such emotions is rather further in the future than I want to focus on; I want to start out by assuming that the brain-emulations are brute-force black-box emulations of low-level neural processes, and that it'll take a significant amount of research to get beyond that stage to create more subtle effects.

That said, I /do/ have some notes on the benefits of keeping careful track of which copies "descend" from which, in order to have a well-understood hierarchy to default... (read more)

I believe I may have phrased that quoted part poorly. Perhaps, "... long before the time the copies diverge enough to want to split into completely separate groups, they would likely have already learned enough about the current state-of-the-art of organizational theory to have amended the charter from its initial, preliminary form into something quite different". I didn't mean to imply 'hundreds of years', just a set of individuals learning about a field previously outside their area of expertise.

0MrMind
I still don't understand why it has to be a charter instead of, say, an AI that can react to change and update itself on new information.

the Constitution

If we're going for American political parallels, then I'm trying to put together something that may be more closely akin to the Articles of Confederation; they may have been replaced with another document, but their Articles' details were still important to history. For a more modern parallel, startup companies may reincorporate at various times during their spin-ups and expansions, but a lot of time they wouldn't need to if they'd done competent draftwork at the get-go. Amendment, even unto outright replacement, is an acknowledged fact-... (read more)

0TimS
The Articles of Confederation were not amended into the Constitution, they were replaced by the Constitution in a manner that likely violated the Articles. Likewise, the Old Testament leads to Priestly Judaism (with animal sacrifice), not the radically different Rabbinical Judaism. I think trying to bring these things in parallel with start-up incorporation is inherently difficult. Re-incorporation of start-ups is driven by the needs of mostly the same stackholders as the original incorporation. Most importantly, they are trying to achieve the same purpose as the original incorporation - wealth to founders and/or investors. Changes to foundational governing documents are usually aimed at changed or unanticipated circumstances, where the founders's original purpose does not address how the problem should be solved.

tweak

hand-wave

Just because I don't currently know the details of the relevant bits of organizational science doesn't mean somebody around here doesn't already know them. Just because I can't do the math as easily as I could for rocket science is no excuse to try to cheat how reality functions.

0MrMind
That is an objection that is only valid for a story happening in a time near to us. But, as you say: and nobody out there can possibly know their own field hundreds of years in the future. I state my case: handwave everything and concentrate on the story.

Are the personalities of the sub-copies allowed to evolve on their own?

Yes, the copies are expected to diverge to that degree, given sufficient time. However, by the time that happens, enough evidence about organizational science will have been gathered for the founding charter to have been amended into unrecognizability. That's not the period of development I'm currently focusing on.

so you would require no special treatment of the subject.

If by 'no special treatment' you mean 'an existing co-op's charter and by-laws could be copied, have the names ... (read more)

0MrMind
Well, if this charter is important for the story, then you should tweak the future organizational science so that it points in the direction you want to. If otherwise it's not, then why not hand-wave it?

Writing Scifi: Seeking Help with a Founding Charter

I'm trying to figure out which details I need to keep in mind for the founding charter of a particular group in a science-fiction story I'm writing.

The sci-fi bit: The group is made up of copies of a single person. (AIs based on a scan of a human brain, to be precise.)

For example, two copies may have an honest disagreement about how to interpret the terms of an agreement, so having previously arranged for a full-fledged dispute-resolution mechanism would be to the benefit of all the copies. As would guidel... (read more)

0moridinamael
In lieu of coming up with a creative solution to your problem, I will relate how Hannu Rajaniemi solves this problem in the Quantum Thief books, particular for the group called the Sobornost. (Spoilers, obviously.) There are billions (trillions?) of copies of certain individuals, and each copy retains self-copying rights. Each copy knows which agent forked it (who its "copyfather" is), and is programmed to feel "religious awe" and devotion to its specific line of descent. So if you found yourself spawned in this world, you would feel strong awe and obedience for your copyfather, even stronger awe and obedience for your copygrandfather, and ultimate devotion to the "original" digital version of yourself (the "prime"). This policy keeps everyone in line and assists in conflict resolution, because there's always a hierarchy of authority among the copies. This also allows small groups of copies to go off and pursue a tangential agenda with trust that the agenda will be in line with what the prime individual wanted.
0TimS
I suspect your proposed charter is practically impossible for you to write. If is was possible for one charter document to scale up and down the way you suggest, then we should expect it to already exist and be in use. After all, people have been writing charter documents for a long time. In the real world, charter don't survive in their original form all that long. To pick an example I am familiar with, the US Constitution was ratified in 1789. Fourteen years later, in 1803, the Supreme Court interpreted the document to allow judicial review of whether statutes complied with the Constitution. You'll have to take my word for it, but whether judicial review was intended by the drafters of the US Constitution is controversial to this day. It is pretty clear that the drafters would have been surprised by the degree of judicial intrusiveness in implementing policy, just as they would be surprised by how much the US has grown in economic size and political power since the Constitution was drafted.
2MrMind
Are the personalities of the sub-copies allowed to evolve on their own? If this is true, given enough time there would be very little difference between a society of people following from the same source and a society of individual that were born from different parents, so you would require no special treatment of the subject.

If I may ask, do you have a preferred email address through which I can ask you some questions which wouldn't quite work out as comments to the blog-post?

0Davidmanheim
Google's email service, with my lesswrong username.

if you have that goal, then you would try anything sensible-sounding and any combination of anything sensible until something works.

I have had that goal for some time. I have tried the sensible-sounding things, in various combinations. They didn't work. So I've been shifting my focus from "trying to keep depressive bouts from happening" to "managing my life on the assumption I'm going to keep getting depressive bouts". I've hit enough such management tricks that even with my bout last week interrupting, I'm about 60,000 words into writing a novel, including 1600 words yesterday; I could be doing better, sure, but I could be doing a lot /worse/, too.

get out of depression

If you have any clue for a method on how a person can reliably accomplish that - especially if it's one that I haven't tried yet - please share. With the whole world.

I trust that you won't mind if I don't plan on holding my breath.

0MrMind
I was talking about the meta-level, and your meta-level question was "Have I made the appropriate preparations?" to which I answered: no, the biggest improvement is if you prioritize depression treatment over any other. That said, on the object level, if you have that goal, then you would try anything sensible-sounding and any combination of anything sensible until something works. But I cannot tell you what is sensible because I'm not an expert on depression.

Maybe there's a bit of terminology confusion here; if a military conflict /doesn't/ affect me personally, it seems unlikely to be a 'significant' one. (Some historical ways a military conflict could affect me personally: Victory Gardens, the Order of the White Feather, the Fenian Raids, even less oversight and accountability for civilian police whose actions would otherwise end up in the subreddit "Bad Cop, No Donut".)

I'm thinking of scenarios such as 'It turns out China put secret backdoors into all sorts of hardware chips, and in a fit of self-... (read more)

As a point of interest: as of when I woke up, the votes were: LessWrong, two votes for paranoid; /r/rational, two votes for not particularly crazy.

Emotionally, I'm not feeling the particular "I'm going to hate myself in January 2018 if I haven't mailed copies of my archival Blu-Ray discs to certain members of my extended family stretching halfway across the continent by then, and the Net gets taken down" urgency that I did when I posted, but it still seems like a good idea to nudge my plans in the direction of being able to handle that particular... (read more)

(A quick FYI, I'm about to try for a good night's sleep, then compare how I was feeling when I first posted in this thread with however I feel when I wake.)

paranoia

Ah, but is it really paranoia if "they really are out to get you"? :)

I've previously demonstrated that I'm willing to make long-shot gambles on 5% odds, given that that's roughly my estimate of cryonics working and I've signed up for it. So let's try working with that number.

Out of all the possible scenarios of a Trump presidency, if you leave out 95% of the most positive options, how unpleasant is the best-remaining one? Put another way, is there at least a 5% chance of American or international politics descending to the point where ... (read more)

4sen
You don't place bets based solely on probabilities. You place bets based on probabilities, odds, timescales, investments, and alternative options. Specifically, you place bets to optimize for growth of principle with respect to time. What you're doing is not placing a bet. If you were placing a bet and wanted feedback, it would have been appropriate to provide a lot more information, such as what you expect to gain from your bet, what you expect to lose in the negative case, what you're hoping to optimize, what your expected costs are, and what alternatives you're considering spending your time or money on. It's not appropriate for you to provide any of that information because what you're doing is not placing a bet. What you're doing is panicking and looking for an echo to tell you that your beliefs are sensible, that the world really is crashing, and that what you're doing is justified. Your beliefs are not sensible, and the world isn't really crashing. I don't know if what you're doing is justified, as that would require a lot more information, but honestly I think that's irrelevant.

I want to provide arguments offering further justification for increasing my priority for making personal offline backup copies of various online resources (such as "it's something I've been vaguely wanting to do for some time anyway, I've just never had any particular impetus to get more of the job done than my current mirrors"), but, from inside my head, it's hard to tell whether these are actual reasons or mere rationalizations.

Do facts such as that I've had this username for 15 years, have said "it's not just a nom-de-net, it's a way of ... (read more)

4sen
I said you sound insane because of your paranoia, not because of what you wanted to do as a result of that paranoia. Whether or not you would be creating backups in other circumstances is irrelevant, except as an indicator of how paranoid you are. I don't think such an indicator is necessary because your first two paragraphs already demonstrate what I see as an extreme level of paranoia, and so to me it's irrelevant whether you already have backups of various sites. It's perfectly reasonable for you to create backups given your beliefs. Those beliefs though I consider insane. The solution then is not to stop creating backups, as that would accomplish nothing. The solution is to stop browsing sites that are specifically designed to make you insane.

I'm having an un-rational moment, and despite knowing that, it's still affecting my behaviour.

Earlier today, my newsfeed included the datum discussed here, of Trump having a phone call with the President of Taiwan; and the item discussed here, about Trump talking about 'shutting down' the Internet. And later, while listening to my music playlist of the Merry Wives of Windsor, one of the tunes that popped up was "Green Fields of France", one version of which can be heard here. And I started wondering whether I was prepared for politics to go in an... (read more)

2MrMind
Only very mildly. The point is that you priority should be to get out of depression: in the case of a military conflict, how much helpful will be that? This is much more important for your long-term survival than a bunch of reddit branches.
0DataPacRat
As a point of interest: as of when I woke up, the votes were: LessWrong, two votes for paranoid; /r/rational, two votes for not particularly crazy. Emotionally, I'm not feeling the particular "I'm going to hate myself in January 2018 if I haven't mailed copies of my archival Blu-Ray discs to certain members of my extended family stretching halfway across the continent by then, and the Net gets taken down" urgency that I did when I posted, but it still seems like a good idea to nudge my plans in the direction of being able to handle that particular scenario with minimal losses of what I find valuable.
6entirelyuseless
You sound paranoid. Even if there is significant military conflict, it won't affect you personally.
3sen
You sound insane desu. Stop browsing reddit for a while. Any board where attention is explicitly rewarded, whether in the form of (You)s or upboats, will almost by definition tend towards encouraging high volatility of beliefs and emotions. It sounds like you've been riding that wave a bit too long. Also, learn to recognize fear mongering.

In case it may interest you: I've bookmarked this link to use as an inspirational reference for the novel I started writing for NaNoWriMo, for a sub-setting therein in which many members of one group can do terrible things to members of another group without any measurable risk of any measurable repercussions.

If you could pick one music track that, if turned into a music video, could most exemplify the emotions resulting from LW-style rationality, what would that song be?

0polymathwannabe
Steve Reich's Violin Phase.
0knb
I immediately thought of this.
3g_pepper
Aside from the music video constraint, I would say Schubert's piano sonata in B flat major. Overall it is an optimistic, contemplative piece (capturing the attitudes of many LWers) but the bass note trill occurring early in the piece and repeating several times throughout serves as a reminder of existential risks such as unfriendly AGI. The piece was used (to great effect) at a climactic scene of the recent movie Ex Machina.

(I apologize for not responding sooner; I've just realized I'm in one of my periodic bouts of anhedonia and social procrastination.)

My short absence seems to have given enough time to get a selection of votes in, and since I'm just about to actually apply the results of this discussion to my fiction, it's time to analyze the results.

I'm ruling out 'rational self-interest' as already being used to refer to a closely-related but not-quite-identical concept, so that I can have my characters discuss the differences.

First word:

  • effective: 6
  • rational: 6 (or 4)
... (read more)

"Do whatever you want"

I /want/ to go camping on Phobos. There are certain practical problems in accomplishing that. Likewise, there are a great many practical problems in accomplishing many other more ordinary things that I want to do; but some of those problems are soluble, depending on the resources I choose to throw at them, but with only a finite amount of resources, I have to make choices about /which/ of my wants to try to full.

Fake Selfishness

choose between dying immediately to save the Earth, or living in comfort for one more year

... (read more)

Thank you for pointing out the term 'production-possibility frontier' in this context, which helps clarify some of my thoughts.

As it is, I don't actually disagree with you, in the main. More than once, I've mentioned that it's often the case that considering both effective altruism and effective egoism (by whatever name) as guides tends to lead towards the same behaviour, in most everyday situations.

effective altruists should be interested in spreading effective self-care both amongst others since altruism is about making others better off, and amongst themselves because if you take good care for yourself you are in a better position to help others, and if you are efficient about it you have more resources to help others.

Consider this line to have gotten an extra thumbs-up from me. :)

"Effective self-care" ... "Effective Egoism"

The fact that you have highlit the differences between these two closely-related concepts, which I ... (read more)

Yes, yes, we are all fundamentally merely computational algorithms running on the same sort of hardware substrate made of stardust, with no fundamental differences between one another. But if one piece of the universe which my algorithms identify as 'other' comes towards the piece of the universe which my algorithms identify as 'myself' while waving a knife and screaming, I'm still going to treat the 'other' differently than I will treat 'myself' and give myself's desire to run a higher priority than the other's desire to grab my wallet. Other bits of star... (read more)

1RomeoStevens
I'm not making a handwavy philosophical argument. Pretending that you are at the production-possibility frontier of altruism/egoism is both a result of, and inducing further cognitive distortion.

"Rationality" is the tool, but by itself, doesn't describe what goals and values the tool is being used to promote. There can be rational altruists, rational hedonists, rational omnicidal maniacs who want to eliminate suffering by eliminating life, rational egoists, and so on.

There are various counter-arguments, such as that if there are too few egoists and too many altruists, then then Overton Window will shift to the point that egoism can become socially disapproved of; or that altruism isn't even necessary for reasonably rational egoists to engage in positive-sum interactions which are nearly indistinguishable from altruistic behaviour, as has been explored in some depth by libertarian philosophers; or that any one egoist is unlikely to be able to persuade any significant number of altruists to become egoists, so the optimal egoist approach is more likely to focus attention on one's own actions rather than persuading others to become egoists; and so on.

0WalterL
I guess. I feel if your egoism is more complicated than "Do whatever you want.", then you've kind of lost sight of the main thing. But obviously this comment is vulnerable to the same objection, so I guess I'll just close by saying that calling egoism where you end up caring about Overton Windows "effective egoism" seems pretty exactly wrong. There's a whole Fake Selfishness link on LW, yeah? That seems like what this is.

That's a very good suggestion list, and a good link; thank you kindly. :)

Hm... is it possible that my stab at a temporary term is actually sufficient as a permanent one?

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